Early investors make money. Late investors lose everything. It's hard to tell what will happen to your friend. Given the warning from the UK government, I'm guessing this will be shut down sometime in January.


Who? I've been a trader for years, I'm active on Tradingview/Twitter, and I'm aware of most well-known traders in the space. I'd really like to know what reputable traders might be shilling BitConnect. In my experience, it's quite the opposite. You may have mistaken someone who bought lots of followers or claimed to be a veteran for an actual veteran.

It's been a while since anyone has reported successful verification in the thread, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Usually if people aren't complaining, then their issues are being sorted out. Here's the last report I saw:


That said, I personally wouldn't verify with Wex. I don't trust them with my documents. There also isn't a real need, since you can trade crypto/fiat/debt tokens all without verification. Last I checked, the daily BTC withdrawal limit was 25 BTC without verification, which is more than enough for me.


It's gone. It was accessible when you logged into BTC-e.nz in September, but that site now redirects to Wex. Support will tell you they are different entities and they don't have the data.

Are they really "burning" their own money? They can simply print more via the central banks. That's the essential problem with pricing extremely limited commodities like Bitcoin in fiat currencies. Those fiat currencies are and can be endlessly inflated.

Accordingly, it's theoretically possible that governments could collude to accumulate and dump the markets as the OP suggests. It seems very unlikely, though, because of geopolitical realities. Governments are in stiff competition with one another. Those governments that see the writing on the wall -- that cryptocurrencies are here to stay -- will do everything they can to facilitate commercial advancement in cryptocurrency sectors. If a government can't destroy crypto, their best option is to leech as much tax revenue from it as possible.

Sure there is. The primary purpose of Segwit was to address transaction malleability in Bitcoin. Eliminating unreliable transaction IDs was necessary to implement the Lightning Network (at least based on how current LN code is written).

The Lightning Network will leverage a network of payment channels to enable much cheaper, off-chain transactions. Basically, users will open channels with one another and with merchants/services/exchanges, creating a network. Each participant in this network locks some BTC into a special multi-sig address, which allows them to spend BTC within the Lightning Network. Whatever they spend off-chain in the LN will count against the BTC they've locked on-chain.

Since LN transactions don't require on-chain confirmation, they can have much lower costs (propagation, bandwidth).

I also used Vircurex back in 2013. They were an up-and-coming altcoin exchange at the time. Unfortunately, they suffered a hack years ago, and were never able to recover. They froze user balances pro rata based on the amount of coins hacked, with the intention of gradually "unfreezing" balances as trading commissions came in. Rather, volume dried up on the exchange and traders exited with whatever they could. I'm frankly surprised that the site is still up and running right now.

Anyway, I'm not confident you will see your coins. New deposits (post-hack) were never supposed to be added to "frozen" balances, but at this point, I'm not sure that Vircurex intends to act honorably. But you should probably keep trying to contact support. It's possible they will still credit the coins and that their node is just offline.

Keep us updated.

I have a simple tax question. My friend just bought into Bitcoin and Ethereum for the first time this month. He plans to sell everything for short term profits early next year (January or February, depending on the price action).

He asked me how to report taxes on the gains. Hopefully I'm correct (otherwise I've been doing my taxes wrong), but I thought I should confirm before giving him an answer:

1) He has no capital gains taxes due (on these investments) for the year 2017, since he won't realize any profits until early 2018. Taxes on these gains would be due in April 2019 for the tax year 2018.
2) Short-term capital gains are taxed at the same rate as ordinary income.

Thanks for any guidance you can provide!

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. I don't believe they do this for customers; they simply can't at their scale. And it would probably introduce security holes into their protocols if they did this for customers using their hot wallet. You can try contacting Poloniex, but you'll probably wait a month just to have them say they won't do it.

Would you mind saying why they asked for this? Did they disable your account?

"High price" is relative to time. The price surely seemed high at $30 in 2011, and at $1000 in 2013. If you believe that a single BTC will be worth millions of dollars someday -- as many of us do -- then $8400 is quite cheap. In that sense, it's definitely a good investment.

That said, you need to be prepared for the volatility. I think we could definitely see prices like $5000 or lower in the coming months. I prefer to trade the volatility. If I were investing for the long term, I'd probably wait out the market a bit.

Copying Bitcoin's UTXO set taps a large network of potential users, but it also comes with a lot of baggage (a huge blockchain to download and highly complex consensus code). ERC-20 tokens are very easy to copy and paste. Developers competent enough to code software of Bitcoin Core's complexity are few and far between.

I think we'll see more forks with even more problematic launches than Bgold. The market will eventually burn out on them. People will realize that the Core developers are far too important to Bitcoin's success to be replaced by unknowns.

For one thing, Bitmain (the largest manufacturer of ASICs) began only accepting BCH for new orders. They are leveraging their market position to force miners into propping up the BCH price. They also played a lot of games with the hash rate, using the EDA and the propped exchange price as cover to exacerbate the Bitcoin network's congestion. I saw some research (can't find the link now) that suggested that the BTC spam attacks are caused by Bitmain themselves, through their various proxy pools. This seems plausible since they could collect the block rewards and get the attacks costs back.

Bitmain, Roger Ver, Craig Wright and others have been waging a deceptive disinformation campaign around Bitcoin network fees, exploiting the above attack. The circumstances around the Bithumb pump and dump are also very suspicious. Thousands of Koreans complained of manipulation and unacceptable denial of service with some customers even physically protesting in front of the exchange's offices.

