The SEC cares about these things only;

- Is the ETF running on a trustworthy platform? Check.
- Can it prosecute manipulators through CBOE? Check.
- Can it prosecute manipulators through the exchanges assigned to function as price tracker and custodian provider? Check.
- Is the ETF backed by the underlying asset? Check.

The odds of an approval have never been this high. If CBOE manages to get that approval, you can be sure that CME will follow.

A few very worthwhile quotes from the stock market bad boys that really apply to current crypto market;


I like this one especially, because all get rich quick rookies are only feeding the elite focosed on the long term. You can't beat the short term market, you'll get blasted off your funds by people smarter and richer than you. Just buy coins, sit on them, and not touch them for at least 6-12 months. Don't try to take advantage of an extremely unpredictable market. The risks are not worth it. We are here to build our own wealth, not further build up the wealth of the elite.

That's a very bad sign for anyone using that exchange.

In most cases when exchanges start to operate massive premiums over the rest of the market, people one way or another face serious difficulties getting funds out. Considering that it is only the USD value of all coins (BTC ratios are normal), it's pretty safe to say that there is almost no way to get USD out of that exchange, and thus it's pretty much worthless.

These exchanges are a real plague for this entire industry.

It is less subject to theft if you take all factors and risks of centralized exchanges in consideration, but decentralized exchanges being more secure doesn't mean they are fort knox.

People complain about centralized exchanges and demand decentralized exchanges to take over, then ill minded individuals focus decentralized exchanges and people start complaining about them as well, and what comes after that? We must accept the fact that hackers are after our coins, and for that reason they will continue to up their game and find ways to steal them.

The future is atomic swaps and LN will be the pioneer in that regard. Why use an exchange when you can be your own exchange? It will take time for proper large scale deployment, but the result will be more than worthwhile. Atomic swaps (BTC><LTC) are already possible, but not recommended to toy around with for the average user.

The futures markets shouldn't *yet* be taken seriously. People think they are important and manipulative because the price went down after CME went live with its markets. For some odd reason people don't believe that this market can move without it being manipulated or influenced by external elements. The mainstream media made the futures markets look like a monster, and they add fuel to the fire by pointing out that the tulip bulb mania ended when futures were introduced.

Let's look at the volumes of the futures markets of yesterday.

CBOE; 1117 contracts worth 1117BTC = $7,000,000
CME; 1740 contracts worth 8700BTC = $54,000,000

Bitcoin's 24H volume $3,500,000,000

These future markets aren't even enough to tickle Ethereum.

No one is and can be perfect in trading. Stop being delusional. All the experienced traders people mostly refer to, aren't traders but just bots doing the work for you.

Humans are slow, suffer from emotions, can't process years worth of data in a second, etc; properly crafted bot can do all that, and that 24/7/365 as long as the exchange itself and your hosting provider remains up and running. People suck at trading, which is why you barely see any individual traders on wall street. The smartest and quickest bots win, where the location of their servers is crucial too.

Within a few years this whole market will account for 95% bot trades and the rest consists of poor retail souls catching the knife more often than not.

All these intermediary fees are retarded as heck. I remember a couple of years ago to have sent €500 euros converted to NZD to someone's NZ bank account, and it cost me €60 in total. I ended up paying €560 just to move €500 worth of a foreign currency to someone's bank account, and it took 8 business days before it even posted. I just now calculated the fees and the estimated number of days before the same transaction will be fully processed, and nothing even changed. This is fucking 2018 not 2000!!

I'm glad that 90% of my business activities nowadays are based on Bitcoin. No one should cope with this tyranny.

It has always been like this. Technically, PayPal isn't doing anything wrong since they abide by the laws within each jurisdiction they are open for business.

The main reason for PayPal to not immediately do anything about the fake registrations is that it economically accounts for a large enough percentage of their revenue/income model. If they force people to immediately upon registration verify themselves with ID and all that, people will move away and PayPal will miss out on a lot fee income. It's a business at the end of the day, which for them is reason enough to allow this. Income is income.

If we look at how things have worked out for crypto related businesses that did actually started to force people to ID verify themselves out of nothing, then it's not good.

What's left of Poloniex after they did it? Not much.
What's left of Bittrex after they did it? Not much.

Facebook accounts can be created with fake details easily, so that's not really a valid way to look at things.

Again, you can just use your account set up with fake details, and I can buy a prepaid telephone number for just €1. In the end you can always choose to not use certain apps or services asking for ridiculous amounts of very precious information.

I use a PayPal account set up with fake details to transact in case I have to, and it works like a charm. I pay someone with a PayPal account in Cash to send a certain amount of PayPal dollars to my account, and then I complete whatever transaction that needs to be completed. The only downside of this is that there is a monetary limit till PayPal starts asking you to verify yourself, but then I dump that account and create a new one. PayPal is technically a bank, but their harsh measures can be easily avoided and abused.

And yes, I am technically abusing their service. I am not using it for illegal activities, but if I can create a PayPal account that easily, so can terrorists, scammers, money launderers, etc.

Not all investors expect quick profits. It may seem like so, but that's only because of the large number of equal minded noobs pooling their thoughts and motives together here. The far majority of the realistic and long term investors don't bother to share their plan of approach, and why should they? It's none of anyone's business.

Don't hope and don't expect anything. Hope and expectations only result in disappointment.

It's unlikely, but not impossible.

Walls? Buy walls? Whatever it is that you are referring to, other than the few potential support levels that you can look at, and hope that they will actually turn out to be that, there is nothing that will keep the price above $5000 if the market really goes for it. I personally don't think it will dip under $5000 but we can't take anything for granted in this market.

