Spending Bitcoin is in my opinion the best way to help this ecosystem. Bitcoin is money and for that reason needs to circulate as money.

People quite often refrain from spending their coins because of the fear of losing out when the price starts increasing again. This can be easily avoided by buying back every single satoshi that you spent, and the best thing is that you can do this at any price (high or low). The more we spend our coins, the more merchants are willing to accept it, and for that reason the more utility value Bitcoin obtains. We are here together and should work together to make it a success.

I use my local fastfood delivery service that I pay for in Bitcoin. It is that fastfood isn't healthy to eat every day, otherwise just for the sake of using Bitcoin I would order every day. 

It is actually bad to have an alternative tier 2 layer competing with LN because it does nothing but bring confusion and potentially slow down progress.

Instead of money hungry entities trying to raise money to fund their project (ahum, fill their pockets), they can better allocate time to look at how they can improve LN where needed, and see how routing can become far more efficient, and more importantly, successful, because that's eventually what we will be relying on to conduct transactions once fully deployed.

That's hilarious. In order to have the network validate a 1GB block, it would probably need an hour to do so, and in that time frame empty blocks need to be minted in order to prevent the network from being exploited by malicious entities.

When people talk about not having 'meaningful' amounts sitting in their exchange accounts it's all relative to the person. In other words, what you consider to be a lot money is literally pocket change for others. Some times I see insanely large buy or sell walls (worth millions $$) pop up that I ask myself why would someone have that much funds on an exchange, but then you have to think about the main rule of there always being a bigger fish than you, which helps you put things into perspective.

In the end there is no way for traders to not be exposed to counterparty risks. People can say you should withdraw your funds immediately, but that doesn't go up for traders with sessions lasting days and some times weeks. In most cases smart and responsible traders never leave more than 10% of their total stash on an exchange.

Exactly.

People still don't understand that cloud mining schemes, even those that have actual hardware running, don't pay users with their mining rewards.

In all cases people are being paid with funds coming from previous investors, and as long as there are enough dumbos willing to invest money in cloud mining, people will continue to get paid. In the same way, if there aren't enough dumbos providing liquidity, the cloud mining scheme will come up with all sorts of nonsense reasons to reduce payments or not pay people at all. You can't win as investor, the house does.

The speculative side is a nasty one, but directly also a very important one.

It's Bitcoin's occasional bull run cycle being the main form of adoption generator, but this directly makes sure that the few people who are really into it for the utility, are being outnumbered by orders of magnitude by get rich quick noobs. For now we have to endure all this mainstream 'torture', but eventually we'll be out of it when Bitcoin starts to mimic Gold and becomes boring enough to be used solely as store of value.

I have conducted far more transactions with Bitcoin this year than in all the previous years combined, and I started back in early 2013. The main reason for that is the adoption boost Bitcoin went through last year. People around me almost beg me to pay them in Bitcoin instead of fiat, which is something I have never seen before.

That's exactly what I was referring to. Never said anything about getting rich.  

That's why it's important to educate yourself. My whole point basically is that you shouldn't let anyone trying to sell you advice or information, which is what they basically do, tell YOU what to do. If you can't figure out yourself how trading works, you'll suck at trading for ever, regardless of how many courses you follow. In crypto you need to absorb unbiased information that doesn't come out of a book. You learn by diving into it, which means losses at the beginning, but later on you'll get to understand this market to a better degree. See the initial losses as a tuition fee.

The problem isn't that he entered before or after you.

The main thing is that whoever it is, if someone is trying to sell you advice or knowledge, then know that it's done solely because that person sucks at trading and investing. If these people even remotely believed in their own research and information, they would have used it themselves and kept their mouth shut, because one doesn't sell valuable information gathered through time intensive research.

In the end people are free to buy whatever they want with their money, but they are far better off investing time in themselves, because self-education is key. Don't let traditional book knowledge not understanding anything about crypto tell you what's good or not. They don't know shit.

