Owning an asset and owning its ETF is a different thing. By owning something and that something becomes illegal tomorrow, the fund might end up being blacklisted but owning the ETF, they might not fall in that problem.

Financial institutions, not retail investors like you and me.

The rationale is that if you have to buy bitcoin, you also have to keep it safe from getting stolen. For buying the ETF, you can trade it without having to worry about keeping the asset safe during holding period. Same with Gold ETF if you have had experience with that you would know.

There are both pros and cons of both methods, but one thing is for sure, if ETFs get started and exchanges start selling them as product, retail investors will also flock in. This will have a positive impact from the governments on crypto, the same reason why the ETF craze a few years back died out and now is starting again. Lets see how much mainstream attention this gains.

It is a cycle of bear and bull. A trader needs to know their basics first, simply put, newbies should not try their hands at trading something like crypto when they have zero back knowledge of how a speculative market works or zero prior trading history in other markets.

For a layman, a drop is price means people are selling and that to them is a bad sign. Add to that the layman's convoluted negative image of crypto from the press and media adds in more distrust in the asset. But they were greedy because someone told them to buy bitcoin at the wrong time and now they got stuck. That is how weak hands enter the market, they dont do research or studies before putting in their money.

However the market currently is recovering between Musk's negatives and Paypal's positives. Overall trend is bearish but recovery will happen.

While this seems like a good to hear news, is the reality so? Or did they do it for getting sympathy of the bitcoin users in their country? In any case, it is a change and change is good as long as political motivations are kept minimum.

They are complementary methods of payment, complementing fiat transactions where the fees of the same or the time consumption is high. Both co-exist because both have pros and cons, which is what comes out to be the basic conclusion of any such thread.

One cannot replace the other - very simple to understand the logic behind that. Over time we may see a growth in acceptance of crypto but they wont replace fiat.

Insist is not the correct term for it. Read before you reply and post only if you have something new to add to the discussion.

For a newbie it is tough to earn merits because majority of the merits dont end up in the threads of Bitcoin Discussion where it is supposed to be sent because threads there will end up as cycles of cesspool after a few pages worth of replies and the OP would have already abandoned the thread. Although this is a "Bitcoin" forum and not a "Meta" forum about the forum.

But try to post in newly started threads and read more to learn first before posting. Your chances of getting merit are more there.

Suggest you to lock this thread soon, you have got enough answers already and it is tiring to see threads like this come up every other day.

Firstly it is sad to see the lack of discussion to this thread till now.

Now back to topic, masternodes do bring in a bit of "old boys club" type of concept in the governance. They tend to accumulate more and earn more - what usually happens is they these people start their own private groups where they start to recruit more users, essentially selling them the coins they own to allow them to get a masternode themselves. This private selling of masternodes is very common with any MN-based coin.

It is not similar to mining of a PoW coin. The miners usually dump their coins on the open market or OTC. They need to ROI fast to pay the miner costs and that keeps the market liquid. Comparatively the MN-coins tend to more of accumulation game. This problem is common to all PoS coins.

I would still consider DASH to be centralized since these people have the influence to manipulate the new users into buying masternodes and essentially controlling the supply. But then the market stats also determine how people trade with that coin, so profitability from trading is a different thing here. If there will be more merchants accepting it, likewise since BTC, ETH, DOGE, and after than DASH is the next one that gets named on any layman's list of crypto, the markets will becomes more profitable for traders.

Defenitely not going to recommend they buy a DASH MN but trading DASH is their own choice.

Agree with manish, penny stock still have a company backing them and they are made out of thin air unlike many shitcoins, so called truth to the term known as vaporware, you should read about these things before taking a plunge in them.

The SEC does not consider the crypto currencies out there to be legal securities but they do consider the penny stocks to be such. There also could be a point of argument why owning an penny stock means you have a partial ownership of the company but buying a shitcoin, you have nothing or legal backing as an "investor", heck even the term investor makes no sense here.

If you are interested in low-cap companies go with the fiat based ones, at least you have some government knowledge that you can legally pursue in case the company shuts down, you will get some of the liquidated money.

Best thing is to ignore altcoins and keep money in bitcoin, the safest of all the crypto available.

A dream for owning one complete bitcoin is an absurd one with no logic backing it but only an emotional one.

