I have always found these claims of ultra secure chips with special storage that neither the manufacturer or any malicious software can gain access to, to be just a marketing feature to keep people quiet.

Chances are that the manufacturer of the chip has left a backdoor for the government to enter, which is why I will not ever touch Huawei phones as there is a higher risk of this to actually be the case. Better safe than sorry.

Thank you for your post Carlton, I do appreciate the time it took you to give me and other readers an insight as to how things work under the hood. I'm out of merit so I can only show my appreciation this way.

I'm not sure what gave you that impression, but services don't give a shizzle about KYC/AML.... services comply with regulations because they are forced to do so, all because the government wants more control.

For a long time a lot of services were free to use without any type of personal information. BTC-E had a daily withdrawal limit of 100BTC before they were shut down, a limit which they had for several years and it worked just fine.

I miss these old times.... I'm sure that if BTC-E was still up and running and continued with their non KYC service, it would be one heck of a popular exchange today. Government agencies are the real criminals. That's a fact.

I'm sure that at least based on the number of transactions, mixers in general are used more for non illegal activities. There is more demand than ever for privacy with how most services nowadays use KYC/AML procedures.

If there are no more mixers, you can say goodbye to your privacy, so hope that governments won't be able to shut down more mixers. Criminals don't need mixers, ordinary people do, which governments don't want so they chase after them.

The Euro is a joke, and I'm using it every single day, which is the worst part.... I rather hold anything nominated in USD value than EUR value, because it's bound to keep falling with no end in sight.

If you held an asset nominated in EUR throughout the last couple of years, you lost big time, while most assets nominated in USD saw their value increase. It's clear that the USD is where you can find most of the confidence.

It's more likely that we will fall back to the gold standard than see a EUR standard become a real thing, especially with how I believe that there isn't a single fiat currency that can do well with the USD imploding.

I think the main part contributing to that is how widely discussed this subject has been, where we have reached a point where a lot of wannabe investors have prepared themselves for a crisis to unfold once again.

The general rule however is that when there is such a mass scale preparing going on for a crisis, you can be close to certain that it won't be happening any time soon, especially not with how much money is being printed.

Money printing can keep the economy up and running for another 5-10 years.... the thing however is that it only makes the crisis that will eventually happen even more of a danger, and it will hit everyone when it isn't expected.

Retailers are generally losers when it comes to trading (percentage wise over 90%), the asset or the type of instrument they use doesn't really matter in the long run.... people either lose their capital slowly or very fast.

I see similar questions pop up more often nowadays, all because of how silly clowns on social media claiming to be TA experts pretend to make a lot of money, while the reality is obviously very different.

It doesn't only affect the crypto space, but also the forex space where brokers pop up and disappear just as frequently as some of the shitcoin exchanges here do.... there is no shortage of noobs to scam apparently.

I dare to question that.... I mean, every single exchange has been hacked and lost a shit ton of coins in the process, so it's not far fetched at all to at least consider the scenario of them being hacked.

Coinbase has a lot on the line in terms of reputation, because the general assumption is that they are never hacked and that their security is top notch, and this provides them enough incentives to never admit that they have been hacked.

I wouldn't hope for anything in November and December months, because if you go back in time, these are usually the months where Bitcoin is losing a lot value, and that can stretch out all the way to January and February.

It's a great time if you are out to accumulate as many coins as possible, but for hodlers it generally isn't a great time.... how likely is it for a market to not do the same thing it did in almost every single previous year? I say very likely.

The current price action where the price dips below and jumps above the $8k mark is very similar to the price action we had at the $10k mark.... once we fall further the next stop is likely $2k lower, so the $6k mark.

It's something no one should worry about.... there was a debate between Bitcoin and BSV proponents not that long ago, where the BSV camp pointed out how ridiculous it is that a Core dev was brainstorming about more inflation.

I'm pretty sure that most of the fud is coming from that direction because they know very well that brainstorming sessions of developers are just brain farts mostly, and never to actually be proposed in a serious manner. Fud galore!

It's quite fascinating how fast technology can progress, because initially it indeed looked quite unrealistic to see a phone run a full node, but the exponential growth of technology keeps shutting people up every single time.

I wonder what the next step is.... how realistic is it that we can see full LN nodes run on a phone within 2 years? It's one thing to run a regular node, but the dynamics of LN I imagine require additional security features and tweaks.

It's safe to say that most competent traders will stay while the not so competent traders will indeed leave the market after having lost a lot of money.... it also happens in the legacy markets where as always retailers suffer the most.

