many other investments are not a global thing belonging to the whole world, and those that are global, are being affected by a lot of things that can cause slow down during holiday season. additionally none of them are on the rise nor are getting adopted as a new trusted investment.

right now many are thinking that bitcoin is also a viable option like gold for example and they would want to invest in it as soon as possible. and the good news keeps coming out! this CME thing is pretty fresh and its effects can continue until end of the year.

I like to believe that there are two things that are currently preventing bitcoin from being a currency, in other words make people want to save it instead of spending it.

one of them is obviously the rising price. which is something expected because bitcoin is on the path of most adoption -pun intended- and that means the price will continue rising like this for a long time to come. that creates the incentive to hold rather than spend.
this will go away when price is more stable.

the other thing is high fees. part because of rising price and part because of limited block space and large number of daily transactions.
this hopefully will be fixed as things like LN come to action but we will always have this limit.

in the end I have to say people are spending bitcoin. actually it is surprising to see how much more bitcoin they are spending as the price rises. there was a good post on bitpay blog about this. they released their yearly stats showing how much people are spending bitcoin year month that price rises! make sure to give it a read.

this only proves that you don't understand what bitcoin is. you think that if the price of bitcoin drops, bitcoin will die! but what you fail to understand is that bitcoin is not alive to have a price. there currently are many in bitcoin just because of the price and because it has been rise madly this year but there still are a lot more in it because it is a "decentralized currency" and they will remain even if the price fell down to $1 tomorrow. they will just buy more of it in that case.

Satoshi is part of that group, he didn't create bitcoin for it to have a rising value nor in order to become rich. he created a payment system that hopefully nobody can control. so far we have been true to this definition more or less. and that's what keeps bitcoin alive.

this is somewhat normal on the internet or the social media to be specific. most people who sit behind their computers and gain the anonymity of being a "throwaway account", start thinking they are strong and can do anything they want.
in this case, most of what they do is to pump their altcoin called bitcoin cash to a higher price. and that is not even new and they are not the only ones doing it. most of the altcoins do the same. I remember earlier this year when the altcoins had their massive pump, coins like Dash were even spreading rumors about bitcoin. and by that time there were a spam attack on the network which some said the Dash team was behind part of it.
it is all bullshit anyways, at the end of the day bitcoin is bitcoin and no amount of talk is going to change that.

the number of idiots among us is increasing day by day, with topics like this from someone who either don't even understand what a Ponzi scheme is or he understands it but he thinks if he calls bitcoin Ponzi he can stir up some shit with it. in both cases starter is a big idiot by definition.

now the question is, should we be worried about this situation (increase of idiots among us) or should we be happy about it?
these idiots can be a good source of income. when they panic sell their bitcoins and then buy it back from us at a higher price before they panic sell it again to us under the price they have bought it!

LOL, one of the main ways of earning money that these altcoin exchanges use is to pump and dump altcoins themselves. it is a well known method! they even place fake buy walls to manipulate the price and a shady exchange like bittrex which is showing signs of money problems is a good candidate of market manipulation.

besides, you can never prove this type of manipulation. price is going up, that is all you see. you don't know that it is being pumped with fake news and a fake group with lots of sheep following it.

well, good news is that they have finally implemented a way to withdraw BTG to our desired BTG address. I think they did it today. so everything is fine now.
according to the website you need to do it before 10th of January 2018 which is more than enough time for anyone to withdraw. the fee is also pretty low at 0.00001000 BTG. with minimum of 0.00007000 BTG.

thanks FreeBitcoi.in team.

the $10,000 is one of those prices that will be like a big barrier against the rally. we will probably see another one of those double, triple tops where price keeps going up to test the resistance and fails breaking it so it drops down and then tests the support and after a while test again to fail.

but I think we will see this happening within 2017. it is going to be a little scary though, I must admit. that is a gigantic rise that is nearly unbelievable. from $1000 to $10,000 in one year, although not unheard of.
but the demand is there, you can't do anything about it.

nobody is banning bitcoin these days, in fact they are all adopting it and even talk about how legalizing bitcoin is going to be a good thing for them. you know as in tax revenue,

in any case, either one of these will bring the other.
if you legalize bitcoin, it will bring public awareness
public awareness can also bring legalization.

but making it illegal won't prevent the public awareness though. bitcoin is decentralized and nobody can really ban it for good. and they can never prevent people from finding out about bitcoin and wanting to use the peer to peer network!

I am sorry say this but investing in bitcoin did not jeopardize his life savings, his naiveté did.


I have highlighted the main issues.
1. going all in.
this is a stupid move. some people do it because they are bold BUT when they do it they are well aware of the risks they are talking. they know they can lose everything and they know they can make a lot. not just think they will make a lot without risk overnight. only an idiot does that.

2. not educating himself.
I mean you want to buy something small like a cell phone you ask around, do some research and see what is best then pay the money. how can you not know much about something that you are investing ALL your money in?!!