Once you start accumulating bitcoin it will anyway cross one whole bitcoin and more, so whats the point in trying to change in your portfolio for that? Your intent is something different here, you wish to get out of the altcoins and get into bitcoin, which is a logical one.

So do that when the altcoin prices rise and sell them at that time to bitcoin or better yet, use an intermediary stablecoin like USDT and sell USDT for buying BTC when BTC drops. But dont focus on absurd things like one whole bitcoin one whole ethereum and so on.

For a new investors I understand owning a complete bitcoin is like a wet dream, but this is trading and here emotions and dreams have no place. It is a game of pure nerves.

Net unrealized profit would be the difference in buying price and selling price multiplied by the number of bitcoin bought like mk4 said. However there is a catch here. If you are putting in USD to buy bitcoin - usually that would have been an OTC deal done privately, then this would be the case but minus some "fees" that the OTC dealer would take.

If you are doing the same on an exchange then you would probably selling BTC for USDT. Now you would to convert that USDT back to USD that I am not sure if involves fees so do check that before proceeding.

Tracking your trades using an excel sheet would be a good long term process here. You would likely buy at multiple low points when they reach and then sell gradually. Often you would be not converting USDT to USD by saving that USDT to buy BTC at lower price again to you get the multiplier of the sell/buy price to multiply the asset at hand, if you get my point.

This is the same scam site group running the lionmining bitcoin scam site.

As you can see the address of the organization is given as

Reference to my post here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5341965.msg57175833#msg57175833

This is a pretty big group of scam sites and marking them all is a difficult thing to do. Reporting to the registrar is the only thing in our hands so I request everyone reading this to do the same as well.

They forgot to remove the "Lorem ispum" placeholder from their FAQ page.

Doing a search on their "phone number" as listed on their footer, I found this forum link where the same phone number and address have been used for some company called ozoneinvestmentsgroup and an admin member is claiming that the site is a scam. I believe the forum to be legit and doing a good job at marking scammers there.

https://www.stop419scams.com/viewtopic.php?t=11717

Did some more searching and found out these websites (read, scams) using the same phone number.

< Deja Vu site design somewhere else?

< Double Deja Vu!
< Triple Deja Vu! Now I am getting tired of the same design.

If you do a search on that address of the phone number, several more such investment scams are going to come up. All these point towards the site to be a scam and nothing more.

There are pros and cons of using bitcoin compared to using altcoin and using fiat.

Free thought is encouraged - the presence of altcoins only confirm that. Now why they exist in the first place was because bitcoin had some downfalls in terms of people using them like fees increase with price, network congestion with craze in the mainstream market. Altcoins try to cover up the market in such situations and I feel that is a complementary process that helps decongest the bitcoin network with time.

It means that the altcoins are not all useless, but also note that most altcoins that have been developed have died out and only the top 100 altcoins in the market have been able to make any impact.

This ecosystem is comparable to a democratic system and not an autocratic one. People are free to use any crypto that they want but will have to bear consequences according to the pros and cons of that currency.

OP seems to be new to this, thats why I asked. None of the well known crypto niche news sites seemed to cover any such recent news. Probably OP found a article somewhere about it.

Mostly they were "thinking about" "might start" sort of thing. Not any concrete approval that a certain ETF has been launched and is being publicly traded on such and such exchanges.

The usage of bitcoin as per country data shows North America among the top. No ETFund being set up there is a bad thing.

The craze for the ETF did die down very quickly and I remember at that time every place on the internet was talking about ETF as if right now the ETF would be done and market was rising as well. But then it died out and after a long time I see someone talking about it on this forum again.

I find it amusing that you are a 8year old account owner of this forum and you ask a question as basic as this one. Where had you been all this while?

Skepticism aside though coming back to point, comparing two modes of speculative trading will never yield an absolute answer. Ask the same question on a forex trading forum you will get answers biased to forex, ask that in a crypto forum like this one you will get answers biased to crypto.

It is a choice of previous experience and knowledge. If someone is experienced in forex and has been doing it for the last 15years, they would hardly move to crypto and start anew. Although that could be a fruitful venture, but the age progression of humans make them less conducive to learning new things and therefore they will likely not be able to profit from it.

Both are profitable and both can bring huge losses. If you havent done either, then look for the one where you currently have more knowledge in.

