It seems to be unclear what the implications are on bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies (perhaps desktop wallets could be affected?), but if it does happen, then will have huge implications on privacy and just security of data in general.

It'll be interesting to see what the tech companies respond with when they well know that it's going to be a huge breach of privacy principles, and will essentially potentially allow hackers to use the same backdoors to breach into systems.

Obviously, if these companies do not respond positively to these requests, it's going to cost them dearly as governments may sanction them for their actions. You're right about having more of this in the news, not many people understand the immenseness of this backdoor situation, if it was ever to come into fruition.

The prediction about the dip was pretty accurate. At the time, I expected that to happen as well, even though some people within the market thought that it was going to be a long term trend reversal.

I probably disagree with the prediction regarding the rebound, however.

Personally, it's more likely at this point to see prices continue to dip until a new bottom is found or $6k support is tested again, compared to prices going straight up "to the moon". With such bearish sentiments still remaining in the market, it's almost impossible for a bull market to emerge at this stage. Expect sideways movements and small corrections in the next few months.

I think that the most likely outcome would probably be that we'll see a resurgence of bitcoin prices in 2020-2021.

A full recovery does seem unlikely at the moment considering that the markets are showing no signs of a trend reversal yet due to the fact that we don't even know whether or not we've bottomed out yet.

Thus, don't expect to see any gains in the short term at any time soon. I believe that the best strategy in terms of investment in bitcoin right now is accumulate moderately, and not expecting short term profits. If you do invest, expect to have to hold for a long time before your profits are realised. I still think that we'll probably dip a bit further from this price level currently.

I don't really expect this to happen, to be honest.

With the current adoption statistics, I think that it's safe to say that probably 0.5-1% of the globe currently use bitcoin at the moment, and that would be a pretty optimistic estimate given that most of these people are not actively using bitcoin, but rather using it as an investment vehicle.

Unless we see a global hyperinflationary crisis in the next 5 years which would potentially prompt many people to active adopt BTC, I think that it's not a likely scenario that we'll see such high adoption of crypto. I think it will happen eventually given time, but half a decade is way too little of a timeframe for this to occur realistically. Don't forget that Brian Armstrong owns a major bitcoin business in coinbase, which means that he is probably biased.

That could be a possibility.

Gold and silver seems to be the accepted standard of storing value in the long term in many countries still, and it's logical to think that people will resort to silver and gold due to their cultural significance.

Confiscation could be a potential policy. However, I don't think that's the main reason why people would transition to using bitcoin and other decentralised cryptos in an economic crisis, from the traditional store of values and hedges against fiat in gold and silver.

The most important benefit that bitcoin has over gold and silver in the case of a hyperinflationary crisis is that it is divisible, it is convenient, which is unlike gold which can't be used as a currency conveniently in times like these due to its inconvenience to transact with. Bitcoin on the other hand, you don't have to worry about counterfeit bars, purity, or weight, which would be the last of your worries when it comes to a full on global financial crisis like you suggest.

Unfortunately, this person has been exposed so many times that it's crazy.

OP, you do seem to be a newbie to this forum, which means that you're what these types of autobuy/telegram scammers prey on. Their reputation on the forum is already destroyed, but unregistered users can't see their reputation, which leads them into enquiring about the product anyways.

The price at which these gift cards are being sold for are a dead give away to this scam. There is no way that he's going to be legitimately selling you gift cards for cheap, otherwise he could just cash them out himself for higher, don't you think? Always avoid self moderated and locked threads, they are another telltale sign of this breed of scammers.

I wouldn't attribute this fall in price over the last few days to the SEC at all, or at least it's not the only reason why bitcoin prices have fell.

The biggest reason that I can think of is still the fact that the last rally was pretty unjustified, and thus ended up as a bull trap of sorts. It's definitely hard to see any bullishness coming out of the market with a sentiment that is currently this bearish, and it definitely makes sense for this correction to have happened rather than not.

