The market itself isn't struggling, but more so those who are craving for the price swings crypto is known for.

In the end, every smart trader knows how to exploit even the smallest movements; it all comes down do how comfortable you are with leverage trading. In the regular markets (Gold, stocks, etc) traders don't know anything other than leveraging their positions, because it's not worth trading on a 1:1 basis. It's time for people here to accept that and move on.

Realistically speaking, the stable market is nothing more than a representation of how people feel; they aren't bullish, nor bearish, so why should the price do anything?

Manipulation evolves just as much as regulations concerning the crypto market does. The manipulation happening in the stock market is less obvious, but less obvious doesn't mean it isn't there. Institutions know exactly how far they can go, and they also know how to make their trading patterns look as organic as possible, which can't be said about those who drive the crypto market.

Everything happening in the crypto world is so obvious and it almost looks like market makers aren't even bothered by anything, and why should they? Exchanges are closing an eye when it comes to their market makers, because they know they are gone when you limit their functionality as exchange.

In the end, people love pumps and dumps, which means that if they want to get rid of manipulation, pumps and dumps will be gone as well. In other words, be careful what you wish for.

I'm not sure what initial research they perform on exchanges they plan to have their coin listed on, but I don't think they are interested in that at all.

Their main goal is to have as many smaller exchanges list their coin, build up a community, generate some decent volumes, increase their market cap, and then a larger exchange might pick them up if all the aforementioned looks good enough. That's pretty much your only shot nowadays to be listed on the main exchanges with how they started taking some responsibility in making sure they don't list blatant trash anymore.

It isn't hard to increase market caps when it comes to coins with large circulating supplies, and it seems that it applies to ETN as well. $0.5 million in volume for a $160 market cap coin is nothing. ETN's all time peak is ~$0.19 where after that it dropped to $0.005 which is a 97% decrease in value (currently hovers around $0.0195). If that isn't a stereo type shitcoin then I don't know what is.

There is a difference between losing on-paper value and losing value as in actually cashing out back to fiat. In terms of losing on-paper value, it all depends on how you deal with it mentally and psychologically. For me personally on-paper losses aren't actual losses at all, because I don't plan to touch any of my cold wallet holdings in the coming 5-10 years.

What if Bitcoin crashes to zero? I don't know, we lost I guess, but that applies to anything of value that you hold as an investment or store of value. Good thing is that with how Bitcoin's fundamentals are showing their strength as time goes by, the odds of Bitcoin becoming worthless slim down as well.

In the end, your opinion is valid as well, because as I stated above, it all comes down to how you deal with it mentally and psychologically, and it seems that regardless of the nature of your losses, a loss is a loss.

Banks aren't really that strict to be honest. If you know the trigger limits of your bank (every bank has trigger limits in place), you can keep going on with shady activities for years until they become even tighter, and then you can still work your way around them, it just requires you to find out what their adjusted limits are.

Banks aren't going to choke the crap out of their operations. They know there has to be room for every being (that includes bad actors) to do what he/she wants to do, because if bank X doesn't provide them that possibility, they'll go to bank Y. If you turn your bank into fort knox, you can be sure that your revenue and profits will tank year after year, and that's what they at all cost want to avoid.

The most realistic scenario is that governments in general take a snapshot of their current financial system, and create one crypto/token for every fiat unit in circulation. It's basically a tokenized form of fiat money, but one that offer more usability for their economy, but directly also more power to the state.

India has been hammering down on anything it doesn't like in the last decades, so it's not something purely related to crypto currencies. In the end, we can only fall back on rumors and vague articles claiming that India is going to do this or that; we will only find out what they are up to once they finally announce it themselves and actually turn words into action.

In the end, India isn't very different from China in the way that they are trying to scare off the mass; they know they can't stop everyone, but if they can keep 75% of their population in check it's more than worthwhile for them. The other 25% can't be stopped no matter what you do.

I'm on the side of hodl and accumulate as many coins as possible on the way down. We won't hover around current levels for ever, so the best thing to do is to have fiat ready to be put into action. People will only realize how much of an opportunity this bear market is when we break through the $10,000 level again, and that's the moment threads will pop up asking whether or not it's still a good time to buy.

It has always been like that; we're repeating the same cycles over and over again, and if people by now still haven't got a clue, they should ask themselves what they are doing here.

Another well known cycle is how the price increases far before block halvings kick in, which means that we can expect a serious form of growth next year. Once the market goes back up the sentiment will improve as well, which means that money will slowly flow back into crypto. 2019 is the last ever year people will be able to buy at sub $10,000 levels.

It will. The only thing is that it won't be Bitcoin replacing them, but tokenized currencies issued by the same rotten governments.

EOS is currently the closest form of centralized governance that we can expect governments to subject their citizens to, but then 100x worse. In other words, they will be able to block/freeze/seize transactions and balances at any time of the day, just because they don't like what you do, or they don't want you to exchange value with an entity they think may become a potential threat.

Not only we as users experience the benefits of what's happening right now in the crypto world, but governments as well.

As always, when you read about these developments, all sorts of agencies are basically trying to justify/legitimize that what they have been doing for years without people here even noticing. We're being spied on from every corner and angle, and I'm honestly not sure how much worse it can be, because we never had any real form of privacy on centralized exchanges and services.

The only difference is that people thought it could happen at some later point (while in reality it was happening already), and now they more and more get to know for sure that it happens.

I'm not so sure if it's a fantastic achievement to actually become a fiat millionaire with how it keeps losing value. If I at some point want to secure some of the value that I hold in Bitcoin, I will try to buy land or as many properties as I can, and all will be paid for in Bitcoin. I ain't going back to fiat. Selling Bitcoin for fiat is like selling Gold for Copper. Who does that?

