There is a possibility.

The 6k support seems to be quite strong at the moment, though, and I think that it's probably going to hold up for a while. I'm fully expecting prices to continue to dip as soon as this support falters, but we don't know when that is going to happen. It could be this month, it could be next year. I actually expected prices to be lower than $5k around 3 months ago, and yet support is still at this level.

Regardless, I believe that with the flow of institutional investors into the market within this bear market, it's unlikely that we'll see prices much lower than $4-5k as the absolute price bottom. So right now, the logical action would be to dollar cost average, and buy coins with spare fiat funds, if possible.

OP, I'd like to remind you that cloud mining sites, especially Hashflare, are shady businesses and even outright scams based on their track record of manipulating customer contracts, and also raising minimum withdrawals to prevent people from getting out, all the while having no solid proof that they are actually mining at full scale.

With that in mind, it is entirely possible, if not probable, that Hashflare and other cloud mining companies are fabricating payouts based on what they can afford and make profit on. That would explain why sometimes you see no correlation between payouts and difficulty/price.

Again, once you enter into a cloud mining contract, it's a completely lopsided deal in terms of who has control over your earnings. It's completely up to the cloud mining company to determine your daily payout, as they do not need any proof of mining whatsoever.

These sort of policies towards bitcoin really make no sense to me.

They claim to be trying to protect their citizens from a high risk investment, but in reality, bitcoin is probably a much better store of value than most of the fiat currencies that governments around the world are issuing right now in the long run. By outlawing instead of regulating exchanges within your country, you're actually generating even more risk for the users.

Probably just trying to restrict access to bitcoin, instead of what they claim to be doing, which is risk reduction for consumers. But anyhow - I doubt that this would impact the p2p trading going on on LBC and paxful within the local area. That's basically impossible to track and shut down.

Their site didn't even load properly for me at first.

What I've found is that in most cases where the team is fabricated, you can usually tell that they are not what they claim by simply looking at the quality of the pictures, and seeing the expressions of the people in the photo, without performing a reverse image search.

Real team photos would generally be people wearing similar outfits standing in a similar position, without too much expression. Stock photos are completely different in that. Besides, the scammers did just a terrible job at trying to crop out the people from the images.

Also, the fact that they offer token sales directly by sending ETH to an address, without any sign up mechanisms, is a huge warning sign. No KYC and no signups on purchase mean that they aren't even bothered to invest in these features, and they're definitely no regulated. Watch out for those characteristics on ICOs as well.

Has the tech team come up with any response to your tickets? Or have they just flat out ignored you?

Not surprising though if they did, since this is literally how yobit is operating right now.

They're obviously using the excuse here that you are the one that made the mistake. While I understand that retrieving ETH from an ETC wallet is a long process, it is doable by most exchanges and definitely have been practically done before. Especially when you offered to pay a cut of that sum to Yobit, there is no excuse for not attending to this matter, but instead, go completely without a response for nearly a year.

Hopefully you now know how bad of an exchange yobit is. Anything could go wrong with them, and there are virtually no benefits of using them. Avoid in the future and take this as a lesson.

No. I don't think that they will let you.

I've stopped using poloniex ages ago, but when I stopped it was due to legacy accounts not being able to withdraw with a $2k limit per day anymore and had to also undergo the necessary verification in order to withdraw. So previously, you had only one set of users called the legacy users who could stay anonymous, but now, even that is gone.

I'd suggest not even thinking about using Poloniex due to its horrendous track record with their customer support, but rather use Shapeshift if you want anonymity, are only exchanging a small amount of coins, and don't care about a few less percent on your coins.

A lot of people make the argument that bitcoin is too unstable to be a currency. I find this completely untrue.

Fiat is actually placed under the illusion of stability, while in reality, it is actually in a constant long term decline due to the debasement of the money supply by the central banks of each country that issues it. Bitcoin has no such problems, as it is decentralised. And even though there may be some short term volatility, it's going to hold its value in the long run.


This is a spot on statement. I reckon that in the future, bitcoin will serve as a safe haven for those who want to store their wealth in a form other than a depreciating form of fiat currency, just like what gold is used for rigth now. The countries of Turkey and venezuela are only two of the most recent examples.

Depending on which country you are in, this slowdown process has actually happened months ago.

