You got scammed and it's your fault entirely. I'm not even sure how you dare to complain and seek for help? Swallow your loss and move on. Wasting time on this is not going to help you.

Every cloud mining service, regardless of it having actual hardware to mine with, is set up to benefit itself. There is only one outcome possible, which is that the far majority of the people lose. If they aren't losing due to difficulty increases and non attractive exchange rates, the service in question will bump up the maintenance fees to eat through people's earnings. In the end every cloud mining service will implode, either by not getting any new investor capital in, or they blatantly run.

The returns are pure madness and hint at one thing only; people know it's a scam but invest anyway because they think they can profit before it implodes.

The thing is that we can't prevent wall street from entering, but at the same time wall street can't prevent Bitcoiners from using Bitcoin as they have always been doing.

Think about it, nothing will change fundamentally, just the price will keep increasing with how institutions pull out their big guns and pump Bitcoin beyond anything we can think of right now. Higher price means more miners (hashpower) being added to the network making sure that Bitcoin's network becomes stronger than ever before.

The only thing they are doing is feeding Bitcoin and making it a more powerful beast that is too strong to take down. People need to grow a thicker skin and look through all this circus. With or without ETF's and wall street on board, Bitcoin is and remains Bitcoin. Wall street can't bribe Bitcoin's main developer because there is none, which can't be said about ETH, XRP, BCH, EOS, etc.

Sexy Tether walls.

I'm not really surprised since it's probably Bitfinex itself adding these walls to the orderbooks. No one in his right mind would have that much value on an exchange with that history.

Chinese exchanges during their glory days in Bitcoin were doing the same thing occasionally. One moment you see a 10,000BTC buy wall pop up, one second later the same whale dumped an exact number of coins in that buy order. The largest ever single order I have seen was a +30,000BTC sell wall on Bitstamp that was placed at $300 and then moved down to $275.

What usually happens is that the price increases in the runup to the event, which happened prior to the previous block halving as well.

By the time the halving took place people were wondering why the price wasn't going up, where they completely ignored the fact that the halving was already priced in. It's somewhat similar to buy the rumor sell the news, but since the block halving is fundamentally so important for Bitcoin, there is no sell the news aside from some people securing profits, which happens after every increase. After the block halving we can expect steady growth.

Yes, the real danger won't come from startups, but from giants such as Intel, TSMC and Samsung. They have the expertise, loads of cash, the best engineers, and the best hardware to produce even faster and more energy efficient miners. Bitmain has had just luck as first mover, but they will see their market share shrink significantly in the forthcoming years, which is a win for Bitcoin.

The only thing Bitmain is doing currently is boasting and lobbying, which will work against them because the only thing they are doing is signalling that they are making tons of money, and when others smell money, they'll jump in and knock Bitmain off its throne. Bitmain was better off operating low-key and still generate billions in profits, but their confidence to go public like this will turn out to be their downfall.

Let's get real here, as long as Bitcoin or any other crypto currency can't compete with fiat head to head on a local level, why should people (the mass) not caring about decentralization use it as currency?

Fiat locally;

Instant payments.
No transaction costs involved for the buyer.
Insurance over products you buy.

Crypto locally (only negative points);

Volatility.
Transaction costs involved.
You have to buy back every coin that you spent in order to not lose out on increases.
No insurance over products you buy.
Your payment may not go through without a confirmation (especially if you included a lower fee).

Crypto is great internet money, but horrible local money, unless you live in a country where there is no proper infrastructure.

Strange one? He's one of the worst entities in this space. He's trying to break the coin that fed him and made him the person who he is right now.

He and his crew of hired developers are raping Bitcoin's source code where they will soon turn BCash into a cheap Ethereum clone on top of that.

Roger Ver with his website misleads people into thinking they are buying Bitcoin, while they actually buy BCash. It's a shame that he owns such a powerful domain.

If you want to know more about his shady practices just use Google.

I'm quite certain that within a year or two the main legacy corporate elite will have taken over the some of the main exchanges in this industry. Poloniex was just a teaser.

That's why it's very important to start building up decentralized economies and put more effort into understanding what LN really is and what it is capable of. I strongly believe that LN is Bitcoin's killer application. It will allow people to utilize Bitcoin as cash on a massive scale that we can't even imagine right now. It will grant Bitcoin an ultimate advantage over any other coin and centralized payment service such as Visa, PayPal, etc.

What's faster than near instant settling payments that barely require a fee?  

If brick and mortar stores accept LN and grant people a 2% discount (which is calculated in due to Visa&Master fees) for every purchase, you can be sure that people will rush to these stores to use it.

Mind explaining how exactly?

Great example of how regulations aren't very effective when it comes to avoiding fluctuations, are the flashy tech stocks such as Facebook, Tesla, AMD, etc.

The only reason why they don't fluctuate as severely as Bitcoin, comes from the available liquidity, but even that liquidity wasn't enough to prevent Facebook from tanking ~20% in a matter of hours, making it lose $120 billion in market cap value. Even Wall Street itself was shocked about what happened since it is the first time a stock lost that much value that quickly.

All these articles stating that the relatively mild fluctuations of this year are due to regulations are straight bs. We have had even more stable phases back in 2015 and 2016 and there were no regulations back then.

