This is what I was going to say. Day-to-day or even week-to-week market movements can be very misleading when they are divorced from context.

In order to understand what is really happening, it's essential to look at longer time periods. The December 2017 peak was huge, and the market fall after that took a long time and drained a huge amount of value. There was a big recovery since then, and we are now on the inevitable down-slope after that recovery. Following this, I expect another upturn, just maybe not quite yet.

There is no point in panicking each time we enter a downwards part of the cycle, especially if the overall trend measured over many years is still upwards.

The market has ups and downs, we all know that crypto prices are volatile. There are crazy highs and despair-inducing lows. What I think is happening now is a part of the natural reaction to the end of the bear market back in February this year. We had a big price recovery - mainly for BTC but also to an extent for alts. What we are in now is the dip that follows that recovery. I think that so long as prices don't drop down to what they were back in February, then we can still consider the overall trend to be upwards.

ETH for me has a lot more potential than a BTC fork. ETH so far has mainly been used as an ICO platform, but smart contracts have vast potential beyond that. We've barely even touched what they can do yet. Whereas Bitcoin-insert-whatever-suffix-you-like is just a pointless money-grabbing chain split. So for me, if it's a choice between the two for the long-term, then I would go with ETH every time. Of course if we're talking about short-term trading instead, it's a different question and the answer depends more on what the coin is doing at that particular moment in time.

I think all alts are low vs BTC right now, and they will all recover together. I don't think there is any specific reason why LTC is so low, it's just that all alts are moving (or not moving) together.

The reason I think is market confidence. It's not high enough yet for people to move from BTC to alts. It might take a bit of upwards price movement on BTC before alts start to recover - but the longer this goes on, and the wider the gap grows, then the more pressure there will be on alts to increase in price. Difficult to see a precise tipping-point really.

I would recommend to get an accountant who is able to handle crypto. There are some about. Or if you've not done many trades then you might be able to work out your tax yourself. This comes under capital gains in the UK. There is a minimum allowance of £12k for the 19-20 year ( https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/rates ), so you'd only be taxed on gains above this threshold. The rate I believe is 10% or 20% depending on your tax band. Again though, get an expert to look into it if you can't yourself. If you have conducted a huge number of trades, it might be difficult to work out what you owe, but I would imagine that HMRC are happy with a best-endeavours approach, given that crypto tax is a bit of a grey area. I have paid some CGT on crypto gains myself.

Yes, that's important. The more cautious people are, the more they wait until buying in. Obviously if you wait too long, the price is too high.

If you want to make a profit in anything, it is generally important to get in early, when the risks are higher, and a lot more depends on your individual assessment of the potential future, rather than hard evidence. It's a question of judgement and risk-taking, and also of being insightful enough to see what it might become, and to assess the likelihood of that happening.

A thing is either a store of value or it isn't, there's not really any halfway state. I think he means that he's partially convinced that bitcoin is a store of value, i.e. he has reservations about it, i.e. he is backtracking partially on previous statements.

Bitcoin is a store of value, it's just that there are several issues at the moment that prevent being as good a store of value as gold or even USD. Not least of which is the price volatility.

It is the fault of the people running the economy - so the government. It all comes down to inequality between generations, and the fact that this is growing.

In practice, yes, it is the baby-boomer generation's fault for not making decisions now to reduce inequality. And it is the fault of the generation before that, who were in charge when the baby-boomers were young, for not foreseeing that inequality would grow and taking steps to prevent it at the time. Obviously this is all complicated by the fact that economies are interdependent, and so impossible to control entirely. Nevertheless steps could have been taken but were not.

Inequality is a huge and growing problem. More and more wealth is being accumulated by the rich at the expense of the poor. It is the fault of the governments who make and have made these decisions. In democracies, it is also the fault of the electorate who vote these governments into power.

I think the influence of whales is often over-stated. If prices start to plummet, I think this is often because a small drop has triggered a mass panic, and a lot of people are selling small amounts. It's not the case that every time crypto drops in price the cause is some nefarious billionaire. Of course crypto markets can be manipulated, particularly with low volume coins, but I think actual reasons for price changes are more mundane and more due to a herd mentality and to people being understandably jittery and trigger-happy given what has happened with previous crashes.

Something is either a store of value or it isn't, there's no 'partial' to it, that doesn't make sense.

Bitcoin is a store of value, it's just not universally recognised as such. And yes it has certain problems and difficulties associated with it, price fluctuations being the most obvious example, but that doesn't make it a partial store of value. That's like saying that you can't spend a bar of gold at the local shop, so it's only partially of value.

It doesn't make sense to use the word partial in this situation - unless of course you are trying to backtrack on some comments about crypto that you've made previously, but only want to partially backtrack...

I think the recent movements we've seen are not really too bad. Yes prices for most coins are still a long way below ATH, but conversely they have also risen significantly since the bottom of the bear market back in Feb. The overall trend viewed over years is still upwards, I don't think we should concern ourselves too much if BTC drops from $10k to $8k, given the lows of earlier this year, and that it was $20k in the last bull. Recent drops are just turbulence in the pattern, and don't really have much if any bearing on where we are going in the long term.

