All people are 'natural born' speculators.

I think you're reading it a bit too far. Anyone can speculate. All it takes is to buy x/y/z asset and think/hope it will go higher. There you are speculating on the price to increase. It requires no special ability or skill, it's something we apply in more facets of life.

Traders just go by the charts and calculate the probabilities of certain pattern formations to break either up or down. Some patterns tend to break 70% up and 30% down or vice versa. If you take 10 trades speculating on the price to break up you'll be more right than wrong. This doesn't require you to be a top trader, just know the market you are trading.

I couldn't care less. Bitcoin has never needed any of these high level bobos. Their only incentive is to fill their own pockets, not to do what's best for Bitcoin.

People should pay attention to what the developers are aiming towards (schnorr taproot for example) and not what these bobos do. They will clutter this space with more cash settled garbage (Bakkt will be launching cash settled futures and options pretty soon). CME is launching options too and doubled the number of contracts entities can hold on a monthly basis. Is that something people get excited about? 

I think it requires consensus on a larger level to allow this to happen. According to what I remember Roger having said once, there are BitPay employees getting paid in bcash. In other words, more people than just the shareholders are in, and thus very likely have no problems at all with these twisted policies.

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The problem I have with donating to the more recognized mainstream charities, is that in most cases you end up having to fill in so many personal details that it just isn't worth it to me. Years ago there was an option to either donate 'anonymously' or donate and fill in the details that also allows you to claim a tax refund. Probably related to shitty regulations. 

Bitcoiners and cryptocoiners in general are too sensitive. While it may seem like so, I do not think they are actually fighting us, they just need to trash talk it long enough to grant themselves a better entry point. Remember, Bitcoin has been adopted by the people before institutions sold them their bags, because that's how it usually goes in the financial market.

Be strong and smart enough to not sell them anything. Keep stacking satoshis. The closer we are to the 200WMA (currently at $4950), the better your entry point is.

Merchants don't have to be exposed to the volatility. That's what centralized payment gateways are for. In this case, the ShitPay's of this world have to hedge the volatility, not the merchants themselves because they are paid in fiat. Also, price instability isn't an issue. It's present in every single emerging asset class that's speculative and lacks liquidity.

FYI; People will only open a payment channel if they plan to conduct more than one transaction, either at the same day or at a later stage.

Litecoin has had an active Lightning main-net for quite a while now. No one cares about Litecoin. It's an illiquid shitcoin. Litecoin's Lightning liquidity counts $6000 versus $6,000,000 for Bitcoin.

It should be a feature free to tap into for users, but I see it all too often on non-crypto brokers that they do charge a fee for such transfers. I'm not sure if there are any crypto exchanges that charge you for this feature, but considering that the profit margin on such a feature is basically 100%, it's a very lucrative move.

In Binance's case it probably won't really matter because they capture such a large percentage of the pie, that they can afford to offer their users features without charging for them. In the same way, they didn't charge users extra for Bitcoin withdrawals when the fees shot up to unreasonably high levels. They lost several dollars consistently for months on every withdrawal. Tells you a lot about how much profit they make.

Hitbtc is one of the worst "top tier" exchanges in the space. They have been selectively allowing people withdraw, and those who they denied withdrawals have been asked to submit id and whatnot to constantly reject them for either being low res, not appropriate format, etc. This reeks of a fractonal reserve model where they do not have the funds available for people to withdraw.

The question then is....... What are they doing with the funds? Invest? Trade? Run an off-exchange lending business? On top of that, they also inflate their volumes artificially. Wonderful exchange.

It all comes down to the technicals. Thus far we have seen the market make textbook bearmarket moves, and this could continue for much longer than people expect.

What we have to do is stop making lower highs and lower lows. We can technically go back up to touch $10,000 flat and still not change anything because that would just be another lower high. If you're really critical, it's possible to consider even the $14,000 top of this year's bull run a lower high in a much longer lasting (nastier) bear market.

The same applies to Gold btw. It has followed Bitcoin quite accurately even though there is a few month lag between the assets. Bitcoin leads and Gold follows.

I rather hope for people to smarten up on how things work in crypto land so that they will not need banks for coin storage.

Education is key in all facets of life, but apparently, within crypto the education that we have been spreading out didn't work because exchanges still hold gigantic stacks of coins. Perhaps that the cost of hardware wallets going down will help, but I'm not sure what we can do differently to make people aware of the risks and stop using an exchange as wallet.

The aim is to be our own bank, not to have banks yet again be our bank. 

The funny thing however is that the people expecting it to x100-x1000 lose everything anyway because of poor investment decisions. People are so greedy that they do not only want to see the price go up a lot, but also see their satoshi stack go up a lot, and they hope to do that by investing in all sorts of shitcoins.

By spending you at least have the item that you purchased. Most of the get rich quick noobs have nothing left but bad memories because most shitcoins lost ~90% of their value.

