Bitstamp is legitimate enough to handle bank transfers directly, why should they take the risk of accepting Tether? Also they are offering both Dollar and Euro trading pairs for all their cryptos, why change it up for BCH?

I doubt that cryptocurrencies will ever replace fiat, at least not cryptocurrencies as we know it -- ie. the permissionless and independent of government type.

Whether some sort of government "cryptocurrencies" will appear is a question of its own, although I doubt the viability of this concept. Either way, in my opinion cryptocurrencies are going to play a large role as a means of payment, regardless of whether it will complement or replace traditional money.

Translation: "We missed the train with Bitcoin, but we see that there is money to be made, so we want in."

On a more serious note, it will be interesting to see how Russia will handle Bitcoin. Sooner or later they will need to provide a regulatory framework for their citizens, regardless of whether they "legally recognize" Bitcoin or not. At which point it will be merely a semantic question if and how they recognize cryptocurrencies.

Is this your assumption or did you actually try to sell lower? Because that sentence doesn't make quite sense to me. If you place a sell order at a lower price than the latest trade you should actually be faster at finding a buyer since you're closer to the highest bid.

USDT is definitely a tragedy waiting to happen and I would absolutely stay away from it. Nonetheless I think that when USDT goes belly up -- when, not if -- its effect on Bitcoin will be short- to mid-term at worst. We might see a hefty correction, but I'm fairly positive that BTC will be able to recover rather sooner than later. There are indeed quite some parallels to MtGox back in the day, but Bitfinex is luckily nowhere near as dominant as MtGox used to be.

In conclusion I would take most of the article with a grain of salt, but it doesn't hurt to stay away from Bitfinex and USDT just in case. There's enough alternatives. Long term I wouldn't worry about Bitcoin though.

It might be also worth reading Theymos' take on that matter:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2435905.0

Where there is demand there is a market. It took Bitstamp longer than expected though.

I still doubt that BCH will ever be anything else than yet another alt, but as long as it outperforms fiat I'm happy.

As BTC and BCH share the same hashing algorithm for proof-of-work they are competing for the same hashrate. The result of this was occasional hashrate fluctuations, resulting in larger block intervals and subsequently congested transactions and higher fees. This was mostly caused by BCH's customized difficulty adjustment algorithm, however they have updated it since then. We'll still have to see how the network behaves once the next BTC / BCH price fluctuations occur.

Other than that the forks caused volatility, with some people selling, fearing that the fork will reduce BTC's value and other people buying, trying to get their free hardfork coins. In hindsight it seems that the buying group was the larger one.

I'm sure there are a couple of more effects on BTC, but that's the ones I can tell you off the top of my head.

...which is something I wished more people in crypto would do.

Of course the market would be a whole lot more boring, but at least pump-and-dumps, buzzword speculation and a lot of other questionable "investments" would fall on far less fertile grounds. Then again I guess that's what makes crypto so fun in the first place.

Pretty much the strategy that I am following as well. Trying to tell the top of a current grow phase or waiting for the point where exchanging BTC for fiat has become obsolete is too risky for me. I'm very bullish on BTC, but I prefer diversifying my holdings on the way up.

What has changed however is that I reduced my cash out rate. I expected a much faster, but less enormous price increase, making it easier to buy back on the way down. Now I'm just happy to take small profits every now and then. I got lucky with the first 2 dips, but I unfortunately slept through the climax of the BCH / BTC drama :X

It's when part of the network decides to follow new consensus rules (eg. bigger blocks) that are incompatible with the old ones, leading two a split of the network into two separate ledgers. This leads to owners of pre-fork coins to have a balance on both sides of the split.

Bitcoin got split into BTC and BCH a few weeks ago due to disagreements about the maximum blocksize, ie. how to approach scalability. Other hardforks are caused by other disagreements.