Demand on exchanges has only been decreasing, while the real demand (capital), is flowing into this market through the OTC channels. Unfortunately for people, OTC demand doesn't reflect the price on the regular exchange market, unless the OTC market dries up completely and the demand shifts back to exchanges.

If there somehow is a problem concerning regulations, then the lack of clarity would be it.

Back in 2013 there was no such a thing as regulatory pressure. After the peak the market corrected back to way more appropriate levels, and the same is happening right now. There is no single reason responsible for the decline other than it being a healthy correction and that the market has to eat through the excess of coins that have been pumped into circulation, and this takes time. Currently we have gone through the correction part largely, and now it's a matter of getting rid of the circulating coins.

Regardless of how long it takes, it will only make Bitcoin stronger and it increases its base value. The fewer people hold coins they bought between $1-$1000 the stronger the market will become, because these coins will be bought by people paying at least $6000 for them. That's why I like these peaks, if there is one way to tempt old hands to sell, then it's a crazy ass bull run.

Sub $5000 will definitely squeeze out week hands. However, between $5000-$5500 there are several points at which support will kick in, so the likeliness of a sub $5000 visit is pretty small, and if it happens, it will only be a brief occurrence. People likely won't be able to buy it unless they pre-set their buy orders just in case, but then again, if more people do that, there is less incentive to dump the price down below the $5000 level.

In the end the only thing that matters is what is my risk and what is my reward based on my investment target.

Simple calculation based on what I have written above.

Buy at $6000 and price drops to $5000 = virtual short term loss of $1000.
Buy at $6000 and price increases to $50,000 in the coming year or two = virtual long term gain of $43,000.

Even if it drops to $3000 (won't happen, but just as an example) your virtual loss is still $3000 versus a $43,000 gain later on.

In other words, Bitcoin is a strong buy right now already.

That. I used Bitcoin as hedge to get rid of a large part of my Euros when the rate was hovering around EUR1=USD1.36'ish. The Euro dropped well below $1.10 three times after that, now who's stupid here? If I can do that easily, and today Bitcoin is way more accessible than it was back in 2014, everyone can.

People just need to let go of their retarded mentality that Bitcoin isn't issued by whatever central bank and for that reason isn't trustworthy or 'backed' by anything. It's exactly the other way around. The sooner smart people start to understand that, the lower their exposure to this toxic system is. The rest will keep wandering around asking themselves why they only get poorer. Open your fucking eyes.

No one has to go full nuts on Bitcoin. Just a tiny (1-3%) allocation of your wealth to Bitcoin is already enough to counter the negative aspects of fiat.

Bump.

People know that and still use it by large numbers because of the lack of alternatives. Exchanges nowadays are subject to more and more regulations, and the only options for people not willing to go through that shit is to use exchanges ignoring regulatory requirements, and then you are just left with Yobit, Hitbtc, Cryptopia, etc. All these exchanges are very similar to each other, but people have to choose which one is the least scummy and go for that.

The only way for this nonsense to end is to have regulators raid the crap out of them. If they can't hit the exchanges directly, then they will target their hosting providers and seize everything they can there. These exchanges are literally a ticking time bomb.

I do agree that bots allow you to have the trading be done for you without your emotions being an obstacle, but the problem with bots that people can buy or rent licenses from, are programmed to do what the programmer wants them to do. If you have enough people running these bots on certain exchanges, it will pretty easily allow the issuer of these bots to obtain a massive economical advantage since they exactly know how these bots react in various scenarios.

It's something not many people think about, but it's a major flaw that might end up costing you dearly in the end. It would be more of a surprise to find out that these bots aren't being exploited by the issuer, than them being exploited.

The thing is that running 50,000TPS through a blockchain is technically possible, it's however not very healthy in a decentralized way. People quite often forget that every on-chain transaction needs to be validated and recorded in the blockchain that every node/computer has to save an exact copy of. In a decentralized network nodes aren't equal to each other and don't run on high end systems, this is a 'weakness' impossible to overcome.

The only way to scale beyond Visa & Co is to use second layers that aren't stressing the network and don't clutter the blockchain. Bitcoin's LN is already progressing and should be capable of processing millions of transactions per second. We still have to see how it works in reality and what its throughput is really capable of, but I'm very excited and confident. To add; Visa & Co use second and third layers as well, so we're definitely not unique in that aspect.

It all depends on the moment you enter as always, and the risk>reward ratio you are willing to expose yourself to.

If you bought Gold like 5 years ago, you are down ~2% plus 5 years worth of loss in purchasing power on top of that. People should accept that Gold in current form just won't perform well to the degree it did years and years ago. It has reached a point at which it will likely continue to stabilize and pretty much swallow everything that governments and other entities throw at it. It's one of the most liquid markets in existence. If people really believe it will increase another 100% in the coming 5-10 years they are delusional.

And then we don't even know what Bitcoin will do as the digital equivalent of Gold. It might very well grab a very large chunk of Gold's market to further suppress it.

The manipulator = bots (controlled by whatever entities) respecting resistance points.

I think it's safe to say that the market this year has more than ever been controlled by bots rather than retailers. The market right now is far too calculated and stable in comparison to how the market was behaving last year. This is the direct result of professionals entering this space and probably will control and stabilize it further in the forthcoming years, especially if they manage to squeeze retailers out of their positions which is only a matter of time.

Bitcoin knocked on the door of wall street and now we'll get it in full glory.