3. reading comments and seeking financial advice from random people!
I haven't really read reddit crap much but here I always see everyone warn newcomers to "invest what you can afford to lose" and I never see anyone assure them of price rise. I never do it myself anyways. whenever I say price is rising I say something like there is a good chance or it may also drop.
you shouldn't really seek financial advice from random people anyways!

gold has value because it is useful. it is not just an asset you invest in and nothing else. gold is being used in thousands of different places. in different amounts and shapes from big size in jewelries to tiny nano particles used in medical technologies.

bitcoin has value because it is useful too. it is not just an asset. bitcoin is useful because it is a currency which is decentralized. has high security and global. of course being cheap is desired but sadly for this short period of time we can not have that. hopefully we will in the near future again like we had low fees before.

well I had no balance on this website back in the time of bitcoin cash, all my balance was either in cold storage or on exchange wallet ready to be sold at the highest price which I did. but this time I was using this website to earn some profit and test some stuff so I had some balance there.

it would be great if they make an official announcement soon. price went up to 0.05[bt] today, as a trader I hate to miss out on the current pump

the term "Account Holder" doesn't even have a meaning when you are talking about bitcoin. the article is not helping me understand what that term means either.
from the way they reported it, I agree with others that say it is a useless click-bait and it is not unheard of from this site to post these kind of nonsense.

although they may be referring to someone who had some money on some exchange and his account was hacked on that exchange because he leaked his password to a phishing attack or something similar. I wouldn't really call this a news-worthy incident though!

one of the best things about trading cryptocurrencies is that you can start with a very small amount, use this to your advantage. you can invest 0.001BTC which is less than $10 with current price and start trading with that. it is 10 times the minimum trading amount allowed on most exchanges and it is also bigger than deposit fees for bitcoin but not withdrawal fees of most exchanges.

never make a trade based on emotions, such as feeling you missed out on the rise or missed out on selling. in other words don't  do panic trading.
try to have a good reason for every coin that you buy and sell when you reach your desired profit not your wished profit. that would be being greedy which never ends well in trading.

in the end it is all about experience. you start with that small amount and make it into 0.002BTC then 0.004BTC and when you felt confined, you can invest a bigger amount or be cautious and turn this 0.001BTC to 1BTC!

one of the issues with bitcoin (that the outsiders don't know, or usually forget) is that the market is very small. the price is decided on the exchanges with small orderbooks. it has been growing in the past year but it is still not at the point that we can hope for.

what this means is that the market is easily manipulated and these corrections become crashes very easily. each time that a drop happens, you can see the initial dump was not really that big but it caused a big drop then the bigger volume comes in with panic and causes the crash.

because of this I say the time between these "crashes" are mostly manipulation of market makers wanting to make more money from disrupting the market temporarily. and this is becoming harder as bitcoin grows.

I was also wondering about the bitcoin gold exchange rate that freebitco.in is offering. I had about 0.5BTC at the time of the fork which now I would like to claim and possibly convert back to bitcoin but with the current exchange rate I will be losing about 0.012BTC=~$100 (price is currently 0.041BTC on Yobit)

I know it is tough to change the exchange rate of a volatile asset on the site every second but it would be great if you could add an option to withdraw bitcoin gold if anyone wants.
you can even do a weekly withdrawal like how BTC withdrawal works, maybe someone wants to hold their BTG until it is properly pumped to 0.1BTC or even more!!!

start by educating yourself more about what bitcoin is, how it works and pretty much the basics to have an idea what you are buying.
and then move on to learning which wallet is best for you to use and what is the safest way to secure that wallet which you ended up choosing.

this link has most of the information you need to know: https://bitcoin.org/en/getting-started

after reading through the above pages, come back here and ask any questions that you may have. like some part that you did not understand or made you confused.

bitcoin as a currency doesn't have any specific impact on a country's economy if you ask me. but it can have positive effects at the same time. for example it has created lots of new jobs and businesses that never existed before. many shops are increasing their sales by just accepting bitcoin in addition to accepting fiat. you can find their statements online.

bitcoin as an asset can have both negative and positive effects. the swings can cause people lost a lot of money specially since most of them are not familiar with trading, but this is not really a bitcoin related thing. the same people enter stocks market and lost money there too.

but these things don't happen slowly or with prior warning.
one day everything is fine and people are happily trading and withdrawing. the next day when they make a withdrawal the system tells them their withdrawal request is being processed but in reality it is stuck forever and they will never be paid. it has already happened like this multiple times with different exchanges.

so far they are working fine with everything that is being thrown at them. with the hack and then their bank closing their accounts. curious to see how much more they can handle.

well China didn't ban bitcoin and never wanted to do it either. however, there are smaller countries that have banned bitcoin but they have just embarrassed themselves with this move because bitcoin is a peer to peer cryptocurrency and you can not ban a peer to peer network without shutting down the internet!

eventually all the countries will change their stance towards bitcoin. many will embrace bitcoin just like Japan did but these countries will be late and will surely lose the market share of bitcoin. for example Japan is soon going to be like a bitcoin haven and it will boost their country revenue through tourism a lot. and it is always a race which lots of others will lose if late.