Agreed. Criminals are always the first to find a way to game the system, and it works for them every single time till it doesn't work anymore, and then they again will find a way to get what they want.

Crypto holders have more than ever become a target and it's only going to get worse. At some point people won't even dare to say they own crypto anymore, because it's very likely going to work against you.

Benefit of crypto for everyone is that we own everything that we have, but once it's gone it's gone for ever. Immutable ledgers aren't meant to roll back just to solve a large theft or other situations where coin loss occurred. People need to be aware of how everything works, and I think that the average joes aren't really that interested in maintaining their own wealth. They will always prefer to have an external party take care of their wealth.

The previous bull run resulted in an even longer downtrend.

In november 2013 we reached an all time high of nearly $1170, and from there the price kept going down to reach its lowest point of just over $150 in January of 2015. That's a decline that from highest to lowest point took more than 13 months to settle. Right now we're at half of that decline. If the situation would repeat itself, which is unlikely but just for example purposes, we will reach the lowest point somewhere in the beginning of next year.

Would the market back in the days recover faster if MtGox was a healthy business? Very likely. Right now we don't have any negativity of that nature harming the market, so there isn't a reason for the market to keep going down for that long. Time will tell whether or not $6000 is our ultimate bottom or just a temporary obstacle for the increased supply.

No. People expecting ROI from the market is exactly what makes this environment as shitty as it is today.

Technically, you can't and shouldn't expect anything from the market. It is quite annoying some times that people don't realize how they contribute to a hype based culture that is only harming new market participants. 99% of the newbies are only here for the profit potential. 1% is here to learn and to actually utilize Bitcoin as currency.

Eventually when the shitcoin/token bubble bursts, they'll be hit extremely hard and they will probably not recover from it if they went full nuts with their savings. If Warren Buffett was referring to altcoins and tokens only with his trash talk, I would gladly agree with everything that he said.

What is that for reasoning? It's the same as saying that people work an entire year to make $25,000 where other people make that in just a month or week. Just accept that there are differences in the world when it comes to wealth generation. The wealth in current times has never been this 'unfairly' distrubuted. 1-2% own 98-99% of the wealth. Also don't forget that there are always bigger whales. Some have hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins.

And eh, are you talking about yourself that you need 3-4 months to obtain 1BTC at minimum? The majority of the people would be extremely happy if they could obtain 1BTC in 12 months.

Yes. That's exactly how it works in that scenario.

It's a major flaw in how everything works, and I am sure that Bitfinex doesn't like the fact that USDT/USD pairs exist. If on any exchange the value can be different from 1;1 it directly takes away the core utility of Tether, and deems it worthless instantly.

On WEX (BTC-E previously) USDT keeps spiking over $1.05 and is currently trading at $1.024 while Kraken's rate is just under $1.

What rise? And what is there to recover?

The fake pump that happened last year doesn't exist for me and for that reason there is nothing to recover. If we happen to reach $10,000 this year, it can be seen as an all time high based on regular demand, which is way more sustainable and offers more opportunities for further growth.

You know what my target was when we entered 2017? It was $2000 before the end of the year. At that point there was no hype, no future markets, nothing. It was a calm market that was supposed to slowly go up and book consistent gains throughout that year. We got something way different in return and it made everyone go nuts.

If we would happen to reach $6000 today as all time high everyone would be excited and happy, but due to that fake peak most people are disappointed now.

It shouldn't act any different from USD/BTC.

Tether isn't special in that regard. Everything that you trade on exchanges isn't anything other than a few numbers in a database that change based on the trades people execute.

USDT isn't pegged to the USD in the way people think it is. It's just a promise.

I can create XUSD, and sell you 100,000 for $1 a pop and promise that at any time you can exchange it back to fiat for the exact same rate.

On Kraken you have a USDT/USD trading pair, which just points out how meaningless the connection between the two currencies is. If you're a whale, you can dump USDT's value down to $0.50 or pump it to $10 if you so wish. Regardless of the price you buy it at, the promise is that you can exchange it for an exact rate of $1 per USDT.

He's talking about conducting transactions (ie, moving value from point A to point B on-chain).

You either choose to not sell anything, or you choose to sell locally for cash, which happens to have gained a tremendous amount of use. Local markets are exploding and there is a lack of coin supply. That's why premium's exist. The fewer the available number of coins, the higher the premiums, and people actually are more than willing to pay these premiums. Some times it helps to be a little more open minded before ruling out other ways of getting things done.

They can't find anything out. They just assume that it did happen or that it is likely to have happened.

In the end we are coming down to the point where this may very well be the next attempt to defame Bitcoin's growth. Bitcoin according to most of the general opinions is nothing, creates nothing, is backed by nothing. For that reason, why should it have value?

I won't deny that I think something shady is happening with Bitfinex and Tether, but as long as there is no actual evidence backing it up, there simply isn't anything that proves it is indeed the scam or empty put people think it is. Tether is as "trustworthy" as it was a year ago. Nothing has changed in that regard, especially not because of 'research' done by whatever parties.

If the proof of fraudulent activities was present, Tether wouldn't exist anymore. Don't people here think authorities would love to see what's happening behind the scenes? If they wanted, Tether was raided a year ago already. The incentive isn't there.

Why should the value go up without anything justifying that?

Bitcoin's bottom value hasn't been breached thus far, just the extremely speculative upper layers. Based on the bottoms we are still in process of growth, but why would anyone here focus on that? People are only interested in the peaks and that's really it. The difference in mentality exactly points out who are the winners and the losers here. 5% winner mentality and 95% loser mentality.

