Till you realize that Bitmain & Co have stakes pretty much everywhere in this ecosystem. It is a big block attack.

It's in everyone's (except the big block camp) benefit to have a fully deployed/utilized Segwit network in order to significantly increase Bitcoin's throughput, but it's not happening. If users love the freedom to choose, then they shouldn't complain about the fees, but they do, which makes them look like a bunch of retarded hypocrites in that case. You not seeing that this is an attack on Bitcoin is just funny.

That's too drastic and not really a viable option. By doing that they miss out on plenty of crypto related traffic in their Play Store.

Facebook saw how much effect it had on their revenue to not allow crypto related entities to buy ad space, which is why they now allow legitimate businesses to buy ad space again.

Google can't see whether an app is scam or not, they just scan the app and approve it based on the requirements their automated system thinks are important. People need to become more careful with what they install on their phones, especially when it comes to mobile wallet clients.

That being said, Google is still "allowing" crypto ads to be published. You only need to change a few characters in order to bypass their anti crypto measures. Instead of crypto you can go with crypt0 or cryptó.

App is reported by me just now. How long does it usually take for apps to be taken down?

His posts are raw and to the point. Is he frustrated? Maybe, but that's well justified in the noob and scummy focused jungle that we have to browse through each day.

If there was something good in it, he wouldn't have disregarded it but looked forward to further development. I'm happy that we at least have someone who's looking through everything thoroughly. Seriously, there aren't that many people left like that. We don't learn by going with the herd thinking everything is great and cool. If something isn't a useful contribution to Bitcoin, then it isn't.

I'm sure most of them are trying to fill their pockets more. Improving Bitcoin isn't necessary, the Core devs are the best at what they do. We need improvement when it comes to LN. People are free to contribute, but where are they? Is it because it's not profitable for them? Probably.

They don't mostly.

The situation has become so bad, that you as store have to make a decision to sell food and other life necessities only for USD or other means of exchange. It means people with their local Bolivars (if they have any already) are being discriminated and excluded from participating in their own economy. It's a horrible situation, but I can somewhat understand why it happens. It's a matter of other people having something to eat or yourself, and obviously, most people will feed themselves.

I'm not sure if it's pro Maduro propaganda, but there have been attempts to hand out free meals to people at least once a day, but that's still not enough.

Food there has become more of an asset than fiat itself.

You know what the most efficient way is for governments to eliminate Bitcoin? It's by simply offering a fair and honest banking/governmental system.

Trying to crack down on Bitcoin by force only leads to local decentralized economies emerging, which is something that's way worse in every form or shape. China's local crypto economy is currently larger than its 2016 legal economy, which says enough. Instead of trying to combat/eliminate Bitcoin, they only made their 'enemy' grow larger. It's more of a problem than ever before and it's completely their fault.

Bitcoin isn't just Bitcoin, but it's a message and an escape. If governments start to make life difficult for you, which they do, people will realize that Bitcoin is actually an escape and not just a speculative shit tool. In a way we have to thank governments for being the pricks they always have been.

$1 trillion dollar market cap for Bitcoin is such an important and powerful statement, that it will definitely result in not only capital parked in Gold to shift towards Bitcoin, but pretty much all legacy assets will start bleeding to a certain degree.

After that $1 trillion dollar milestone the "slow" capital (the braver institutions, governments, hedge funds, royal families, etc) will start to massively inflate Bitcoin's price towards even greater hights. It would be a tremendous achievement when governments will finally start stocking up Bitcoin instead of just Gold.

It's actually quite 'easy' to see Bitcoin hit a market cap of $1 trillion. Bitcoin at $60,000 with a circulating supply of around 18 million coins at that point is only a matter of time. Realistically, we're just another bull run away from doing it.

How so? I have been using Bitcoin as store of value for years, and it worked out pretty well.

People think just because of the fluctuations that Bitcoin isn't suitable as store of value, but why would you bother caring about short term fluctuations when the price is bound to increase throughout the forthcoming years? If you park your money in Bitcoin for a couple of years, why are current fluctuations a problem? You are not speculating, you are not planning to use any of it, you just want it to grow as time goes by, that's what a store of value should function as.

Most legacy means of value storage have time on time proven to be unreliable in that aspect. Bitcoin has been and still is the ultimate store of value of this century.

The stipped size of blocks is still capped at 1MB and that's exactly what the blockchain absorbs, regardless of the increased virtual block size due to Segwit.

Segwit only makes sure that more transactions can fit within that fundamentally capped 1MB block, which is its biggest advantage in terms of providing a temporary scaling solution.

It's a shame that till this day Segwit isn't being utilized by more than 50% of the network. It's clearly a big block attack to not devalue their asic boost technology. Assholes that they are.

A fully deployed Segwit network could fit like 6000-7000 transactions within 1MB block, which is insane. It will last us a year or two, easily.

I dare anyone believing altcoins to become near worthless to short them, because instead of altcoins going to zero, your balance will go to zero.

We are dealing with people not caring about fundamentals, decentralization, currency aspect, etc. It all contributes to a situation where even the worst altcoins are worth billions which is pathetic but the damage is done already. It's impossible to bet against altcoins long term speaking because you are really going to burn yourself. Altcoin's get fueled by Bitcoin's increases and as long as Bitcoin keeps increasing, which it keeps doing, altcoins will follow.

The danger of governments not classifying assets and use cases is that it offers them way more freedom to blatantly prosecute individuals left and right.

In all cases you are wrong and the government is right because they make the rules and bend them at will, especially if they don't like the way you conduct business or speak out against them publicly. That's how things have been happening in China for years and to a certain degree also happen in Russia. In other words, the lack of clarity means more power to the governments, and that directly translates into suppression.