Actually, we might be up for potentially a 'bear market' that lasts all the way till Q2/Q3 of 2019.

Historically, the first few months of each year thus far have always been the worst months for Bitcoin. Nothing but declining prices.

It allows long term minded Bitcoin freaks to keep accumulating coins well under the $10,000 level for plenty of more months, and we can enjoy how crazy the constantly changing sentiment is here, and the shitfights happening within the EOS verus ETH scene. I love the drama in this scene man, there is never a shortage of it.  

It could ONLY go to 80% if Bitcoin continues to tank deep which makes altcoins tank even deeper. Bitcoin going up means altcoins will eat up Bitcoin's market cap dominance and we'll be back hovering within the 40-45% range.

People just need to accept that Bitcoin being even close to 50% is a fantastic achievement with so many altcoins and tokens artificially inflating the total market cap. It's one coin (BTC) versus thousands of other coins. It's an unfair comparison in every shape or form. Bitcoin technically has only a few competitors, while Ethereum has hundreds of competitors trying to take its spot.

Bitcoin gained dominance verus all other coins. Ethereum lost dominance verus all other coins. If there is one coin 'losing' the battle, then it's Ethereum.

The only positive aspect is that buying properties and whatnot in Turkey for foreigners has become a whole lote mor interesting with strong EUR and USD. In the end everything has its pros and cons, and these shaky countries quite often offer the best possible investment opportunities. Horrible situation for the locals, great opportunities arise for foreign investors.

1BTC = 36,800 Lira, which is like a small fortune in Turkey. People in normal circumstances can do equally as much or even more with 1 Lira in Turkey than they can do with 1 EUR/USD in their own country. I have actually considered buying into Lira with my EUR, but haven't done so yet because I think we haven't seen the worst yet.

We shouldn't want crypto to be accepted by the state, and we don't even need it.

Bitcoin's glory days were <2013 years where the majority of the people were actual admirers and users of the utility. The speculative aspect was just an unwanted side effect. Now it's the complete opposite; people want banks, governments, institutions, hedge funds to start welcoming Bitcoin. Why? Just so they can sell high and then exit the market.

Let governments suppress Bitcoin as hard as they can, it will help Bitcoin's utility shine again, which is that decentralized local economies start to emerge and we can focus on that what really matters. Less mass use = less need for scaling solutions = great for everyone.

That definitely applies to Tim Draper. 

In a way we all have an incentive to hype Bitcoin up the best we can, but I do feel how passioned Tim Draper is. Bitcoin is the only ever option for people to obtain financial freedom in the most convenient way. It's in our best interest to make sure we do everything we can to have Bitcoin succeed, because if it doesn't, we're back to square one, which is that we are yet again an easy to exploit slave of the system.

For the first ever time we can store a large part of our wealth (which I actually have) in Bitcoin to hedge haircuts (the Cyprus haircut is still an open wound) and failing fiat currencies. I feel sorry for people in Turkey with how much their currency lost value in such a short period of time. This is a good but expensive lesson for people is to lower their fiat exposure and jump into Bitcoin, which they seem to be doing in a mild way.

I somewhat agree and have to point out that the mainstream media and the average joes also think that you're a criminal when you buy $5 worth of weed. You have done absolutely nothing wrong, but you're a criminal in their opinion. In that regard, we can safely assume that the criminals that's being referred to are mostly people buying drugs to have a good time. The rest of the actual criminal use of Bitcoin is definitely there, but it's negligible.

People don't realize how dangerous it is for criminals to actually use Bitcoin (or basically any other crypto) as means of exchange. The risk of getting ripped off your Bitcoins during a large transaction is greater than the transaction being settled without any problems.

Bitcoin itself might be way further in every aspect, but the weakest point, which is its extremely thin market, has always been weak and has never really improved. Whales can literally toy with the market in every possible way, and they are doing that right now. Nowadays with BitMex being in the picture it's more profitable than ever before to ping pong trade their leveraged positions. BitMex is more a factor of manipulation than the futures markets are. $5.3 billion in volume in the last 24 hours isn't peanuts.

