Bear markets don't lead to assets dropping to zero, otherwise, all stocks would have been long dead now.

I think that his primary point that he's trying to make that most cryptos are worthless, which is true for a lot of ICOs. However, bitcoin is not one of these coins as it actually gets practically adopted, has the trust of the community since it's the first crypto, and is decentralised. No idea why anyone would expect BTC to go to zero realistically.

As they pointed out bear markets are nothing special and generally bitcoin does decline quite a bit before recovering in the next bull market. The professor here is exaggerating this drop by putting it way out of the context of historical bear markets with the same magnitude that has recovered. And it makes sense that they do recover, as adoption is still increasing, and institutional investors are also on the increase.


Pretty accurate.

There is no real, sensible analysis of bitcoin price in mainstream media overall at this point because of the fact that it does not grab attention of readers. These extreme, illogical predictions are what gets clicks. That's why i think we've got so many of these predictions that if you have any sense of the market, will know that it's not true.

Of course. It could already be a possibility right now given enough adoption into the bitcoin network. There's already the means to do it in the form of bitcoin, all that is required is an increase in adoption worldwide to the point where bitcoin can be used worldwide without having to exchange any currency.

Obviously, that would be a pretty utopian view by our standards and probably won't happen any time soon.

More likely than not I think that if there was to be a global currency, which is a likely possibility in the future at some stage, it will still be issued by some sort of central entity, potentially a world central bank of some sort.

The other more realistic possibility is that bitcoin will not replace fiat currencies outright around the world, but rather be a globally accepted alternative to fiat. It's still a global currency, and it holds value wherever you go without having to exchange forex. But I don't think that in that bitcoin as a parallel global currency scenario you can say that it's the "single" global currency around the world.

But hey, anything could happen. Bitcoin could become the dominant currency for international business over the internet, as some sort of niche. We don't know at this point other than the fact that BTC is capable of being just that.

What are your thoughts on bitcoin, and other 'global' cryptocurrencies?

They're also decentralised and not associated/affiliated with fiat currencies issued by governments, but obviously they operate at a larger scale than the localised, community based currencies that you seem to be interested in.

To me, these global decentralised cryptocurrencies are the most interesting compared to community issued ones as they could facilitate international transactions with a unified currency like never before - saving on efficiency, cost, while being a global store of value. I'd be interested to hear your take on the benefits of community currencies compared to bitcoin. I mean, individual communities can still adopt BTC and benefit from it, and potentially enjoy more stability in the long run in their currency of choice.

Aren't they also planning on releasing a national crypto or something along the lines of that?

Seems like the government of India is currently interested in blockchain, but yet, they're not supportive of bitcoin at all which makes no sense.

Their policy of restricting banks from dealing with bitcoin businesses simply don't make sense to me while they are trying to adopt all this blockchain technology into corporations and a national crypto. I understand that they're trying to take the centralised route of development, but not accepting decentralised cryptos into their economy will only mean that they themselves lose out in the long run.

I mean, it's possible.

Given that fiat currencies around the world will be on a constant decline due to the government debasing the currency, it would be no surprise in the long run if decentralised cryptos held up its value against such depreciation, leading to a rise in nominal value. Besides, demand for bitcoin should increase drastically as well.

However, it's hard to see this happen in the short term like he claims, "in years to come". More likely than not widespread adoption isn't going to come any time soon at this stage, and a rise 1000 fold currently does seem quite an unrealistic figure for the short term given that we already experienced a pretty big bull market last year.

Nope. All the while they're trying to revamp their site and add new features, while this promise that they made way back has not been fulfilled to this date.

Honestly not surprising at this stage, they already have a pretty bad reputation. Besides, as others have mentioned the ownership of the company have probably been a contributing factor as to why other altcoins have been implemented while Segwit, which should be implemented before any of the others do, has not.

Either way, I'm not using blockchain.info again and haven't since the early days. There is no advantages whatsoever with using them compared to using Electrum, GreenAddress, or other wallets that do support Segwit, and offer more control over your coins in terms of ease of management of private keys than blockchain.info.

