No convincing reason? Perhaps not in the very short term, but Bitcoin's long term potential goes way beyond anything you can realistically think of right now. It fills me with joy seeing how LN adoption is picking up where more and more merchants are accepting LN payments through their supporting payment gateways. Coingate recently announced that they right now allow thousands of merchants to accept LN payments, which is a very big deal.

Bitcoin's utility value comes from those who use it as store of value and money. LN takes care of the latter aspect.

It's actually better that no one debates Roger again, because let's be honest, we know all his points;

# Bitcoin is electronic peer to peer cash as described by the very title of the whitepaper.
# Bitcoin Core is slow, expensive and unreliable.
# What was the last time you conducted a Bitcoin transaction.
# The Bitcoin Core people don't think Bitcoin should be used as cash for the entire world.
# Posts of mine and Coinbase CEO are getting deleted from Reddit.

It's the same nonsense he has been rehashing for about ten months straight. Notice how more and more people are starting to get annoyed by him on social media. He has no clue about how he's making a dick out of himself, and it's pretty amusing. His relationship with Craig has cooled off to the point where he refers to Craig's side as nChain people.

Very. I must say that Jimmy did well enough. I found Roger to be the poor performer actually.

Wonderful.

It's about time that altcoins, which serve next to no purpose, are deflating. Seriously, the longer this bear market lasts, the more healthy the price ratios start to look.

Poor Bitmain, their precious BCash stash has resulted in a virtual $500 million loss as we speak, and the end doesn't seem to be near yet. Bitmain is in a very bad position right now. On one side they have to keep providing artificial buy support for BCash with their Bitcoins, and on the other side they can't endlessly keep throwing around with Bitcoins because that would again weaken their financial position.

Whatever they do right now, it will for sure hit them hard financially. That's what you get for choosing the wrong shitcoin to support.

Faking volumes is marketing for exchanges.

If we look closely at what sites the majority of the exchanges get their traffic from, then it's either Google or CMC. Especially CMC has been gaining a tremendous amount of popularity with how effective it is to up-rank your exchange by simply boosting your volumes. Higher CMC rank as exchange means you'll be getting loads and loads of more traffic.

It's not something I think is a good thing, but in this industry you don't stand a chance as exchange being 100% fair in all aspects. In order to gain attention, you have fake volumes, otherwise you'll be packing up your stuff with a loss 12-24 months later. It's a brutal market with how extremely competitive it is. Hundreds of exchanges are trying to fight for the same pool of users. Glad I'm not planning to run an exchange. 

Boring? This clearly shows that you are here for the wrong reasons. This also clearly shows that you can't benefit from a market in decline. In other words, you are out to book easy profits on the way up due to hype pumps. Just take a long break and come back somewhere in November to see if the market changed its sentiment, or start using Bitcoin as money right away (best option).

The more you use Bitcoin, the less you get bothered by how "boring" current market is. Usage is your only savior with how we won't be seeing anything close to $20,000 for a longer period of time.

Hodlers doomed? Not sure what your definition of a hodler is, but it's highly flawed. The only people suffering right now are get rich quick noobs.

Correct.

Criminals (regardless of their nature) are one of the most flexible and creative entities in an economy. In most cases they are always a few steps ahead of everyone else, and I don't see this change at all. People somehow think when this or that happens, everyone will have a better life and there is less criminality, but the nature of the beast is that it adapts to every new situation and keeps doing what it inherently taught itself to do.

It's time for people to stand up for themselves and don't rely on anyone else in order to make the world a better place. If everyone just keeps waiting for governments to take action, we'll be in the exact same situation in 2030 without any booked progress. I'm glad I stepped up right on time, but the sad thing is that everyone around me is still doing the same things they did years ago, have not changed of opinion, and will likely never change of opinion. It's their loss in the end.

It's not going to combat bad actors operating on exchanges outside the reach of US regulators, because all the action happens in Asia. You can already see that the regulated exchanges within the US have turned into brave kiddies not doing much wrong. Their volumes have gone down significantly due to how there is more regulative oversight now.

People using exchanges don't have any anonymity to begin with, so what's not there can't be destroyed.

