Again, these businesses are largely going to be targeting other institutional investors within the market.

Even though that yes, their use of bitcoin will represent more demand for bitcoin and potentially when their products launch it could cause a short term spike within the market, I wouldn't regard this as actual adoption.

They're going to be involved in mainly speculation and that's not necessarily anything positive from the standpoint of actual usage of the technology. Obviously, there is no stopping them from doing it when the markets mature a bit more and regulation also becomes more clear, but most likely this news is going to be the source of a lot of FOMO in the future which I think is irrational.

On the one side, you have people who are arguing that regulations are able to bring a more mature environment for institutions to step into in order to invest, and lead to more adoption as people's trust in crypto rises. On the flip side, you'd also have some restrictive or draconian regulations especially in regards to KYC/AML requirements where it may not be as positive.

These are all valid. There are drawbacks and benefits of regulations. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's not up to us to decide the regulations, nor is there any way for us to stop certain regulation from happening.

For sure though, I can see that the image of bitcoin being something used in the underworld would clear up if more regulations came into place that are positive, and that could lead to more demand. But it still all depends.

Yeah. And with the nature of bitcoin, you can't really track private transactions at all which means that the actual trading volume for bitcoin is largely unknown, even with the misleading volumes on exchange, let alone off exchange.

We could see more and more people go with these private trades in the future, or agreements, settling for larger volumes than an exchange is usually handling.

Others have raised the issue of fungibility and I think that's a concern as well. Though, we have really no proof that this is actually happening just off the sole word of one person. I would find it extremely surprising if 20% premiums are being paid for these coins, tbh.

Just quoting from their website:


This alone should have been enough to raise suspicions. I mean, what cloud mining with a legitimate business model would just completely waive the electricity and maintenance fees off like that? It's impossible that they are actually mining if that's the case.

But their calculators show high returns as well which are by no means sustainable in the long run, and clearly demonstrate their illegitimacy.

Either they're misleadingly advertising here, or more likely, they are just a fraud in disguise. Do stay away from them.

I would not say that just solely based off the 3% correction that we saw today that anything major is coming our way, considering that in the last 6 months the index has still been on the upside.

But to me, there definitely will be a bear market within the stock market coming our way very soon. That's something that's only a matter of time after 10 years of consecutive growth as well as overbought shares, in my opinion. But obviously, you don't know when it's going to come.

All we can do right now is prepare and hedge against a potential stock market crash, which could have some pretty deep consequences. Holding some bitcoin which is independent of any of this could be a smart decision to make.

The reason is most likely because merchants who accept credit cards for bitcoin is more likely to be victims of fraud than simple purchases of goods, because of the fact that bitcoin is irreversible as well as being extremely liquid which makes it perfect for a lot of the credit card scammers out there.

That's the primary reason that these exchanges ask for this 3D secure thing.

I honestly don't know what you can do in this case, other than contacting your bank and asking for a replacement card with this 3D secure thing, or even switching banks for that matter. However, you could try potentially linking the credit card to your paypal account, and purchasing BTC using Paypal on Virwox or other exchanges that way.

First of all, you should have never ever gone near yobit. If you heard any reviews on the forum and seen any of the complaints, you know that they are not some site that you want to mess around with.

At any stage they could take your money, suspend your account, and call it a day with their selective scamming. And there would be absolutely nothing you could do because of their unresponsive support and the fact that they're largely an unregulated entity.

For now, I'd recommend you just being patient and waiting for a response. Keep asking for your account to be unbanned and ask for justifications as to why it was banned. If there was some form of valid justification, ask them to return your coins. Keep reiterating these messages to their support, possibly in Russian as well using google translate since some people found success with that.

Institutional investors are already adopting bitcoin, in 2018. It's only going to continue in the future it seems.

There really has to be stuff to be said about how much institutional adoption actually matters, though, because they are honestly just speculating on bitcoin's value and pretty much nothing more than that. Does that really help bitcoin in any way in the long run? Probably not.

But it does drive prices up in the short run and I guess that's something to feel good about. But again, once institutions see something profitable and holds promise, their investment/adoption is imminent.

I mean this will not necessarily affect the people who are using coinbase as an exchange since they would already be verified. But it will affect the people who are using coinbase primarily as a wallet, being unverified, and sending and receiving in cryptos only.

There are two potential motives for this. Firstly, they probably want more people to get verified so that they can use the services that they actually make money off, which is exchanging USD with BTC. Secondly, there could be regulatory concerns as well.

Expect a huge drop off of users of Coinbase, once this gets into place. But to be honest there were never the need to use coinbase as a wallet in the first place, and this could be positive in terms of getting people to actually using decentralised wallets.

I don't think that bitcoin could ever be truly 100% decentralised. That's just the case with all the bitcoin businesses that are holding funds for its users.

At some stage, you still have to trust someone to hold funds for you.

But apart from that, I'd say that the absence of a leader does probably make bitcoin more decentralised, and a lot more decentralised than a lot of other cryptos who have a leader who still asserts a degree of control over the coin. Perhaps Satoshi thought of this as well when he went AWOL, but that's all speculation.

