CMC plays a very important role in this.

In the last 12 or so months it has become increasingly more difficult to nest yourself in this industry as exchange, but there is a pretty convenient way to work around that 'problem', which is to generate tons of (fake) volume and have your exchange climb the CMC ladder to attract tons of noobs. In other words, faking volumes is a different type of marketing for exchanges.

CMC is ranked as the 341th website globally, which is an achievement on its own, and that's why exchanges are desperately looking to rank up on that site in terms of volumes.

OKEx, currently ranked nr 2 based on volumes has been a champion in faking volumes, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that their main traffic supplier is CMC. The same applies to Huobi, and yet again, their main traffic supplier is CMC. Another Asian volume faker with an obvious CMC connection is ZB.com, and this is currently the 5th largest exchange based on volume.

If people still think CMC is a meaningless site, they are wrong.

Binance did well, I have to give them that, but their foundation is fragile and very much subject how active regulators will become in the forthcoming years.

Binance is a squatter, it just enters a certain jurisdiction without bothering about registrations and licenses, which in current times regulators aren't really in the mood for to combat, but you can bet on it that this won't last endlessly. Japan is the first country to actively stand up, and as you can see, they left as soon as they felt the situation became too serious to ignore.

Seriously, how difficult is it for Binance to obtain the proper registrations and licenses to still operate in Japan? Japan is a crazy large market that will keep bursting out of its jacket. It just points out that they aren't interested in obtaining them, or they couldn't and won't be able to pass the requirements. They have never been hacked in the way other exchanges are hacked, and money is totally not a problem, so what is the problem?

The trick here is to not take anything these mainstream bobos say seriously. In all cases, especially when it comes to CNBC, they have turned out to be perfect counter indicators. During certain events I short their bullishness, and long their bearishness. The easiest money making opportunities were the consensus event and especially the BAKKT announcement, which CNBC was extremely bullish on, not just somewhat bullish.

I remember them saying that when Asia would wake up (as if traders regardless of where they are located are ever sleeping) and they process the BAKKT news, the price would jump up significantly, and when Asia 'woke up' the price tanked hard.

In the end, all news outlets try to sell your garbage and rehashed information, it's their nature. It's up to everyone here themselves to go straight to the source to consume the most important developments in the world of crypto.

Could be, but considering that Yobit has a delay throughout its entire platform, it might give people the impression that it's just a counter bot reaction, but I'm pretty certain that Yobit isn't shy of front running people's orders for its own benefit. I have seen the same be done through platforms as Cryptsy and Mintpal back in the days, and they are the prime example of a shitcoin exchange with shady operators.

Yobit is far worse than that, the only difference is that they are still operating, but I wouldn't want to test their durability even for one second. Playing Russian roulette isn't my style.

It shows growth for sure, but it's quite inflated as well. Firstly because you're only looking at peak volume moments, and secondly, as time goes by more exchanges are added to CMC, which autmatically adds way more volume, even in case there hasn't really been that much organic growth at all.

Another thing to take in mind is that Asian exchanges are champion in faking volumes, which has been a major contributor to globally increasing trading volumes as well, and let Asian exchanges be the main price drivers of the last year(s). In other words, everything concerning volumes should be taken with a grain of salt.

The thing with markets is that in case they test the same lower support levels over and over again, they eventually break. It doesn't autmatically mean it will happen to Bitcoin, but with how there is very little support to keep the price above the $7000 level, we shouldn't discard it. The bias definitely hints towards more bearish price action rather than bullish price action, but there might be some bullish action coming up very soon.

Realistic possibility right now is to have seasonality kick in somewhere next month to lift the price.

Past Q4 seasonality increases that started in October;

2014 $300 > $450 = 50% increase.
2015 $230 > $500 = 115% increase.
2016 $600 > $1100 = 80% increase.
2017 $4500 > $19,500 = 330% increase.

