Not a good argument. Bitcoin's astronomical growth comes from the fact that it has grown from nothing to something. PayPal is an already established business and for that reason can't book similar growth rates.

Again not a good argument. Bitcoin's net dollar transaction volume is largely coming from its speculative nature, while PayPal's volumes are nearly for 100% economical transactions used to either buy or sell goods or services.

I still haven't seen you explain how Bitcoin is already killing them.

I think I have to correct you here. PayPal's volumes have only increased throughout the last couple of years, and that to me doesn't seem like they are losing their dominant position as financial institution.

See for yourself how PayPal's volumes have been growing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277841/paypals-total-payment-volume/

Despite all the complaints from people that PayPal is allowing scammers to charge back on innocent people and merchants, and that the fees are too high (which they are), it's still one of the more popular services.

I actually expected a decline a year or two ago, but they keep growing and growing, which for them as business is a healthy way to move forward. The question is how long will they be able to keep it up.

Not entirely. If we follow the blind chicken gang supporting XRP, which is one of the largest altcoins in this industry, they seriously believe that it may reach $500 to $1000 per token.

It's entirely ridiculous, but people only seem to pay attention to the single token or coin value, which in case of XRP means $0.30 per token. It's easy to buy into and a few hundred bucks worth of it buys you a lot of coins.

People's main obstacle with Bitcoin is its higher price. They don't want to buy 0.15BTC with $1000 of their savings, but thousands of smaller coins. It's a psychological matter in the end.

It's impossible for people to know what dip to buy on the way down, especially if this is their first ever crypto bull run. For them a decrease of 20% is a fantastic entry point, but they have no idea that this market corrects with 75% on average.

It's even a tough call for the more experienced Bitcoiners. I have seen how mostly all of them were extremely hyped up and were really believing that $50,000 was the next stop while the price was still around the $17,000 mark.

Then their ultimate bottom on the way down was the psychological $10,000 mark, then $8000, then $7000 and then $6000. People can act tough all they want, but they were doing nothing but playing the guessing game.

It all depends on your outlook. In the last 5 years gold has been down like 15% which if you also add the loss of purchasing power, makes it even a less fruitful option to go for with Bitcoin being around.

Everyone has its own opinion of course, but we should at least acknowledge the potential of Bitcoin's growth and how it might disrupt everything the traditional system stands for today. If you don't try you don't know.

I'm not going anywhere in life by having my wealth invested in traditional options that yield you a few percent if you're lucky. I'm at a point in life where I can take a significant amount of risk, and I'm sticking to it.

As for OP, the only challenge will be the first trillion. I can see a scenario where various entities will try to prevent Bitcoin from reaching that market cap because of how psychologically important it is. After the first trillion the sky is the limit.

That was actually what I referred to. This industry has one of the worst possible mainstream adopters in existence, and the crypto related news outlets perfectly adjust themselves to serve these people.

It's called know your market and demographics, and the crypto news outlets surely do know how to generate traffic and clicks. We really need to break through the speculative bubble in order to expect quality content.

It seems that the best content nowadays can be found on Reddit, Steamit, Medium. The key is to follow the right people and ignore those who don't contribute to worthwhile exchange of information.

Hasn't the media always been a noob focused news outlet? They pretty much serve people the quality and content they are worth, which in most cases translates into rubbish content, especially in this industry.

Everyone with sense doesn't pay attention to mainstream media outlets, but follows everything that matters on their own, which results in more accurate and unbiased information that is actually worth something.

The average joes swallow everything you throw at them, and for that reason there is no way to expect anything to change. I even expect things to get worse and it seems that things do indeed only get worse.

What new and amazing do you expect to happen? It's clear that the market cycles throughout Bitcoin's history of 8-9 years haven't changed at all. Based on that it's probably safe to say that we will see far lower than current levels.

BAKKT was probably the best possible good news event for this market, but no one even bothered to react aside from a few people here, but they aren't the ones being able to actually move the market to reflect this development.

Nothing can change the sentiment other than the price to break out of its lower high cycle. Once the price breaks out of this long term bearish downtrend, you'll see the mainstream start becoming bullish again.

We should calm down and stop asking people to do this or that. If market movers want to contribute towards a long lasting bear market, which seems to be the case, nothing of what you mentioned will help in any way.

We have to remain realistic. People don't care about anything aside from seeing the price moon swing and that's really it. They don't care about using it as payment because there are more convenient fiat options they use.

People here are lazy and don't want to do anything other than looking at the price in the hope it's higher than the last time they looked it up. Just let the market do whatever it wants to do. It's all part of the game we're playing.

He also stated that Bitcoin would need to bottom out before it pumps (his predicted bottom is $5000). If his predictions hold any value, the price would first need to drop far below people's precious $6000 mark.

That being said, I'm quite bored with all "expert" predictions nowadays. It has become more noise than actual signal, and when that happen you mostly know it's pure desperation.

All the crypto funds have to act overly bullish to not let their clients lose hope and withdraw their capital, but when they are wrong time on time again, people will eventually take their losses and move on.

