I don't really buy that explanation. Yes, multiple exchanges made similar announcements about Taiwan's banking/AML reform, including Okcoin.com and BTC-e. But Bitfinex said many months ago that they had already moved most of their money outside of Taiwanese banks, so that doesn't explain it.

I actually think the Taiwanese banking reforms provided a nice cover for the simple fact that Tether has no interest in letting anyone (customers, regulators) know where their money is.

No, none of the exchanges do. But the IRS case against Coinbase users leaves us important info to consider. While the original request for all Coinbase user information (including trade activity) over a three year period was deemed a "fishing expedition", the IRS came back as expected with a narrowed request for all users with > $20,000 in activity in any one year. The case is ongoing, but I think we can expect that eventually, a narrowed request will be approved by the courts.

So what I'm saying is, whether or not they send a 1099 to the IRS, you don't want to be caught in one of these IRS nets. They are closely watching the Bitcoin exchanges.

The people shilling it are either 1) paid to shill or 2) are holding BCC and want it to pump. The project is extremely shady. The loan program is a pyramid scheme on its face, and there is no reasonable explanation for the level of promised returns. This will definitely end in tears.

The UK government has already threatened to revoke Bitconnect's corporate registration within 2 months, so I expect the whole scheme to unravel by then. There are much better projects in this space. The future is decentralization, not centralized Ponzi/pyramid schemes. Invest accordingly.

I think this is missing the bigger picture. Tether = Bitfinex: it is majority owned by Bitfinex's parent company.

So when we talk about Tether collapsing, we need to talk about how the entire circulating supply of USDT represent Bitfinex liabilities. Most of its supply was inflated after Bitfinex lost its ability to send/receive wires. That's probably margin profits exiting Bitfinex onto other platforms (like Poloniex).

You might associate these "toxic assets" with altcoin exchanges, but they are Bitfinex's liabilities. It's funny because Bitfinex can't even wire people USD, but they are the highest volume BTCUSD exchange. Go figure. Anyway, I don't see how we can deny the effect on BTC there.....

That's just the problem. I recall hearing on a Telegram chat from Giancarlo Devasini that Bitfinex aren't criminals -- they just do their banking like criminals. That sounds fair enough to some of us anti-government nuts, but it doesn't exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy inside when holding USDT.

That's been my feeling all along. Tether has the funds fully backed, but they can't risk moving them or informing the bank of the true nature of custody. It seems like a precarious situation. How is anyone ever going to get their money out?

Does anyone around here use the Square Cash App? If so, could you share your experience? I guess it's like Venmo/Paypal, except they recently started a pilot program to buy/sell bitcoins within their app:
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14396689/1/squares-bitcoin-play-could-offer-legitimacy-for-cryptocurrencies.html

Also, I'm curious if anyone knows the details regarding verification requirements?

It seems like originally, the service required users to set up a debit card / bank account. Since last year, you can keep a balance in your Cash App wallet instead of withdrawing directly to your bank.

Does anyone know if that means you don't need to set up any payment options (debit or credit card / bank account) at all? Can I just receive $$ to my Cash App wallet and pay it out to someone else? If so, I'm curious what the limits are before you need to verify identity. I can't find this information listed on their site like I can for Venmo...

Is there a way to transfer from my Paypal to Venmo, since they are the same company?


My friend needs money. Bitcoin is a hassle for him, he says Venmo is easiest. Seems like any other P2P money transfer service and it's free. It's owned by Paypal, and I don't need to verify identity < $300/month. Which works because I don't use it often.

So, why wouldn't I buy Venmo?

Need $240 Venmo.

Dealing with trusted/reputable members only. Willing to send first to trusted members. (I'm aware of the reversibility of this payment method, hence only dealing with people who clearly aren't scamming for a couple hundred bucks)

I can pay a small mark-up over spot price. PM me.

OP: Edit the thread name to add Whaleclub to the name. This way, it'll get better Google results.

People have been complaining about Whaleclub's abusive/scammy ways for years now. They are known for reversing profitable trades based on dubious reasoning that is not within their TOS. They are also known for refusing to answer for this behavior on Reddit. People should definitely avoid them like the plague.


I wouldn't waste too much time on it. At least, by his account, these profits were an overnight windfall made on a highly volatile market. There are chances like this everyday in crypto; the best advice I can think of is to move on and start making money on a more reputable site. Consider Bitmex: they offer high leverage bitcoin/altcoin futures and they are much more reputable than Whaleclub. I've never seen such complaints against them.

Technically, Segwit was not necessary for the Lightning Network to work. It's just that all Lightning Network code was built with Segwit's transaction malleability fix in mind. So, as coded, we need Segwit. I think we will start to see Lightning transactions on the mainnet next year but I don't want to be overly optimistic about the timeline for full adoption. The routing and network topography issues are still not completely sorted out and tested.

The other thing that we need to come to terms with is that on-chain fee should and will continue to rise, regardless of the Lightning Network. Even if LN eventually takes a majority of network transactions, that suggests exponential network growth, and every channel requires two on-chain transactions (to open and close a channel).

Thus, demand will remain high for limited on-chain transaction space. At the same time, we need this demand to push fees higher, because transaction fees need to pay for the network's security. As each reward halving goes by, it becomes increasingly important that fees rise to replace the block subsidy that is disappearing.

