Market cap doesn't say anything.

If we look at how thin the orderbooks of exchanges are, you can move the market cap up or down with $10 billion by only pumping or dumping the market with 10,000BTC worth $65,000,000.

Right now, in order to tank Bitcoin below $5000 on Bitfinex, you only need to dump around 9500BTC. If we also look at the possibility of stop loss orders triggering each other, then the damage will be even more severe. The market cap of a coin in no shape or form represents the orderbooks of exchanges. You only need to manipulate the orderbook of a leading exchange and you are good to go. We need way more liquidity in order to change the situation.

Bitcoin's speculative nature is indeed full of surprises, but in some cases the probability of a major correction to happen is quite easy to point out.

Last year was the perfect example;

# Crucial $20,000 level was coming closer during a major bull run.
# CME opening =  sell the news.
# Tax sales.

It still doesn't offer any guarantees, but the way higher probability was enough to convince long term holders to liquidate a large chunk of their coins, and that's exactly what they did. Smart people have bought back at least everything that they sold, but there are too many coins in circulation still from those who haven't bought back or are no longer going to buy back. As long as these coins are circulating we aren't going to see much improvement, unless an ETF pops up suddenly sparking demand.

If exchanges don't actually invest in proper staff upgrades then nothing will ever improve. The growth of the crypto ecosystem at all times severely outperforms any sort of staff upgrade, and then we have certain exchanges not adding staff members at all.

After that we have different layers of staff members, all with different authorative positions. In most cases people first get to contact the lowest layer that is only allowed to provide informative help, where the layers above have more power to act, but they directly are the hardest to get in touch with due to how limited in number they are. Binance seems to serve its users in the best possible way, and that on all grounds.

Decentralization has never been an easy alternative. It requires people to step outside their comfort zone and to actually contribute effort to obtain financial freedom and everything around it. People for the first time ever have the ability to conveniently use a tool that allows them to transact and maintain wealth online, and that without anyone capable of limiting you.

Gold has been a great tool back in the days, and still is, but the convenience that Bitcoin offers is certainly changing how we are dealing with value.

People should be happy with how the market has gone down. Instead of paying top prices you can get a way better deal right now.

People still don't understand that crypto related services are as bad as traditional financial services. If you want to avoid falling under their terms and political bias, then don't use them. Coinbase is nothing more than a crypto bank trying to satisfy those on top of the food chain, and with how severely regulated they are, things will only become worse, especially when Coinbase is granted a banking license.

At some point Coinbase and other exchanges will share blacklists in order to prevent people banned from one service to use other services. It's the same form of exclusion we are trying to escape from in the regular system. This is the direct (negative) side effect of a growing crypto economy. This is no longer the niche it once was.

It highly depends actually. I am quite sure that the far majority of the coins will become worthless or near that in the coming 5 or so years.

The first gen altcoins are almost done and over, while we are now in the process of getting rid of the second gen altcoins, and this will continue till people come to sense.

I stopped dealing with altcoins in late 2014 and I am happy that I did so. I quickly realized how full of shit the altcoin market actually is. Years later, nothing has changed for the better, and nothing will change for the better. Every now and then we'll see one coin pop out and become actually big, which turned out to be Ethereum, but what's next? Bitcoin is allround and Ethereum is so.

First mover advantage is incredibly important and will make sure that smaller coins with better tech don't manage to grow out to a potential threat, especially when you take into consideration that the larger coins can implement these features just as easily.

Scaling is important, but everyone tends to discard the fact that decentralized incentives aren't meant to scale to towards mass day to day usage on-chain, which is why we are working towards LN.

If we look at BCash's approach, which is to allow the blocks to be as big as they need to be, then it works in the short term, but later on it will work against them. Roger in an interview was at first stating that people would first need a $500 computer to run a node, then $1000, etc. And then he points out that people aren't running nodes anyway, so it's not a problem at all. In other words, he is ready to heavily centralize the node distribution in the future.

Common sense is mostly enough to prevent you from buying wrong dips.

What I do is calculate the probability of certain levels to become strong support levels, and based on that I allocate a certain percentage of my capital to buy these dips.

From $19,000 to $15,000 is a dip, but one that you should ignore.
From $15,000 to $11,000 is a dip, but again one that you should ignore.

I started buying back with a small percentage as soon as we broke $10,500. I used a small percentage because the likeliness of this being a strong support level is low.

The most of my buy back activity happened between $6000-$8000 and I am more than satisfied with that.

It looks like that. Being bullish has no positive outcome. Being somewhat bearish might have.

It could have plenty of reasons, but in a market as easy to manipulate one thing is very important to realize; if something looks too good to be true, then it mostly is. In other words, things aren't as the market wants you to believe. The whales active on spot exchanges are better off trolling BitMex than the very expensive futures that are subject to strict rules. The likeliness of being busted for manipulation on CME is 100x higher than BitMex.

BitMex is the absolute leader in every aspect and probably the main source of manipulation, but no one is focusing on it. Even in current slow market they manage to push $1.4 billion in volume in the last 24h. There have been days where it was over $5 billion.

At least, it's good that you acknowledge your mistake. I hope that you at least learned from it and never ever dive into similar schemes again.

Plenty of thousands.

YouTube shills mostly and the sick minds behind BitConnect. It's not for nothing that the YouTube shills in the end deleted most (if not all) of their content to prevent complaints, legal cases, etc. They were promoting something from which they know it was very likely a scheme, and that with their face on internet. They literally sold their sould to the devil, and as always, nothing good comes out of such practices.

Some people could have recouped at least a certain part of their investment, but they were stupid enough to reinvest. Just as with cloud mining, never reinvest 'earnings' since it will force you to start earning from scratch again.

