I honestly don't care, and I strongly wish them the best of luck with whatever they transform into.

I'm already at a point where I conduct way more Bitcoin transactions than legacy bank transactions, and if the price in the coming years becomes a bit more stable and usable to pay may bills with, I will ditch them completely.

The only reason I currently use a bank is because of the following reasons;

# The price is not stable enough.
# My employer doesn't pay in Bitcoin (yet).
# I can't pay my bills in Bitcoin (yet).
# Local stores don't accept Bitcoin through LN (yet).

If these factors change, it's adios banks for me. I'm happy that I have never subjected myself to debt, so I am at least free from that poison.

Common mistakes that have been there for decades and people still haven't learned anything.

We just have to accept that people inherently cause more harm than good to themselves and their environment. It all comes down to the situation and the event that makes people end up doing something they otherwise wouldn't do. If you have to make a split second decision, the majority of the people will drop all their initial values and just go with what they at that point consider to be the best option to go for.

It's either a good or bad decision. It can't always be a good one, so one way or another, they will end up making the common rookie mistake anyway.

Just let it happen. People learn from mistakes, not from lists.

Do they require double confirmations on all transactions or just the higher ones? As far as I know merchants using BitPay can manually adjust the number of confirmations per x amount. I know that when it concerns higher value transactions BitPay by default only subjects merchants to 1 confirmation, where everything else is manually set by the merchant itself. I'm sure that with enough demand they can lower it to just 1 confirmation, but we don't know how confident they are in Bitcoin to do that.

Downside of BitPay is that they charge a ridiculous extra fee. It's not ridiculous as per its value, but more that they find it necessary to charge it. I'm sure Roger has something to do with this.

I actually like that. Funny thing is that all these coins focus on Bitcoin, and completely disregard other altcoin competitors, which is a real killer in a market like this.

Bitcoin has the first mover advantage, it's the base of everything, people use it as safe haven during altcoin dumps, etc.

Ethereum on the other hand is as vulnerable as any other altcoin, its size doesn't really matter. People constantly make fun of EOS, but I am quite certain that when they get everything up and running (regardless of how scummy and centralized they are), they will outplay Ethereum in every possible way. In that regard I am seriously considering massively shorting Ethereum at the moment EOS gets its shit together.

Another important aspect is that EOS holds billions worth of Ether that they can convert back to EOS at any time, or even dump for BTC or USD.

Interesting times are to be expected. 

It's a 50/50 situation actually.

We have gone down so much from near the $10,000 level early May, that there was only one way for the market to move in the short term, and that was up. I even mentioned that like 10'ish days ago and went long under $6000 and it worked pretty well. It's not because I knew it was going to happen, but the likeliness of it to happen increased, and based on that it was a risk worth taking. In this market you wait for the best possible odds, and then you strike.

The downtrend however is still intact, and can remain intact even if we do cross the $8000 level in the coming weeks or months. The only thing an increase does is slow down the downtrend, but that's really it. Just don't expect anything from the market and you'll be fine. Average your buys on a weekly or monthly basis is the least risky way to buy into this market.

With current investors are you referring to the empty headed baboons complaining about the price fall? If so then yes. If you are referring to investors in general, then definitely not.

Investors with basic level thinking capabilities and market understanding know when to enter and when to just wait, or even short. These are the people you don't see or hear, because they know what they do and have confidence in what they do. It's always the get rich quick noobs and other sheeps you see complain. The main difference is that investors are accumulating at current levels, and noobs are still doubting whether or not to sell. 

It may seem ridiculous, but it's the government we're talking about, they are kings when it comes to legal extortion, so in that regard I'm not that surprised at all. I live in Europe, which is quite a friendly and civilized continent to live in, and we have had certain tax proposals that were just as ridiculous, but they luckily weren't accepted.

If people continue to abide by the law of their government and show no will to move away from that toxic roadmap, then prepare for worse in the forthcoming years. The underlying problem of everything is the mass licking to government's ass, and as long as that continues, they are basically working towards their own end.

Unfortunately, that's a starter pack doomed to fail. They do believe in hypes. They do believe in predictions. They don't have their own plan.

Newbies thrive on luck, which may grant them some profits here and there, but eventually that luck will run out and they leave with empty pockets. The far majority of the active participants in the crypto economy only lose.

The less active you are, the more there is to gain for you, especially in the long run; your coins gain value, and you can short the market at least once or twice a year. What more can you wish for? People building up wealth in a slower manner will always outperform the majority only paying attention to the short term. Trading the short term market only benefits a few people, the rest will regret having even attempted to trade, or they are too stupid to realize and continue to burn themselves.

Currently everything is still in beta, and technically, right now you can only swap BTC>LTC and vice versa. I am sure that we'll be seeing a whole lot more LN innovation in the coming months, but we need to have patience. Coins don't necessarily need Segwit (it however is highly recommended to run Segwit when it comes to Bitcoin forks) to implement LN, which makes LN a whole lot easier to deploy on a large scale.

Everything is far too techie right now and too 'buggy' to completely trust. Great thing about LN is that everyone can build on it, so it's not related to just one camp that is responsible for development, we all to a certain extent could be. That's why we don't have to deal with nonsensical scaling discussions anymore. We want it, we can do it.

If you are sure that the price will recover and reach another all time high, why is it alarming that the price is going down in the short term? Can't the market just correct and settle around more appropriate (realistic) levels? It's actually quite funny to see how people are panicking about the market going down, but they all have "confidence" in the market to recover. If that confidence was genuine, you wouldn't panic but celebrate buying discounted coins right now.

