Whales have always been and will always be in control of the market, nothing will ever change there. I rather have whales in control of the market than a bunch of gambling addicted lunatics thinking this is a money making paradise, which it clearly isn't.

Merchants in control of the market? Really? At least you should have said that it were the payment gateways who are in control of the market, which would have made a bit more sense since the far majority of the merchants use payment gateways to settle their crypto payments. Selling pressure from these payment gateways is negligible, especially with how the bear market single handedly trashed people's confidence to spend or invest their coins.

I agree, pumping a price without selling at peak doesn't make sense, but what the BCash camp is doing doesn't make sense in its entirety. They really believe that their version of Bitcoin is Bitcoin, and for that reason kept accumulating more regardless of how hard people kept dumping. In a matter of like 3-4 months, Bitmain's BTC holdings shrunk with just under 15,000BTC.

Let's do a quick calculation;

31 DEC 2017; BTC holdings ~36,900BTC.
31 DEC 2017; BCH holdings ~841,900BCH.

31 MAR 2018; BTC holdings ~22,100BTC.
31 MAR 2018; BCH holdings ~1,021,300BCH.

The average BTC/BCH price during this period ~0.13BTC which loosely calculated could have accumulated Bitmain 114,000BCH + 40,000/50,000BCH from their mintings returns ~164,000BCH in total.

841,900BCH + 164,000BCH = 1,005,900BCH, which is pretty close to their balance on march.

Further accumulation becomes visible once they release new balance figures.

They didn't really double their Bitcoins. The split gave them additional coins in form of BCH, where they then used BTC to accumulate even more. If you also take into consideration that they have pumped the price numerous times last year, where they tried to maintain certain higher levels, you can imagine how severe the losses might have been at that point already.

Another important aspect is that by entering 2018 Bitmain also entered a new fiscal year, so the losses they suffered from this year is what really matters.

Simple and yet very convenient solution from the exchange's end is to no longer allow people to deposit funds while they aren't verified yet. There are already exchanges with this policy, and I think it should be operated on a much larger scale. It makes no sense to allow people to deposit funds while they have no opportunity to ever withdraw anything without walking themselves through whatever form of verification.

It saves exchanges plenty of time time as well, because all these people with stuck funds are constantly spamming support with tickets and whatnot while it could have easily been prevented. Imagine how many people ran into these problems just because they were too hasty to realize that centralized exchanges can seize their funds at any time of the day.

Usually you only lose when you sell at a loss, but that doesn't go up for businesses having to factor in even virtual losses, and that will definitely work against them with how they are trying to tease potential investors related to their *potential* IPO. I actually thought Bitmain would be smarter than this, but they shot themselves in their foot and it likely won't end well.

The planned pump during their recent stress test was a desperate attempt to initiate a bull run, but it failed. Investors aren't willing to buy Bitmain's bag.

It's pathetic when you take into consideration that the largest miners aren't able to sell the major part of their minted coins, so what happens is that every large to semi large pool ends up sitting on a large number of coins while the price keeps going down. Supporting the wrong coin ain't easy.

Not sure how wealthy Jihan himself is, but he could technically pump his own capital in Bitmain to write off some of the losses.

That shows how easy to trigger people are to label everything as illegal or against the law just because their government said so.

I honestly don't mind black markets to exist. It's always a minority of the vendors giving the market as a whole a bad name. Good thing is that the level of moderation on these markets has increased, so the likeliness of being exposed to the extreme side of it has been reduced significantly. It's impossible to prevent completely which people have to bear in mind. Let's blame the people doing these bad things instead of the tools they use.

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It's quite interesting to see how creative people are with finding all sorts of potential reasons as to why the price goes up or down, and yet they completely miss the point of why the market is actually heading down. The only consistent aspect of the market this year has been the contiuous lower high formation, which is perfectly normal during a bear market, but super difficult to grasp with how people don't acknowledge the market as it comes.

Every bump up makes people believe we are due for a recovery, but they have been proven wrong time on time again.

It's perfectly fine. I think the larger miners will actually prefer a longer period of time at which they can somewhat expect stable returns, while currently the difficulty has been going up consistently. Everything is better than seeing the price hover between $6000-$7000 with the difficulty increasing continuously.