More and more mobile clients start to pop up supporting LN, but they are all operating using a third party node, and as far as I have seen, they don't allow you to swap from LTC>BTC. It's purely BTC channel payments they focus on. I am operating my own node, and have to put all the time I have this weekend into finding out how to execute my first ever swap, which obviously requires me to set up a Litecoin LN node as well.

I haven't reported any of my progress since it only consisted of simple channel payments that went through without problems, but will definitely do when I come across bugs.

If you want a hassle free mobile client being capable of regular (on-chain) transactions and LN transactions, then Bitcoin Lightning Wallet is the best one to use right now. Minimum channel funding through that wallet is 0.003BTC, maximum 0.1677BTC, but the best is to just keep it as close to 0.003BTC as possible since it is for testing purposes only.

How sweet, a calculated BCash pump yesterday following the news of their IPO application, and as happened with other calculated pumps, yet again a 20% increase. They aren't doing much to cover how Bitmain tied that coin is. It's pretty much a stock or security, just like how XRP moves up and down based on Ripple's performance.

It's going to be interesting to see what Bitmain's Q3 and especially Q4 profits look like, because it's impossible that the bear market hasn't significantly affected their sales. Considering that smart investors and the regulators do their work and value strong profit reports, they will for sure know that weaker net profits are imminent in the upcoming quarters. We'll see how much of an obstacle that will be.

At this point in time it's indeed impossible to work around fiat's centralization (especially if you also discard stable coins), which is why centralized exchanges will always be the dominant factor in that field, but that's all fine. In the end, we already have a base currency, which is Bitcoin, and with how you can swap from coin to coin without having to worry about confirmation times, there isn't really an obstacle to prevent it from being a base currency.

The majority of the coin to coin traders trade to profit in Bitcoin, and when there are bad times coming up, they park their funds in Bitcoin to counter the leveraged effect of altcoins during corrections. The only thing we need is patience and help build up LN where possible. Play with it. Test it. Try to swap from BTC>LTC and vice versa. The latter is what I am going to dedicate my weekend to.

Even if people don't know what Bitcoin is, they will certainly be able to see that it isn't a regular ATM. On top of that, if a complete newbie at some point finds out about Bitcoin, that person will then finally know what that ATM is for and might even use it. It's all about reaching as many people as possible, and while you're right that these ATM's will mostly be used by existing Bitcoiners, it will help making the process of buying Bitcoin a bit easier for new users.

Exchanges have proven to be unreliable during peak moments, where wiring money to an exchange might take days, and these ATM's are perfect to counter that. Also, the more ATM's are available near people, the less they have to search for local sellers of Bitcoins, which is getting increasingly dangerous as time goes by.

Cloud mining in general has been nothing but a guaranteed way to lose money, but it wouldn't even surprise me if this BCash camped site on purposely suppressed your Bitcoin rewards even further down. They have been found scamming people by selling them Bitcoin which later turned out to be BCash, so it's entirely possible that they cheat on you in that field as well.

Cloud mining in general = no go.
Cloud mining + bitcoin dot com = 100x worse than no go.

Definitely.

Japan is probably one of the very few countries that actually does that what you are talking about, but it's not enough to prevent thefts in form of hacks.

Exchanges will always have to deal with hot wallets, and hackers are out to breach their systems in order to withdaw as much value as possible, and have it confirm as quick as possible, which is why they mostly go for altcoins. Bitcoin's "slower" confirmations offer exchanges quickly noticing theft the ability to double spend in an attempt to reduce financial damage.

And yes, even if there is a successful theft, exchanges will likely refund you one way or another, but the refund process will always favor the exchange and not you. Let's say you have 10BTC in your account at today's $6500 value, and the price shoots up to $15,000 not long after, they will obviously only refund you $6500 per coin. In case the value drops to $3000 for example, the exchange will suddenly refund you your coins instead of fiat.

For sure, but the potential reward will be enough to comfort their current growing pains.

