It's not really comparing the same thing. Most people probably use coinbase to convert between crypto and fiat, but use Binance more for crypto to crypto trading. I do't really think a user comparison say much about either of them. Coinbase is a big crypto/fiat gateway, Binance is a big exchange.

It would be nice if all coins were good coins, however I think the useless ones should be allowed to fail naturally. I really don't like the idea of coins being refused the right to exist just because someone decides it's no good.

One thing I've found very useful in establishing some context is to look at the long-term charts with a logarithmic scale. Prices increase so much that any bull run makes previous years' movement just look like a flat line, which wipes out any understanding of history. With the log scale, the overall trend is much more readily apparent. You can see from the chart below that the huge dip from Jan 2018 to Feb 2019 was really nothing to worry about - although on the linear scale charts it looked quite bad.

ETH has done really well since launch, but obviously just because ETH has increased by x%, that doesn't mean that every other coin will as well. Remember that ETH launched quite a few years ago now, when prices for everything - including bitcoin - were much lower, and there was much less interest in general. Also think about what ETH's market cap was at that time - and then compare to what Tron's cap is. I don't think that Tron can achieve the same percentage gains.

The bigger the better really. Binance and Huobi obviously are good. Bittrex is older but I use it for smaller coins as it has a really wide selection. In general you want exchanges that have high volumes because this means smaller spread between buy and sell orders.

The market is still bullish. We are in a consolidation phase. Hopefully we are now nearing the end of it, and back to price rises - some encouraging signs today.
I much prefer this sort of rise where we have periods of cooling off and establishing new support levels. It makes the whole market more resilient.

1. Have a plan and stick to it. Define your entry points and exit points before you start, and then stick to them.
2. Be logical. Don't succumb to FOMO or panic-selling.
3. Don't hold on too long. If a trade starts going the wrong way, then re-assess it to decide if this trend is likely to continue. Know when to cut your losses.
4. Get some experience. This is the best teacher.
5. Stay away from low volume coins that have a big bid/ask spread (big gap between highest buy order and lowest sell order). You'd need a big market swing on these just to break even.

BNB doesn't have smart contracts though, not really. I don't think it can compete with ETH in this space. Unless this is just using something like Cosmos. It's not like BNB has years of development of its own smart contract platform. It can and is competing with ETH on token issuance, but I don't agree that it is competing directly in smart contracts. At least not yet.

Facebook's money-making is based on surveillance capitalism, that is the exploitation and selling of user data. They have some really advanced behavioural profiling algorithms, and they are not going to stop this activity anytime soon. Facebook absolutely will not comply with any restrictions to do with information security. Of course they may say they'll comply, and they may convince (or bribe) officials in order to legally comply, but that's a different thing altogether.

I don't like Facebook, but they are undeniably hugely successful. I imagine they've put a vast amount of effort into Libra, and I don't think there's any chance of FB giving up on this.

Binance is the one at the moment. Everything on there is mega-hyped, so its probably good for buying and then selling quickly, but I'm not so sure about long-term strength of these coins. It reminds me of how ICOs used to be a couple of years ago, when so many coins hit hard cap really quickly.

I'm note sure about this as a strategy. We all know that coins can rise and fall dramatically. If you are buying coins that have already been rising, there is quite a high chance that they will drop again after you've bought them. Added to which if you're just buying blindly based on market performance rather than the properties of the coin itself, then you won't know which ones are likely to continue rising and which are just pump and dump.

Hi all  I thought I’d try to summarise Bitcoin's vulnerabilities to Quantum Computers, as well as some potential defences, and get it all in one post. Apologies for the wall of text, but hopefully it is useful...


Mining can potentially be much quicker with QCs.
The current PoW difficulty system can be exploited by a Quantum Computer using Grover’s algorithm to drastically reduce the number of computational steps required to solve the problem. The theorised advantage that a quantum computer (or parallelised QCs) have over classical computers is a couple of orders of magnitude, so ~x100 easier to mine. This isn’t necessarily a game-changer, as this QC speed advantage is likely to be some years away, by which time classical computers will surely have increased speed to reduce the QC advantage significantly. It is worth remembering that QCs aren’t going up against run-of-the-mill standard equipment here, but rather against the very fast ASICs that have been set up specifically for mining.

Re-used BTC addresses are 100% vulnerable to QCs.
Address Re-Use. Simply, any address that is re-used is 100% vulnerable because a QC can use Shor’s algorithm to break public-key cryptography. This is a quantum algorithm designed specifically to solve for prime factors. As with Grover’s algorithm, the key is in dramatically reducing the number of computational steps required to solve the problem. The upshot is that for any known public key, a QC can use Shor’s approach to derive the private key. The vulnerability cannot be overstated here. Any re-used address is utterly insecure.