I don't think that it'll be much of an issue for bitcoin holders. It is a huge breach of privacy for sure and I'd for this reason probably think twice before travelling there again, but it doesn't really pose any more risk to bitcoin holders.

Firstly, there is no rules in terms of you can't bring bitcoin into the country. Secondly, you're not actually bringing bitcoin into the country.

Bitcoins remain in an address that does not physically move. You can easily copy down an encrypted version of the private keys onto paper, or even use an online wallet for the time that you're travelling there in order to circumvent the customs laws.

Man oh man. I wonder who would fall for these types of scams (unfortunately, there are people who actually do).

I mean, it's just so damn obvious. Coinbase itself doesn't even make 350% in 10 days, let alone offering someone the opportunity to make that kind of returns on their investment? Please. At least make the scam more realistic.

Just be careful with any email that you receive of this nature. And use your common sense in terms of judging what returns are legit and what returns are ponzi-like when investing online. Do your research as well as always.

I don't think that the current decline is as a result of panic dumping per se.

It's honestly just a natural part of the cycle that we are in. We've seen huge bullish rallies in the year of 2017 and thus, there will be corrections sooner or later, and that happened within this year.

That's the simple fact of it. The market sentiment has turned bearish because there hasn't been much activity within the market since the start of the year. There is absolutely no reason to panic and every reason to buy and use dollar cost averaging to your advantage, though.

It's a big if, first of all.

Given the track record of all the ETF rejections that has happened in the past I still remain quite pessimistic about the fact that this particular one is going to be approved in the future. Even if there was a slight chance, there could be postponements that make the decision way later than the suggested date.

Assuming that it does get approved, though, I think that $10k could be possible especially later on in the year because a recovery is near. However, I only think this will be something short term and not going to have any long term effects as more people realise that ETFs honestly don't matter that much to bitcoin users, but only to institutional speculators.

I noticed this recently as well when I wanted to exchange some AUD to USD, rates have certainly spiked and USD has been pretty strong for the past few months for sure.

I honestly think that this is only going to affect the traditional economy in terms of exports, imports, and tourism. I don't think that USD going strong is going to have much to do with bitcoin prices, even though theoretically prices for BTC would drop as well.

The main reason is that bitcoin's primarily traded against USD itself which makes the rates at which USD is traded against other currencies less relevant. However, if in the future we see more equal distribution of trading volumes of BTC against other fiats, this could change.

The campaign manager and ANN poster of this scam is still yet to respond to all these accusations, and take down the ANN, even though it is apparent that the first accusations against the legitimacy of the site had started a month or so ago. That warrants a neg in my opinion if he keeps up with this behaviour.

Anyhow, their site design is rudimentary at best and that's always a telltale sign for a scam. Also, their idea that is being pitched (being blockchain based real estate) has already been done countless times before, which is another characteristic of ICO scammers who aren't able to come up with their own original ideas.

I like how they're admitting that they faked the team before by replacing all the images of the members with new ones as well. There is still no social media/linkedin profiles for any of them. No info on when the token sale actually is that I can find, hopefully no one has invested yet.

I pretty much agree with your prediction, but the lowest that I see prices go is probably $4k at the moment. But I do think that a dip or two are still going to come our way before prices actually start recovering.

This is pretty much based on the previous cycles, especially the most recent bear market of 2014. Obviously it's not going to be a perfectly mirrored version of that, but it should be fairly close given the cyclic nature of the market within bitcoin.

Though, for now until the end of the year most likely, I think we'll still consolidate at $6k and see prices stay put and move mostly sideways without any major movement.

Is it talking about short term, or big picture? Because even though prices are low right now, there is still huge demand for bitcoin in a lot of countries where capital control is instated on their local currency which restricts access to foreign currencies.

And in countries like those, bitcoin is definitely still used in order to help these people get their funds out of the country, which is what the demand comes from.

But if it's talking about the short term prices, then I realistically do not see prices rebounding in a major way any time soon. There is simply not enough bullish sentiment within the market, but it's certainly a good price for long term holders to get in at.

Not just a scam but a very obvious one as well. They're offering people a free 0.0003 BTC per day just by signing up. Just use your common sense here, how is this profitable for them at all?

At some stage they will ask for your deposit/investment in order to withdraw the funds that you earned for free, and they'll simply eat that up and exit scam. That's usually how the scam goes.

There has been countless examples of the same scam strategy in the past and this is just another version of it. Might not even be a ponzi for all we know, it could just take your money as soon as your deposit rolls in.

No one is going to do this with you. 1:1 is not going to happen, that's the harsh truth.

You already listed all the exchanges which have good rates, however, expect to be asked verification documents before you even start a transaction.

If you trade P2P with credit cards or paypal, you're going to incur a huge fee, at least 10% if you aren't able to provide the necessarily KYC documents. At your last resort, trade P2P on a platform like LBC. If you do have KYC docs, then just simply use Coinbase, Xapo, etc. which accepts credit card/paypal deposits.