Bitcoin's network is already so insanely large, that 10-20% more or less hashrate isn't going to compromise security too much.

Back in 2015 Bitcoin was stuck below $300 for what almost looked like an eternity, and the nature of mining in general adjusted itself to that situation. Great thing is that we as simple users aren't really exposed to that. Miners know what they buy themselves in so it's all part of the game. Money doesn't grow on trees.

Actually, Facebook is no longer banning all crypto related ads. Legitimate businesses with the right licenses are still allowed to buy ad space after a brief audit on Facebook's side. Unfortunately for OP, he doesn't fit in that category.

That. Either buy ad space by participating in the weekly auctions (link to current round) hosted by theymos, or contact a capable campaign manager which still is or has recently ran a signature campaign. You can also try to buy ad space on the more popular news outlets such as Coindesk, CCN, Bitcoinist, etc (avoid bitcoin dot com).

It's not really strange, but more so desperate. If you have to cover that sort of content it clearly points out that there isn't anything else to report about.

Mainstream news outlets use crypto as buffer in case they run out of regular content, which on the other hand is also understandable. It's a business at the end of the day, and they have to keep their clicks and other hit rates at certain levels to demand premiums for their ad space. What interesting or juicy stuff is happening in the regular (non crypto) world right now? Boring times.

It surprises me more that people are still surprised about this.

I don't think there will ever be a time where our current exchanges will experience a massive influx of liquidity. In all the years that I have been here literally nothing has changed when it comes to the available liquidity. It's partly the hostile nature of this market, but more so the shady nature of exchanges in general, and how easy it is to crack them or just pretend that they got hacked.

Also, the whales of back in the days grow with the market, which means that they right now have just as much authority over the market as back in the early days.

In the end there are two options;

1) people accept current market with shit exchanges and the 'freedom' wealthy entities have to pump or dump the market by any amount.
2) people go for a more centralized/regulated exchange environment with bells and whistles pausing the market after every 10% movement.

Decentralized exchanges aren't a thing yet at current stage so I have left that out.

The longest running chain + the network with the most POW running is Bitcoin. If people (aside from the BCash camp) thought that BCash was it, they would switch to that coin. In other words, BTC is the only Bitcoin.

Initially nChain might have some ground to stand on IF Coingeek is willing to side with them. Coingeek minted over 33% of the blocks in the last 24 hours, so they are quite a significant player. I however don't believe that Coingeek is willing to support something that has no economical viability to it.

They are barking right now, but it's a money matter at the end of the day, and I'm pretty sure that they are willing to shut up as long as they can be a major player on the dominant chain. If you go with nChain, you can be sure of the fact that another split will occur within 12 months, because these idiots won't rest before they can claim 100% of development and have everyone bend over for them.

Jihan even labelled Craig as a Blockstream spy. Some others even say that Craig's side is worse than what the Core developers stand for.

Really? Is that even worth talking about? BCash and BTG are altcoins not adding anything of value to this space. In all cases these are the coins hit the hardest during any sort of declining market.

CMC is an exchange traffic booster, not a price driver of any form. If you look at the traffic stats of most exchanges, then CMC is the first or second to pop up as traffic provider, which also explains why certain exchanges desperately try to inflate their volumes to rank up. The higher your CMC exchange rank is, the more traffic you can expect.

Top 3 exchanges in terms of volumes;

CMC is the second largest traffic provider; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/binance.com
CMC is the first traffic provider; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/huobi.pro
CMC is the first traffic provider; https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/okex.com

In the same childish way the coin they call Bitcoin Cash, can be called Bitcoin ABC or Bitcoin Unlimited since these full node clients are by far dominating the distribution.

1202 Bitcoin ABC nodes.
739 Bitcoin Unlimited nodes.
24 Bitcoin XT nodes.

In the end, BCash isn't worth much without Bitmain's deep pockets artificially offering buy support to sustain the price and thus the value of their own +1 million BCash holdings. If they end up splitting in November, it's already clear that the chain having Bitmain on its side will be the real winner. The other chain will turn into the next BTG after a while.

