Not really. Bitcoin has grown from nothing to the worldwide phenomenon that it is today without an ETF and it will keep doing so. Bitcoin's reliability and safety are based on its network and in that we can trust completely.

We need world wide user adoption and not silly tools for institutions to terrorize our market. I'm happy to see the SEC not willing to approve an ETF, but I'm realistic to understand that it will happen eventually.

The role of the SEC is to grant itself enough power by not letting other assets grow out to rival their selected elite industry. It's completely rigged and they only use investor protection as excuse.

Right. I remember how people around me didn't see any value in mobile phones, while currently mobile phones are pretty much dominating the world and most people can't live without them anymore.

The only problem with crypto is that every coin or token in this industry isn't capable of handling mass use. Being decentralized means that you have to sacrifice scalability and that will definitely break most of the projects.

We haven't yet seen the power of second layer technologies, but this is basically the only hope for crypto to really become a mainstream vehicle since on-chain scaling isn't long term viable.

The public (speculative gamblers) is wasting its precious time. If there is one thing the SEC has been signalling, then it's the fact that they aren't keen on an ETF regardless of how solid everything around it is.

They just can't deal with how the majority of the volume is coming from non regulated exchanges, and it's safe to say that nothing will change in that regard since the US can't regulate the entire world even though they would love to.

Maybe, maybe we'll see an ETF before the block halving, but considering how difficult and time consuming ETF listings are, even when it comes to traditional assets, we shouldn't be surprised if it ends up taking 10 years.

I honestly don't want to see another all time high any time soon. I prefer to see the market bottom out properly first, otherwise we'll keep jumping up and down and eventually tank deep below the $6000 mark.

If you keep testing the same main support levels over and over again, eventually they'll break. By itself consistently testing the lower side of the support isn't indicating that we're ready for more growth.

It only points out that the demand above $6000 is no longer there. People just need to accept the market as it is and stop desperately hoping for a miraculous bull run that won't happen.

Take a break or do something else that's productive.

Asia has always been more open-minded towards technological innovation. It was way before Bitcoin even existed that in-game weapons or points were being traded as digital assets in high volumes.

They are totally used to this concept where crypto is the next digital asset, but in this case it's usable nearly everywhere. It has more utility and fits nicely in the time we're in. Asia is the main price driver for crypto.

Europe as always is incredibly slow with everything. I can't name up anything they forced through in a timely manner aside from their stupid and extremely annoying cookies law.

Nearly every site that I open requires me to manually accept cookies. Thanks Europe!

Great overall points.

I am mainly stunned by how people still expect the market to go through a bull run. It's like last year's increase has brainwashed people to such extent, that they think the only way for the market is to increase.

In a way it's understandable if people blindly entered this market early 2017 where the price shot up from $1000 to nearly $20,000, but at some point you expect common sense to kick in, but it's not happening unfortunately.

If you browse through all social media platforms (this forum included), there is only one term that dominated the entire crypto space, which is bull run. I have never seen something similar to this during my years here.

Not entirely true. If it was Roger Ver knowing that there was a critical bug in Bitcoin, he would probably leave it there for ever or try to exploit it himself to boost his Bcash toy.

He is emotionally connected to Bcash and it's extremely unhealthy as we can clearly see. He doesn't skip one opportunity to trash talk Bitcoin and he has even been scamming people on top of that.

They even "officially" celebrated the rebirth of Bitcoin and gave it the name Bitcoin (BCH). It's disgusting but there isn't much that we can do. Roger has a mission and he has gone all in to accomplish that.

Losing trades are perfectly normal during trading sessions. It's called collateral damage, which is impossible to avoid since the market will always do something you don't expect, even in the stock market.

High frequency trading done by institutions can result in several days without one single penny in profit, but they at the end of the month still manage to squeeze out a profit due to their consistency.

And high frequency traders mostly are granted precious information from the stock exchange itself that allows them to front run orders. If even that doesn't result in guaranteed profits, it simply doesn't exist.

In other words, losses are part of the game.

The problem here is that increases and profit taking based on a specific event is a temporary practice.

Let's say the SEC approves an ETF. The price breaks $20,000 and all ETF speculators start selling their coins to take profits. You know what that means? Done is the ETF effect for them.

From that point they will focus on the next big thing to once again repeat the same speculative hype nonsense. People here don't care about the long term effects of these financial instruments.

If people lose trust in Bitcoin because of an ETF they don't belong here. I hope they'll leave and never come back because we don't need these parasites. We need more people interested in the technology itself.

He keeps bringing up that point throughout his threads.

Some people just don't understand that Bitcoin's energy consumption isn't waste. How can keeping a network secure with several billions worth of transaction value per day be a waste of resources?

Should we similarly consider the financial system's energy consumption waste? It's not waste when the entire world is depending on it, which applies to Bitcoin's network as well. People need to grow up for once.

Miners are paying for their energy consumption, so how is it waste anway? If that's considered waste, then I'm quite sure that we at home combined actually waste more energy than anything else in the world.