That's not true. Bitcoin trading is regulated in many jurisdictions. For example, Bitfinex was fined by the CFTC a couple years back for the way they were handling custody for BTC margin trading. Similarly, no matter where an exchange is located, their jurisdiction regarding enforcement of securities laws and other regulations is based on where their customers live.

That's why, for example, Bitfinex restricted trading of tokens they deemed "securities" for US customers before pulling out of the US market entirely. Even though Bitcoin might not be regulated in the British Virgin Islands or Hong Kong (where Bitfinex is located), it is definitely regulated in places like the USA.

Ideally, both. Crypto is much more volatile and fast-paced. If you like high-leverage day-trading, I much prefer trading BTC futures to forex. Traditional TA, particularly volatility and volume analysis work great on BTC and other crytocurrencies. I find the price action much less choppy than forex, although you will find similarly nasty stop runs.

But like I was saying, diversity is good. When this bull run is finally over, I'll be moving significant profits into other markets -- gold, oil, stocks. Less exciting, but it's good to keep feet on the ground. I've had all my money in bitcoin and altcoins for years, so it'll be good to diversify into some "safer" assets.

Have you not been watching DASH? After the Bitcoin Cash pump topped out, the money flowed into DASH. The price spiked nearly 60% that night. And today after Bcash's big rebound from the lows, sure enough, DASH is back near the highs again.

I don't think this is a coincidence. They are both heavily backed by Roger Ver. It's pretty obvious that Roger was at least partially behind the Bitcoin Cash pump to $2800 (his coins moved to Bitfinex). So I don't think it's a stretch to assume that he had something to do with the DASH pump.

I'm definitely watching Ethereum. It hasn't moved out of its trading range, so it has the best risk/reward -- much better than DASH.

I think it's very likely that Roger Ver (and probably some of his associates) were manipulating the market that night. Roger's publicly identified coins were moved to Bitfinex (he voted with them on a coin-staked poll), he publicly stated the next day that he sold bitcoins for BCH and ETH, and timing lines up very well.

I think it's probably illegal in various jurisdictions that Bitfinex serves (and also Bithumb) to engage in these manipulative practices -- spoofing, the server outage at the top on Bithumb, etc. But who is going to stop them?

Personally, I'm an abolitionist, so I certainly don't think anyone should go to prison over this....

I thought it was a joke when I first saw it. I think that everyone was taken aback, considering that nobody besides Jeff Garzik was still openly backing Segwit2x. Turns out the joke was on them: the btc1 client was completely broken, and got stuck 2 blocks before the fork was set to occur.

It's embarrassing for all the NYA companies, but especially for Coinbase. They supported the fork until the bitter end, long after everyone else had given up. And in the end, nobody had even bothered to audit the consensus code well enough to discover that the code was broken.

Unfortunately, I don't think anything will change. It seems unlikely that any businesses will displace Coinbase, even after all their recent missteps.

Just a technicality here, but it doesn't matter whether it got "cancelled." The forking client was in the wild; there are still btc1 nodes online as we speak. The reason that the fork didn't occur is that the btc1 client broke. All btc1 nodes apparently got stuck at height #494,782 - 2 blocks before the fork was supposed to happen. I'm not sure that a block would have been mined once the fork occurred anyway, given the high difficulty and lack of user/service support.

I actually got "YOB2X" tokens credited to my account at 1:1 to my BTC on Yobit. I'm assuming this is due to B2X. People are buying it at 0.03-0.04 BTC for some bizarre reason.

It depends which version of Electrum you are using. If you are using a standard non-Segwit Electrum wallet -- with addresses like 1xxxxxxx -- then Coinomi should work for you. I do not believe that P2SH (3xxxxxxx) or Bech32 (bcxxxxxxx) addresses are supported at this time.

Personally, I'm waiting until the dust blows over. I think BTG will probably get pumped sometime down the road, so I'm just leaving them where they are. When I do sweep the private keys into a BTG wallet, I will make sure to send my BTC to new addresses first.

At this point, if Coinomi isn't an option, I would go with the official Core client.

I agree. This is a result of market saturation. Six months ago, demand for new coin offerings was so high that ICOs were an easy chance to double your money (or better) immediately upon launch. But now, the hype has subsided, and many less promising projects have sprung up to exploit all the dumb money that is entering the space. As such, I prefer not to be locked in an ICO when there is a good chance that I can buy cheaper down the road, below the initial offering price.

As for the OP: The only ICO that interests me right now is Bloom. I think they have a great marketing approach, and their product is being released at a great time (in the wake of the Equifax breach).

Almost 80% of the supply is already mined. I think that speculators/investors are already pricing in the future lack of new mining supply. So, the effects on price between the year 2139 and 2140 (when the supply will be completely mined) will be minimal.

This isn't like gold or silver where future supply might be unknown. We can look at the code and know that there is less than 25% of new supply up for grabs -- for all of eternity. That's it. Investors have all the information they need today. No need to wait until the year 2140 to act on it!

I have a couple friends that have used the Xapo debit card for more than a year. Both are/were very happy with the quality of service, and it seems like there haven't been many issues regarding merchant acceptance or banking problems. Haven't used it personally, though. I spend my bitcoins as seldom as possible!

However, I should point out that Xapo upset a lot of its customers with their support of the Segwit2x fork. There was even a video/Youtube campaign by (former) Xapo card holders who destroyed their Xapo cards in protest. So, if you have strong opinions about Bitcoin forks, you may want to consider that before getting a card from them.