Processed (accepted) transactions are theoretically somewhat vulnerable to QCs.
Theoretically possible because the QC can derive private keys from used addresses. In practice however processed transactions are likely to be quite secure as QCs would need to out-hash the network to double spend.

Unprocessed (pending) transactions are extremely vulnerable to QCs.
As above, a QC can derive a private key from a public key. So for any unprocessed transaction, a QC attacker can obtain the private key and then create their own transaction whilst offering a much higher fee, so that the attacker’s transaction gets onto the blockchain first, ahead of the genuine transaction. So block interval and QC speed are both crucial here – it all depends on whether or not the a QC can hack the key more quickly than the block is processed.


Possible defences...

Defences using classical computers.

• Modify the PoW system such that QCs don’t have any advantage over classical computers. Defending PoW is not as important as defending signatures (as above), because PoW is less vulnerable. However various approaches that can protect PoW against QCs are under development, such as Cuckoo Cycle, Momentum and Equihash.
• Modify the signature system to prevent easy derivation of private keys. Again, various approaches are under development, which use some pretty esoteric maths. There are hash-based approaches such as XMSS and SPHINCS, but more promising (as far as I can tell) are the lattice-based approaches such as Dilithium, which I think is already used by Komodo.
  

Defences using quantum computers.
As I’ve said a few times, I’m more of a bumbling enthusiast than an expert, but exploiting quantum properties to defend against QC attack seems to me a very good idea. In theory properties such as entanglement and the uncertainty principle can offer an unbreakable defence. Again, people are busy researching this area. There are some quite astonishing ideas out there, such as this one.


I’ll leave it there. Apologies for all the external links, but hopefully this has summarised a few things.

The thing is, it's not rumour, it's news.

What generally happens in this sort of situation is that the change has already been priced in. Often coins dump a bit once the event actually takes place. This is because everyone thinks halving=price increase, so they start buying as soon as the first credible rumours emerge. Once it becomes official, everyone has already bought in, and are now waiting to dump to make profit.

Of course it may not happen that way this time, but that's often how it works.

Monero is certainly one of the best privacy coins, but I'm not sure about the future of privacy coins in general. The tendency with new projects is towards KYC, and governments have been getting increasingly concerned about money laundering and other criminal activity. Whilst privacy coins are certainly useful and important, I think they may suffer in a future regulatory crackdown, so I'm not convinced in a long-term hold for profit.

I wouldn't bother with ETC. Just stick with ETH. I don't think ETC is going to be any good in the long-term, everyone will just go with ETH instead. I think the only real reason that ETC is a big coin is because it has the ETH name, similar to how BCH still keeps some value. Although at least ETC was a legitimate fork, which is not the case with all of the money-grab BTC forked coins.

Bitcoin.

After that I'd look at sectors by use case:

• Smart contracts I think are likely to transform society, so take your pick of the smart contract coins. Obviously ETH is a good one here.
• Fast payments are another great use case. Again take your pick, but I'd go with XRP.
• Any good IoT coin.
• One of the RFID coins, maybe Walton although that's a gamble.
• Green energy as a bit of a stretch. Likely to be a huge sector, and a good fit to crypto. There are a few good coins. WPP maybe?

Yes $20k for BTC is certainly achievable given the history of price movements. It wasn't so long ago it was below $5k.
However there is a difference here between acheivable and likely. I don't think it's particularly likely for BTC to hit those heights soon. The bull has been losing strength for quite some time now, and we are in a consolidation phase. Perhaps prices might move up again before the end of the year, but another 100% on top of existing rises seems unlikely, and if it does happen I think it would not be sustainable and we'd have a big pullback quite quickly.

That doesn't sound right to me. If it's an airdrop, they shouldn't be asking anything of you.
An airdrop is a free distribution of coins to promote the project. If they are sending out to addresses, why would you need to prove you own the address? It sounds like they are hoping someone will make a mistake and hand over private information, such as KYC data or private key. I would recommend to stay away.

Yes, those that promise millions of dollars can be quite misleading. This is based on a) the ICO hitting hardcap, and b) the coin maintaining its ICO price once it hits exchanges. In practice 'a' happens quite rarely, and 'b' hardly ever.
It doesn't mean it's not a good project, but just that the rewards in dollar terms are generally quite low these days. You will tend to get a smaller share of coins because it doesn't hit hardcap, and thenn the price usually tanks on exchanges.
Bounties are better if you go only for good projects, and think about them as long term bets.

It's kind of weird how low ETH is vs BTC. I know a lot of the huge ETH rises in 2017 were due to ICO fever, but still, it's a great coin and should be much higher in BTC terms.
I do think ETH will start to rise at some point fairly soon, and it could kickstart the alt run that we've all been anticipating. ETH is one of the few alts that has the strength to pull the whole alt market up with it.