For new investors it definitely requires balls of steel in some situations, especially during corrections, but if you aren't doing anything with your funds, there is basically no need to stress out over Bitcoin's fluctuations.

If you have let's say $100,000 in your savings account, and you don't plan to touch any of these funds for at least a couple of years, why would it sting you that the value is fluctuating? The same applies to Bitcoin as well. Bitcoin's bias is always to go up in the long term, and as long as that's your target, you're all fine. Fiat's bias is to always go down in the long term, so I am much much more comfortable to hold through Bitcoin than anything else.

I remember how trolls back in 2014 during the correction made fun of those that bought the 2013 peak of $1100. Look where we are today. As long as you keep holding everything there is no need to stress. It only took ~4 years to book a 500% returns (I'm conveniently ignoring the near $20,000 peak). Where do you get these returns? Patience.

That's the worst ever thing one could do, and the worst thing that could happen actually happened in your case. I'm surprised no one pointed that out yet.

Exchanges in no shape or form are wallets or accounts you can store your funds in for a longer period of time. These platforms are solely meant for trading purposes, where if you are done with trading, you withdraw all your funds back to your own wallet (one you as sole entity has access to).

I do feel bad for you though, it's the lack of knowledge and understanding of how fundamentally unsafe exchanges really are (regardless of how "regulated" they are) that made you lose out big time.

Get yourself a hardware wallet;

https://shop.trezor.io/
https://www.ledger.com/

For obvious reasons only buy from the original web shops and not some third party sites.

Yobit is a snake in the grass, very hard to combat without physical office locations and unknown operators. I'm pretty sure that if regulators start to dig in for real, they will be able to knock them off the internet, but what happens after that is they will relaunch just like what BTC-E (now WEX) did and the same problem pops up once again, just under a different name.

The only effective way to get rid of Yobit is to have people stop using that exchange for once. If there is no demand for Yobit, they have no other option than to shut down eventually. No exchange will operate when it costs money instead of makes money. Yobit in the end is nothing more than a reflection of how fundamentally shit this whole crypto space really is. Yobit does nothing other than fill up the demand coming from lunatics.

It's quite funny how this market has changed significantly with absolute lunatic retail investors finding their way to Bitcoin. Back in the days shorts piling up was a negative aspect according to the general sentiment, and now everyone wants to see sky high shorts because of a potential short squeeze.

The same applies to hard forks. Before BCash people were so afraid of hard forks, that they actually believed the end was near. After BCash, and thus knowing that free money is part of the deal, people suddenly started to wish for more hard forks, and they got plenty of it afterwards.

If you like drama, pumps and dumps and some random shit happening, this is the right place to be.

You might not see things as I do, which is totally understandable, but I can't change the way I am in this. I'm probably a bit too emotionally connected to Bitcoin, but I do see it as my duty to prevent anyone from even potentially forming a threat to that what I think is here to serve us freedom in the best possible way.

And yes, BCash has shown its true face and lost the battle to a larger degree, but that doesn't mean I'm done trying to prevent as many people as possible from investing in that garbage. Roger's bitcoin dot com domain and the bitcoin twitter handle are being used to deceive people in the worst possible way. Newbies don't know what's right or wrong, they are sucked into all this due to Roger's anti Bitcoin propaganda campaign.

It doesn't feel as a waste of energy in my case, it fuels my strength to continue doing this.

By the time it is 2022 the price has gone up to such degree, that people won't even bother pointing him at his wrong prediction.

He can always say; well, the price didn't go up to $250,000 but we are at least above $100,000 which is fine as well, and everyone will agree with him.

Honestly speaking. I hope for the sake of Bitcoin that we won't reach $250,000 by that time. I prefer Bitcoin to be fundamentally ready and reflect being worth such figures before actually reaching them. Bitcoin as it is right now is not fundamentally ready. It will be eventually, but there is no need to rush things. Let's enjoy this journey, because this is the first and last one we'll ever be able to witness.

You are an expert amongst a community full of other experts. Now happy? I'm still more expert than you though. I'm the expertest expert in existence.

