the bubble burst.

but the funny thing is, people always see the bubble, and they close their eyes on the burst part and then wake up after the burst is over and say they have missed it so it must still be a bubble.
you can see how many missed the epic bitcoin bubble burst this month which was a $7000 drop from 19k to 12k.

I think we can also say after the crypto bubble comes a lot of nagging kidos who missed the chance to buy.

you can not find reason before the rise, you can then associate reasons with the rise after it already happened. that is a huge difference.

in January 2017 nobody could ever know that Japan is going to adopt bitcoin as a currency and then after they did nobody could imagine they also would remove taxes on bitcoin payments. these two combined led to a big movement around the world where other countries started doing similar things. apart from that it gave bitcoin some legitimacy that it didn't have in the eyes of many.
increased adoption led to increased speed of the rise and price reached $5000ish. the rise on its own brings more investors who have been left behind so price continued rising to $8000

then bitcoin hit mainstream adoption in US when CME and NASDAQ started adopting bitcoin against all odds. the meant a million new users sign up in 2 days on Coinbase to buy bitcoin and that is still growing.
again increased adoption led to increased rising speed which then broke $10,000 and other ATHs all the way to $19,000

we may not see $20,000 by the end of 2017 but it certainly is not far. it will be reached in a month or so.

I think they do have a good point in their theories but the problem with all of them is that they are exaggerating the effects of it by 1000 times. it may cause small crashes, it may even slow down the rise at times or make the drops bigger but it won't be any bigger or generally worse than they already are.

and I am also more worried about the fee situation of bitcoin. that has always caused the biggest damage to bitcoin than anything else and it opens up room for others to swoop in and take the market out of bitcoin's hands. it has already started with Steam stopping to accept bitcoin. who will be next? Microsoft?

the source for this was pretty damn funny
we already know there are governments from different countries working on cryptocurrencies of their own, there is no need for some weird source telling us about it. the biggest one since they started first, is the Indian one in my opinion called Lakshmi.


can they force you to use credit cards?

I am not even going to check if you are making that up or is it true.
but in case you have not noticed bitcoin.org is just a website like thousands of others and it is publishing an opinion, it is not representing bitcoin. it may as well say bitcoin is shit and it won't change a thing about it.

the question you should be asking is "how successful are altcoins in their attempts in creating a better system and fixing the issues that are known?"

and the funny thing is, I have not yet seen any altcoin that could find any solution that actually works for any shortcomings that bitcoin has. if I am missing one out there, I would be happy if you could introduce it to me.


I don't think bitcoin can change that much as to abandon its blockchain (replace it with DAG like IOTA). but it is moving in the direction of addressing some of its issues, with things such as Lightning Network. we have to wait and see how that is going to work out in real action.

and I believe if anything has any chance of competing with bitcoin it is an altcoin without blockchain, not necessarily IOTA but something like that.

you don't know that because "bitcoin owners" don't hold a flag telling the public how much bitcoin they own. all you saw is some stats on some website telling you how much each transaction output is worth and at least half of them are change addresses and the other half is the result of the spam attacks against bitcoin network.

the cost of sending a bitcoin transaction which can be $1 worth or $1,000,000,000+ is worth the same and it is worth $12. that is with current bitcoin price. maybe you think bitcoin is worth $35,000 I don't know!

there is a difference between being an skeptic and being an idiot.
being skeptic is actually not that bad, it means you have doubts and usually people will go and try to educate themselves to do some research and fix those doubts. and so far all of them have changed their mind about bitcoin and have invested in it already.
but being an idiot means they listen to the FUD and act irrationally. these people see the potential but stay away then when it is too late they invest but it is too late and price is correcting so they panic and sell below what they have bought and lose money. after price recovers and goes back up they start desperate spam everywhere!

I think now everyone knows that ethereum is not even capable of handling a simple small amount of transactions. you can see that happening each time there is an ICO or something like this new game on the blockchain called cryptokitties.
how do you expect something that is even worse than bitcoin be able to compete with it?

the ETH withdrawals being stuck is understandable because the ETH network has turned to shit ever since this cryptokitties crap started there and because ETH can not handle large number of transactions.
but the c-cex site itself also has some issue, I have been experiencing slowness, specially in their API which is so infuriating to sit and wait for a small response. luckily I don't have much there and I won't deposit anymore until they fix these issues or at least make an statement about it.

literary every single altcoin because all of them, without exception, will be pumped at some point. at least once and they can give you good profit. but it will only happen if you know where to look and only if you catch them soon not after they have already been pumped. also don't forget that holding random altcoins and lots of different ones just in the hopes that someday they will get pumped will cause some serious losses in the long run because those altcoins that are not getting pumped, are getting dumped.

