Correct. Last year pretty much everything went up in value by at least 1000%, so there wasn't much that anyone could do wrong, not even those blindly picking a coin to park their savings in.

I was the loser here for advising people not to invest in this or that shitcoin. Every coin I told people not to invest in last year went up balls high. I was literally told that I don't know anything despite being here for so many years. I couldn't even counter that with how the prices kept going up even after I thought they would correct, lol. That's why I'm keeping my mouth shut when I'm being asked for input.

People should do whatever they think is necessary. They are expert as long as the price keeps going up and silently find their way out when things start to move in the opposite direction.

How do you know they can't be buying at the top? It's not very likely because they usually have more sense in them, but they may have been fomo'ing just as hard as regular joes.

Circle (which is backed by the most powerful financial institutions) acquired Poloniex for an insane $400 million, which is a clear miscalculation on their end.

Private futures contracts between institutions and miners makes the most sense with how both parties end up with the certainty that they get what they want, because we all know how crazy this market can be some times. It also demonstrates the proper usage of futures contracts, which can't be said about the lame ass casino shit being offered by CME & CBOE.

They very well could crash more, but the point is that their valuations aren't necessarily the most important aspect to focus on with how these stocks draw speculative interest more than any other sector. The thing is that we don't know whether this is the best opportunity to short or to long, and that alone is reason enough to not mess with US stocks at all.

Chinese stocks on the other hand look like a sweet deal with how some of them corrected over 50% this year alone. There may be some more downward potential, but that's simply a matter of averaging the market down. It is that all my time and money goes towards Bitcoin, but I would definitely long some stocks over there if that wasn't the case.

It's great as long as the price has a bias towards the upside, which can't always be guaranteed, especially if the bear market turns out to drag on for years.

If Ledn ends up shorting a small percentage of their BTC holdings (which is what payment gateways do as well), they could potentially work around the risk of falling prices, but I can't read anywhere if that's something they will be doing. It would make sense if they did, because regardless of how much potential they believe hides within Bitcoin, there are limits for everyone runnig a business.

Positive side is that if large enough parties take out a loan with their coins as collateral instead of dumping them on the spot market, we may face less selling pressure.  

Netflix is just one of the many. Every streaming service has its own selection of series/movies/documentaries that it offers, which would require people to have numerous paid (monthly) subscriptions just to watch what they are interested in. This also applies to porn sites where people mostly look for specific scenes and photo sets of their favorite models.

Most people here don't complain about fees because they generate most of what they have through campaigns, tasks, etc. People putting fiat on the table felt the pain of the high on-chain fees last year, so it really matters. Another thing is that it just doesn't make sense to pay $9 for something that also requires a $9 (or higher) on-chain fee, which is why LN is so important.

These predictions at least show that there is no difference between the average speculator here and what some people consider the elite. They're all guessing their asses off, and they just keep going till they are right, which they eventually will be. The same applies to Arthur Hayes who constantly comes up with new price forecasts.

I have yet to see someone openly admit that he/she just doesn't know what's going to happen. But then again, these people are just not given any air time because news outlets are only out to either cover bullish or bearish narratives, which is what sells at the end of the day.

These predictions became more of an early morning laugh than something worth taking seriously.

Dobitrade is a volume cheater.

Look at their alexa rank; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dobitrade.com

18.8% of their traffic comes from CMC, which is why they are doing the best they can to artificially inflate their volumes, and it seems to work.

Look at Binance's alexa rank and see the difference; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/binance.com

Only 5.7% of their traffic comes from CMC, because they have done enough to build up their brand in more respectable ways.

You only need a basic level of market understanding, the rest is not important.

Most of the traders don't care about what coin they trade, they just look for the momentum and hop to another coin as soon as that momentum is about to fade. BCash is going through some serious momentum as we speak, which as you can see, that's where traders are trying to get the best out of that opportunity till the hard fork takes place and they short the crap out of it as goodbye kiss.

The problem people often face is that they try to dig up all sorts of data about the project itself, and who the people behind it are, which is definitely important for long term investment puproses, but the short term market doesn't mirror the utility and usefulness of a project, just the speculative side.

It's the bear market nullifying everything that fits in the good news category. I'm certain that if it was announced during last year's bull mania the market would go nuts over it. The only problem Bakkt will be facing is that the bear market will significantly reduce the demand for their product. I hope it's calculated in and they accept that this is part of crypto.

That being said, while Bitcoin is sitting on its ass, there is something brewing in the altcoin market for the last couple of days, so we might be in for some crazy fireworks over there. I went long on Ethereum just under $210, so I'll let that position accumulate me some Bitcoins as insurance for my long position on Bitcoin around $6500 that doesn't seem to be doing much.

Exchanges will do everything they can to have themselves rank up based on volumes on sites such as CMC, because that's where most of the traffic comes from nowadays.

Asian exchanges are amongst those who cheat the most with their volumes, where OKEx and Huobi are the absolute leaders in that field.

People know it happens, they simply don't care. As I said above, sites as CMC are very important for exchanges, and for that reason will do everything they can to retain their top 10 spot, because that's what traders look for and consider 'safe' enough. The downside of this is that compliant exchanges can't compete with cheaters because of how much there is to lose for them.

Out of the exchange top 10, 8 exchanges are unregulated. The other 2 might be as well, but I'm not sure. No wonder the SEC isn't interested in this nonsense.