Secondly, Goldman did announce previously that they will put their trading desk project on hiatus for now, which may have sent panic waves through the market, even though I'm not buying that story particularly. IMO, this dip offers up a great opportunity to accumulate.

Look. All of these things are purely speculative with no proof or reasoning.

There are absolutely no guarantees when it comes to the long term aspect of these claims, and once new speculative data comes out from others, people quickly forget about previous ones - even though it might seem like some sort of major piece of news right now.

I'd say that it's probably a bit unlikely, but still possible.

$96k is not something that would surprise me if it happened, but I think that it'll probably take more than just half a decade for it to occur, especially when 2023 would most likely be near the tail end if not the end of the next bull market which will likely start in 2020-2021 due to the halving. At least it's not completely unreasonable like the other predictions made by media personalities like Tom Lee, or John McAfee.

I completely agree with your statement.

There are still some people out there that seem to think that a bull market could still emerge this year. In my opinion, that is just completely and utterly unlikely. There is no hype surrounding ETFs anymore, despite what some people may tell you.

The pump that we had a few weeks back was obviously a bull trap looking at this stage, which I expected.

Markets are overall extremely bearish still, and I think that it's irrational to think that it's going to change at any stage of this year given the 2014 bear market lasted much longer than this. Remember that in bear markets, even news regarded as bullish previously do not matter much.

I don't think that this intrinsically changes anything at all.

It's just another way of saying things, it's like saying AUD/USD instead of USD/AUD. They are both the same pair being traded, just worded differently.

Until bitcoin actually becomes somewhat accepted as a global alternative currency to fiat at the least, I don't think that this movement to price dollars in satoshis will pick up. You could do it if you want to, but most people are going to stick to the prices which they are familiar with.

It will eventually make sense if mass adoption picks up, merchants start accepting bitcoin internationally, and fiat is no longer the most popular form of payment used. But that's far from the case right now if you know what I mean.

I think that it's not necessarily safer in terms of the security of your funds per se.

You're probably able to claim compensation from hacks etc. if they do happen with a bank, which means that in most cases you're covered. However, I'd say that a perfectly secured bitcoin wallet is much safer than something like a bank which incur way higher rates of hacks, and fraud, including cheque fraud and credit card fraud.

Think of it this way - would you rather trust a central entity and a central database, or a decentralised system based on cryptography? Probably the latter.

Also this is not taking into account at all the reversibility of normal fiat banking payments, as well as the fact that bitcoin is a much better store of value than fiat. These all add up to give bitcoin the upper edge imho in terms of long term security.

First of all, you're definitely right about the inevitability of bitcoin taxing as countries continue to regulate the crypto sphere more and more.

I think it would be very unlikely however for a country to tax bitcoin with a uniform rate, which is why I think that anticipating taxation levels solely based on a percentage is most likely a futile thing to do.

Most countries are already taxing bitcoin profits at the same level that they would tax personal income and/or capital gains tax, which varies depending on the country that you're in. If your country is a historically low taxing country/tax haven of sorts, then expect it to be much less than countries like Australia/NZ/Canada, which has taxes of up to 40-50% depending on your income level. So it all varies and there's no single answer.

Exactly. At least China has a pretty cashless society by now (which India isn't close to being) and even then it is hard to enforce their ban on exchanges and bitcoin trading, simply because they can't just monitor everyone in the country that has a Wechat or Alipay account and say for certain that a person is definitely trading crypto.

They'd have to invest huge amounts of time and energy which at the end of the day, won't even accomplish anything as people may even just revert back to cash or simply trade more discreetly.

I don't know why India did this. They could have regulated the crypto economy but instead, decided to sanction it completely. And now to enforce it, they'd have to invest hugely into it financially. I really think that they only thought of this now, and didn't foresee P2P to be a big threat when they first restricted banks from dealing with crypto entities. There's a reason why bitcoin is so resilient, it's a P2P currency, without a central entity. Which means that trading can always move to different venues as no one can shut the entire network down.

