No need to exaggerate things.

The difficulty went up nearly 15% a few days ago, and it currently signals a +6% difficulty adjustment for next period. It means two things;

1) The current price isn't low at all, meaning miners have plenty of room to keep making profits even if the difficulty keeps increasing further and the price doesn't.
2) The current price is close to break-even levels, but miners mine anyway and accumulate in anticipation of higher prices later on.

Option 1 is the most viable in my opinion. Miners in most cases only care about the economical gains they can book right now.

I have not.

You are free to predict anything you want, don't worry. The worst that will happen to you here is that noobies will call you a fud spreader. 

Even though I don't necessarily agree with what you are saying, it's more realistic than 99% of all the predictions here.

I actually think that we are lacking bearish predictions. I want kwukduck to come back. I miss that dude. I sent him a PM just now in the hope that he will get an email notification. I asked him to come back. His last activity dates back from late February this year. 

It highly depends actually. While I do agree that governments initially weren't all that positive, they will soon find out that Bitcoin offers the perfect features for them to trade with other governments they don't trust. Instead of governments trolling and rigging deals through their central banking system, Bitcoin will allow them to cut that nonsense out. In the same way that goes up for multi billion dollar corporations conducting business with foreign parties.

I expect this to become reality pretty soon actually. Give it a year or two at most.

Since when did Bitcoin's trading volume surpass forex's multi trillion dollar volumes? 

Adjusting predictions based on the flow means you are hype riding, period. In other words, you have zero technical input and don't deserve to be taken serious.

EOS, if it ends up experiencing a decent level of success, will follow the same route as Ethereum, meaning that its own success will be its downfal. These platforms aren't able to keep themselves decentralized in the very long term. It's impossible for them to scale against mass use. If you take that into consideration, there is no point in using Ethereum or EOS over a centralized platform that does everything better.

First you advice someone to buy a bot and that hell be fine, and then you tell him that it only results in losses. That's pretty contradicting isn't it?

Mass produced bots (regardless of how cheap or expensive they are) work according to how the issuer of these bots want them to work. It grants the issuer a crucial advantage over you and all other buyers running these bots. I would never trust a third party bot with my funds, and I would definitely not recommend people to use something they don't fundamentally understand. Does that make sense?

Tired of trading means you are not capable of trading, so the simple solution is to quit.

In all cases, whether or not someone is double spending or doing some other shady activity, performing a 51% 'attack' on whatever coin is gaining an economical advantage over the rest in each and every way. This form of abuse is illegal by law because it will very likely result in a situation where losses occur on a global scale within that specific ecosystem.

Every pool without malicious intent will never allow its hash rate dominance to come even close to 50% of the total. In case pools grow too large, they will simply try to lower their dominance themselves, or ask miners to point their hash power to other pools, which is the only right way to follow. There is no other way to stimulate a healthy and less centralized mining environment.

I would like to know that too. It's probably a kiddie not knowing anything about ecommerce that messed it all up. Money is leaking away from merchants and BitPay itself, so it has to be corrected at some point. If something is working, don't break it. How difficult is it to understand for people.

Indeed, BTCPay at this point isn't viable for most of the simple merchants only caring about that extra bit of revenue. It just requires too many steps to set up; it requires you to take care of hosting, set up an exchange account, verify yourself in order to get your fiat back, be subject to different taxation laws since you are dumping yourself now, etc. Just not accepting Bitcoin would be an easier option for merchants.

Bitcoin's volatility is definitely a factor of attraction, but it's actually changing, and will change even more when economical difficulties start knocking on the door, which we aren't all that far away from. Bitcoin is Gold, but then the digital equivalent. It will (and already does) serve as a very easy to access hedge against anything the regular economy exposes you to.

Why would you buy a promise on paper in case of Gold, when you can actually hold billions of Bitcoin without needing to store it elsewhere due to the fact that there is no bulk and whatnot. Buying paper Gold isn't the same as buying actual Gold, and if you buy actual Gold, you need to store it somewhere because you definitely don't want that bulk in your house. It's one of the plenty major advantages Bitcoin has over Gold, and that advantage will translate into capital flowing out of Gold to Bitcoin eventually.

We are in the dumb usage stage. Within 5 years we will see a completely different market and completely different uses of Bitcoin.