Accepting losses is way easier than waiting for the market to reach $20,000 this year as experts keep pointing to, which isn't going to happen. Taking your capital out also means no more stress.

The media isn't against crypto and the media isn't the reason the price has dropped.

The media is nothing more than a sentiment surfer. If the market is bearish they become equally as bearish. If the market is bullish, they become equally as bullish. They have to do this in order to remain relevant.

They know how markets work. During bear markets good news has no impact and for that reason they reduce good news articles as much as possible, unless the good news is too big to not publish.

Last year during the bull run the media was extremely bullish, and even so bullish that it nearly annoyed me as Bitcoiner. People just need to accept that we're dealing with businesses and not anti crypto outlets.

If people are not valuing their privacy enough by handing over precious information to ICOs requiring KYC/AML verification, then they definitely won't mind handing over their information to an established exchange.

It's shocking to me how people don't care about anything as long as they are in a position allowing them to potentially make profit. Some people blatantly admit that they don't care about it.

Their reasoning behind that way of thinking is that they aren't wealthy enough to become a victim of theft and whatnot. They don't realize how stupid they make themselves look by talking this level of nonsense.

Bitcoin isn't losing or gaining value. Coins tied to Bitcoin do. 1BTC = 1BTC.

It's not the best thing to add so much importance to Bitcoin's dominance in terms of its market cap. Altcoins are similar to leveraged positions which make them go up and down way beyond Bitcoin's price movements.

If we indeed happen to see a somewhat decent increase this year, it will pump altcoins back to where they started before the recent decline, and who knows what an altcoin season (if it still exists) is capable of doing.

Fact is that the whole crypto industry has not been innovative enough this year, which is quite a shame. It's like the bear market has completely covered this industry with so much negativity, that not much seems to happen.

That's not really an excuse. It's quite easy to open a short position at BitMEX and just have the downtrend work for you. It doesn't cost any time or effort, just leave it open and check back once a week or so.

If you use a low leverage count your liquidation price is pretty much well out of the easy to access market range. Ignore all the people saying low leverage counts are for pussies, these people are big mouths and gamblers.

That's the best way to move forward. People don't realize how much of an opportunity it is to use current levels to significantly lower your initial buying price. Lower average price means quicker profits on the way up.

Sadly, that's the hard reality. In most cases these are also the people finding themselves in a position where gambling and high interest short term loans are part of their daily lives.

They desperately keep looking for ways to exit their miserable and non successful life, that they discard all possible risks resulting in severe losses and unfortunately, long life debt suppressing them for ever.

Considering that very few people have had the opportunity to actually buy or sell the top, it's more likely that most underwater investors (bagholders) are stuck with on average at $15,000 priced coins.

Fair enough. I'm reading into LN more regularly nowadays with how the developments and even adoption starts to pick up pace. Can't wait for the first proper client to pop up to allow even noobs to use it without problems.

Currently there are a few clients available in the app store, but they are everything but easy to use, and completing payments is a nightmare since the node they run has barely any proper routing channels to use.

My guess is that we have at least a few more years of LN development to go through before we can comfortably use it.

Harris referred to on-chain transaction fees, and not shitty centralized services allowing people transact with each other instantly and for free. You bring up a point that's completely irrelevant to what Harris was talking about.

It's not Bitcoin you're transacting with through centralized services, but worthless numbers somewhere in their database. The only thing happening is that balances change and that's it.

If we all start transacting through centralized services we can just as easily stop using crypto as payment form and use fiat based services, because there is no difference. We need to move away from centralization, not stimulate it.

It doesn't have any hype behind it, which renders it worthless as instrument. It all comes down to the thought of having institutions enter this space with their capital, not retailers who can easily buy the asset themselves already.

The selling feature of the current ETF is that institutions can buy long term exposure through their preferred platform that is regulated and proven to be reliable of serving multi billion dollar parties for years and years.

That being said, the ETF that people are hyping up might just as well be a flop and enjoy barely any institutional interest. We'll see what happens, but people should be a bit more conservative before celebrating an unproven event.

Dip below $5700 is enough to see $5000s from where we can only hope that it won't drop further.

I initially didn't pay attention to Arthur Hayes's $5000 prediction, but it might hold a bit more weight than most of us here think, especially with how he pointed out that he doesn't care about the price as long as it is volatile.

If you want to create a crazy volatile market where everyone goes nuts, you only have to break $5700 and the panic will be complete. If it drops to $5000 and below, it could as easily drop to $3000 as final bottom.

I'm glad I just hodl and dollar cost average. Trying to trade this market is pretty much a one way ticket to nothing but severe losses.

The harder these parasites supported by the legacy industries trash talk Bitcoin, the more they fear for their position. It's admittedly scary to see decentralized networks take over and eat up their market share.

They are trying to protect what's left of their elitist empire before crypto finds out a way to properly scale without compromising on its decentralized nature. It's going to happen eventually, the only question is when.

Are you living under a rock? No one in the last 2 years has praised Bitcoin for its low or near free transactions. Free transactions were a thing back in 2011/2012/2013 but it's over. Harris is an idiot.