You know what I consider to be a smoke screen excuse? All these sudden changes to grant governments more precious information about users. We don't know how much of people's information has been given to governments already in the last couple of years. It's surely more than enough to prosecute ignorant large holders if they want to.

I set up a blockchain account for someone today, and to my surprise there is still no Segwit support.


I get it that it requires some form of complexity, but if Coinbase can do it as much larger entity in this space, blockchain shouldn't have any problems with it at all.

BCash has full support on their platform, but no sign of Segwit. Is this going to be yet another BitPay situation where just because assholes as Roger Ver have a stake in these companies they can somewhat dictate their roadmap?

I'm not sure if that's really a positive. You're basically infecting the market even further with something (stable coins) you don't want to see gain traction in this ecosystem.

In the end, all stable coins have one thing in common, which is that they aren't actually pegged to the dollar. The only thing that makes these coins worth a dollar is that you can go to the issuer to sell them for $1 a pop. The stable coin itself nothing more than a regular token with a promise of the issuer tied to it. In other words, you'll be able to hold GUSD just like how you can hold USDT.

1 USDT is currently worth +$4 USD at WEX. Just shows you how worthless these pegs really are.

I actually prefer the SEC to keep rejecting these proposals. Let's be honest, aside from speculative incentives there is nothing good that comes from them.

In the end, institutions will enter on a large scale anyway. If it isn't made easy for them by entering through ETF's, they will work on their own ways to enter in a fully compliant manner. Bitcoin is too interesting for them to let the SEC dictate the market. I just hope that whatever happens, it will take some years in order to have the crypto ecosystem actually be ready to see insane amounts of money flow in.

Last year was really embarrasing and a clear demonstration of how crypto just couldn't handle the increase in traffic. In other words, it failed hard.

I haven't seen one single decentralized crypto currency or token other than Bitcoin.

I'm obviously biased towards Bitcoin, but let's be honest; every crypto or token has a face to it that is able to fork at any time of the day with minor agreement.

XRP is a security. Brad Garlinghouse doesn't yet realize that he's helping his own toy to become redundant within a couple of years. He's showing financial institutions how to become more efficient, and once the 'learning' process is over, financial institutions will fork his toy and use their own version to accomplish the exact same results, but without using anyone's external service.

Bitmain made the same mistake by signalling their own success medicine to the outside world. Nice domino show of failure.

Soon every 'reputable' exchange will ditch its own crap token and replace it with their own 1:1 stable coin. Seriously, this whole crypto space is getting more ridiculous with the day.

It was already shit, but we have gone way beyond what Bitcoin was meant to tackle, and now suddenly we are welcoming all this centralized garbage? No thank you.

I am waiting for the McAfee dollar which is backed by coke leftovers inside his nose.

It's all speculative nonsense. The only reason people badly want to see an ETF approval is because of how they blindly assume it will instantly sky rocket the price.

As soon as the price has gone up after an approval, they will sell the top and then no longer care about ETF's. That's how it always works in this space. People hop from event to event hoping to sell the top. These are the same people that will no loner care about Bitcoin when there isn't a viable way to book significant gains anymore.

I'm really happy that the bear market is freaking out all these get rich quick noobs. The only one's who are comfortable during this bear market are those using Bitcoin as money. Low fees and a near stable price around the $6000 level, what else can you wish for?

The Goldman Sachs "news" is nothing more than noob-bait. It had no effect on the market.

Why is it so difficult to understand that smart traders just sold another lower high peak? It was bound to happen and everyone here with common sense could have made some money on that decline simply by going short.

Another thing is that whales don't have to accumulate spot market Bitcoins nowadays. They accumulate profits on platforms as BitMex and Bitfinex by simply buying or selling into their own orders and have their longs or shorts cash in. There is little to no collateral damage due to the absent activity of get rick quick noobs and other lunatics that usually turn this market into a roller coaster.

The spot markets are still the dominant force, by far.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets (ignore everything with ** to it)

Cash settled futures markets;

https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html
http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures

You can clearly see how the cash settled futures markets in no shape or form have much importance to them (yet).

