Nothing will be able to help Poloniex to regain its position with how Asian exchanges not caring about who's registering take this industry over like a virus.

Seriously, why would anyone use Poloniex over something like Binance? You can easily trade 'fiat' pairs by simply buying Bitcoin or Ethereum locally and dump it for USDT on Binance to trade other coins. Poloniex currently occupies the 41th spot when it comes to exchange volumes, which is piss poor and not really inviting anyone to sign up there.

The main thing is that acquiring an exchange involves a lengthy legal procedure. It might very well be that Circle was interested in Poloniex during its prime days and contractually settled the deal at that point, which they now obviously heavily regret. They paid $400 million for an exchange that currently isn't even worth 10% of that. 

That's for once a worthy article to read through.

It really makes me feel like a noob with how I have been trying to securely generate and store private keys. If you see how much effort and thought they put into the whole process, it makes you a little bit more comfortable as Coinbase user that they handle the highest possible security standards. According to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong they hold around $20 billion in crypto assets, which aside from potentially Binance, makes them the largest single crypto holder ever.

On the other hand, it also makes you a little bit more understanding of why larger parties aren't yet jumping a hole through the roof to take care of their own crypto storage.

Smart traders did so, but silently. Average joes as always only buy when the price has been going up for a while, because an increasing price boosts their confidence. In no shape or form will these people buy on the way down, especially if you take into consideration that most of them even believe that Bitcoin might become worthless at some point.

In other words, every significant decrease might give them the impression that it's done and over for Bitcoin, which explains why the mainstream media is adding fuel to the fire by triggering that weak spot. It's a disgusting practice, but for media outlets it's pure business. The only thing we can do is help newbies here understand the very basics of Bitcoin and this market, and hopefully they will turn into the next generation hodlers and users.

One of the most important aspects is that we should pop people's bubble that makes them think Bitcoin is a get rich quick tool.

I'm not wondering what's going to happen with the price because I simply don't care anymore. If the price is getting to a point where I think it's overbought I'll short it and that's pretty much my only "trading" action.

Great thing about the $6000-$7000 range is that you can stock up some coins within that range and start using it as money. If the price goes up your Bitcoins will buy you more goods, and in case the price comes back down to where you bought your coins at, you are still not losing out. Usage is the most important aspect. If you're here solely for the gains, you're wasting your time. You might just as well invest and go away for a couple of years.

It's called ignorance and somewhat mixed with hypocrisy.

In all cases when people don't use something, they'll consider it useless and in case it consumes a significant amount of resources, it's automatically a waste of resources for them.

People didn't like the internet in the very early days, where it was said that it would be an environmental disaster. If you look back now, where billions of people use and rely on the internet, it's suddenly no longer an issue. I'm pretty sure that Bitcoin will follow the same route where later on people will no longer start throwing with their nonsensical arguments.

And yes, there will always be a good number of nitpickers that regardless of how something works, will not agree with it.

It's just a logical event and a very welcome subject for universities to attract a whole new category of people they otherwise would have missed out on.

I am honestly of believe that blockchain as 'technology' is severely overhyped at this stage, but at least it's good to see that this hype is actually one of the main reasons people get interested at first. In most cases a simple database system is more than enough to book the efficiency gains people think blockchain offers, especially if decentralization isn't a must.

So far today Bitcoin with its conservative scaling approach is the only proper example of how a blockchain actually serves a purpose.

It's just market movers trying to get the most out of all this nonsense ETF speculation. If market movers wouldn't react to any of these ETF's, no one here would even bother caring about them. As always, it's move up -> noob and mainstream media hype follows. It's a psychological game that's being played here.

In the same way, market movers could have easily granted the bakkt announcement importance by driving the price up, but they didn't bother, and now you see barely anyone is even talking about it anymore.

Bitcoin doesn't need any handy dandy institutional dildo tools to rocket its price up. The sooner people understand that, the less effective whale manipulation will be.

I'm not convinced by this increase at all and have opened a short position at ~$7050 because I believe that this is the next lower high in the longer term downtrend.

It may go a bit higher from here, but it should peak out at around $7500 from where we will correct. It's almost too predictable in my opinion, but as long as everything remains the same, which I think it will, we'll keep setting lower highs. I'll say it again; the long term downtrend has been the only consistant aspect of this year's market. Don't work against it.

The next 'easy' short opportunity will be just before the SEC announcement next month.

I get that completely, but the world needs more than just Bitcoin, and there is enough room for other currencies to develop themselves in their own field.

Another aspect is that with how exchanges are more than ever focused on verification and whatnot, people instead of trading altcoins versus fiat, will trade altcoins versus Bitcoin. It's a base currency. I'm personally not a fan of these ties, but they add to Bitcoin's utility and make sure a very large number of Bitcoins will be kept off the market pretty much for ever.

In other words, Bitcoin is actually being used as currency, and it has been so for years and years. It never loses value against any coin.

I honestly can't think of anything that's marketplace related and more user friendly than OpenBazaar. You can pay vendors instantly without having to wait for anything, and you can also choose to use an escrow option in case you don't trust the vendor, which is great. It's more user friendly than it has ever been, so definitely give it another go.

If we can convince not only people but also stores to use OpenBazaar, it might turn out to become a potential competitor for PayPal. In most cases sellers complain about PayPal that it always favors the buyers, even in some obvious cases. It does end up costing sellers thousands of dollars in some cases, and Bitcoin (you can also use other currencies through OpenBazaar) tackles that with its irreversible transactions.

The only thing OpenBazaar will need to actually become a competitor, is some sort of a web interface so that people aren't forced to install software.

It's not about you as user doing anything bad, but the exchange itself, or the party they outsourced their verification tasks to. You can only hope that nothing happens with your private information, but since there is no way for you to know, you'll always have to worry about it.