It is a placebo effect only. In reality they are all random picks based on assumptions or manipulated picks based on which project paid the owners to pump their coin so their advisors could sell and sell off the shitcoin to a newbie.

Sharing shilling information. Not reliable I would say. What is reliable is charts which already exist and the analysis that you can do on your own.

Most newbies want to get-rich-quick and they quickly learn the reality after getting whitewashed by these signals groups. That greed is what makes them go for such groups and the memberships. All of that is a waste of time and money. They should ask themselves if you need to pay someone to profit, why you are paying at all?

Things always start with the geek, then become mainstream and then get the recognition that was supposed to come.

Bubble? I would not call it a bubble anymore, maybe that thought was there when bitcoin was about to touch 10k USD but not anymore.

Also dont get your simile of old computers that dont run - that is junk and only worth selling at whatever price you can but bitcoin is growing in price. Development is happening behind the scenes on Core and gaining attention from the world's big companies.

"Fiat" please dude, make sure you read your posts before closing the tab.
Bitcoin being allowed for merchants who are into e-commerce will be the next big thing after Paypal allowing bitcoin. Very soon we might see this happen because once the companies start accepting bitcoin one by one all follow suit due to peer pressure.

So I did a check on the text written on the about page of the website and turns out that they are copy pasting the same writeup on some other shady investment websites.

Take a look at these:

Just the first page of the search engine revealed this, I am sure there are hundreds more of these sites.

If all these websites are being run by the same group then there is no question of being a legitimate operation of multiple investment sites, they are all scams.

Anyone reading this should know that the above listed site has got zero legitimacy and those who are not caring about the risks of getting into such a hype/ponzi/scam, good luck with your money.

But supporting a project does mean that the backer has some interests in it. Very few people would back something just out of pure emotional connection. VCs do that for profits because they have the skills to identify a possible profitable project from a non-profitable one.

I get your point but most of the users here have come to back projects to get paid. One of those could be by becoming a part of the project in future but I dont see that being the most common case for VCs or retail investors.

SBD is a good example for how alternative use to money can be obtained by using the same altcoin. This is lacking in most altcoins - an inherent method to develop a supply/demand gap. That drives the price and keep the market active.

That is normal though. These small fishes help the bigger whales cash out their profit, exactly the reason why celebs make such comments on social media, the breeding ground for shills and manipulative media.

They brought in their own downfall with that. Fear of missing out, like I said previously makes people do wrong things at the wrong times. Buying at the time of selling is the one mistake every trader should be careful of when prices are unstable.

See how the celeb hype died down now? Even paypal made a new headline with their news, but people are not covering that or pumping the price up. That is what happens when people watch too much of social media. I expected the price to move up a lot with that but I guess the effect will be late in showing in the market.

The crypto market runs on such rumors, it would be a good time to remind yourself why you got into DOGE in the first place. Was it because some millionaire celeb told you to buy it or did you have a specific reason to believe that it will go up in price?

Listed or not listed on coinbase is not the point here. That would have a temporary positive effect on the price, correct but the long term value for holding in your case depends on your reason as I asked above. If you have a logical reason and you believe that to be correct then by all means dont sell at this time. But if you are second guessing yourself, put that mental stress away once and for all and sell in case the price rises beyond your buying price.

There is no need to burden yourself with such questions as long as your mindset behind buying that coin is sound. This is also the reason why one should never listen to others to trade but make decisions by themselves.

But you are asking for an unsustainable thing anyway.

The altcoin staking system is not sustainable. Ask why? Because once a group starts staking a coin, there will be a constant rage to accumulate more and more by that group. The good thing is that the prices will go up but the bad thing is that the chances of getting an ROI with the same investment capital becomes low. The ones getting in late will have no chance of making any sort of return and very soon this ends up being a manhood-war between the bagholders. Silently other bagholders sell off their holding at this inflated price and then exit the same leading to the end of that altcoin.

Same will happen with all the DeFi lending pools.

Only the ones who remain profited at the ones who were diligent to get in early and buy a huge stash and then exit before the peak happens. It becomes a rat race for joining the next big shitcoin.

You might have a different opinion, but I have seen the ICO market, the defi market and the concurrent "passive earning" traps set up during each of such hypes. All them are rat races. But if you can "sustain" them then good luck to you.

To answer your question though : https://coinmarketcap.com/yield-farming/