Check out the aforementioned links and you'll see for yourself.

Quick comparison in volume today (in case people are too lazy to look it up themselves);

CBOE 24 hour volume = $12.8 million.
CME 24 hour volume = $58.3 million.
Binance 24 hour volume = $213 million.

In other words, Binance's volume is three times bigger than both CBOE and CME combined.

Interesting is how I notice that more well stacked "regular" coders that I used to do business with are no longer interested in their main roadmap to eventually work for companies as Google, but strictly to dive into everything that's blockchain related. Some of them have had the opportunity to create a startup themselves with the easy help of raising funds through an ICO.

It's insane how simple startups with just an idea managed to raise millions in funds in just a matter of days, and these are exactly the startups trying to attract the best coders by paying them ridiculous amounts of money. The only problem I see with this is that everything looks fantastic when the crypto market is going up, but the same startups have become incredibly fragile during the current bear market that will probably last for a couple of more months at least.

The real growth numbers will become visible (in 2019) once we get to see some actual statistics over the entire year of 2018. Till that time, take everything with a truck load of salt.

---

I don't get it, why do some people feel the need to quote the entire OP? Cut that out.

It seems that everyone has its own opinion on what they think both loans and debt are, which is great because we shouldn't use a precompiled term for granted just because it's in a dictionairy.

In the end, the fundamentals are exactly the same. You have to pay back that what has been given (or whatever other term you want to replace given with) to you. It doesn't matter who the entity is you have to pay back, debt is debt regardless of its shape or form.

On another note, there are also student loans in my country. In this case you are still exposed to debt initially, but you will no longer have to pay it once you graduated. If you don't manage to graduate, you will have to pay back every single penny because it simply isn't your money to begin with.

It's actually pretty simple. What made people love Bitcoin initially? It were instant faucets, instant bets (betting without confirmations), smaller payments that we right now consider dust, etc. If you can bring all this back, people will fall in love with it, especially all the newbies that are using shitcoins for these purposes right now.

If you offer your products as LN merchant for a lower price than all other legacy merchants, you can be sure of the fact that people will notice it. The only thing legacy payment services do better is offer buyers protection, but it's a straight nightmare for merchants. You should know how much merchants are losing on a yearly basis due to false charge-backs. In case of larger merchants, it can add up to tens of thousands every year.

I strongly believe that Bitcoin's utility as a currency is just as important as the store of value aspect. It may not be like that for you personally, but I'm using Bitcoin as money almost on a daily basis (even more so than fiat) and it's incredibly important to have it advance to the next level with LN.

Gold is an overpriced piece of metal that has no real utility other than some minor industrial and commercial uses. Gold's store of value aspect has been lagging behind due to how it has no other utility to use as back up, and that just points out how important it is to have Bitcoin not become the same redundant asset.

That's of no use.

Every site or service you are using involving Bitcoin can update its terms at any time of the day without notice, which pretty much means that before you do something, you carefully have to read the TOS and hope that they don't change anything directly afterwards. It's an 'invisible' enemy that you can't fight against, regardless of how many times you read their terms.

I'm super stoked with how stable Namecheap has been functioning throughout the last years, and they haven't ever asked me for anything. The only downside of Namecheap is that they use BitPay (big blocker camped payment gateway). What bugs me is that BitPay now asks for an extra fee on top of your regular payment amount, which is straight bullshit.

Fantastic news! We're yet again a step closer to the downfall of BitPay since they in no shape or form will ever add LN payments.

I'm not really a fan of centralized payment gateways, but the good thing here is that it will stimulate users to actually switch over to LN and that alone is already the best short term goal to achieve. The more people use LN, the less incentive there is for them to use altcoins.

Another thing is that adding LN payments as payment gateway makes you gain an advantage over the rest, so there is also an economical incentive for them to quickly adapt to new technoligical advancements speeding up Bitcoin payments. In other words, the future is more than bright for Bitcoin, but not so much for altcoins.

Go suck on that Roger.

Roger; but but, the very title of the white paper states electronic peer to peer cash.

Everyone else; just shut up with your white paper.