Since bitcoin transactions and the network itself is decentralised, it essentially means that there is no means that a government can take to completely shut down the usage of bitcoin in a particular country.

China already has tried to ban ICOs (which may actually be positive given the state of the ICO market is in right now) and exchanges, as well as getting Wechat and Alipay to flag and suspend accounts. But none of this is going to be a completely foolproof way of stopping people that want to use bitcoin from using bitcoin. Bans can happen but the enforceability of such bans are going to be extremely low.

I guess that's the ultimate advantage of decentralisation in bitcoin, that governments cannot exert ultimate control over the entire system, and that the supply of the coin is hard coded so that again, governments cannot debase the coin.

I think that in some aspects, yes. In some other aspects, it is actually still quite underrated.

For example, the fact that people still think that there is going to be one single ICO that will be able to disrupt the entire digital economy or a sector of that economy (whether gaming, shopping, or so on) without the project having any sort of prior experience with actual business is absurd. Centralised cryptocurrencies and blockchains are also over hyped, like certain projects regarding institutions issuing their own tokens, etc.

However, actual decentralised cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as a store of value is probably underrated in my opinion. People still don't realise that bitcoin is able to run parallel with fiat, and serve as a store of value and safe haven asset.

I don't think that they're necessarily going to disrupt anything.

Perhaps this could be used as a safe haven asset of sorts for investors who want to keep their savings offshore in Swiss Francs, except in a way which they can access whenever they want online and transact with it in the form of tokens. That is the niche that I think they will likely be focusing on.

But even then, there are already cryptos like Tether which essentially stand behind the same principal of pegging it against a fiat currency, which seems to be the whole idea of this crypto. Only difference is that there is a whole suite of services that this crypto may offer to investors in the future, which is yet to see how practical it will truly be. But at the end of the day - this is centralised, and I don't see that much promise in the long run.

Literally the most terrible attempt at faking a team that I've seen in a while.

The CEO doesn't even have a fake profile image attached to his name, with the most generic name that there could be for a fake name. While the other guy in the team was randomly scraped off a dating site, apparently.

Can't believe no investors ever raised doubts about the project before your accusation came out, which is just absurd.

BTW, ICOHolder is pretty redundant simply because they are so inaccurate. It's not the first time we've seen something like this happen, and it could potentially cost misled investors tons of money.

Bitcoin's network simply can't be controlled by governments due to its decentralised nature.

If bitcoin is officially recognised by the government, then it is only on a legal sense. For example, they may recognise bitcoin as a currency, which may have potential tax implications. Another term for this process would be legalisation.

However, it does not mean all of a sudden that bitcoin transactions will be able to be controlled and verified by governments after this process of legalisation. Because whatever recognition bitcoin gets from the government is only applicable for the government/taxation agencies, and has no effect on the network itself.

Actually, centralised cryptocurrencies are not necessarily a contradiction. It's just that it makes no sense for anyone to make an investment or affiliation with any centralised cryptocurrencies because it essentially is the same as any other fiat.

I honestly don't see where Maduro is trying to go with the Petro other than trying to lure in investment from overseas to finance their regime and escape sanctions, potentially.

The thing with Bolivar pegged to Petro is that Petro is not backed by actual oil reserves, but land that has unmined oil reserves which need significant investment in mining to actually dig out of the ground. Tying the bolivar to this centralised asset will do nothing to help the hyperinflation going on within the country at the moment, in my opinion.

Well, short term prices are definitely related to news. Don't think that the correction from $7k+ to now is a result of any particular piece of news, though.

It's just that sometimes people overly stress the importance of such news. Sometimes news is exaggerated within the market to bring market sentiment artificially down in the short term, just like we saw with ETF rejections when the first ones came out. But as you can see now, no one cares anymore about ETFs being rejected in the market.

News does play emotionally on the market in the short term which could drive prices up or down. But in the long run, what matters most is adoption, not news at all.

Again, this demonstrates the inflow of institutional investors to the market.