If Coinbase manages to become what Binance is right now, or something even close to that, it will be the best move they have ever made, especially with how they have the banking aspect on their side, and they might even be granted a banking license to become a bank themselves. It's an extremely powerful combination that no one in the industry currently enjoys. If Coinbase was listed on a stock exchange, this would be the time to go long.

I'm mainly interested in how long Coinbase will be ignoring EOS. It will be a massive achievement for EOS itself, and a massive plus for this market in general with how it will lead to more diversification of the utility platforms. Noobs massively flow into Coinbase with their fiat during rallies, and when they have more options to choose from, it will lead to less Ethereum domination in that field. We all have seen what happened last year.

XRP is pretty obvious in my opinion, it is a security and for that reason won't be listed unless Coinbase has the proper licenses and whatnot, which directly opens the door for Stellar to be listed.

My top five of most realistic candidates;

Stellar
Cardano
NEO
Dash
NEM

Every aspect of this industry suffers during a bear market. The thing with average joes is that they need a market to consistently keep increasing in order to feel comfortable and have enough confidence to start investing or trading. They enjoyed the ride up last year, and have taken a long break on the way down. They will come back as soon as we start to approach the psychologically important $10,000 level, which will surely generate plenty of mainstream media air time all over the world.

They are far too blinded by ignorance and short term gain greed to realize that unfortunately. These people are called dumb money for a reason. No one can help them.

I have conducted enough international transfers back in the days, and they are indeed expensive, but that's what I have Bitcoin for. No more for me.

The whole idea of banks allowing you to suddenly enjoy much faster transfer settlements is where the tricky part starts to pop up. Banks don't need a blockchain or XRP to provide you faster transfer settlements, and I'm pretty confident that banks (and governments) don't want people to enjoy that level of convenience. They thrive on making everyone wait and charge insane amounts of intermediary fees. No way they will get rid of that.

There is too much if involved.

We're at a stage at which people (the smart ones) start to understand how everything works here, which in my opinion will only reduce the probability of something like that to happen. I think it's pretty safe to say that the market participants you are referring to are already positioning themselves in the way they want by taking advantage of the current downward market cycle.

All the accumulation happening right now means there is less needed in the future, unless the demand shoots up to insane levels, but again, that's impossible to time.

Technically speaking, we don't even need decentralized exchanges, but just an environment where we all can be our own exchange, and LN offers that environment.

By the time we're a year or two further, there is a much wider level of interoperability between all sorts of networks, and that's when the real party begins. Spot traders will always use centralized exchanges no matter what, which is perfectly fine, and the other part of the industry will feast on peer to peer trades as they should be. That's what I call a perfect balance between supply and demand.

It will take some time, but we're still at stage one of everything so that's perfectly fine. Last year was the first ever time that both Bitcoin and Ethereum were pushed to their limits, which caused fees on both platforms to sky rocket, and that's actually a good thing. You don't know when you reach your limit until you actually reach it. See it as a stress test.

That's actually not a positive. If you take into consideration that XRP transactions are by definition reversible, you know why banks are feasting on their technology.

Fudamentals for crypto are improving when people acknowledge the essence of why Bitcoin and other currencies are so important. It's mind boggling how the sentiment changed in favor of XRP in the last year or so. Bitcoin? Shitcoin. Ethereum? Shitcoin. That's unseen and all coming from how people don't understand what we're trying to do here.

How do you know that these coins are actually lost? Don't believe the crap that news outlets are spreading. Some coins might indeed be lost (ie, burnt for ever) but that doesn't mean the extent of burnt coins reaches all the way to 3 million. There are some solid hodlers out there not willing to move their coins, which might also have legal reasons in some cases.

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OP; Bitcoin having a hard cap of 21 million BTC doesn't mean that there are only 21 million units out there. Every 1BTC unit can be split into 100 million smaller satoshi units, so there is plenty of juice for everyone by the time mainstream adoption kicks in.