I think that the reason for the price drop may be something else, because it already happened before the FED makes a new decision. However, all speculations say that rates should no longer go up in the US, but also in the EU, which should be good news. The reason for the price drop is probably the liquidation of long positions, but also losses in the futures market, which together reached almost $1.5 billion.

There is possibly one problem here that no one has mentioned, and it is possible that the Ledger HW in question has one of the first firmwares that, as far as I know, cannot be upgraded to new firmware, and therefore I think that such a device cannot be used with Ledger Live. There are examples of Ledger replacing such devices with new ones in the past, but given that the OP does not have the correct seed it is a dead end for now.

The situation is a bit unclear about whether the OP has access to his Ledger account or not - so that should be clarified first of all. Resetting is an option that should not be considered as long as there is no seed to make a recovery.

Given that the OP says that he is in the EU, and if we assume that his country is in the Schengen Area, then he can come on a nice vacation to the Adriatic Sea (maybe even pay for the vacation with BTC) and visit physical crypto exchanges where he can sell cryptocurrencies without KYC up to in the amount of 1000 EUR per transaction - and considering that there are more such branches, in a week he can go home with x0 000 EUR - problem solved (unless he does something stupid and buys a new car for cash or something similal - or the OP is a big fish who has at least a million EUR and our advice does not help him at all )

Imagine what would happen if people spent less time complaining and instead focused on finding solutions to their problems? If some things have changed for the worse, then you can try to adapt and change your way of life in order to try to find a better or additional source of income. This may mean that you will have to find an additional job or find a job where the salary is higher.

Therefore, it is not funny that people continue to spend money on the same things as before, regardless of the fact that these same things are more expensive - if we consider that no one can live without food, and most of them even without electricity, running water or things like cigarettes or alcohol.

In addition, your government does not want you to have the opportunity for any savings, because the poorer you are, the more dependent you are on that same government and the crumbs it throws at you from its table.

Some would say "If you have a friend like that, you don't need an enemy".

A "friend" told you that there is a forum where you can earn Bitcoin just by writing messages, but he didn't bother to at least explain some basics. So many sticky topics that literally sting your eyes, and you are looking for "guidelines and resourceful materials" is definitely not something that promises that you can contribute to the forum in any way.

However, if you prove otherwise, I will gladly accept that I was wrong

Of course, there are crypto exchanges that do not require KYC and are called decentralized exchanges, but the only way to remain anonymous on them is to sell BTC to someone live face to face - if the money from the sale will be paid to your bank account, then it will depend on the amount if the bank will react and ask where the money comes from, or it will automatically report it to the tax administration/financial police.

You want to be smarter than the system, but all the time you are going in the wrong direction and actually asking the wrong questions. If you want to sell cryptocurrencies and not pay taxes, find someone for a face-to-face transaction, buy virtual Visa cards and spend money online or add them to your mobile wallet and spend anywhere - or move to one of the countries you mentioned.

The fact that you want to convert BTC into stablecoins really doesn't make sense to me, because then what will you do with stablecoins?

@Speedoguy, I would just add that perhaps you should take privacy into account when you sign a message as proof that you own a certain amount of BTC. What I want to say is that maybe it would be smart to send the amount you want to prove that you own to a new address in a new wallet - and it would be ideal to break the link between the main storage and the new wallet (using a mixer).

I don't know what it is specifically about in your case, but it is possible that there are scammers who are trying to find out how many coins you actually own in order to try to scam you in some way. Think about it, if someone has $1000 worth of BTC, they are not as valuable a target as someone who has $10 000 or maybe ten times as much.

There must be some stupid statement competition going on that we don't know about, and Jamie obviously really wants to win, considering that he wants to surpass some others who have been doing it for more than 10 years. What does Bitcoin have to do with smoking? Does Jamie want to say that the right for someone to smoke and poison themselves and others around them is the same as the right for someone to buy and own Bitcoin?