If that happens to become reality, it's great for the local crypto economy, but there is no way that foreign players will even remotely consider to settle themselves in an unstable country. On top of that, being settled in countries such as Ukraine will definitely scare off large scale investors. In other words, there is more to lose than to gain here.

I'm sure that businesses will rather prefer to pay tax elsewhere than to be extorted eventually by Ukrainian government officials. There you have the law of the state, and the law of the elite.

Malta seems to be the main hotspot for the top layer of the crypto world, and nothing will be able to change that, at least not any time soon.

I honestly think that you should stay away till you understand what Bitmex actually is.

It's not a regular exchange, but a platform where you can buy yourself into various types of contracts speculating on the price of Bitcoin or other altcoins to either go up or down. Depending on how much leverage you go with or the contract type you buy into, there is a chance that you will lose your entire position.

There are plenty of newbies depositing Bitcoin to lose it all not long after, and from there blame the exchange for being a scam, or that they have been hacked and someone stole their coins. It's not something to underestimate.

Read; https://www.bitmex.com/app/faq

Nah. I'm pretty content with how everything works nowadays with Bitcoin on my side. My only need is decentralized money, which is what I have right now.

I consider myself to be fairly demanding and well above what an average user of the internet looks like nowadays. If I can be satisfied with how things are right now, I'm sure that the average joe (which usually doesn't care about decentralization at all) is even more satisfied.

Ripple clearly demonstrates with their database products that you don't need a blockchain to get things done more efficiently. The only reason they label themselves as a blockchain party is to ride the blockchain hype, which is understandable. It's free marketing and investors seem to love raining millions on anything related to this industry.

The wheel has already been invented, it's Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto currencies. There is nothing more to gain here.

It may not at all apply to Bitstamp, but to me these cases reek of insolvency.

I remember that Coinbase at some point went through very similar delays, where they came up with all sorts of excuses to justify why it took so long. Don't forget that there is way more crypto in circulation than actual fiat, especially after a bull run that stimulated people to cash out, which basically means that the fiat reserves of exchanges are on their lows, maybe even completely exhausted.

As you said yourself, there is no way to fact check whether or not they actually process withdrawals as long as the money isn't in, so we can only speculate as to what might be going on in the background. Not much to do other than to wait for Bitstamp to have that deposit come through (whenever that may be).

All sorts of LN adoption is more than welcome. I personally am more interested in what we can do with LN online.

I am not interested in paid subscription plans, but do like some content that's being offered, which is where LN will offer its utility to allow people to instantly pay for the content they want to consume, not what they are forced to consume by paying for a monthly subscription plan. This business model will attract way more clientele because most of these subscriptions scare people off.

By allowing people to pay just for the content they want to consume, it might also reduce the popularity of illegal download/streaming sites.

Bitcoin is more of a stablecoin than the fiat pegged stablecoins are, so no surprise here. CME is still pushing reasonable volumes, which I expected to be in the hundreds by now insteads of thousands of coins. On top of that, CME has generated more volumes in the last 24 hours than the traditional USD exchanges.

Coinsbank €63 million.
Coinsbank $53 million.
CME $38 million.
Coinbase Pro $30 million.
Gemini $26 million.
Bitstamp 21 million.

Coinsbank (previously known as Bit-X) is the 'new' upcoming exchange with a solid amount of EUR volumes. Great addition to this industry. Funny is how they started out with a long running signature campaign on this forum. From mediocre exchange to top of the game.

I always go for stability, but that's because I'm actually using Bitcoin as a currency almost on a daily basis.

It feels good when people pay me in Bitcoin and still be happy afterwards that the price doesn't immediately rocket up like crazy. If there is one thing that will for sure discourage people from spending their coins, it is them feeling bad about having used Bitcoin as money while they just as easily could have kept it longer to catch that increase in price.

Replacing spent coins is an easy way to still catch future price increases, but why would regular people do that? Spending fiat is way easier and requires no further actions.

That's why I like Bitcoin so much, it's not representing one group; it's representing a whole economy full of all sorts of participants, and that economy has clearly chosen for Bitcoin, and not a cheap ass knockoff of which most its coins aren't generated through intensive POW, but donated to wealthy assholes through an airdrop.

In the end, the miners are the real winners here, because they have a secondary SHA256 chain to mine on, which makes their previously worthless deemed hardware worth something again.

The most important factor is what it cost to get yourself a license as money transmitter (and there may be other licenses you might need to obtain), which you have to renew annually. It all depends on the country and state you operate in, but it could go easily over $100,000 a year.

In that regard, it shouldn't come as a surprise that a 4-5% margin is somewhat of a minimum in order to make it worthwhile, especially if you deduct taxes afterwards.

That's pretty harsh, but hey, entities deploying ATM's know what they get themselves into. That's why most of the larger entities try to deploy as many as they can, because that's the only way you can have it work for you instead of against you. The cost of these licenses is a killer, literally. It's meant to demotivate smaller businesses from entering a space the larger businesses don't want them to operate in. 

If the problem turns out to be on Changelly's end, it might very well be related to how they are waiting for exchange rates to go back up. It's common practice for Changelly, and they don't seem to care about all the users complaining about huge delays and transactions that didn't make it through due to exchange rates not recovering.

On the other hand, why should they care? With Shapeshift out of the way Changelly has become the main 'instant' exchanging service in current times.

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OP, I know it's difficult and annoying, but don't try to contact them too much through various channels, because they may end up blocking you. Let 24-48 hours pass and try it again. There isn't much that you can do other than to keep waiting.