I honestly don't really consider that positive news. But even if it was positive news, the bear market instantly nullifies positive news and makes it look like the market doesn't care at all.

In the end, there is only one bit of good news that will be actually bullish, and that's Bitcoin being able to scale. For that reason I hope that we won't be going through a bull run at all, but just a steady increase so that the network doesn't cripple again, especially with how various parties intentionally prevent Segwit from increasing Bitcoin's throughput.

Bakkt is very close to launching so we'll see how fruitful their presence in the crypto space will be during the next 6-12 months. The downside of launching during a bear market is that they might be shocked about how low the initial demand is, so I hope they take that into consideration and don't consider it a failure so soon.

Why are you shocked? The first sign of shady activity is when an exchange hides itself behind whois protection supplied by its domain registrar. An exchange that isn't planning to mess with its users and complies with all rules within the jurisdiction they operate in won't do such a thing. Easy way to detect bad actors is to check whether or not they use whois protection. It helps you avoid 90% of the bad actors in an instant.

Coinmama has been around for a while with mixed user experiences. It doesn't seem to be an outright scam, but I wouldn't recommend anyone to test it either. It reminds me of Hitbtc. Half of its userbase doesn't experience any problems, and the other half experiences nothing but problems and even think it's a scam.

It's not going to happen fella. If people were still having some degree of hope that the SEC would let an ETF come through, they can thank the drama/fud around Bitfinex for slimming down the chances even further. All the market making happens on non compliant USDT exchanges, so what do you think the SEC's thoughts are right now? I can't even blame them to be honest.

The only increase in price this year will be related to Q4 seasonality, so you can be sure of the fact that most of the increase we'll book in the last months of the current year will be undone in the first months of 2019. It happens each and every year. It's a returning crypto cycle. Look up the charts and you'll see that it's true.

Buy now. Sell in December. Buy back in March or April. Or keep hodling if you don't want to speculate.

I like what Bitmex is doing, they don't use hot wallets at all; all they do is process withdrawals manually once a day and that's it. It means less convenience, but more security, so what are exchanges waiting for? I would even like it to become an industry standard amongst top tier exchanges that hot wallets no longer exist, and who knowns, maybe it will become an actual requirement on regulatory level.

The only risk left is that the exchange itself will run off with the funds, but that's highly unlikely in an environment where most of the funds are known to belong to exchange X or Y. We will never be able to eliminate risks entirely, but we can instantly book a massive improvement in security. I think that's more than enough to give traders and investors a peace of mind.

I actually believe that the banks are more of an obstacle for growth than regulations. It has been a returning topic that banks freeze bank accounts of crypto related businesses, and reject applications for bank accounts in case it concerns a crypto related applicant. It's a nasty move just because they can't stand what crypto stands for.

I have dealt with two banks in the last couple of years where they forced me to either stop completely with crypto activities, or to close my bank account immediately. The latter I did. I'm glad that my current bank isn't such a jerk.

It's definitely over. ICO's had free game last year, and that's largely over at this point, and with how regulations are continuously being deployed on a much larger scale, the demand for ICO's will continue to diminish. If you also take into consideration that top tier crypto exchanges won't be blindly listing every ICO token anymore (also for legal reasons), it makes another ICO pop even less likely than it already was.

It will be interesting to see how the utility platforms will adapt to far lower ICO demand, because that's what they have been banking on all the time.

It's going to be difficulty though. It's great that people get excited about these legacy parties entering the space, but what's it worth if they end up dealing with cash settled products only?

It scares the crap out of them about what is needed to operate in a secure enough manner so that they won't get robbed, either offline or online.

People don't understand how difficult it is to secure crypto currencies in the best possible way. It's not a simple matter of using hardware wallets. Generating keys can't be done in the same place over and over again, which is why Coinbase each time uses a different location where it has a tent that's prepared to not leak any data or signals that malicious entities may compromise.

One mistake means they lost their crypto assets for ever. It's not fiat that you can reverse at any time of the day as long as it isn't withdrawn physically.

It's very deceiving, I agree. Bitfinex doesn't differentiate between actual USD or USDT on their platform, which means that their USD orderbooks (they are always nominated as USD) are mixed up with actual USD and USDT. In other words, we don't know what percentage of their daily USD volumes consist of actual USD. I would easily assume that the majority is USDT.

https://support.bitfinex.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010505034-Fiat-on-Bitfinex

Looks good on paper, but it doesn't work like that in reality. We humans will always be greedy and experience fear when money is involved. How can we not? Trading isn't a fun hobby we do to enjoy. It's serious business. In order to counter our human weaknesses, we use bots that actually do what they are programmed to do, and that in the best possible way.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that algorithmic trading activity in the crypto market has exploded this year. Staring all day at price tickers to manually day trade is an utter waste of time.

People only know that it is a falling knife after the price has been going down consistently for a longer period of time. It's extremely difficult in this market to define the right dips to buy and the right peaks to sell.

Last year was quite a hectic year in terms chart analysis on the way up. From $2000 to $20,000 every $1000 increase in price was said to be the peak to sell according to "chart gurus", but those who did have lost badly. The same "chart gurus" said that nearly every serious dip this year was the right one to buy, and they were wrong again.

The only thing you can do to hedge your risks is to buy/sell with smaller fractions at a time instead of going all in or all out like how most people here tend to do.

I'm pretty certain that Bitfinex had a perfect world picture in mind in the way that other exchanges wouldn't trade USDT against other fiat currencies, but they couldn't be more wrong. That's exactly why Bitfinex has no USDT/USD pair because they know how contradicting it is with the main principles of their token.