Calvin Ayre also posted a picture of himself with Craig Wright. The caption said something about plotting the death of BTC. It left a sour taste in my mouth.

They're both liquid assets that can be bought and sold on exchanges, or through brokers. They're both investments, are they not? The stock market has been hot for years. Now it's time for crypto. I think that's what he's saying.


One difference is that with stock brokers, you generally pay a flat fee to buy/sell. On cryptocurrency exchanges, we pay % fees, so we end up paying a lot more. Who came up with this % commission stuff?

That will be one of the perks of ETF trading -- flat fees. Also, trading from retirement accounts (tax free). Can't wait!

Most of those don't even exist yet. Cash and Gold are already traded on major exchanges, so they are very easy to track. It's not even clear that the others will happen... isn't Bitcoin Silver a joke?

In any case, Blockfolio is very quick to add coins....


I'm not too worried about that, personally. But here's a thought: why not just add coins in "watch only" mode? That way, you can see the ticker in your portfolio and also set alarms/notifications. But as far as Blockfolio knows, you don't "own" any coins.

Give it 2+ years of consideration before you make a move like that. If you want to live off trading, you need considerable living expenses put away in the bank. You will have bad trading runs (break-even and losing stretches), and you can't expect to live off your trading capital during those times.

During the last bull run in 2013, everyone thought they were a genius trader too. Turns out that it was just a bull market. Once the market rolled over, and the "easy money" stopped rolling in, a lot of these "genius traders" had to go back to their day jobs.

Give it some serious thought, whatever you do.

You don't need to "trust" the Bitcoin Gold team to profit from the fork. 1 BTG = $380 at this moment. That's free money for BTC holders. The problem is that the ecosystem is very immature, and average cryptocurrency users don't understand the first thing about security.

I've been trying to tell people: sweep your BTC into new addresses, first and foremost. Wait for reviews of a wallet -- don't be a guinea pig. The Core Gold wallet and Coinomi are both reported safe to use (not that I trust them). Even if you think the wallet is safe, you should transport BTG in increments and never put BTC at risk.

I knew they were incompetent from the start. But with so much money on the line, they could have hired a few competent developers. They should have had a trustworthy fork of Electrum ready at the start like Bitcoin Cash did.

It's unfortunate that the only wallets available for BTG are the Core wallet (takes forever to download the blockchain and not sure I trust it) and mobile wallets. Coinomi is Android-only. Anybody have reviews on Freewallet? Is it safe?


You don't need to do anything. If you think the price of BTG will continue rising in the future, you can hold it. There is replay protection, so you can just use BTC normally and your BTG will remain held in the original keypair.

This market is so frothy right now, and alts are doing well. I wouldn't be surprised to see it go higher...

Well, that escalated quickly! Bulls just stepped in and pushed the price up $25 in a couple hours. We just crossed $400! This price level is right where the early September top was, so I suspect we will see some resistance here.

But that's a 40% rise in 2 weeks. Even measured against BTC's recent moves, that's a pretty big gain. I'm sure glad that I didn't get shaken out of my ETH bags while it was sideways for so long.

It's a Bitfinex-centric issue. So all we need to do is look at the Bitfinex or USDT price vs. the rest of the market. If the market was concerned, and Bitfinex traders were worried about the money in Bitfinex's custody, then a price premium would develop. Instead, the Bitfinex price has remained fairly equal with Bitstamp and Coinbase, and at this moment is actually lower.

That tells me it's already being priced in right now. The Tether FUD might be the reason that the rally stalled shortly after making new ATHs. Money is clearly flowing into alts, though, so I suspect this is just a bump in the road before more rallying.

Normally when I send a transaction with a fee that low, I flag it with opt-in replace-by-fee. So if it gets stuck like this, I can re-broadcast with a higher fee to get it immediately confirmed. It looks like you didn't do that here.

I think Peter Todd released a tool called doublespend.py (a Python script) that allows you to quickly double spend low-fee transactions. I think it should be somewhere in here: https://github.com/petertodd/replace-by-fee-tools

Alternatively, you can try pushing your transactions here:
https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/
https://confirmtx.com/

I haven't seen much info about Bitcoin Silver. I heard it was a joke, and after seeing the proposed spec, I tend to agree. It's basically just a clone of Bitcoin Gold. What's the point?


Oddly enough, the BTC price rose into the Segwit2x fork date, then abruptly dropped hard after the Segwit2x cancellation. This is the opposite of what many were expecting--that price would fall due to Segwit2x uncertainty and rise when the uncertainty was gone.

But in general, these Bitcoin forks are definitely cash grabs to get newbies' money. "Bitcoin Diamond" is next, coming next month....

I agree, identity theft is a real concern. I don't trust many of the bitcoin exchanges to store my data and prevent it from being stolen, so I'm very careful about how I approach services that enforce AML/KYC (anti money laundering and know-your-customer) policies.

On the first point: With the Bitcoin protocol itself (your wallet), you never need to provide ID. It's completely decentralized and peer-to-peer. No government intrusion.

On the second point: This is a bit trickier. You can buy BTC on LocalBitcoins, but it's getting harder and harder to buy with cash and without ID. In places like the US and western Europe, regulators and police are pressuring high volume LBC traders to act in compliance with money transmitter laws. So they've started asking for ID.

This is one reason why I really like to earn BTC and hold it, wherever possible. I hate forking over my documents.....