It depends on how you look at it. In order to have Bitcoin obtain the highest possible value and usefulness, you have to allow both its store of value and currency aspect to bloom. Stable value means merchants (same applies to payment gateways) accepting Bitcoin are less likely going to hedge their risks by selling or shorting a portion of their sales. In other words, way less selling pressure.

The more stable Bitcoin becomes, the more willing people are to actually spend it. People right now either don't spend because the value has gone down, or don't spend because they believe the price will sky rocket. It's not something that's helping Bitcoin's currency aspect. Also, the more stability there is, the less we have to deal with absolute lunatic retail "investors". I see more advantages than negative aspects.

I love it. It's pest that came into existence due to toxic beings thinking they can just come in and take everything over. BCash is a security leaning on Bitmain's success and financial input. In other words, it's the first corporate attempt to outplay Bitcoin and steal its brand. This is the exact reason it's so important to protect Bitcoin whenever we can and wherever we can.

People don't realize how serious this case is. If Bitcoin ever fails, the entire state of crypto fails (technically altcoins have already failed when it comes to decentralization) because nothing will ever be able to provide you the same comfort of decentralization. For that reason I'll do whatever I can to trash every BCash snake whenever I see one.

It's not really worth it like that. At best you'll outperform inflation marginally, which is just an utter waste of time in my opinion. Bitcoin in just a matter of years has wiped out hundreds years worth of inflation, and that was just a glimpse of what power hides inside its massive long term potential.

I'm obviously heavily biased towards Bitcoin, but that's not without a reason. I strongly believe that people will be able to obtain more financial freedom than ever before even if they allocate just 10% of their net worth to Bitcoin. As extra people can always have fiat saved up in their bank account and some of it invested in bonds or index funds. You don't have to choose when you can have multiple allocations at the same time.

Why is that suspicious? Isn't it possible for someone to have confidence in Bitcoin?

If BCash wasn't given birth, I by now would have had nearly 4 years worth of coin age on some of my cold wallets as well. With how difficult it is to sell coins without handing over all your personal information to an exchange, I expect the early hodlers to gain more and more coin age until they find a way to comfortably put their coins to work without being taxed.

And yes, I wasn't forced to move my coins, but how can I not when BCash hovers over 0.2BTC. It was a fantastic opportunity for me, plus I didn't want to contribute to BCash's value increasing by keeping my coins untouched. The more people dump their BCash the lower its value becomes. Dump that shit.

I'm pretty certain that he has way more than that. He's balls deep into Bitcoin and these auctions were a fantastic opportunity for him to save plenty of time and money because of how difficult and expensive it is to buy large numbers of coins through an exchange. I can't look in his tax records, but he's definitely hiding a large percentge of his coins somewhere. Who doesn't?

For the first ever time we have a convenient way of storing wealth in a way that governments can't freeze or seize. On top of that, in the early days it was much easier to buy coins without sacrificing much of your privacy, so he has been lucky in that regard. The same goes up for Vitalik and all other large Ether holders, they are on purposely undervaluing themselves. 

In my case, only ~15% of my total holdings are public record (which I do pay tax over), the rest is hidden neatly. It's none of anyone's business where these funds are, and I'm definitely not paying one single penny in tax over that what isn't known. Taxing idle funds is theft in my book. It's my money.

It depends on what happened. What banks do is mostly this;

Bitfinex's bank $20,000 -> intermediary bank -> in some cases there is another intermediary bank -> OP's bank account.

It highly depends on where the money is stuck, which as you can imagine, can take a long time with how shitty the banking system is set up. For every action you are forced to ask permission and wait one or more business days to get any sort of response, and in case the intermediary bank doesn't think you are worth their top priority, you'll end up waiting a long time.

It's much faster to fly over to Bitfinex's bank from any place in the word, pick up the money there, and fly back.

I'm using Bitmex as well and have seen it happen frequently enough to know that it's not always related to technical difficulties or server load.

In some cases (when it's not a technical difficulty or server load) it's what I call a moment of getting rid of unprofitable positions that otherwise would have cost Bitmex money. Don't forget that there is some internal market making going on that actually trades to make profit, and not trades to stimulate market activity.