We've seen an extremely strong recover in the housing markets after 2008, to the point where there's probably a second housing bubble that is going on in the past few years. And this time, it's not just in the US. It's pretty much major cities everywhere.

I don't know if this growth in the housing market is going to continue after this correction lasting a few weeks long, or if it would lead to some form of major adjustment downwards. But overall, I think that property prices would have to eventually come down. We just don't know when it is going to be right now, but I definitely think that it's very risky to try take out a mortgage right now.

Gold is still a major asset in the reserves of a lot of countries, including China and the US.

Whether or not a bull wave will come is up for debate. Obviously with me having an investment in some physical form of gold I'd like to see the prices get up, and there are also signs that this current bear market is going to come to an end soon, there is simply no accurate figure that would say when the bull market will actually be kickstarted.

It's no surprise that growth even in a gold bull market is projected to be so low, due to gold having a much larger market cap than bitcoin, and also having derivatives traded on major platforms. To be honest, I only really see my investment in gold as a long term hedge against fiat currencies, and even then I'm starting to move some of my gold savings to bitcoin.

Even though $6k does seem like the floor that's serving as support and is holding steady right now, I think that there is every possibility that we'll dip below that floor soon and see potentially $4-5k before bottoming out within this year or even the next.

The bear market is still nowhere near over at the moment, so definitely don't get too optimistic. There was a huge bull trap just a few weeks ago as well where everyone got excited, but if you look at the 2014 crash, you'll see that the time frame that it took for prices to reach the bottom was around one and a half years, way more than the time elapsed since the peak of the bull run last year.

Your advice is spot on, though. I think that we're entering a clear accumulation zone. Dollar cost average your buy orders if you have any funds to invest in bitcoin. Accumulate for the long term when everyone else is panic selling. I think that's the most sensible strategy to go with right now, especially if you focus on the huge potential for BTC in the long run, as well as new companies, mainstream investment banks, or well known traders showing some major interest in bitcoin.

Do you have any screenshots to show what you're talking about?

3 suspensions in the last 5 months does seem extremely unlikely. Did poloniex management give you any reason why they have done what they did? Or did they just request for more documents each time they froze your account?

I've definitely never heard of anything close to this kind of scenario before. But I can tell you this - my experience with poloniex has been nowhere near pleasant. I had a withdrawal stuck in "awaiting approval", which is something that a lot of others experience as well on a regular basis, and since their support was so incompetent, it took them 2 weeks before getting the withdrawal through. Others are known to wait up to months.

These issues are quite common with poloniex. And even after the circle buyout things don't seem to go that positively for them. I'd suggest if you can, get your funds out of your account asap and switch to a more trustworthy exchange like Binance atm.

Bitcoin is actually inflationary, not deflationary.

I guess it depends on what your definition of deflation is. But if you consider deflation to be a general decline in the money supply, then bitcoin's currency level actually never goes down. There is a constant increase in that, each block that's been mined.

However, the level of inflation just slows down over time due to halvings.

We could see potential deflationary issues when bitcoin nears its supply ceiling, and the rate of lost coins exceed that of new coins coming in, but even then it's unlikely that it'll affect any single country as bitcoin is global. Besides, if bitcoin serves as a niche, safe haven asset in the future for those who want to save their wealth in the long run, there is nothing wrong with its supply being capped and potentially even decreased, just like gold. It's a store of value - after all.

I really doubt that hoarding cash would cause recessions. That's up for debate obviously.

Besides, the reason why people are hoarding bitcoin at the moment is because they see potential in bitcoin as an investment. Especially in a bear market like currently, they don't see much point in spending their coins for so cheap, especially if they bought at a higher price. That's completely logical.

Once volatility goes down due to merchant adoption going up, I'd say that the hoarding we see right now will be significantly lessened as people start to use bitcoin as a day to day form of exchange in their transactions.

Furthermore, I don't really see how holding bitcoins instead of spending them actively all the time can cause any recessions in a particular country - bitcoin is independent from any state, and decentralised. It's also not just a single country's population that is holding bitcoin.

Established members of the community have put out warnings ages ago already when Hashflare initially started to go rogue, by reducing the customer's contracts from lifetime to 1 year, as well as raising the minimum withdrawal levels to unrealistic ones.

In fact, there has already been a previous attempt at a change.org petition which states that this activity is unfair and should be reversed: https://www.change.org/p/don-t-let-hashflare-io-change-lifetime-contracts-to-year-contracts-hashflare?recruiter=777085939&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition&utm_term=share_petition?

