I'd say that a lot of the ICOs before this could probably be considered to be shares in a sense anyways.

Checked that thing out, and didn't really understand what it really was. If it is true, then it's definitely interesting. I don't really see how one product will be able to encompass the legal process of issuing securities, though.

Also, even with this system, it would rely on the company making the right choices and not just failing everything. After all, these are shares of a company, you're relying them to perform to make a profit. Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean that all of a sudden you'll have more rights when the company collapses.

I'd still agree with your original hypothesis that bitcoin dominance is inversely related to bitcoin price. This rally currently is probably too small to say that it's going to be the case forever.

But I definitely see drop off in altcoin and ICO interest overall - there is no buzz within the market because it has just become so saturated and people are realising that most are completely garbage. Combined with the bearish sentiment in the market, we don't see bitcoin prices falling behind within this stretch of time.

I still think this will change once a bull market starts and bullish sentiment is injected, which is why I think this is a temporary thing. People will be looking for quick short term profits once again once a long lasting bull market starts, and continue to FOMO buy alts since I don't think the alt craze is quite over yet instead of holding bitcoin, which is the sensible thing to do in the long run.

Seems like the OP of the ANN thread is already long gone. Hopefully no one invested anything major into this scam.

This is why you always do your due diligence before investing, and get familiar with the style of scam sites.

Just by looking at their home page alone, you already see a template and background used by hundreds of other scams. Obviously team was fake as well, and that's great job by the OP to uncover that. Seems like all but 3 linkedin profiles are deleted already, which seems like an admission of guilt. Always cross check their LinkedIn profiles to see that they are legit if you are planning on investing, and even if they do have a linkedin profile, it could be easily created by anyone. Better be safe than sorry in these scenarios.


It's not a gamble at all because you're guaranteed to lose money with a project which is willing to lie to its investors and/or even break the law by having a completely fabricated team. It's immoral, unethical, and illegal. There is no chance that they were ever going to deliver on their promises and result in profits for the investor.

Interesting. What would be more interesting is if this could have just been tested out with bitcoin itself instead of a company issued token, which is probably centrally managed anyways. But it is a corporate experiment, and they probably are going to push this coin for widespread adoption in the future.

But this just shows how blockchain technology can be used in real life.

The usability is really not the hard part. The hard part is getting adoption, which is easy for a centralised coin like this because the company can just ask its employees to use it, but difficult for bitcoin and others. As to bitcoin, though, time will definitely see increased adoption, and real life usages for it.

Please use the scam report layout as detailed here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260073.0. Include some proof like screenshots, and make your case more easily understandable. Right now, I can probably only understand half of what you are saying.

Seems like to me that the site is very sketchy at best. Very poorly made.

Wouldn't be surprised at all if they don't even have any prepaid cards to speak of, but rather, it is just their cover for their scam to lure people into buying their products. Once you send BTC first to them first without any sort of escrow protection, they will take it, and not deliver the product while trying to get you to pay more.

It really depends on what mechanism they are using to moderating the stability of their coin.

Different systems can have completely different and contrasting mechanisms of doing so. For example, stable tokens on the BTS network work completely differently to Tether. So there is really no one single answer to your question.

And generally, if the stable coin is decentralised in moderating its volatility, the process takes some time to reflect. So when demand is high, prices will still go up on the market. If you want to see an example of this, go look at the SBD charts.

There is a link between the amount of google searches for "bitcoin", and bitcoin price. And it's a strong, positive one.

The fact is that once prices go up, people will be more interested in bitcoin, especially those who are not into bitcoin yet but are somewhat intrigued by the idea of it all. That itself leads to them searching for bitcoin, as the markets are bullish and there is lots of action.

But it does not work in reverse. Bitcoin price movements are not the result of the amount of media or search interest held in bitcoin. Even though the bear market is not over and prices could dip more, this theory does not work out at all.

Just understand that bitcoin is one of the only cryptocurrencies that are actually created to benefit the users, instead of to benefit the creators of the coin. The commercialisation of cryptocurrency issuance has really brought in some completely trash projects.

In a bear market like this, I do think that bitcoin is going to be holding up its value with the least value compared to the rest of the market. We've seen this plenty of times.