This could turn into another health-environmental agenda in which some "geniuses" will claim that Bitcoin is more harmful to people than smoking

El Salvador is an over-hyped story, because I've watched dozens of videos from that country where people try to pay with Bitcoin and the sellers look at them in amazement because they don't know what it's all about. Bitcoin as a legal tender in a country where 70% of the population is practically offline or does not have a bank account is just an interesting story and nothing more.

In the EU, there are many interesting stories about how Bitcoin (as well as other cryptocurrencies) found their way into local economies, but that's not really interesting, is it?

Here, for example, everything you see on these two websites can be ordered and paid for with cryptocurrencies, and is located in one EU member state

Link1
Link2

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I just wrote to you that you cannot do what Saylor is doing and that his company is much more than investing in Bitcoin. Unless you want to do something radical or maybe even illegal to avoid paying taxes, I suggest you pay 20% of the tax and enjoy the rest of the money. It would be nice to pay 5% or maybe even nothing, but let's be realistic, unless you have a lot of BTC that you want to sell, everything we have written so far is simply not worth it.

Saylor has a company that deals with various things, among other things, developing apps for Bitcoin and simply transfers all excess profits to Bitcoin - you as an individual cannot do what he does. In other words, you want to outsmart the system so that you don't sell Bitcoin, but at the same time you profit from it - or you sell Bitcoin, but you don't pay tax, or you pay much less than the 20% that it amounts to in your case.


I've heard about it, but I don't know if that model has a sustainable business strategy. However, the idea that you should give your BTC to someone in order to be able to get loans is actually very problematic at its core - because you are not the owner of the BTC, and the company you entrusted them to can disappear at any moment and you are left with nothing. They have their own ANN thread on the forum, but the last post was in 2022.

This applies to physical cards that are subject to KYC, but not to virtual cards that you can make as many as you want, pay with them online or add them to Google/Apple Pay and pay contactless at any place where cards and contactless payment methods are accepted.

There are also "anonymous" physical cards (one member has been selling them on the forum for a long time), but this service costs quite a bit and you have to be prepared to use a card issued in someone else's name in another country.

I also recently saw a topic about a virtual/physical card that seems to have been issued in Hong Kong, and somehow I doubt that anyone in the EU could so easily get information about a person using such a card (although I may be wrong).

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You have other options if it's the EU, in Croatia you don't pay tax for 2 years after purchase, otherwise the tax is 10%, and I think Slovenia also has favorable laws when it comes to cryptocurrencies. Of course, it's a matter of which country you prefer, whether it's language, culture or maybe climate. If you ask me, Switzerland is perhaps the best choice because of its level of democracy and neutrality.

I have read various stories in which members write various excuses when they are caught cheating with alt accounts, but this belongs to the very top of human stupidity if it is true. Two people meet in a public place, one of them connects to public wi-fi and logs into his BTT account and allows the other to write posts using the same account

Regardless of whether there is any truth in it, everything else that comes to the surface now only pushes you deeper into the hole that you unfortunately dug yourself. What could possibly absolve you of the charges is the possibility of the admin viewing your IP address (in case you did not use VPN/Tor), but also if you were not intelligent enough and use the same IP address for both accounts, it would definitely be the last proof that would end this story.

I personally would not go to countries where the security situation is not the best, and Montenegro is certainly one of those countries, considering that it is an extremely divided country with great national tensions that can escalate into civil war at any moment. As for El Salvador, regardless of the fact that Bukele allegedly cleaned the country of gangs, you still need to be careful and choose safer (more expensive) places that are not as cheap as some people think.

Why have clients in the US bought over 450 000 BTC so far using ETFs (spot), and more than half of that has been invested through BlackRock? It's a matter of reputation and trust that such companies have, and people who invest in that way want to do it in a quick and simple way without CEX, DEX, private keys, wallets, addresses - and they don't care about anything else but profit.

