Hi Lauda,

I have decided to leave the Coinpayments Signature Campaign.
I will remove the signature tomorrow.

Thank you for running the campaign in an extremely professional way.
I didn´t encounter a single problem during my 3-4 months in the campaign
and the payments were clocklike!

The only period where the price is guaranteed to go up is in the
months before the next block reward halving in 2020. These events
always create a bull run, because everyone knows for sure that the daily
selling pressure on the market will drop after the halving.

2018 probably won´t be a good year in terms of returns, but 2020 is going
to be similar to 2017 if you ask me. This isn´t even taking into account the
possibility that improvements like the Lightning Network manage to come into
effect.

I think it is more likely that they will place the exchange rate risk on the taxpayer.
They will simply convert it right after receiving it (probably automated) and if Bitcoin dropped
in this time frame by 20 % they will simply send the taxpayer a tax bill for another 20 %.

There is no way that they are gonna take on the exchange rate risk themselves when they
can just as easily place it on the taxpayer.

Nevertheless these are good news, because this makes a BTC ban even more unlikely
in the US.

Maybe their main motivation isn´t really putting up a massive troll show, but rather to fill their
own pockets? After all there were many rumors that Chinese officials made enormous profits by trading
the news that they created themselves. In my opinion it is likely that the Russian officials are playing
the same game here. Create positive news, release contradictory statement, release bad news, release
a contradictory statement...

Of course it is also possible that they are just badly coordinated and one government body has no idea
what the others are up to. Or it is indeed just a massive troll show. I guess we will never know unless Wikileaks
or a similar organisation releases a report about these allegations.

Update:
Secretive Chinese bitcoin mining company may have made as much money as Nvidia last year


This is a new CNBC article that shares this estimate of how much money Bitmain has made in 2017.
Now remember that 10-20M $ are enough to prop up the BTC price temporarily and you can see
that they have a huge warchest to do whatever is necessary to keep up the price. And this is only
a single company that is not even only a mining company nowadays.

If you think they will just let their business that generates 3-4 billion $ / year in profits fail and close their operations
you are completely delusional.

Bitcoin won´t fall below the average cost of mining a single Bitcoin and everyone who makes predictions
like BTC at 1000 $ or lower doesn´t understand the incentives in play here.

There were numerous reports of people in this very forum, who had their N26 account closed
due to regular cryptocurrency-related transactions.

You would expect that an emerging bank like N26 would be very friendly towards new inventions
like digital currencies, but this is a far cry from reality unfortunately.

I would strongly recommend using Mistertango over N26 even though Mistertango has a few
drawbacks as well (e.g. high BTC deposit fees).

I wouldn´t overestimate the investment of Peter Thiel into BTC. Likely a big share
of the investment of his fund is client money (I assume that his fund doesn´t only consist
of his personal funds?) and not own capital.

Besides, if you measure his Bitcoin investment in terms of percentage of his total net worth,
most of us have probably invested a higher percentage of our net worth into Bitcoin. His
exposure to BTC therefore is pretty conservative and not exactly the big news that some people
claim it is.

I´m also pessimistic about state-backed cryptocurrencies.

However, there are a few situations where they can actually be highly beneficial for a country.
One of the most common potential use cases is the ability to circumvent international sanctions.

E.g. countries like Russia or Venezuela that are subject to sanctions can try to sell off resources,
weapons or other stuff that they aren´t allowed to sell. A state-backed cryptocurrency would
allow them to bypass the international banking system that is heavily controlled by the US and therefore
is crucial for enforcing international sanctions.

Whether this use case is a pipe dream or an actual way of dealing with sanctions remains yet to be seen.

This is the beauty of charging a fixed commission while investors are exposed
to all the variance 

However, the outcome for investors is still easily within the possible range of outcomes.
Variance can be crazy in a game with a very small house edge and high betting limits.
Both requirements are definitely fulfilled by Bustabit.

Bustadice was at a loss for the investors for several months after the site launch and suddenly
1 losing day of a whale was enough to turn around 4 months of investor losses.
It is entirely possible that the situation at Bustabit could play out similar or that the situation
for the investors gets even worse as players continue to perform above expectation.

This is obviously dangerous and should be fixed.
However, I think that the danger for you personally is rather hypothetical, because I don´t think
that you are using a Windows-based system for online activities.

Therefore I think it is highly unlikely that you are running a keylogger-infested
computer.

There is another potential reason why Bitcoin is interesting for hedge funds. Imagine you are down a few
percentage points for the year and you hope to turn the year around, because your income as a hedge fund
manager is obviously dependent on the performance of the hedge fund. Which asset aside from
Bitcoin goes on a crazy bull run during the end of the year regularly? Besides, the tiny actual float
of Bitcoins on the exchanges makes the market prone to manipulation. Hedge funds are obviously
highly experienced in markets and have the knowledge and the capital to exploit opportunities like this.