While I do believe that it definitely does contribute what you stated, the premiums are more related to the lack of actual supply, and to a lower extent the monopoly position of market makers exploiting the arbitrage opportunity at cost of poor people. These people don't have much choice other than to buy every available satoshi at any price.

Bitcoin in South Korea last year has been trading $6000 above the USD rates of exchanges as Bitfinex, GDAX, Bitstamp, etc. They have the best possible and cheapest overall infrastructure, which points out that it was purely the lack of supply that drove Bitcoin to these record highs. As quickly as that premium popped up, that quickly did it vanish. Most premiums right now are well under 5% which is pretty normal I guess.

Definitely. People don't understand that ~75% of the value altcoins currently have is donated to them by Bitcoin due to their tie.

People also don't understand that without Bitcoin's tie there is no way to value an altoin or token. Tokens are priced in Ether, which is based on Ether's value against Bitcoin. It's impossible to value an altcoin or token without people comparing its relative value to Bitcoin in order to determine whether or not it's expensive or not expensive. All the spoiled altcoin brats should show a little more respect to big daddy Bitcoin.

Don't count yourself in the profits already. It may very well be that if Bitcoin starts going down after the SEC rejection, altcoins may go down further with it instead of gaining back some of their 'lost' ratio. People can call altcoins cheap as much as they want, but they aren't really that cheap.

Ethereum has way more downward potential at this point. If it breaks 0.05BTC it with a high probability will dip well below 0.04BTC this year. It will be an interesting time for Ethereum enthusiasts with a hard fork coming up next month. There is so much to break with how complex their network is, and also when it comes to everything running on top of it. In other words, it's going to be an important time for the majority of the tokens.

I think he's referring to Bitcoin's dominance versus coins that share the same characteristics.

If we look at the tokens specifically, and then more so the big ones such as Ethereum, people are not willing to spend them outside their own ecosystem. Why is that? Because of all the games and garbage they can buy themselves into with Ether. These people don't care about anything other than making a quick buck. If governments crack down on all the nonsense that happens within Ethereum's ecosystem, and there is a lot going on there, people will ditch it.

The most popular Dapp on Ethereum is a ponzi scheme called PoWH 3D which should say enough.

As with everything, especially in the crypto market, if more money means you are able to steer the market to your preferred direction and constantly be on the winning side, the platform you trade on will cheat on you. There is no point in having a business where wealthy players suck the money out of it. Casinos at least have their house edge working for them, these platforms don't have anything other than faul play.

This makes things even worse (comes from the article posted by Samarkand);
No way they are just randomly gambling.

In other words, fully decentralized peer to peer exchanges.

Miner have been selling their mint at premiums for years. People think they are dumping them on exchanges, but that's false for the most part. It makes no sense to sell something for spot value when you can get 25%'ish above spot by selling to private buyers. We see $8000 as current price, for larger miners it's more like $10,000 per Bitcoin. In other words, the premiums that miners charge are baked in already.

You can't just ask 50% over spot value because your margins are starting to get very tight, private buyers will either decline on the offer or get their coins from other OTC sellers. The coins other OTC sellers offer aren't virgin, but hey, how much does that matter if it saves you a considerable amount of money?

I definitely agree with how BTCPay is better in every way and combats gateway centralization, but there are some factors to take into consideration;

# you need a server of yourself to run it or use something like azure, and it requires some level of technical understanding.
# you have to store your coins yourself, and you have to convert your coins to fiat yourself as merchant, which increases the risk of losing value in the process.

What incentive is there for a non crypto merchant to put time and effort in setting it up while stopping with accepting Bitcoin is an easier option? The only way I can see it become a viable option is when merchants generate a decent amount of revenue through Bitcoin and don't want to miss out on it.

We can't assume that anything has been done because there have been similar cases where funds have mislead potential investors by tricking them into thinking that legally everything has been set up, while later turns out that nothing has been set up at all. It could very well be that they are waiting for actual capital to come in, and then start up the legal process. We can't take anything for granted here.

The difficulty doesn't make the price go up. It's price up difficulty up. If the difficulty is going up but the price not, miners (mostly the smaller ones) will eventually pull back their gear and the difficulty will drop.

If you can generate your own energy conveniently, it could always be somewhat profitable, but if you depend on external energy suppliers you can't endlessly mine profit. In that case there is a base price you can't get under.

Ether is not a token people are willing to spend outside Ethereum's own ecosystem, which is why very little actual Ether->goods transaction activity is happening.

Bitcoin of all coins has the least speculative use and the most actual currency use. It's nothing to be surprised about since most noobs have ditched Bitcoin because it became too expensive for them to buy into. Yes, people can buy smaller fractions, but people can't swallow paying thousands of dollars for just a chunk of a coin. They rather use that money to buy plenty of whole coin units from lower market cap coins.

If BitPay didn't mess up and start charging extra fees for using Bitcoin as payment option, people would be more willing to spend their coins.

Correct. It will turn out to be a crucial level, because if we don't manage to break it this year, we'll keep building on the lower high lower low trend. It's the only consistent trend we have experienced this year, and it may continue for a long time. The only thing to look forward to is more institutional adoption, which may take years, another ETF, which isn't something you can count on as we know, and then the block halving.

For now it's pretty silly that we are waiting for a regulator to make or break the short term market with their decision.