The more adoption Bitcoin goes through, and thus the more acceptance there is worldwide, the less incentive there is for people to sell Bitcoin for fiat. People will spend it, and that's how money should be used, because Bitcoin is money at the end of the day.

It depends though. It's definitely true that they need to have a good amount of coins in reserves to actually deliver, but if you have been looking at the on-chain transactions lately, there is a lot going on where significant numbers of coins move back and forth, which is a clear sign of how the OTC market is exploding while the spot market is bleeding in terms of volumes.

It may very well be that they have bought in their coins through OTC markets already, and it actually makes sense as well. In other words, whenever Bakkt goes live, it's the speculation that has to drive the price up initially, and not so much Bakkt itself.

I'm pretty sure that if they end up doing something with ICO's, it will definitely not be fueling Ethereum, but BCash. Roger is known to eliminate or block that what grants its closest competitors more economical power, and for that exact reason he will not mess around with Ethereum and other coins.

For those who follow BCash 'development' lately, it's clear that one of their highest priorities right now is to have ICO's and other applications be hosted and built on top of BCash. ViaBTC raised $30 million (very likely that most of these funds were coming from Bitmain, lol) with it's ICO on top of BCash, and I'm sure that that more will follow. He also said that he expects BCash to have a higher market cap than Ethereum, so we'll see where this goes.

I gave up on my initial number of coins to own goal after the bull run of last year. I'm actually happy that I did so, because there is no point in chasing a certain number of coins when you at any time can be put against a bull run making sure that prices increase with 100-200%. I rather realistically focus on allocating a certain percentrage of my monthly income to Bitcoin, and by doing that I automatically see my net worth increase throughout the years.

Forcing yourself to reach whatever amount of Bitcoins will mostly turn into an unhealthy fixation doing more harm than good, especially when you for that specific reason fomo in during bull runs, all because you're afraid of never being able to reach that number with how the price keeps pumping.

If a silly thread created by a random newbie on a forum is able to scare off "investors", they are obviously here for the wrong reasons, and also extremely ignorant.

Have all the overly bullish noobs who think the price will shoot up to $20,000 this year contributed to a price increase? No. If hundreds of people being overly bullish simultaneously can't even dent the price, how will one newbie accomplish what hundreds of others can't accomplish? It's just a matter of logical thinking; everything people say for or against the market is all empty talk with a 99% noise ratio.

It seems that Bitfinex is in the process of losing its whales with how their cold wallet keeps shrinking. In the last ~45 days Bitfinex's cold wallet shrunk with 100,000BTC, and the outflow of capital isn't even over. Bitfinex needs to act quick in order to not turn into the next Poloniex. I just hope for the traders there that Bitfinex won't halt withdrawals in an attempt to stop the 'bankrun' that's going on.

It's not an arbitrage opportunity at all. USD has more value than USDT, so the 'higher' BTC/USDT prices are technically still the same as the 'lower' BTC/USD prices on exchanges as Coinbase.

IIRC, there was a mixing service that used a trusted forum member to escrow a certain amount of coins, all to ensure that in case the service doesn't pay out, the escrow funds would cover that amount. So yeah, this is basically the only way to prove that you're here to conduct fair business as mixing service.

Considering the fact that no one will ever entrust over 100BTC to a freshly started service, why not have a chunk of these funds be held by an escrow? It would definitely give future users of your service a peace of mind.

It may be far fetched, but couldn't the big boys backing Circle be out to take over a large exchange solely to "control" the assets connected to it, all to use them as a vote to steer development of various 'vote sensitive' projects into a certain direction? Ethereum has proven to be 'attackable' that way as long as you have enough coins voting for you.

Bitfinex has already abused its EOS holdings to upvote itself, and it's out to become a block producer as well. https://www.bitfinex.com/eos

It all comes down to how usable or not usable people think Bitcoin is.

In most cases those who believe it is usable, will be able to look through the energy consumption of Bitcoin and acknowledge that it is securing close to a trillion dollars worth of on-chain transactions every year. In other words, the energy consumption has an actual purpose, and one that allows Bitcoin to become and remain the most secure/powerful 'computer' network ever in existence.

Those who don't believe Bitcoin is usable, or believe it doesn't serve a purpose at all, will always think Bitcoin's energy consumption is a waste. Let them think whatever they want, it's their rightful opinion, but one out of ignorance.

It's all or nothing for me.

I won't ever sell my coins for fiat, but will buy more when the price tanks hard enough. I have always done that and it worked well for me throughout the years, and I'm certain that it will keep working well in the forthcoming years. With so much more adoption potential the current price is an absolute joke, so by buying now you'll be able to capture that long term potential by simply hodling. It's the easiest thing in the world and you'll see your net worth go up. That's a fantastic deal!

Bitcoin has been the opportunity of the century for the non elite to actually become an elite. What's the alternative? Saving? Investing in stocks? Real estate? All a waste of time with Bitcoin still being the best option, by far. I don't exaggerate when I say that we can expect a 10-100x growth in price in the next 10 or so years. After that you can liquidate some of your Bitcoin holdings to buy real estate or whatever.

How is it slightly more realistic than it was when the prediction was made? Current price is even below when Novogratz made his prediction.

All the perma bulls you see throw around with $50,000 before the end of the year predictions are stuck inside their own bubble. They can't objectively look at the market without having their overly bullish bias completely overrule that what's actually going on in the market. Seriously, the most realistic predictions have all come from bears, because they don't let their bias get in the way. It's very refreshing reading through what bears think.

There is a saying; if all the loud 'experts' were so expert, they would be trading the market, and not selling you worthless advice.