Also, the price never reflects the real utility value of Bitcoin. In most cases the price is either overvalued or undervalued. We don't ever get to experience price levels for longer periods of time where we can say that Bitcoin is somewhat fairly valued.

Some times I really believe that the best option is to live somewhere deep in the forests of South America just to not be confronted with all this nonsense.

No internet. No money. No government. Just you, the nature, and animals, and some creepy bugs and whatnot.

Where I live we are subject to so many taxation laws, that even if you don't use anything, or don't have an actual income, you still have to pay tax. I see it happen quite frequently that people without an income and any way to pay due taxes, are being bombarded with penalties constantly adding 50-100% to the amount the tax department thinks they owe them.

Is this the way we are supposed to live? Why does someone not being able to pay a penny have its life ruined because of all the penalty amounts that are being added each quarter of not paying? It's ridiculous.

Miners are already working towards renewable energy.

The problem here is that the main concern for policitians isn't Bitcoin's energy consumption, but Bitcoin itself. They just use Bitcoin's energy consumption as a smoke screen to hide their toxic motives. Even if Bitcoin's network is being maintained for 100% with renewable energy, the hypocrites that politicians are will find something else to blame Bitcoin for.

We have to blame the entire system for ridiculous taxation policies. If every person and business was taxed fairly, there would be no need to hide your wealth or undervalue properties. It's done for a reason.

That site lost my interest instantly the moment I saw BCash's "fair" value is $900 instead of the current $500.

It enjoys way less use, is a coin donated to people for free, is artificially being kept at a certain value to not have miners ditch them and make it easy for malicious entities to attack its network, etc. It's probably safe to say that they aren't really that keen on Bitcoin. 

It's way more useful to put coins aiming to operate within the same industry each in their own dominance list, which would significantly change things, but since this is a mere noob metric we probably don't need to take it that seriously.

Do as the user above you suggested.

One thing I do want tot point out is that people should avoid dealing with 'businesses' hiding themselves behind a whois privacy wall. In 90% of the cases these businesses end up scamming people one way or another, and this could have been prevented by not using them. It's a simple but yet extremely important indicator that people keep ignoring unfortunately.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the same entities behind miningcolocation run similar businesses under a different name.

http://whois.domaintools.com/miningcolocation.com

I didn't say any ICO actually paid that. I just said they don't care to pay these figures with how ridiculously much capital they raised with their ICO.

Who are you to say that they don't need it? It's like saying Apple generates $100 billion in profits per year and they don't need to increase their profits any longer.  

Businesses are in to see increasing revenue and profit streams, and not to turn down potential ways to make money.

Important point you guys seem to discard is that Binance only *unofficially* asks for these crazy fees to hedge the risk of seeing ICO's dump on innocent traders and then blatantly withdraw Bitcoin. In case that happens, Binance can minimize or even prevent getting burned by using the coins they obtained by fees to fill up the gap.

People think the banking deals settled by Ripple the company are similar to banks positioning themselves in XRP the token, but that's not the case. XRP is nothing more than a product without any purpose other than allowing people to move value quickly through its centralized ecosystem. If people like using centralized garbage they can just as easily keep using PayPal, and the best thing of all is that PayPal has no insane premine.  

Ripple the company, or more precisely said, Brad Garlinghouse and his buddies, own 60% of all the XRP tokens in existence already (they are currently locked up). On top of that they also own the majority of the circulating supply. It could very well be that they literally own like 75% of all the XRP tokens, which means 75 billion of the 100 billion tokens.

XRP on average pushes through trading volumes of around $250 million per day, which is peanuts. Litecoin, which is less than 50% of its size, pushes through the exact same daily trading volumes. Even Ethereum Classic with a $1.1 billion market cap generates more trading volume. XRP is just one big clown show.