Superb contribution, this is definitely what we needed here! I like the nostalgia of going back in time.

01-April-2013 Bitcoin Value Surpasses $100--Is This Another Bubble?

I am still searching for an article that I read in 2013 before the market hit $100 for the first ever time. It stated that if Bitcoin would ever reach $100 it directly would be its highest ever point it wouldn't be able to reach again. If anyone finds that article, or one similar, please post it here. I would love to re-enjoy the moment of reading it. I never agreed with it before reaching $100 back in the days, and today's price perfectly confirms that.

I actually want to see drama. There is no point into making things look positive just to nurse a few noobs. If people can't seperate bad from good then let them suck on it. It hopefully will allow people to grow a thicker skin and make them care less about what criminals do.

I would also love to see a movie covering the MtGox situation at some point. So much has happened, where each stage in Bitcoin's history is definitely worth having it converted into a movie.

I am searching for the catch, but there doesn't seem to be one. No ICO incentive...... That's pretty surprising.

It's definitely an extremely bullish indicator, but the deal with these ETF's, at least from the position of US regulators, is that regulators don't want average joes to enter. It's not for nothing that VanEck and SolidX had to make sure that an initial issue price of $200,000 has to be in place. Even the CID (Coinbase Index Fund) has an issue price of at least $250,000. US regulators just don't want to expose average joes to Bitcoin and crypto in this way.

They have no problems seeing institutions throwing in potentially billions, but some retail pocket change is a big deal apparantly. It perhaps comes down to how institutions are more capable of properly calculating the risks that are tied to this market. One way or another, there has to be some sort of a reason. At least, the exclusion of average joes make it 100x more likely that VanEck and SolidX will have their ETF approved.

Partly, but what a lot people tend to ignore is that mining equipment will only become faster and more energy efficient. Right now we have had years of explosive network growth that came with explosive energy consumption. What we are working towards is more explosive network growth, but with less energy consumption. Overall the energy consumption will still increase, but by far not in the way the consumption has been increasing in the last years.

I am even sure (it might even be happening already) that at some point the heat that mining farms generate will be turned into energy, or at least get sold to near villages to have them warm up their houses and whatnot. In current time and day waste doesn't exist anymore. Waste is waste when you don't do anything to have it work for you. If other industries manage to perfectly reuse heat, why won't mining farms be able to do so?

It's not market dominance, but market cap dominance. Stop paying attention to such worthless metric. It's meaningless in every shape or form with supply manipulation and ICO's constantly popping up out of nowhere.

Even right now that 40% figure isn't accurate. XRP doesn't have a $21 billion market cap, but $53 billion, which is higher than Ethereum. It perfectly displays supply manipulation, and the fact that CMC and other sites only fetches data from the circulating supply, which is false. It was last year where a coin popped up and had a $1000 billion total market cap, and that with only a 24H volume of $6000 lol. Ignore all these noob sites.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only ones with an actual major market share, and a well developed ecosystem around them, which are the only aspects that matter in market terms.

That's understandable, but doesn't have to be a problem. In case you are spending 0.05BTC for example, you have to make sure you buy that amount back directly.

It directly translates into a situation where you will no longer regret having spent coins, and the effect of payment gateways dumping their coins on the market will be nullified. It basically means that you contribute to a circle that combats the market to suffer from an excess of payment dumps. In other words, there is absolutely no need to limit yourself when you can perfectly keep spending your coins.

I understand that in some cases it's not as easy to buy back your coins, but overall the amounts that people spend are on the lower side, which makes it easier to buy it back.

Bitcoin will become productive with LN and generate income for you without fundamentally exposing your coins to any sort of risk. I think it will be the first time where you can put your coins to work allowing yourself to earn micro bits without having a different party control them. It will be a major breakthrough because you now have the incentive to actually use your coins in a way that has nothing to do with buy low sell high.

The more liquidity is being added to LN, the more usable it becomes, and the more rewarded liquidity providers will be. It concerns very small rewards per time, and the market effect will likely make sure the fees become extremely low, but if it happens thousands of times per day, it adds up nicely in the end. We're not there yet, but the promise is definitely there.

I have never used one single stop loss order while I was trading. Instead, I have always believed that from time to time massive 'dumps' do pop up in certain artificially triggered situations, which is why I always used to have very low buy orders waiting on various levels. Ironically, instead of leaving my buy orders open, I withdrew them and then a week or so later, BTC-E tanks from close $700 to $102.

Admittedly, my buy orders (before I withdrew them) were more in the range of $400 at that time, but still, it would result in a quick profit that I missed out on.

Not really. If you read through the terms that most cloud mining providers (scam or not scam) handle, they can legally get away with it and for that reason don't have to run.

People should blame themselves for this and not HashFlare. If you before investing know that the day will come where your contracts or shares won't be paying out anymore, then you have no right to complain or moan about the situation afterwards. If you are man enough to buy into cloud mining, then be man enough to accept the risks and each outcome associated with these risks. It makes no sense to complain about something from which you know it will happen with continuous difficulty increases.

That was a pretty lengthy but somewhat worthwile article.

In the end the conclusion I like the most is that we should be saving ourselves, which is pretty much what I have been doing for years now.

I have no confidence in governing bodies because they keep messing up and keep making sure that the value I worked hard for is depreciating constantly. I also want to cut ties with the system because of how unfair the tax system is set up. The far majority of my wealth sits in Bitcoin and I am actually happy to have very little exposure to the regular system. I actually hope that the price will keep dropping, because that will motivate me further to lower my fiat exposure.

All my fiat that goes into Bitcoin never exits again, which says enough. Bitcoin's 'bubble' inflating = regular economy bubble deflating.