Overall, most traders always lose over a longer period of time, so even if the sentiment within a certain market changes drastically for the better, the freshly booked profits will never nullify the losses traders booked before that.

All you need in crypto is chart to trade.... fundamentals are meaningless because the price will reflect whether a project has great or poor fundamentals, which traders then trade until their markets become too illiquid.

In most cases, when the claims made by the project are too good to be true, then they mostly are. I know it's very interesting to invest in a project claiming to change the world or be the next this or that coin, but it's just too much.

Other than the obvious signs as mentioned above, it's hard to seperate scams from legit but just badly executed ideas. In both cases you will end up losing a lot of money if you went in deep.

If we look back at most projects and what they have turned into, then it's safe to say that most ended up making a lot of people lose a lot of money, where a minority of them made a select few extremely wealthy.

It's largely based on luck to find an actually good project because you will only find out how good or bad a project is after a year or so.

Well said.... people have bought into hopes and dreams that were impossible to realize within such a short period of time. Instead of golden mountains people ended up with a pile of dirt valued way less today.

It's not that I blame people for thinking big after what happened to Ethereum's price, but bubbles do burst even in the crypto space.... no one is entitled to anything despite the general assumption being that.

I don't mess around with altcoins but for Ethereum I made an exception. I can see it do well in the coming years, especially if POS makes it through. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only coins that make sense to hold.... the rest is crap.

Controlling emotions is a difficult task and requires people to have a rational---unbiased state of mind, which you clearly don't have because you are deep enough invested to feel uncomfortable as the price drops lower and lower.

Maybe that you can look into how shorting works, because it provides some sort of an insurance policy in case the market turns against your hodl position. That way bear markets are easier to go through because it makes you money.

Obviously, don't use crazy leverage mutipliers but one that allows you to ride the market down without being worrying about being stopped out. I would say anything below 5x will help you accomplishing that.

We share a similar opinion, but one that's less popular because you will only satisfy people by saying that we will break through the $20k mark before the end of the year, while that obviously isn't going to happen at all.

We have seen the price go up way more than many expected, so why are people so upset that the price is taking a healthy step back? Instead of complaining start accumulating....

If you in January would have told people that we would see $14k this year, they would tell you to seek professional help. Everyone was expecting the price to fall under the $3k mark and bottom out just under/above $1k.

It's kinda exciting because it's a lot of value that's being moved back and forth, and then we have the speculators keeping an eye on large coin movements, especially when they are being sent to an exchange.

I used to follow whale alert on twitter but it has turned into a spam fest where each large transaction post is cluttered with "they will buy XRP" or "they will buy ADA" posts. Altcoiners must be super desperate to post crap like that.

It's all people know, and they also rely on the safety provided by centralized financial institutions because people make a lot of mistakes leading to a loss of money, get scammed, and so on.... most of which will be refunded to people.

In crypto there is no such a thing as being refunded, because every mistake that leads to a loss of money is permanent and people don't want to deal with that.... they want to be spoon fed and looked after.

I never really worry about using my banking app to pay for something online, while I constantly worry about using my mobile Bitcoin client and triple check everything to make sure I haven't made a mistake somewhere. It's a pretty big deal.

No one should be interested in it anymore as there has not been any growth at all during the days that they were fully operational.... isn't that the definition of a flop? Why not just call it a failure instead of hoping that it will pick up later?

Bakkt for today has generated 6 whole Bitcoins in volume, and that after the decent price action we had yesterday.... one would expect that it motivates traders to speculate for or against it, but nope, Bakkt is still doing absolutely nothing.

Binance was crowned to be the best exchange to have ever existed last year, while people are now slowly shifting back and start to see flaws in the way they operate.... that's a good thing because it makes people not blindly trust them anymore.

If we look at the 0.0005BTC withdrawal fee, it's much better than BTC-Es 0.001BTC, and much better than Yobit's 0.0012BTC. I would actually be quite happy with 0.0005BTC IMHO, but people as always want to pay close to zero in fees....

People are like a bunch of sheeps repeating what others are saying just to be part of the herd.... there is so much more to Libra than people think or care about, but because everyone is almost indoctrinated to think against it, they don't see it.

I like the fact that major fiat currencies and financial institutions are now facing a new competitor with the potential to accumulate so much power, that it can make them obsolete in a matter of years.

Isn't that what people support Bitcoin or pretty much any other crypto currency for? I would love to see Libra launch and take over a system that has never really been challenged by anything simply because they didn't had the numbers Facebook has.