For a more detailed explanation see for example here:
https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-bitcoin-forks-explained/

That's the thing though -- banks are only insured to a certain amount. For example in Europe (or maybe it's just my country) most saving accounts are "only" covered until EUR 100,000,-. That's still a whole lot of money, but not all of it. Anything you hold in a savings account beyond that amount is basically at counterparty risk. Now banks usually are a lower counterparty risk than say cryptocurrency exchanges, but I guess you get my point.

Apart from that I agree with you.

The main argument that I accept against proof of work based cryptocurrencies is the amount of electricity that is consumed.

However I'd argue that it's still nothing compared to the labor and material cost of traditional banking.




Well, only to a certain amount. And the cost of those amounts that are covered, is simply spread amongst all of the bank's customers and / or the tax payers. Someone still has to pay in the end.

Of course they are.

Question being, how much of Bitcoin's growth was caused by the ICO hype? I personally think that Bitcoin is largely decoupled from the ICO market. However as always there may be relations at play that will be only obvious in hindsight.

Congratulate them on their great work. Then shrug and move along. Assuming they have no effective control, this doesn't change a thing about Bitcoin.

We all use Cryptography as standardized using the NSA's input in our everyday life. The internet, GPS and TOR all have military roots. All of which are undoubtedly useful and important inventions, regardless of where it came from.

Well he's not wrong.

He has his own metrics with which he assesses investment opportunities, successful ones at that, and Bitcoin happens to fail short in this regard. He doesn't like gold either, so it has neither to do with Bitcoin being a new technology, nor with Bitcoin being a bad investment in itself.

While I disagree with his conclusion I see where he is coming from and he's consistent in his thinking. I respect that. I respect that more than flip-flopping hype-train-jumping Wall Street bankers to be honest.



Warren Buffett made more money investing than he or his descendants will ever be able to spent, I doubt he has reason to be jealous or to feel like he missed the boat

Here's a list that should be somewhat up-to-date. Note that Bitcoin acceptance may differ based on your region (eg. Expedia only accepts BTC payments on their US website).

https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins/

Noteable other (non-US) merchants include: aohostels.com (hotel / hostel rooms) and lieferando.de / lieferservice.at (food delivery service)


I personally mostly use BTC for namecheap, Steam and HumbleBundle (in cases where HumbleBundle accepts BTC, which is unfortunately not always).


Noteable exchange platforms for buying / selling BTC include: Coinbase.com, Kraken.com, Bitstamp.net and Bitcoin.de. There are a couple other ones that have a heavy focus on alts, but most of them don't allow for direct bank transfers.

A++++ creativity, 10/10 would conspire again.

Also Bilderberg Group is an anagram for Briber Gold Purge which reveals their true agenda: Bribing the public to purge gold by switching to Bitcoin!

As mentioned in the other post, security shouldn't be an issue with either device. If you're into alts however, you might want to check which ones are supported by each respective wallet. Most major alts are supported by both, some minor ones however, are not.

At the end of this article you'll find an overview of alts supported on Ledger vs Trezor:

https://coinsutra.com/best-hardware-wallet-bitcoin/

I personally am a fan of Trezor, but maybe the Ledger Nano S is supporting some alts that you'd be missing otherwise.

Anything we can automate, we should. Otherwise we'd still be stuck in the pre-industrial area without any social or technological progress at all.

Free up workforce from unnecessary, menial tasks and put those people to good use elsewhere. It already happened to most manual labor, why should finance be exempt? For every job that becomes obsolete, new opportunities will arise. As a result global productivity and thus wealth will increase, it's just the matter of fair distribution that is worrisome.

Try consolidating these few Satoshis with some of your other coins by sending them with an ultra-low fee to another wallet you own. It may take some days, but they will be arrive sooner or later. If your transaction gets dropped from the mempool after 1-2 weeks, just try again. It'll get through eventually.


It's a valid concern, but I honestly doubt that on-chain transactions will reach fees of that magnitude once lightning network gets deployed. Even if that were the case, people would most likely simply use alternative crypto-currencies until they reach capacity as well.