Bitcoin is a great investment for hedge funds, which is also corroborated by the emergence
of more than 200 cryptocurrency hedge funds during the last year.

I agree that some parts of the Nitrogensports experience have deteriorated (especially
the grading time has increased by a magnitude). However, you can´t really blame
them for introducing a withdrawal fee. They introduced it during a time where the BTC
transaction fees skyrocketed and they simply couldn´t continue to pay it out of their own pocket.
You also have to take into account that they need to consolidate user deposits as well, which
incurs costs that are not directly visible to the end user.

Besides, they still allow 1 free withdrawal every 2 weeks if you meet certain requirements.
All in all I´d say that they need to improve some stuff (grading, cracking down on cheating
at Nitrogensports poker), but the withdrawal fee is not one of them
if you ask me.

I´ve admitted that my comparison of Bitcoin mining to the US Military was somewhat flawed.
But I could easily argue that your comparison is flawed as well!

After all you are comparing a company with centralized solutions like a search engine
or a video sharing service to the best invention of the 21st century. If all Google services were
gone by tomorrow no one would really notice, because there are plenty of other search engines and
plenty of other video sharing services.

On the other hand if Bitcoin was gone by tomorrow this would be the death of the idea of a decentralized,
global world currency (or more accurate: an immutable settlement layer, because it will likely never be
used the same way that fiat is used now). If anyone of you thinks that a random altcoin would simply
take Bitcoin´s spot you are completely delusional.

Bitcoin could consume 100x the energy of Google and that still wouldn´t change the fact that one
is easily replaceable and the other is unique.

I concede that my comparison of the energy consumption of the US military to the
energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is somewhat flawed, because they are not directly comparable. However,
I simply wanted to show that there are still many things that are destructive instead of constructive that consume
more energy than Bitcoin mining.

I strongly disagree with the statement in the quote. E.g. if a BTC mining company uses renewable energy
from hydro power in Iceland there is no way that the energy would be redirected to a country that is burning
coal energy if the mining company would stop mining. This is simply completely uneconomical due to the location of Iceland.
On the other hand Bitcoin mining is possible from any place on Earth with an internet connection and therefore it
is a great use of renewable energy that is abundant in countries like Iceland or Canada (countries like Norway would
be great, too, but energy prices are too high there).

Bitcoin will never drop to a level that is as low as 1000 $ / BTC again.

In my opinion the following 2 reasons make a scenario like you describe impossible:

1. The Bitcoin price is dependent on the performance of the paired fiat currency. Just take a
look at the loss of the purchasing power of the $ over the last 100 years and you will see that
even if Bitcoin doesn´t really do anything the BTC/USD price will simply rise, because the $ falls in value.
An asset with a perfect monetary policy can´t really lose against fiat currencies with a terrible
monetary policy.

2. The miners (and other parties) are heavily incentivized to prevent Bitcoin from dropping
below the average cost of mining a single Bitcoin.

You can find the full argument in another thread where I already elaborated this theory of mine:
Why the Bitcoin price is not going to fall below a certain price point

The fee estimator by coinb.in is great!

However, I think that the following fee estimator is even better:
https://whatthefee.io/

Given the fact that their previous spam attacks didn´t have the desired effect and Bitcoin
Cash hasn´t gained any popularity I doubt that they will try a similar attack again.

There is just no reason for them to waste lots of money - even though they get back a
share of the transaction fees that a spam attack costs - if even a congested Bitcoin
blockchain didn´t cause people to switch to using Bitcoin Cash.

Therefore I don´t think that we will see a spam attack of this proportions again.

I completely agree with the decision of the Nano team. You can´t seriously expect that we will see
a rollback of the respective blockchain everytime that an exchange gets hacked.

This would undermine all trust in the currencies that do this on their ledger and destroy one
of the main features of a blockchain (immutability).

Besides, this could open up a scam opportunity where an exchange operator can claim that
his exchange was hacked just to siphon off the funds himself and end up getting bailed out by a blockchain rollback.

Apparently Bitfinex is banking with the Dutch Bank ING now:
https://www.coindesk.com/dutch-bank-ing-confirms-bitfinex-account/

This seems to be the first real banking relationship with a big bank
since Wells Fargo dropped Bitfinex. Of course Coindesk is not particularly impartial
regarding everything that is related to Bitfinex, but this is still good news
for every BFX customer.

After all having no real banking relationship for months and later having only accounts at tiny
banks in Poland and Portugal was one of the major red flags for Bitfinex.

As I already argued in another thread this news can probably be at least
partly explained by the fact that Poland is an extremely religious country that has
become even more conservative under the current government.

Making a paid FUD video is just in line with other videos against stuff like trading,
online gambling or other activities that are not endorsed by a country that is growing
more conservative.

They want people to work hard for a wage that they can heavily tax instead of gambling
huge money on the price movements of cryptocurrency.