And if we're talking about long term value, then there is even less debate. Bitcoin has stored its value extremely well over the last decade or so that it's been in existence, and with a limited supply, there is no question that it's going to continue to be a good store of value in hard times financial times.

What I hope is the case here is that they are actually legalising and recognising bitcoin mining, but not just trying to push their own little national cryptocurrency like Venezuela is doing. If it's the latter, then there is really nothing to see here.

Perhaps this is because of their sanctions and mining would be a way against the sanctions imposed on them, as a source of revenue. But who knows what their true intentions are at this point.

All I know is that every country can get something out of legalising and regulating bitcoin in a sensible manner, whether attracting more foreign investment or boosting tax revenues. An attitude of constantly antagonising bitcoin is only harmful for the state itself, and even Iran is recognising this.

I'd say that it's neither of any of the options.

While perhaps some government restrictions placed on bitcoin and third party bitcoin services are contributing to the bear market, they are not the root cause. I believe that a bear market was simply imminent, and was only a matter of time before it happened, because of the fact that markets rose so much during 2017 that it was becoming unsustainable. Thus, a period of corrections and dips were only natural, and this has been seen countless times before.


It's going to happen sooner or later. People tend to write this off as some kind of far sighted prophecy, but it really is not. We've seen a market cap that was around 30-40% of that figure already last year, so it's closer than people think.

With a limited supply and growing adoption that we've seen that will continue well into the next decades, bitcoin is bound to be more valuable in the long run. It's simple economics, supply of bitcoin isn't going to get much bigger since it is emitted in a limited manner, while the demand of coins will go up over time as more merchants accept it for payments. That's not to mention the imminent inflation that will debase the value of fiat as well, which would mean that when bitcoin is traded in relation to fiat, its value will rise in the long run, at least theoretically speaking.

Dunno if there are any data bias within this data set or not. There is just insufficient proof either way.

I definitely find it fishy that Turkey would have such high adoption rates compared to some other developing countries, with nearly one fifth of the citizens owning BTC. Even when assuming that this data is legit and not biased (which it probably is, as people could be picked and chosen for the survey to create false conclusions), most of these people are likely still only using bitcoin to cash out to another fiat currency like the USD, because of lack of general merchant acceptance of the coin.

Is it necessarily a bad thing though, that adoption could be not as high as what this chart shows in certain countries? Absolutely not. It means that BTC adoption is still low overall across the globe, and demand is still quite low right now. It means that there are much more undiscovered demand and potential that has yet to be realised within BTC right now, which from an investment point of view, makes bitcoin a great long term asset to hold.

Traders simply do not care much about ETFs getting rejected anymore, or at least not as much as they used to. And this reflects within the price, which barely moved when the news first came out.

The fact of the matter is that bitcoin ETFs will benefit pretty much no average adopters even if it was approved, and I think that's the fact that's finally starting to catch up to some people. It's only going to be benefiting those in big financial institutions, no one else.

Also, a part of this is relative stability when it seems like everything is going bearish is probably contributed by the fact that there was no hype surrounding the ETF anymore. Markets don't go into a frenzy awaiting for the decision, so when the decision comes, the impact on the market is much lesser than previously, which is actually a great thing.

Interesting read. Technically, this would be a cryptocurrency, but it's important to note that it would still be controlled by the RBI, and will be backed by fiat currencies.

Essentially, their vision here isn't anything positive to do with bitcoin, or even bitcoin regulation for that matter. What they are looking into is a better way to print their fiat and manage the fiat economy, with an on-chain cryptocurrency that they still retain control to.

It would be no different to Venezuela's attempt at a national crypto, like the Petro, or even any fiat that is stored on debit cards - except it's on a blockchain. So I wouldn't really say that it's positive nor negative to bitcoin.

What is interesting to me is that they are still trying to enforce their sanctions on bitcoin, which is ridiculous while they try to develop their own crypto. They even seem to be trying to regulate P2P trades, which will prove to be much harder than they think:

Searches for "bitcoin price" does not reflect real interest in bitcoin at all. When it goes down, it does not mean that bitcoin adoption is going down.


This as well. A lot of the results that pop up when you search 'Bitcoin Price' are quite ridiculous and clickbaity.