Given that BlackRock provides its services in around 100 countries around the world, we can expect that there will be more countries where this service will become available in the future.

What I will tell you at the beginning is that option 1 doesn't seem likely to me in any country where converting crypto -> fiat is considered a taxable event - so it doesn't matter if you sell BTC directly for fiat, or if you first convert it into some stablecoins and only then in fiat.

As for selling BTC without paying tax, there are some physical exchanges in some EU countries where you can sell (for now) around EUR 1000 worth of crypto per transaction, and theoretically if you visit several such branches in one day, you could quite legally sell crypto in worth several thousand EUR. Consider that the fee for such a service is about 5% or more.

Another way is virtual cards - KYC is also not required, and depending on the provider, the maximum amount per card is around 1000 EUR (some may offer a higher amount). Also, the validity of such cards varies, but I know that there are some that are valid for up to 3 years. The disadvantage is that the fees for such a service are around 10% or more.

Regarding option 3, of course there are countries where you don't have to pay taxes after x years from the moment you bought cryptocurrency, but for that you should become a citizen of one of those countries, and that's not something you can achieve overnight. I don't know if it is possible to somehow cheat the system within the EU and stay in one country, and at the same time sell crypto in another and thus avoid taxes - but I think that with all the new regulations something like that is actually not possible.

In addition, there is another problem, which is that each of these countries can decide to change the law at any time - so you could find yourself in a situation where you move to a country, live there for a certain period of time, and then instead of less or none you pay even more taxes than in the country where you lived before.

Nothing terrible happened, a completely normal correction that will only slightly delay a new ATH. If someone is looking for reasons, these seem logical :

This is really good news for everyone except CW and its sponsors (followers) who do not respect the courts and laws anyway and I have no doubt that they will continue with their lies in another court in another country. I don't know what the legal consequences are for CW considering that the verdict will be negative for him, but I hope that the judge will give him a fair scrubbing in his final verdict👨‍⚖️

If the judge ever publishes his BTC address, I'll pay him a big beer, he definitely deserves it🍺

As if the outcome of the election depends on crypto-friendly voters, and we know that's simply not true. I'll just say that Trump with his "cowboy" behavior is much more dangerous than Biden, and I really don't know what should be better in the US when it comes to cryptocurrencies?

The US has Coinbase, Grayscale, Microstrategy, BlackRock, Fidelity + the largest network of crypto ATMs in the world and more than a third of miners in its territory - it's not like we can say that they're not crypto friendly, right? However, lobbying and interests are always intertwined, and a proposal can always remain only a proposal if someone powerful lobbies to keep it that way.

If you live in a country where you need money to go to the police and report a crime, and you also think that this company has more power than the law, then you are unfortunately in a big problem and you live in a country where criminals have more rights than those who become theirs victims.

The proof you have is the phone number from which the call came, and the fact that you gave someone access to your bank account, which was then emptied. It means that it is a bank transaction that left a trail that can be followed.

Maybe it's too late to report fraud, maybe it's not - but the decision is up to you. Personally, I would always try to find those behind it, not only because of what they did to me, but also because of what they will do to others.

Does anyone really think this is Biden's idea? Well, a man does not know who is alive and who is dead, in which country he is and with whom he is talking, and someone thinks that he personally has a problem with Bitcoin? Taxes have always existed and will continue to exist, and increasing taxes as in this case is just a cultural way of telling miners to pick up their equipment and find another home.

On one occasion, I wrote that China and the US are not so different when it comes to human rights and freedoms, with the difference that China passed a law and banned Bitcoin trading and mining, while the US will do it in a much more "democratic way" by increasing taxes.

As for whether Trump would be better than Biden, perhaps some have forgotten what Trump had planned for cryptocurrencies at the very end of his term, and the Biden administration rejected all of that. Whether it will be Biden or Trump is completely irrelevant for Bitcoin, the policy basically remains the same, which is the protection of the national currency and national interests.