Can you point me to anything confirming that when it comes to the VanEck ETF?

I have done my best to read through the relevant parts of the proposal but nowhere does it state anything like what you are trying to imply.

I don't think Bitcoin's existence is the result of the financial crisis that Lehman triggered back then, it possibly just gave Satoshi more incentive to rush it and use the anti bank sentiment to boost his project, and it seem to have definitely helped.

Banks and payment services have historically done bad to customers by refusing/blocking/censoring transactions, and I think that was Satoshi's main point to address based on the whitepaper. It's not for nothing named peer to peer electronic cash. Great thing about the early years was that Bitcoin was in its prime days when it comes to currency usage. SilkRoad was the perfect example of how easy and convenient it is to use Bitcoin as currency.

Interesting is that most users were not cashing out to fiat, which partly came from the lack of exchanging services as well, but people just spent their received Bitcoins, and that's how an economy should work. Bitcoin (as in money) needs to circulate and not be sold on exchanges because of whatever party can't take the risk.

BitPay going rogue once again points out that while we are not dealing with banks, it's just as bad to have a crypto related central party function as such.

It depends on how you plan to utilize your Bitcoin capital, and whether or not you have been keeping it under the radar all the time.

I still don't know how I am going to work out the latter. I'm paying due taxes over that what I use to trade on centralized exchanges, but that's not even 10% of my total holdings. The other 90% is neatly hidden far away from anything possibly being in a position to link these holdings to me personally. I did however expose myself to unnecessary privacy risks by waking up these coins because of how I couldn't resist dumping BCash for Bitcoin at prime rates.

Institutional interest is something a lot people are focusing on, which rightfully speaking is definitely a next level form of recognition and it takes away Bitcoin's "criminal" edge amongst corporate entities, but it doesn't seem like their interest goes beyond cash settled products yet.

We need to build sustainable growth based on actual user demand, which at the same time is a far more sustainable form of growth. That's why I am extremely happy with how LN is growing out of its 'beta' shell slowly but surely. There are various clients already allowing you to utilize LN to conduct smaller payments and it works extremely well. Even so well, that it almost seems like I'm using some sort of centralized payment service because of how fast the payments are. It's next level shit.

Bitcoin has always been bullish, people just get emotionally wrecked by this bear market. Once we're going up again for a couple of months, no one will even look back at the bear market.

The goal is exactly in your post; it solves the dependence on the underlying native asset.

And yes, Ethereum itself is still a mess in terms of scalability and that indeed won't change any time soon. I have never been a fan of these platforms because you are heavily subjecting yourself to a force that decides for you when to scale and what to use. The main reason projects run on top of Ethereum is because of how easy it is to market yourself and thus raise capital.

If nothing happens in terms of scalability within a reasonable time frame, you'll see that more and more projects will disconnect themselves from Ethereum to run their own platform.

The most convenient option is to have non Ether token fees be pushed to the miners directly at protocol level. It will require a fork, and some level of re-organizing, but it's perfectly possible, and there actually seems to be quite some demand for this.

The second option is where an intermediary exchanger on the Ethereum network basically does the converting from x token to Ether and miners still get their Ethers, but that doesn't address the main issue with how you are still tied to Ether. It however does allow anything operating on Ethereum to operate without touching the underlying Ether token. In other words, more operational freedom.

The third option could be a mixture of both aforementioned options. Let miners pick what fee they think is the most economically attractive fee for them.

- not allow Bitcoin's fees to decrease to the lower range of $0.01 during normal times.
- not willing to lose some level of ASICBOOST effectiveness.

First option is more a Roger thing where the other comes down to Jihan and miners siding with his ideology. BCash has nothing other than lower fees to praise itself for, and as long as their fees remein below Bitcoin's fees, which is something that's guaranteed to happen regardless of how much Roger is trolling, they can call BCash "faster" and cheaper.

BCash's number of transactions is already low, but if you also take into consideration that a large chunk of it (in some cases 50%) are micro payments from tip bots and whatnot, it becomes clear that there is next to no actual peer to peer usage.