$20k by the end of 2018 is just silly and it has always been because it would have been a very small rise (a little more than 2x) but bitcoin has much bigger rises even if we finished 2017 with $9000-$10,000 price, it would have still been a small rise for a full year.

I agree that this rise, specially the jump to $19700 on coinbase was very scary. and as we can see it did not last at all. the price fell down back to $15000ish and I say it is still big but it seems like the market demand is still there. maybe there is some little room left to go down but that is pretty much it. there has been a lot of mainstream adoption lately after all.

this may be the first step in the process of banning ICOs.
many countries have been doing it. because the way Initial Coin Offerings are working these days is that anybody with basic understanding of how to create a token is starting his own ICO and just raises some funds and when they get the funds they don't do anything else anymore, they just move on to creating a new one to make more money.
and that is illegal all over the world.

yeah, only if bitcoin becomes useless and dies it can go down to $1500 and then continue falling down to nothing and disappear. but that is not something that is going to happen anytime soon.

the question is, why would you want to know? lets say it fell to $1500 in the next hour. you still are going to continue as before and wouldn't do anything about it

legal? yes
possible? yes
risky? very!

one of the issues most people forget about Arbitrage trading is the fact that as someone new to it, you should remember than there are always so many others, so much faster than you, who are doing it. many of them are using automation. for example as soon as the price difference occurs, their bot buys it from one place and sells it on the other.
imagine you open the exchange page and look at the prices and try to open your calculator to see if it is profitable, by this time the bot has already made the trades and is now with profit. by the time you make your decision the price may not even be the same any more.

a drop from $18k to $12k is not called a "slight fall back", that is a 33% drop which is the common big crash that bitcoin has after it has some massive rise followed by some FUD campaign causing a crash.

a "slight fall back" is what happened in the past 12 hours. according to BitStamp price went up to $16,667 and then fell down to $14,239 which is a 14.5% drop. if you wanted to invest, you should have done it then and there an enjoyed the recovery and the possible follow up rise.

apart from that, if you want to be absolutely safe then wait until a big drop happens which will show the end of this bull run and then buy in that drop. such drop/crash will last a couple of days at least. but it may be longer too.

no, it is not just you. although I only agree with the circle thing on your chart, well a little bigger one including the rise from $10,000 and above. not the whole chart. up until that point I do not see any problem with the rise, I consider it perfectly natural and understandable to rise like this and this big. but I can not understand the rise from $10,000 to this point and possibly even more to come. that doesn't struck me as a natural rise anymore. or at least not 100% natural because obviously there is a lot of adoption still going on but not enough for $16,000 like this!

and I am not scared of the fall, I love a fall to sell and buy even more bitcoin with the profit I gain. but I am afraid of is what happens because of the drop and how big it can be. I don't like seeing bitcoin in a prolonged bear market struggling to rise. and that will damage the adoption in my opinion but at the same time is good to flush out the weak hands if it lasts a short time.

I think futures markets will have more of a publicity effect than having any major effects on the price itself in the long run. there are still risks involved and people can do the same thing with exchanges already, so they don't necessarily gain anything special from these markets apart from a more secure place to trade bitcoin instead of using these risky and sometimes scammy exchanges.

as I said it is the publicity that matters. when NASDAQ adds bitcoin, nobody can dare call bitcoin "fraud" anymore and even if they do, they will be ridiculed by everyone not just by bitcoiners who understand why that person is saying it.

it is perfectly healthy up until $10,000 and then things got weird, I wouldn't still call it not-healthy, it is all about the adoption.
remember when the media was repeating how bitcoin is not safe, how it is "fraud" and it is dead, and all that bullshit. that kept a lot of people away from bitcoin. now all of them had a wake up call and now are buying. even if every one of them buys a tiny amount this rise happens like this. pretty simple.

the alts drop because the yare pumped and because they are useless.

it is a pretty common thing that whenever bitcoin price is moving like this, people make more transactions, it doesn't matter up or down as long as it is a big movement. some will be selling their coins and some are buying and moving it out of exchanges.
and now that the adoption has grown too big, obviously there are a lot more people who are making a lot more transactions but the block space is still the same as before so the number of unconfirmed transactions grows this big.