In a free market where pegs don't have to be respected, you should expect the value to move up and down based on the sentiment at a specific time. In other words, a miserable miscalculation on Bitfinex's end.

USDT will only be virtually worth $1 if all exchanges agree to not have it trade against the USD, but that's never going to happen.

The thing with stablecoins is that they can be used pretty much on any exchange that supports them, and that without abiding by their respective regulations within the jurisdictions they operate in. In case a government doesn't like exchange X and Y, or doesn't seem to be able to shut them down, the easiest way to crack down on these exchanges is to cut off that what grants them their income and can be cut off easily, and that's the fiat reserves of these stable coins.

What happens if the government right now seizes the bank account(s) of Tether (assuming for the sake of argument USDT is backed completely)? It will hurt Binance, Bitfinex, OKEx, Huobi, ZB, Hitbtc, Coinbene, Bittrex, Poloniex, etc. That's one heck of a blow to this whole ecosystem.

That's basically my main concern, and not so much fiat exchanges such as Coinbase who are compliant and licensed to deal with fiat.

Crypto related domains with the term invest in them by default lose their credibility.

If you also look up their whois information, you'll see that they are hiding themselves behind a whois privacy wall, so another major red flag right there.

Next.

I see, it's very weird actually. Bitcoin itself is performing as it has been doing all the time, which is without any problems.

It may be related to USDT based on the timing; perhaps that a whale or more than one have dumped a significant amount of USDT on Poloniex in the last days, and have withdrawn as much BTC as possible.

Another explanation might be that they are upgrading their wallet clients, which would be the least worrying scenario, so let's hope it's this one.

It's not as easy as it may seem for regular traders, especially when it concerns new markets, which applied to South Korea when there was a $5000 difference in price. By the time western traders managed to get everything ready, the premium was gone already. I doubt that we'll ever see such premiums again in South Korea.

In most cases the exchange operators are pretty harsh on those who try to withdraw liquidity from their markets, especially when the price differences are so far apart. It happens frequently where traders deposit whatever crypto asset to exploit the difference in price, but then the exchange in question doesn't let the deposit come through for obvious reasons.

The bear market has immensely increased the demand for USDT with how it is the only safe haven asset on exchanges like Binance. The majority of the traders value their holdings according to their USD value, and will do everything they can to protect it, which means that USDT is the only option to go with. In other words, the utility of USDT is there, regardless of them being actually backed by fiat or not.

We all have our rightful doubts about USDT. I'm quite certain that Bitfinex used non backed tokens to pay off its post "hack" debt, but we can't prove that it isn't backed, so they will continue to ride people's benefit of the doubt, possibly for many more years to come.

We can only hope that more exchangs will end up becoming fiat entry/exit points like Bitstamp, Kraken, Coinbase, etc. With enough time, USDT dominance will significantly decline.

Bitfinex briefly surpassed $7700 yesterday. The peak yesterday was the result of big buys triggering a short squeeze, which is why it only affected Bitfinex.

Bitmex fetches its pricing data from Bitstamp and Coinbase Pro, which are pure USD exchanges not being affected by the inflated prices USDT exchanges suffer from. Both Bitstamp and Coinbase Pro are one of the most stable and conservative exchanges in this market, and are probably the best reflection of the market at any time as far as volumes and pricing goes.

It is, but the problem with people here is that they are waiting for things to happen on their own, and it doesn't work that way. It's all about supply and demand; if the users (who represent the demand) aren't in the mood to spend their coins, why should merchants even bother accepting it?

I can guarantee you that Bitcoin (or basically any other crypto currency) causes more frustration for merchants than actual benefits. If a payment for whatever reason doesn't go through on time, people will contact the merchant in question, and what the heck is the merchant going to do? The merchant will then need to contact its payment gateway, etc. In other words, too much hassle for no reward at all.

The worst thing is that we haven't booked any progress throughout the last years in making Bitcoin become more of a currency.

That's what we have tokens for that can run on top of Bitcoin. USDT is the perfect example of how you can create money that doesn't exist, and it can be done in more ways than just one. It grants you the security of Bitcoin's immensely powerful network, and you have the possibility to issue tokens subject to inflation, or even back them by whatever you think it should be backed by, so I don't really see an issue here.

In the end, people advocating for freedom of choice shouldn't want fiat to be replaced or killed off, because that's not different from governments trying to kill off what they don't like.

It's a hard one to call because everyone here has a different opinion on when they believe the bear market is 'officially' over, and everyone's opinion is pretty valid in its own way as long as we haven't broken through multiple previous lower highs. Even if we climb up towards $8000-$9000 it's not a guarantee that we won't fall below $6000 again, or maybe even lower.

From my personal standpoint, we really have to smash through the psychologically important $10,000 barrier in a confident manner in order to talk about a potential end of the bear market. Breaking that level is important in so many ways, that it might even result in a pump towards $11,000-$12,000 shortly after.

The only way to make sure you catch the next bull run, is to buy as many coins as possible right now and to patiently wait. You can't time bull runs, but you can guarantee yourself an early seat by utilizing the market in its current form. The current stability that we can rely on between $6000-$7000 lends itself perfectly for accumulation purposes.

The block halving in 2020 is an extra factor of motivation to start accumulating right now. It might look far away, but the market starts climbing up far before the event actually takes place. OTC dealers and other parties will be out to fill up their reserves far before the block halving as well, and who knows, Bakkt might even be an extra trigger with their physically delivered Bitcoin futures.