Of course Hashflare is fraudulent. The fact that they are currently not even paying out due to the unprofitability of their entire scheme (or perhaps, them fabricating payouts due to liquidity issues?) is only a reflection of their overall track record. I really doubt that a petition alone would change anything. Either someone launches legal action against them, or even better, just educate people about this matter. Prevention is better than a cure.

Hashflare's entire business model is based on ripping people off this way. No way they're going to respond to a change.org petition that does not pose any threat legally to them.

If you look on their site now, the names of the team members are back up.

I think that it's very likely that they saw this thread, panicked, got rid of the names on their team to avoid detection, and later realised that OP already archived their website anyways so they brought back the names.

Great job on OP's part on picking out all of these scammers. But honestly, simple research would reveal 99% of these potential ICO scams.

The idea underlying the entire project is very vague and probably has been done thousands of times before - the first warning sign. I couldn't find any proof of relationship between Officium and the partners they list, either. For example, they say that Fidelity investments, workmarket, swell investments just to name a few are their investors/partners. However, I couldn't find any publicly known info to show that this is true. Of course, not to mention identity theft on their part.

When an exchange has issues with their deposits and/or withdrawals, then it pretty much always results in their internal market prices not aligning with the rest of the market. This is exactly what happened with WEX.

There were both fiat and crypto withdrawals being halted in the system, causing the prices of certain coins to artificially inflate.

Two of the coins that are supposedly still open for withdrawal are ZCash, and USDT. Both of which are trading at over 300% premiums, which is not surprising. People are essentially paying extra to try getting their funds out instead of waiting for a fiat withdrawal to finally come, which is significantly more risky.

Even though there may seem like an arbitrage opportunity here, there really isn't, as the withdrawal system is completely screwed right now. I'd suggest not using them, especially with their track record of being shady.

I think that it's going to be similar to the 2014 crash.

It's not going to follow the exact same paths, but the patterns within both of these bear markets should be relatively the same, including the percentage decrease from the peak before prices bottom out finally (around 70-85% in both bear markets).


I disagree with this sentiment. Even though it seems like that we've already achieved mass adoption and demand is at its historical peak, I think that if you put this into a long term perspective, we're still in an early adopters phase. Institutional investors did not participate much within the last bull market, but are flooding in as the bear market ensues. This bear market could last for a few years, but i do expect a full recovery in price sooner or later, and also adoption picking up sooner or later as well.

You already provided it to them, so the only thing that you can do is pretty much ask them nicely to delete it.

Since they are a regulated company, they are legally obliged to protect your data, and ensure that it does get deleted if you request it to. So I doubt that there is anything to worry about there (unless you're providing info to a phishing LBC site). The chance of misuse should be extremely slim with an established company like localbitcoins.

However, I don't know why they rejected your verification docs repeatedly, assuming that you did provide the real documents for yourself. Also, I was never asked to provide my personal info when I registered. Is there a special reason that they're requesting this from you? Perhaps I'm not staying up to date with their policies after they suspended my account since it had 'significant trading volume'.

I completely agree with what The Pharmacist said.


Even without considering whether or not legalising marijuana is really going to benefit the economy, I believe in the freedom of choice that people has when it comes to these substances. It does not cause any harm to the general community, and even if it was illegal, it's simply a futile thing to regulate as people are going to continue to cultivate and smoke the substance regardless of its legality.

Coming back to the economic impacts, there could definitely be tax revenue made from legalising marijuana, with less taxpayer money spent on trying to police the consumption of it (which is absolutely ridiculous imo). Also when you take into account that marijuana is probably less addictive than tobacco and perhaps even alcohol, it's more the reason to do it.

I couldn't find anything that directly points to them as a scam on their site. However, the general feel of the site definitely makes it seem like a ponzi scheme of some sort (including what I call "fractional reserve mining"), if not an outright scam.

The site is relatively new, and has nowhere the trust of Genesis Mining.

Besides, even if they were legit, the historical returns produced by cloud mining investments are laughable. I would myself, never put any sum of money into any cloud mining service, as if they were actually mining, the returns would be minuscule if not negative.

IIRC it's really easy to obtain company registration certificates for UK and Belize, so even though they do have them, it doesn't say anything. It's too much risk for the investor for too little reward, imo. That's the bottom line.