I'd have to agree with the Chinese government over this warning.

If you take a look at the scam accusation board, you'll quickly find that there are a ton of scam ICOs with completely fabricated teams. In fact, I'd regard most ICOs to be shady or scams even if their teams are not necessarily fake, simply because their intentions are well documented to be not to actually innovate technology by any means, but to raise as much money for themselves as possible.

Perhaps regulation over the space would be nice to see instead of an outright ban, but this is definitely a deserved warning. They're not wrong about how ICOs are mostly fraudulent and using blockchain as an excuse to raise money whatsoever.

The thing is that they don't say in the article who are the participants, where they are selected, how they are selected and whether they were totally randomly picked out of the crowd.

I think that the data is most likely skewed. If you interview actual random consumers across the world, no way 72% of them plan on buying more bitcoin in the future. That's just absurd given the current adoption levels. It could be well possible that the majority of the respondents are chosen because they are bullish on crypto already.

There has to be some sort of data bias that they are not pointing out here, and I wouldn't use these stats as grounds to be bullish at the moment. Bull market is going to come eventually, but not right now with the bear market still within sight and the market sentiment overall still being bearish, with the bottom being uncertain still.

They are most likely going to deliver the bitcoin to you if you used them.

Doesn't mean you should use them, though. Firstly, they are using using the bitcoin.com domain as leverage to promote their shady BCH movement which I don't support. You can even see this as on the buy.bitcoin.com bitcoin cash is listed as "recommended".

Secondly, their fees are extremely high. $10 minimum on Simplex's part, and 5% otherwise plus bitcoin.com's commission of 2.5% leaves a rate similar to virwox's.

My suggestion would be to use them as an absolute last resort, if you can't find anywhere else to buy at then they're not going to scam you, make sure you choose bitcoin core instead of bitcoin cash when you actually buy anything. But their entire site and agenda is shady and I wouldn't use them personally. There are plenty of alternatives, with way better rates especially for smaller purchases (since there is a $10+ minimum fee on their site).

It definitely could.

Fiat is definitely not the best store of value there is, and there are many flaws to it. And I completely respect their point of view as well because hey, at least they are not blindly falling into the fiat scheme that the government has set up, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in the short term, but in the long run will always depreciate and takes away from your wealth bit by bit through depreciation.

Even though that's the case, the most realistic scenario is that a government will continue to rule over each country in the future, which means that they are most likely going to continue to issue fiat. Whether you like it or not, fiat is here to stay probably. In which case, bitcoin will realistically only serve as an alternative, but will still be a huge role since you can always hold it to hedge against fiat.

From the government's point of view, obviously 2 and 4 combined would make the best outcome for them.

However, in reality, this is extremely hard to enforce. Since bitcoin taxes are mostly in the form of CGT, it's difficult if not impossible to calculate or forecast someone's profits or losses just from a purchase alone.

In my country, you simply return any CGT or income tax that you incur from bitcoin trading or employment with your tax return. I'd expect that this would be the case for most other countries as well, unless a GST is also present.

I don't believe having a national crypto community is going to be the answer to all of their problems, obviously.

What matters is whether individuals do something to hedge against their country's depreciating fiat currency, which has seen some extraordinary hyperinflation in its past.

People need to start realising that they're still not safe with storing wealth in their Pesos, and they need to put some of their savings in alternative assets like bitcoin, or gold, so that when another crisis does come, they are able to have some leverage in terms of savings in independent assets. What's happening is Kenya in that regard is completely irrelevant to the situation in Argentina right now.

I think that bitcoin would actually respond very positively.

The fact that bitcoin is completely unrelated to the stock market, real estate or any other fiat related investments mean that it is completely independent of the traditional investments which will be the most hard hit out of all in a financial collapse like 2008.

And with a limited supply, its value should hold up well within that stretch of time. When people see widespread panic within the markets they may even look for a safe haven to store their wealth, and theoretically, bitcoin demand could actually be boosted by this as people seek for alternative investments to park their wealth.