It's funny how decentralization is such a selling point of this space, yet barely any coin actually offers that. XRP is just as centralized as any other altcoin or token in crypto land.

The problem with crypto in general is that every coin or token has a face, which is a massive point of failure, but noobs don't seem to care as long as they see their investment start paying off. These ignorant assholes are the sole reason utter crap coins have value, and the sole reason legitimate projects don't stand a chance to bloom.

In other words, it's just as bad as the legacy economy where governments use regulations to effectively eliminate potential competitors for their lovely monopoly elitist businesses.

It will happen again, just not in the extreme way it happened last year.

If Ethereum at some point will switch to POS, whether it's partly or completely, which only seems to be a matter of time, it will make sure the demand for GPU's sinks down far deeper than most people here can even imagine. Another important aspect is the domino effect that might follow. If other coins see that Ethereum's POS switch is successful, they'll follow, which means even less demand for GPU's.

It might be a good moment to short these companies. The sole reason they wen't up significantly was because of crypto, and the sole reason they'll fall down hard will be because of crypto as well.

Don't even bother, it's a waste of time.

Cheaper and good quality doesn't combine well in this field, especially with how much historical evidence there is of similar projects who aimed to do the same, but failed miserably with a lot users financially damaged due to their stupidity.

I'm not necessarily saying that ExCraft is the same, but just ignore it. If you don't hear anything from it in the next 6-12 months you know that you have done well to ignore it early on. As with everything when it comes to software, services and projects, in order to minimize your own risk, let other people be the "beta testers".

The only thing that's holding Bitcoin up is false hope that the SEC's decision next month might be positive for the ecosystem. It was somewhat predictable that $5800 wouldn't break, and in the same way the increase in the runup to the deadline is predictable as well.

If the SEC rejects the ETF, which I really hope they do because it's technically rejected already (postponing = rejection), we'll see how the market reacts to that and how much support is left around the $5800 level. I honestly believe that we'll see $5000 in that scenario and it's great for the market with how it could be seen as one of the last shakeoffs below $10,000.

That's not really true. In all cases it's only a select few people (probably below 5%) actually manage to book any profits. The majority of the people are the losers providing the winners with profits. Money doesn't grow on trees, where you have one winner there are like a dozen of losers.

Crypto in general has barely any liquidity to it, so even without pumps there are enough opportunities to benefit. The only difference is that those who know what to do and look for can book profits within very tight ranges, where the noobs need massive swings in order to profit.

Also, while the majority of the people are only here for the speculative aspect, the rest is here actually for the utility. There is always a point to buy crypto.

Profitability isn't really an issue at current levels.

The insane OTC demand for virgin coins has increased to such degree, that miners aren't selling their coins for $6000 but $8000 and upwards. It's nearly impossible to buy mint as individual, unless you want to pay the insane premiums, but not everyone can afford that, especially with how the minimum is calculated per block instead of individual coins.

Professional parties aren't really keen on buying already circulated coins with how they still haven't completely dealt with their 'Bitcoin is being used by criminals' syndrome.

Yeah, kwukduck definitely doesn't care about his account reputation.

I'm afraid that has been banned since his last activity dates from late February this year.

Or perhaps he isn't banned and it's a sign that there isn't much for him to fud about with how he believes that ~$5800 is somewhat of an ultimate bottom and the market will remain neutral for a long time. Either way, it would be good to see him come back because his bearish trash talk means the price will go up and up. His silence is somewhat indicative of the boring market we're in.

My genuine prediction when we entered 2017 was to reach $2000 before the end of the year, but not with the intention of selling at that price. In no shape or form could I have ever seen the massive bull run kick in lifting the market up all the way to nearly the $20,000 level. This is why you should always cash out profits in smaller quantities.

At $2000 I thought cool, my prediction was right.

My thoughts afterwards;

At $3000; the market will correct.
At $4000; the market will correct.
Jump
At $10,000; very important level and we'll tank hard from here. This is where I cashed out like 25% of my profits.
At $11,000; people starting to get crazy.
Jump
At $15,000; cashed out another 10% of my profits.
At $16,000; insanity.
At $18,000; we're nearing the $20,000 level and with how the start of the year is historically a bad one, and traders will sell the CME news, I cashed out 25% of my profits.
At $19,000; yep, somewhat expected.
At $19,500; boom bie boom puffff, down we go.

That may be true, but we can't really blame crypto for that. It wasn't supposed to grow this large this soon. The main thing here is that the bull run of last year exposed Bitcoin's and Ethereum's weaknesses as largest protocols.

It's safe to say that there is no way for them to scale within a reasonable period of time to meet user demand on the higher peak levels. On a more positive note; because of their limitations that have been exposed, we now at least have seen an acceleration in the development of scaling solutions, while without last year's bull run it could have taken a few more years to come to that same conclusion.

In other words, we have saved ourselves a couple of years of time that can now be spent figuring out other useful implementations and such.

Not strange at all, especially with how we have entered a time where every continent or country has some sort of its own agenda and motive to do what it does. It has become way more obvious in the last year or two because it's pretty much a domino effect that has been initiated. It has been brewing for years but countries never really bothered to trigger each other in the way they do it now. It could very well be that Trump was the trigger needed to release the pressure.

It's however important to remain somewhat neutral and for that reason not take the obvious signals for granted so easily. In most cases what we see isn't what we get. We get what we don't see, which is why these geo political games are quite an interesting and everlasting subject. I'm from Europe myself, but I am not choosing side with anyone. Everything is rotten to the core and for that reason we yet again come to Bitcoin as subject to hedge all this nonsense. I know that whatever happens, the pressure on my native fiat currency won't inflict any damage on me.