Most Bitcoin enthusiasts restock their satoshi stack after having spent some. I do that too. Works well.

It is true. However, they refer to the lightning deposit/withdrawal button as LNX, which is very confusing because it could just as easily be a shit token. It would be better to have it be Bitcoin Lightning, or under the same tab as Bitcoin where you can specify if you want to use the main chain or the second layer.

I like how the most controversial exchange in the crypto sphere does the most for Bitcoin to be adopted by the mass, and have its throughput increase, and that despite there being risks attached to accepting lightning deposits and withdrawals for such a large exchange.

https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/1201812641456513024

That's actually pretty cool. Is he accepting Bitcoin directly or through a payment processor? In case he is accepting payments directly, does he accept the transactions without confirmations? When it comes to low value items the risk is pretty low, but that risk exponentially increases when the value of the items increases.

I'm curious to find out because it's kinda hard to think of people willing to wait for that one confirmation to come through to walk away with their item.

Actually, Bitcoin will have an inflation rate of ~1.8% next year as the reward halving takes place. The general assumption of an okay fiat inflation rate is 2% (has definitely been higher in the last years in most countries), which means that Bitcoin will inflate less than fiat, and actually increase people's purchasing power over a longer period of time.

In 2024 the rate of inflation for Bitcoin will be ~0.9% which is just insanely low. I'm pretty sure that the market as always will front run this event and reflect the super low rate of inflation a year or two before the 2024 halving. In other words, getting in now is quite a good time if you have the free capital that you won't be needing in the forthcoming years.

It's probably closer to 2 million Bitcoin if you add that they hold the Xapo 'bunker' funds and GBTC's funds.

Don't forget about Huobi holding ~300,000BTC and Binance with ~400,000BTC. Still no match for Coinbase, but they deserve to be in that list for sure.

With time, more legacy financial institutions will offer custody services, which should translate into a Coinbase exodus because it's more convenient for people to entrust the institutions they are familiar with than a native crypto company. More competition is welcome.

Industrial scaling? That's something centralized blockchains do because there are businesses behind them doing what's best for their business.

Shady entities tried to do that with Bitcoin in the past but failed. I'm glad big blockers have their own centralized chains to play with now. It suits them well. Plenty of block space yet no one willing to utilize it. In other words, the industry isn't interested.

People buying Bitcoin for a quick flip based on fundamentals are losers. Fundamentals can keep getting stronger while the price keeps decreasing, which we have seen happen. Bitcoin's fundamentals are better than ever before today, yet we're 65% below the price when Bitcoin fundamentally sucked in 2017.

Technicals are super important and the reason shitcoins with zero utility can pump for quite a long period of time. Traders just follow the charts and do not care what the name of the coin is or what it does. People ignoring technicals always pay the price for their stupidity. Fundamentals buyers in my opinion are those who buy Bitcoin today with the intention of sitting on their coins for at least 5 years.

Remember, markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent!

People do not care about the past. They only care about the price after they bought Bitcoin, which generally is around the high of each bull run.

Bitcoin does not need a new reason for a bull run, it never did. It erupted when nobody expected it. Bakkt was spit on by the whole space, made fun of. No one bought Bitcoin because of Bakkt.

As always, when the technicals improve, institutions buy, and when they buy, dumb money buys because dumb money pumps money into anything they see increase rapidly.

More like dumb folks within crypto. Bots have been turned into a meme due to all the dumbos here thinking they can earn passive income (in some cases due to false advertising).

People have tried trading manually but failed, then tried again and failed again. If people are willing to pay decent money for a bot subscription (remember, people are cheapskates, they don't usually want to pay for anything), they have likely failed on all fronts before and this is their last "money making" method.

Revenge trading is part of the problem. People lose so much money that they want to find a way to make it all back, but that's where the problem only gets worse. 

I honestly wouldn't rely on any financial institution or middlemen when it comes to purchases related to crypto. People all blindly assume that they can get their money back and whatnot, but I have my doubts because there have already been services running a policy that they do not tolerate such transactional activity.

I personally find it more surprising that people keep looking for mining gear despite how little rewarding it is. It's a horrible allocation of fiat or Bitcoin. With the halving coming up the larger farms will do their best to squeeze out the smaller miners because they just can't compete unless they are ready to swallow losses for months straight.

In fact, plenty of high tier traders do make mistakes quite often. What matters here is that when a trade doesn't work out, they take on the other side of the trade if there is enough up/down side left. It will force them to take a hit on their initial trade, but that will be turned into a profit by going with the flow of the market, and thus not stick to the initial trade hoping it will still work out.

Some traders hedge against faulty trades through options, but that's something most people aren't familiar with. I have to admit that I'm not comfortable trading options myself. My motto is to not overcomplicate trading so I'm not planning to use options. Basic trading is already super time consuming on its own.