All it means is that most likely people from the mainstream only search for bitcoin price and actively follow it when there is a bull market around. In a bear market like currently, there is rarely any action in the market in terms of upward growth, and it's obvious that once a big correction comes and markets don't move upwards like they used to for a few days, searchers that are only interested in bitcoin as some sort of get rich quick scheme or some novelty will stop searching.

We've seen this correlation before, searches for "bitcoin price" directly correlate to actual bitcoin prices. There's nothing to worry about here.

Interesting read.

I actually never realised that bitcoin was actually in fact using the overwhelming supply of sustainably produced electricity that far outweighs the demand normally within the energy markets. If that's the case, then that's simply more the reason to not be worrying about the non-issue of bitcoin energy consumption.

It's probably a huge contributing factor to why sustainable energy hasn't taken off fully yet, because there isn't enough profits being made from selling the energy at its full generation capacity. Bitcoin mining could be the equaliser here in terms of really being able to pick up the demand for the wasted energy.

Even without consuming this wasted energy, people need to start realising that bitcoin mining is no more harmful to Earth than something like banks processing transactions, simply because what matters more is how the energy is generated, not how much is used.

Obviously, a decentralised cryptocurrency.

I would never use a centralised currency unless I absolutely need to. One of Bitcoin's most innovative and promising characteristics is the ability to transact trustlessly, without a third party involved in any of the processes, including the handling of the supply of currency, or storing funds. And another one of the characteristics that make bitcoin have so much potential over the long run is its limited supply, hard coded into its system, and is enforced on a decentralised level.

With a centralised crypto you're getting none of that. Essentially it's going to be fiat v2.0, just on a blockchain, that's all. It's not a store of value that the decentralised cryptocurrencies are, because it is managed by a central entity, more coins can always be added to circulation, forks can be done, etc. etc.

Whether bitcoin or any other decentralised cryptocurrency is legal tender or not is completely irrelevant. What matters is whether or not the network itself is decentralised.

So basically, using something that can't be efficiently mined as reserves to a completely centralised cryptocurrency that is offered to investors within an ICO. I wonder what could go wrong here.

You simply cannot force adoption onto people. It is completely pointless to do so as there is no practicality in terms of using the Petro right now, there are no benefits of using it over a foreign currency like the USD, nor is there any benefits of it over BTC.

I would never trust a single cent with such token, simply because the government's incompetence in terms of economic management, and their nation's over-reliance on oil as a source of revenue. To me, Petro is nothing more than a scheme that was used to generate income for the government through the crowdfund and all that, and there isn't a bright future of it whatsoever.

Generally, just say that you're reserving all rights to change the terms whenever you want when you are conducting a giveaway.

There shouldn't be much legal repercussion once you state this, especially considering that it's a giveaway and not any time of formal work contract. And as long as your actions are justified, in terms of for example, not paying a certain user in the giveaway because he cheated or whatever, then you most likely won't face any issues on this forum either.

Only thing I could think of is if you're giving away your ICO tokens, in which case you may want to check whether or not you need to legally do KYC before you start.

Capital gains tax could be potentially helpful to boost revenue for the government. However, I don't think that it's that good when it is taxed at extremely high rates essentially not allowing profits to be made from investors.

And the thing is, big corporations are just going to move their investments offshore or use various strategies to minimise their tax paid, while the ones that are actually paying this are the people at the bottom and middle of the investment categories.

There are also some pretty weird rules in terms of the length of holding and the tax paid, at least in my country, and with all the record keeping that you have to do it's just too much of a hassle overall. I'm not against capital gains tax, but excessive amounts of it with inconvenient reporting measures is definitely not the way to go.

If you switch the figures on coin.dance of the trading volume on Localbitcoins from Venezuelan Bolivars to BTC, you will see the whole picture.

The fact is that trading volume is not increasing at least on localbitcoins, in terms of BTC terms.

I honestly don't know whether this is because of the fact that Venezuelans simply can't afford to buy more BTC due to depreciation of their fiat currency, general disinterest, or their government wanting to push their centralised crypto.

Squatter raises a valid point, that most venezuelans most likely only want USD. It doesn't give BTC any less credit, imo, as it is the currency allowing them to do so.