The market is perfect. Yesterday's difficulty adjustment was almost +2.8% and the next potential adjustment already signals +9%. The market can't be that bad when miners are this confident.

It's just the same bla bla as always. Nothing changes the fact that they don't know more than we do regarding what's going on. Common sense does the job.

Governments aren't pushing that hard when it comes to regulating this market, and what has the SEC done to ICO's that it scares off investors? Investors aren't really investors but just gamblers not caring about anything. Regulations can't stop them from buying the next potential Ethereum.

Regarding institutions, how can we expect them to instantly pull out their big guns? If they enter, it will first happen through financial instruments which we are lacking currently. Futures are okay but they don't offer long term exposure and it's more gambling. I'm fairly sure that an ETF backed with the underlying asset will be the first major sign that institutions are entering.

The most important factor for institutions is regulative clarity and custody. Both are lacking and both need to be worked on.

In that case they don't even need a blockchain but just a replicating database just like how RAID1 works, but then globally. The term blockchain is extremely hyped up and in most cases doesn't even bring that many advantages to centralized incentives. If you want to become hot and potentially worth more as business, jump into blockchain. It's a trend that the general public likes a lot.

Not sure how much valuable input it has since it only concerns some basic tests, but Western Union CEO pointed out that XRP isn't bringing any significant advantages and doesn't provide the efficiency XRP initially advertised with. I honestly don't even think they need XRP at all. Nothing prevents them from creating a way better alternative that will be allowing them to do everything they want, but without using an external entity to do it.

Western Union is the third party already when people want to transact, and when XRP comes in place it will be the fourth party sticking its nose in something it doesn't have shit to do with.

HashFlare isn't different at all. Technically speaking, all cloud mining sites are quite similar because they made the game that you play, and they decide when it's game over for you. They beforehand know that the majority of the users will end up losing, and if it doesn't happen naturally, they will make you lose faster to cut you off. Party continues as long as there is new money coming in, but as soon as that isn't the case anymore, say bye bye to your "earnings".

If people think cloud mining sites will pay users from their actual mining earnings they are delusional.

Faith in what? That exchanges will mess up again? In that case, I have faith in exchanges to keep messing up due to their incompetence.

People can talk trash about Japan's severe regulations concerning exchanges after the major theft not that long ago, but they at least acknowledge how much of a structural problem there is with exchanges. The majority of the exchanges won't be able to comply if Japan's standards were being used globally. All because of how crappy they are. Why do you think larger players are avoiding exchanges? They know it's like playing Russian roulette with your coins at stake when you use them.

If it really depended on people's mind as you say, they would stay away from exchanges.

Bitfinex's orderbook doesn't differentiate between actual USD or USDT, it is mixed. For that reason it's impossible to find out what percentage of Bitfinex's liquidity and volume consists of USD or USDT. In other words, dumping 10 million USDT or USD makes no difference.

If I deposit 1,000,000 USDT, what should happen is that somewhere Bitfinex will need to make sure that I at any time can withdraw the same amount in actual USD (regardless of USDT's value since nothing can change the fact that 1USDT is backed by 1USD), but we don't know if that is actually happening.

Bitfinex knows how to apply a proper smokescreen to hide their *potentially* fraudulent activities.

A very bad one. Or what about that Monero baboon with his +$800k watch. 

I don't like that attention grabbing nonsense and it only distracts attention away from that what really matters. The event itself wasn't all that bad, but it could have been done way better; if there was less circus going there perhaps would be more room for actual worhtwhile development presentation and talk.

I don't want to see lambos or anything pointing out how financially successful someone is. I want to see and better understand how we can improve the fundamentals of crypto. Vitalik for example has all the 'right' to show off his wealth, but he doesn't participate in such act of nonsense. We need more people like him and less of the fools that are looking for spotlight attention.

Hate is a term holding serious weight. I don't think it's hate in most cases, but just people in general not understanding that these movements are perfectly normal for a finite supply asset that from nothing becomes something. You really have to experience what's going on in order to figure out that what initially you thought didn't make sense actually does make sense. If people aren't even interested in giving it a chance, then they will remain as they are.

In case of banks it might be a bit different, but they will (some already are) get involved in this market. They will eventually become entities replacing or acquiring all current exchanges. If you don't have that first mover advantage, you just aquire them. The few hundred million they cost is peanuts for financial institutions.

I actually like every aspect of this market and don't want it to change any time soon.

If you throughout the years manage to increase your coin holdings on the way up, then there is nothing else that you can wish for. Every ending of a bull run means that I end up with more coins than before it started. I know that eventually the market will become more stable, but for the time being I want to enjoy it as much as I can.

We are part of something that will likely change the financial world, how can anyone not like to be part of this revolution?

It doesn't even matter anymore why the price has gone down. The only thing that matters is what you are doing to improve your position in this market.

Ok, the price went down after your purchase at way higher levels...... Buy at current levels to get that price to come down. Do something to improve, be productive. As soon as the price starts going up again, you'll realize that the coins you bought at current levels will help you to virtually break-even faster.

Waiting for the price to go back up to the levels you bought at is pointless and a waste of time.

I ended up moving my coins to dump BCash. Not only did the ~0.17BTC average sale per Bitcoin tempt me to dump them, but I don't want to contribute to BCash's circulating supply to remain scarce.

I won't tell you what to do with your coins, because I hate that if someone does it to me, but at least consider how people not dumping BCash will help that coin to reach new highs much easier. The only outcome is that Roger Ver and Jihan will end up getting richer. Both ill minded individuals are only out to harm newbies thinking into BCash is Bitcoin.

All the other forks I haven't done anything with yet and probably will not with how their price isn't worth even thinking about it.