In most well developed countries there are local services allowing you to buy and sell Bitcoin without going all naked, and if you buy your coins there, send them over to an exchange as Binance to trade. As long as you aren't touching fiat, in most cases an exchange as Binance won't annoy you with verification requests. Bittrex is too trigger happy when it comes to freezing accounts. They ruined my legacy account. Not my cup of tea.

Most interesting aspect of Roger speaking out yesterday, is the fact that he significantly lowered his tone in various ways. He wanted to say that Bitcoin was no longer usable for commerce at all, but corrected himself and referred to how it wasn't usable for commerce last December. In other words, he admits that Bitcoin as it is right now is actually usable for commerce.

The other part is that he is now opting for people to diversify, diversify, diversify and you can guess, diversify. Could the potential split of BCash be a reason for that? It might be. Timing is very interesting.

Also, every altcoin investment when it comes to cold hard gains is potentially a better short term investment than Bitcoin. In other words, people have the freedom to dive into nearly 2000 altcoins to pick which one suits them the best.

It's very expensive "free" money in this case. If BCash splits, it will lose a large chunk of its hashpower and instantly becomes more vulnurable to attacks than it already is.

In all cases, the only entity being responsible for granting BCash importance is Bitmain, so whatever chain Bitmain ends up supporting, that will become the most "successful" one. Roger Ver will follow his master Jihan everywhere, which again is a major plus for that specific chain with how much of an influential player he is.

Instead of being happy with how certain parties within BCash don't agree with each other, because that's a part of decentralization, they blast each other off and throw around with mud. We're dealing with con artists who all want to have full control over something that's not meant to be controlled by anyone. They are going to ruin everything they worked so hard for and I absolutely love it!

It's in people's nature to hardcore shill that what they own a lot of. In all honesty, we are doing the same with Bitcoin more often than not, and that while we haven't had all that much history of actual use and utility to fall back on. It's mostly all speculative hype that we have to dig through and as long as we haven't done that to reach the utility phase, people will not give Bitcoin a fair chance.

On the other hand, we should be glad that not everyone sees Bitcoin the way we see it, otherwise we by now would hover over $100,000 already.

As stated before, breaching $1 trillion is a very important psychological milestone. Even when some goldbugs don't want to acknowledge Bitcoin's power publicly (remember, there are always people telling you that you're wrong even when you are 100% right), they at least know that Bitcoin will likely eat into Gold's market share even further. They'll sleep a whole lot less comfortable knowing that.

I honestly believe that the whole Turkish citizens are converting their savings to crypto currencies story to be hyped up just to draw attention. Sure, some of them might actually have bought themselves into crypto, but it's negligible in the grand scheme of things.

It brings us back to how people were speculating that back in 2013 the pump from $30 to $250 was caused by people in Cyprus massively converting to Bitcoin, which obviously wasn't the case. Back then speculation had at least some right to develop since there was a pretty decent pump going on, while right now the market hasn't even been dented by Turkish "demand".

The volume on the exchanges there has increased marginally, which just points out there isn't really much action going on.

Please, these bullish predictions are just tiresome, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic they are.

The last thing we need is more high level Bitcoiners throw around with +$50,000 predictions. It seriously only works against everyone here, especially with how it significantly slows down the process of bottoming out.

People need to focus on actual use, because if you're only here to hop from a far away event to another far away event, your stay here is boring and an utter waste of time. That's exactly why you see a lot people here complain about the bearish market conditions. It's not the market's fault that people get bored. Stop complaining and be productive.

The market cap being $217 billion doesn't mean anything on its own. You only need to manipulate Bitcoin's price through a leading exchange and the whole crypto market will react to that. On an exchange as Bitfinex $100 million is enough to get the price to nearly double in an instant from current levels, and considering that most of the sell orders belong to whales anyway, the money spent to pump the price largely returns to them. This just shows how empty this whole market cap thingy really is.

$500 million is enough to stimulate another bull run. If the first part is done right, you'll have retail investors further boost it to whatever insane levels.

This whole USDT manipulation saga however is just the mainstream media trying to talk down on Bitcoin. In all cases they are just looking for reasons to point out how fake Bitcoin's increases are and that it can only increase through manipulation. They'll do everything for some ad pennies.

Actually, Roger Ver owns that domain. He just turned it into a misleading website using the Bitcoin brand to hardcore shill Jihan's older generation asic recycler toy called BCash.

I wonder if it is possible to have theymos blacklist that .com domain on this forum. It's only being used to mislead people. It's damaging. We shouldn't allow that to happen.

Lol. How is a decreasing altcoin market cap dominance good or bad for anything? It makes no sense. It's just a statistical metric that has no influence on individual coins you buy or sell into. Why would you care about altcoins anyway? If you believe in their fundamentals then you wouldn't be afraid of a decreasing dominance in market cap, but you are afraid it seems.

If a coin has really something to offer it will manage to grow on its own, if not, it will remain stagnant for years and slowly be delisted from most exchanges. Don't focus on market cap dominance.

I know plenty of people from the older generation who did as you state and have had an amazing life in their younger years, and they all regret not having done more to save up all that money for where they are right now in their life. It's next to impossible for them to actually do any paid work due to health issues and whatnot. Every penny they do have is worth a dollar for them with how they can only spend their money once.

I honestly rather have $10,000 in 50 years (discarding inflation and whatnot) than $1000 right now. I am in a position to make as much money as possible at my age, and I'm well aware of the fact that I'll be needing every penny way harder at a later point in life than right now. That's why I'm not recklessly spending my money left and right. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy life, but there is a conservative limit to everything. It's just a matter of common sense.