Calculated risks yes, based on knowledge. Not risks based on hopes and dreams.

LN will be the trigger for Bitcoin's currency aspect.

Some people as counter argument tend to say that LN isn't you transacting in Bitcoin, but what are you transacting with when you are using your debit card or banking app? You aren't actually using the underlying asset, but just a layer that is meant to tackle scaling issues. The only way for you to transact with the underlying asset in fiat is to conduct cash transactions, everything else is just based on layer technology. That's what makes fiat such a great payment tool, and the same goes up for Bitcoin with a widely deployed LN.

On-chain transactions and other data storage = slow but guaranteed death for decentralized incentives.

That's certainly possible through LN, just like it is through OTC markets.

The only thing you need is people to trade on exchanges to set the price, and that will always continue to happen. The markets (LN and OTC) operating outside the reach of exchanges will adapt and move with every increase or decrease, which is called the market effect. No one wants to have its coins listed too expensive, because people won't be buying them, and no one wants to have its coins listed too cheap, because you'll be out of coins quickly.

I am sure that with time LN trades will and can settle faster than a trade does through centralized exchanges right now.

None. It just doesn't feel good to convince merchants to accept something I am not willing to spend.

On the other hand, I made dozens of people in my circle familiar with and accept Bitcoin, which they are now heavily into, and these people are sharing their knowledge with their friends, and so forth. It has become a means of payment from peer to peer for people conducting transactions through the internet.

For local payments it's not convenient yet. As long as my legacy debit card does a better job than Bitcoin, I'll keep using that, and I'm sure a lot others are with me on this.

Because people are as much of an idiot as McAfee himself is. If you buy into the rubbish he is granting shine through his Twitter account, you're a straight sheeple without any self respect and thinking capabilities. If McAfee can make you buy into whatever rubbish, then pretty much anyone with a large following can do. Greed has taken over nearly everything crypto stands, which is pretty destructing in my opinion.

Also, I thought that he was a billionaire, but it seems that he isn't. He's a fairly common multi millionaire with a net worth well below $10 million according to various sources. This pretty much explains why he's accepting payments for Twitter promotion. I was wondering why a billionaire would ever do that, but it's clear now. He's not a billionaire. 

It's funny how people are trying to stand up as if they know everything; where were you before all this started? You were probably one of the plenty enjoying the ride up, and now you got burned, you act all bitter. These cycles come and go and are impossible to time and impossible to figure out what exactly caused them, other than the obvious.

In the end all these gigantic pumps are equal to each other, and empty of nature, which has been proven year on year with how the market corrects. Another thing that has been proven year on year is the fact that all time highs do get broken through, and in this case things aren't different. Go with the flow and stop constantly trying to understand something that won't and can't ever be understood.

Tether and the futures markets will get blamed for all (up and down) movements from now on. Is that fair? No, but people are too ignorant to look beyond what's right in their face.

I prefer to keep them hidden since these were transactions from and to my cold wallets.

Yes, there are plenty of nodes that by default ignore 0 fee transactions. What client are you using and have you tried to create a raw transaction and use an external service that will broadcast your transaction for you? If you do, carefully inspect if all parameters are set correctly, because this is how people quite often end up paying insane fees.

Your words only make sense if you short the crap out of Bitcoin right now and provide screenshots or video content (better option) so we can see if you actually believe in your nonsense.

From $6000 to $1000 plus leverage will net you a massive profit. You are crazy if you don't do it if you are so confident of yourself. Also don't forget to short altcoins because they will go down way harder, which means that you will net even more profit.

People quite often hate future markets and all other platforms because you can short Bitcoin right now, but this is the best way to shut up naysayers; either short or gtfu.

I have sent a couple of 0 fee Bitcoin transactions this year and they were confirmed within 10 blocks, but that was without heavy network congestion and the amounts were fairly large. I'm sure that if it was an amount of like 0.005BTC or so that it would sit there doing nothing for plenty of more hours.

In the end it's not worth the hassle. Seriously, wasting hours just to save yourself $0.01 in fees is ridiculous and shouldn't be an option, unless it is more for testing purposes wich was the case for me when I sent transactions without any fees.

Network usage increases the fees significantly because there is no infinite block space. All fees are justified as long as you are willing to pay them.

Aren't decentralized exchanges meant to tackle the issue of platforms asking you to do something you don't want? 

I haven't seen a decentralized exchange ever subject its users to KYC.

Either way, the only bright future is to distance ourselves from exchanges entirely. With time local services will be widely distributed enough to allow you to enter and exit the market conveniently, where LN will allow you to swap one currency to another without the need of any exchange or whatever platform; we become the exchanges ourselves. Less fiat, more crypto to crypto trades with Bitcoin as base.

Decentralized exchanges will never be able to solve the problem of incorporating fiat in a truly decentralized manner so we should forget about that.

People think the blockchain is a miraculous piece of technology, but it really isn't, and when it comes to financial institutions adopting blockchain technology, it definitely won't be immutable.

Financial institutions thrive on reversing and correcting information in their massive database, not sure why people think they will ever make use of a truly immutable ledger. It goes against everything they stand for and their way of doing business. They make the rules, bend the rules, remove rules when they start to work against them, and spit on people like they are nothing but potential income for them. It's their game and without Bitcoin we would be subject to these financial institutions for many more years.

People should grow a thicker skin and stop hoping for the blockchain to save the world. It won't.