It depends on what you consider to be criminals. I doubt the ratio of usage back in the days was heavily biased towards criminals. It's something people just assume because of the term dark web.

I don't consider people to be a criminal if they want to buy weed or other natural forms of drugs. If that's what they want, and it doesn't bother or hurt anyone around them, then let them buy it. Why should we even care?

People need go grow a thicker skin and start to accept others as they are. Why do we have to call someone a criminal just because the law criminalizes certain practices? It makes no sense.

The same basically applies to futures. The majority of the volumes last year was being generated by unregulated exchanges, and is still the case today. The CFTC is even investigating a couple of exchanges as we speak.

The CFTC and the SEC might seem like completely different entities, but they share the exact same foundation to operate on. Can we say that the futures markets were part of a failed experiment?

PayPal's popularity comes indeed from its world wide merchant adoption, but the other crucial aspect is that it always favors the buyer, which is what people absolutely love about PayPal.

I have seen loads of complaints from sellers when it comes to reversed transactions and whatnot, but they keep using it to remain relevant. You can't stop using PayPal as merchant, it's that simple.

It's not for nothing that PayPal managed to grow consistently throughout the last few years. The only negative thing is that they recently changed their F&F fee structure.

Sending $1 to 'friends' costs me $1 while before the F&F fee was fixed at 1% of the transaction value. Not sure why they decided to change their fee structure, but I hope it will help boosting Bitcoin's adoption somewhat.

Technically speaking, Ethereum (the devs) never claimed to have any intention of surpassing Bitcoin in any way. It's as always the community behind it trying to act cool and hype up their investment in Ethereum.

BCH and XRP on the other hand have actually expressed how they think their rubbish coins are better than Bitcoin and should be the main vehicle in this industry. It's quite funny and pathetic at the same time.

Interesting fact is that Roger Ver has some form of involvement in XRP and he seems to own quite a large chunk of it as well. This could very well explain their shared anti Bitcoin ideology.

Just because something can happen doesn't mean it will happen. If that's your way of looking at things, we shouldn't discard the possibility of falling back below $100 either, or even below $10.

Back in 2013 we were initially hovering around $15 and within the same year we touched $1100. The long term correction took the price back down to around $150 in 2015. It didn't fall back to its starting point and it won't this time.

If there ever would be a time it was a realistic possibility, it would be after the 2013 correction, but it didn't happen. We're way further now and created a new floor just like how we created a new floor after the 2013 bull run.

Good thing about the current drop is that we will find out how strong the $6000-$5700 range really is. It's not very usual for a market to stay strong after so many attempts to test such a crucial support range.

It will be the fourth test this year and I honestly don't know how long it can hold if its being tested that often. If you keep falling back it's a clear sign that there is no sustainable demand for Bitcoin above the $6000 mark.

On a more positive note, it's time for a crypto summer sale and in case the price does happen to drop further, let's jump in and make use of the opportunity. Bear market or not, never say no to discounted Bitcoins.

The ETF isn't that important. At worst we might be testing newer lows between $5000 and $6000 but nothing more than that. If people say they think the price will fall to $1000 they are delusional.

While others are panicking I have bought myself some smaller bits around $6400 some moments ago. It boggles my mind how people still don't understand that corrections are a blessing instead of a negative event.

The real market test will follow directly after an actual rejection. If I'm not mistaken (correct me if I'm wrong) the SEC has still one more opportunity to postpone the ETF before actually approving or rejecting it.

In all cases we will for sure know the outcome this year.

Of course not. Even if people are genuinely qualified, Bitmain will only end up employing a small percentage of what they promised to employ. Bitmain is just in it for the money, they don't care about the locals there.

The only question is how friendly will the local government there be if Bitmain doesn't live up to what it was expected to do initially. Will they let Bitmain keep operating or will they interfere and still force them to employ more people.

It's one thing for Bitmain to employ cheap Chinese workers, but it's another thing when it concerns American workers demanding far higher wages. We'll see what happens, but it likely won't end well.

It's impossible for people to completely convert their shitcoins to Bitcoins due to the lack of supply. I read an article last year where blockchain analysis pointed out that around 2 million BTC is used for altcoin trading.

Those who manage to convert to Bitcoin will decrease the BTC/alt ratio significantly, which directly forces people to sell down the fiat pairs, otherwise the already near worthless shitcoins will become worth even less.

The majority of the people trade or invest in altcoins because they want to end up with more Bitcoin. This once again shows that there is little faith in altcoins, and that will break them eventually.

I am of believe that we'll only see a handful of our current coins survive in the next 5-10 years.

The demand is there so it won't take much to make dumb money believe there is something to gain here. If they invest in the worst ever ICO projects without thinking, they will definitely not skip this one.

I am strongly of believe that the problem isn't these ICO's, but the continuously increasing demand from dumb money. It's impossible to combat this by having stricter regulations considering that people will take the risk anyway.

If similar scams in the legacy industries managed to remain relevant for decades, these ICO scams will follow the same path, especially with how you can decentralize the entire ICO process.