A nice quote, thanks. I think this is a good demonstration of the fact that a lot of the problem with judging things or people from the outside is the difference in perspective. Someone who is 80 years old will have a view of the world that is heavily influenced by the value systems he developed when he was growing up, which relates in large part to the values of the society of that time. An 80 year old judging a 20 year old will always find the youngster lacking in some way, because he is measuring someone against a value system that is not relevant to that person. An 80 year old likely grew up thinking that environmental issues were the sort of thing that hampers the industrialisation of a society, whereas to a 20 year old environmental issues relate to survivability on the planet due to global warming.  One human judging another (or a group of others) will always have an opinion that is skewed by their own value system.

I feel strongly that a lot of the problems that millennials and younger generations face and will face are not of their own making.  It is undeniable that jobs now are less secure and less well paid, that university tuition is far more expensive and that housing is also far more expensive. Also as they get older they will face more problems not of their own making, such as worse pensions and of course global warming / climate change.

However they also have opportunities that other generations have not had. Crypto is one of these.

I think whatever generation you are from, you will face opportunities and challenges, and the key to a successful life is to face these with a sense of responsibility for your own actions. Different people and different generations are dealt different hands in the game of life - the important thing is to make the best of the hand you've been dealt.

These all have the same causes: rising inequality in society, and the ridiculous inflation of house prices.



Not sure if this is true or not, but it's plausible as younger people are generally more tech-savvy than older generations, and millennials probably have a bit more money to spend on crypto than do younger adults.
If they do spend more on bitcoin, then that might be their way out of the situation they find themselves in in the first set of points. Buying bitcoin is I think a good financial decision for the long-term.

We are still waiting for an altcoin bull run to start. Every time we get some upwards movement, prices quickly pull back to previous levels. I do think we are set for a break one way or another. The longer we stay in a tight price band like this, the more likely it is that we will have a decisive breakout. The question is whether this will be downwards or upwards. It is support rather than resistance that is being tested at the moment, which suggests there is a lot of downwards pressure, which might make drops more likely than rises.

Longer-term, alts do look undervalued vs bitcoin, so I'd still anticipate an alt bull at some point - just maybe not yet.

One reason that governments don't like crypto is because it is borderless. This can impact severely on their ability to control and direct their economy. Say the national government wants to increase interest rates by 1% ... how does this work when a large chunk of the economy uses bitcoin rather than the national currency? This is one of the objections they have to the Facebook coin. Crypto takes power away from governments.

XRP is weird in that there is often good news that should reflect in the coin price, but doesn't. Some of this is no doubt due to the dumping of extra tokens into circulation by Ripple. This is a contentious issue. However the XRP price does look too low at present relative to BTC and ETH. In the short-term I would not be surprised to see it rise anywhere up to about 75% of ETH market cap. Longer-term anything is possible, but the outlook I think is good for XRP to remain top 3 in cap.

Binance are doing an excellent job, and BNB is certainly a promising coin, but I can't see it overtaking ETH.

A lot of what Binance offers is 'current', whilst most of ETH's potential price is in 'future' functionality - I don't mean stuff that it can't offer now but will in the future, but rather integration of smart contracts into the mainstream. I think 5G may help to start this off, as it should lead to big developments in IoT, and IoT is perfect for smart contracts.

https://www.coindesk.com/what-the-next-4-years-of-ethereum-look-like

This is a good summary of where we are and where we're going. It's a couple of months old, but much of it is still valid and it seems to me a pretty solid assessment. We should base our opinions of ETH more on what it is and where it is going, rather than on short-term speculation-driven price changes. ETH price at the moment is low because all alts are low. I do expect it to recover.

That is a common tactic, yes, but I think in the UK there is more to it. This can be traced back to David Cameron becoming PM. What happened was the Lib Dems secured a big chunk of the vote in the election (by positioning themselves as more left-wing than Labour), which meant that Labour or the Conservatives could only govern as part of a coalition with the Lib Dems. So the Lib Dems basically decided which party would form the government. They chose to join up with Cameron and the Conservatives, and their price for doing so was that a referendum be held for the Alternative Vote system, a sort of Proportional-Representation-Lite. Cameron gladly agreed, with a simple strategy that as soon as the referendum got started he would campaign vigorously against it - and his plan worked perfectly. Only Oxford and Cambridge I think (obvious high IQ hot-spots) voted in favour, almost all of the rest of the country voted against, and AV lost by a landslide.

Come the next election, the Conservatives faced a threat from UKIP, the party that wanted to leave the EU. So Cameron thought he'd just do the same trick again. He'd siphon off the UKIP vote by promising the Conservatives would have a Brexit referendum, then he'd campaign vigorously against leaving the EU, and win, as he did with AV.

Except he fucked up, lost, and then quit rather than face the consequences.

It really irritates me that the Lib Dems now position themselves as being the party of Remain, when these are the bastards who put Cameron in power and caused the leave vote in the first place. I'm not a fan of the Tories - but at least they are fairly honest about being evil. The Lib Dems shift about like crazy and have no policies or beliefs beyond whatever they think will get them some votes.