The main problem here is that pretty much every similar platform works like this, or else they don't have a proper chance to exist for longer than a year with how whales would literally empty the whole place.

I think the whole ICO thing will at some point implode and people won't even talk about it anymore after a couple of years. It happened with fiat based crowd funding platforms as well; there was a massive initial rush where people pumped money left and right in anything they believed could yield a decent profit, and most of them got burned. It left a bad taste in their mouth and then even more regulations kicked in and the initial rush vanished not long after that.

ICO's aren't a use. It's a weakness for the platform that hosts these projects. All you are doing is hand over all the voting power in form of circulating supply to competitors, and as we can see with Ethereum, it doesn't end well. Projects got burned, people got burned, and Ethereum itself got burned. The real winner here is EOS.

I think that people and businesses realize how easy it is to tackle this problem by just upgrading their clients. Another thing is that we're in a positive flow right now with Bitcoin being up like +4%, which means that bad news per definition doesn't stand a chance to nest itself in people's minds.

We're at 20% now (was close to 10% at time of writing above post) so I'm confident that we'll smash through the 25% barrier without much problems.

It definitely contributues, but in the end, I strongly believe that even if you present the SEC a bullet proof ETF, they will still reject it because they might not want to contribute to even more power for Bitcoin. Don't forget that Bitcoin is a counter reflection of the regular economy; the more Bitcoin increases in value, the more the regular economy deflates.

In other words, I think there is much more that causes the SEC to reject these ETF's than just regulatory concerns. If you have the ability to allow Bitcoin to enter a trillion dollar market, or to prevent it from entering, you have to outweigh the pros and cons for yourself, and it's clear that there are only cons in this case. Bitcoin is rat poison as traditional gurus tend to refer to it, and I agree, it has the potential to undermine governments (the rats) with ease.

Notice how crypto-silent CNBC has been in the last couple of weeks with how these stocks went through the roof. Their famous Bitcoin ticker they used during their shows has gone as well for the most part. I'm glad that at least for now we don't have to deal with their muppet show again. It was really embarrassing because their presence causes more harm than good.

Average joes are fomo'ing hard on these so called pot stocks, just look at the search results of Tilray;

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=tilray

If people still believe that operating on a regulated platform helps reducing volatility, they are absolutely wrong.

I know what they are trying to do.

Coinbase bundle = Coinbase Index Fund for average joes. It's pretty much a fund that's backed by the underlying assets, but made to fit in a less official looking jacket that does not need to be given permission for by regulators. The only main difference is that people are free to sell individual assets, while the official index fund is one product as a whole that can't be altered.

Minimum purchase is $25 but can be pumped all the way to what your daily limit allows you to buy. I think that this is the start of something that we'll be seeing a lot more in the coming few years with how regulators aren't keen on handing over approvals regularly.

Does it ring any bells? Banks creating shitty financial products on their own has lead to a massive economical collapse years ago. I hope we're not going to repeat that right here.

It's sad to see that we're living in a time where average people and other economical entities really need their government to give them an okay sign in order to finally dig in. Bitcoin is meant to tackle that, and while in current state of the world it's not likely to see people and businesses turn against their government, it really is a possibility now you can't be financially terrorized by your government anymore.

I'm not saying that governments are in and in evil and they serve no purpose, but people's soft attitude towards them made governments the insanely powerful entities that they are today. We gave them that power and with Bitcoin we can take some of that power away from them if we unite.

The government should be there to help you, and not to extort you. What did they do to deserve people's 'loyalty'?

Unfortunately, a lot people still think there is a possibility that we'll be reaching last year's prices before the end of the current year. These people gain confidence by how lunatic perma bulls keep throwing around with insane valuations to be reached, because these "experts' know how everything works, right?

There was a time not that long ago on this forum that if you even tried to hint at the market to go down further, that people would call you a troll of fud spreader. That just shows how ignorant and blind people are that we are dealing with in today's market. As years go by, we'll be coming closer to the true face of mainstream adoption, which also means that the people we'll be dealing with next year and the year after, will be ten times worse than those that we are dealing with today.