I wouldn't really say that the building of such tool is anything majorly positive to bitcoin itself due to the fact that it's treating bitcoin as purely a speculative token rather than a practical currency to use, and that the use of the tool is only going to realistically benefit the elite traders at wall street as well as institutional investors.

There are also no clues as to how exactly their tool will function, so even if it does come out the accuracy of its predictions are probably going to be debatable. But hey, markets are likely to show signs of bullishness in the short term in response to this news, even though there might be no long term benefits to this.

It's possible, if the government are switching to issuing their national currency on a blockchain.

It's actually an interesting point to consider because it is actually extremely likely that this will happen some time in the future. We're already seeing many governments around the world expressing interest in doing so, or actively doing so already (Venezuela, for example).

Even though it would still be considered to be a crypto, it is in fact just fiat currency issued on a different platform. The element of control is still there for the government, and I wouldn't say that anything would change much in terms of how the economy is run. To the average consumer, it wouldn't be any different than electronic transactions that we already have atm.

Obviously there are, and there are probably multiple types of bots, whether bots that are made to purely spam the forum, or if they are in a signature campaign and using a bot to generate their posts. All of these are possible and have happened in the past.

Your concern here is mostly on the KYC that you have to submit.

I think that when it comes to your personal information, the best policy is to not submit anything if possible. If you don't know who's going to be handling your data and they are forcing you to hand it over, which is something that I wouldn't be comfortable with - don't join it.

Seems like you could use coinbase plugin on your site.

However, there is likely going to be some degree of KYC when purchasing with wire transfers due to fraud. I'm fairly sure that for your customers, this is definitely not for them as they're looking to pay in a fast way, not to sign up to coinbase and get verified and all that whole process. Plus, the rates on coinbase generally aren't that good. There is also a few days delay when it comes to wire transfers.

If that does not work, then I would incentivise the customers by providing a discount when paying for bitcoin, while having a list of bitcoin exchanges which they could potentially use to purchase BTC. As others mentioned due to regulatory issues there is simply not a lot of services that do what you're looking for here.

Good finds. Fabricated teams always mean that the site is a scam. They likely have something to hide, either in case of an exit scam, or because they have no qualifications to run the project.

I think that some of the referenced sites themselves probably aren't even the original source of the image. For example, for Thomas Williams, there are 3 sites that you found with the same image, except with different names. Very likely that these sites either used stock images, or they are themselves fabricating testimonials.

That aside, they've pretty much recycled the idea of a social trading network, which has been done in other sites as well as ICOs probably hundreds of times by now. Looking at their whitepaper, they even refer to "pump groups" as one of their motivation. That's how shady they already are even without being exposed with a fabricated team.

According to their own stats, there has currently been $15k or so in token sales. Hopefully after this accusation, no one else falls for this scam again.

Again, they are trying to launch something that is a derivative instead of dealing with actual bitcoins, held on addresses.

All of these derivatives/funds/etc. are all going to be targeting other institutional investors or mainstream traders, instead of actually benefiting anyone that actually uses the bitcoin network for on-chain payments tangibly. They're essentially treating bitcoin as just another speculative asset, which it is in some ways, but they're focusing entirely on that aspect.

People need to understand that. It's why I don't really care about Goldman's decision to put their trading desk idea on hold, because it pretty much brings no benefits to bitcoin itself.

Also, I don't understand why they think that holding funds in Coinbase, Xapo, or Bitgo vaults are secure at all compared to just having a privately developed cold storage wallet. There are just so many counter party risks that could go wrong with vaults that involve a third party. The third party could always access your private keys, and access your funds (whether legally or illegally), regardless of the level of security they've got externally.

I agree with the other users here.

Shorting means that people see the market as overheated, or is a co-ordinated effort on trying to keep markets down.

Shorting to me generally suggests that even though markets may be currently bullish, they are most likely going to be negatively affected if there is a huge amount of shorts within the market.

If unexpectedly, markets see a huge reversal of prices and see prices rise, it could cause a short squeeze if the conditions are extremely bullish. That doesn't happen all the time, though, and there would still be some bearishness before the squeeze comes. Would be interesting to see your sources on this theory.