Even if an entity out of panic dumps Gold worth Bitcoin's entire market cap nothing will happen with that market.  

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If people don't bring up these threads and news sites don't report about China, it feels like China doesn't exist, and that's the way I like it. Let them have fun with their ChinaCoin and keep using the great firewall to censor everything they don't like. Why should the rest of the world even care about them? We in current times have a way more diversified (almost decentralized) field of global demand for everything related to crypto.

China is a paranoid and psychopathic country only knowing how to cause problems. The less China, the better, and the more healthy this market remains.

Bitcoin will keep breaking traditional fundamentals with how small it still is. You fail to understand that while the price may have increased significantly throughout the last years, the number of available coins has never been this low. A constantly growing circle of wealthy entities will try to buy up as many coins as possible, which only further decreases the number of available coins.

If you also take into consideration that we will have various funds that are backed by actual coin supply, the market will dry up harder than ever before.

We have had various countries last year that functioned as prime example of what coin scarcity means. South Korea at a sudden point traded Bitcoin at a +$5000 premium!

Short it.

I think it's safe to say that Microsoft offered them a much lower price in cash (potentially billions lower), which is why they went for the stocks.

It's actually a very smart move from Microsoft with how its stocks are hovering around their all time high levels, where in current state of the stock market, a correction might be due. In other words, Microsoft wisely hedged a potential downfall of its own stocks by acquiring GitHub. By the time the stock market correction has taken place, they will buy back their stocks at much lower levels. It's a game that's being played, where the wealthiest always have the main advantage.

It's basically the same as when you try to sell your car to a dealer. Cash value is always lower than trade value.

Definitely.

You are living in a country you don't know the rules of. Instead of reading news articles, dive into how your tax laws are set up.

If you don't understand that the lack of classification of Bitcoin, or basically any other value tool, doesn't make you exempt from tax, I don't know what will make you understand that.

That dude holds over 10,000,000,000 in XRP, which is more than 10% of all XRP in existence, and then we have some other vague individuals holding like multi billions of XRP units. He and the rest of the gang have all the incentive to steer XRP to become a toy for financial services, and they actually have done a pretty decent job in that field.

Buying XRP means you support this gang to become and remain multi fiat billionaires, so definitely don't participate in such practices. It's probably the most hated token in the industry, and rightfully so. The only people shilling for this garbage are get rich quick noobs. I would rather keep using legacy payment infrastructure than a centralized token named XRP.

This seems more like a fud attempt.

What's the point of opening a thread when you don't provide any proof in form of a screenshot or don't even copy the text in the email.

Exactly that. People quite often tend to blame the centralized fiat infrastructure for not performing well, but every centralized crypto gateway is just as bad. In recent times BitPay's 'subtle' change has cost merchants potentially millions in revenue due to how difficult it is for the average person to find a workaround. Geeks and those who have been here for a longer while will put some effort into finding that workaround, but the average person will just skip it entirely or use CC or PP in worst case.

Merchants then will blame Bitcoin for losing popularity and whatnot, all due to the incompetence of the services they pay to make things easy for them.

We definitely need a longer term pattern to really see if there is any correlation with the future markets, but it wouldn't really surprise me. If we look at how empty the market has been in the last months, then it's safe to say that the average nutters just stick to holding instead of trading. If you take away the unpredictability of the average nutters, the market is free for you to manipulate in every direction without any effort.

There is so much secondary market activity, that just by bumping the price up or down you can have your leveraged trades on various platforms pay out big time. Even if your spot market trades make you lose out due to this manipulation, your secondary market profits will make up for it. It's practically impossible for whales to lose in a market lacking serious liquidity.

Be happy that all that garbage isn't running on top of Bitcoin. Ethereum's blockchain exceeded 1TB already, and within a year from now another TB will be added to its blockchain, and the year after that another 1-2TB, and so forth. Bitcoin's blockchain is still below 200GB in size, and roughly only ~50GB will be added on a yearly basis. Bitcoin Core's conservative approach helps Bitcoin remain easy to host for every person at home, which becomes near impossible with Ethereum.

Another important thing is that the SEC chairman just now said that the rules are clear, which is that regular crypto currencies are NOT securities, and where all tokens are securities, and that goes up for Ethereum as well. It's something that has been the case for a long time already, but people don't seem to understand it.

The interview can be seen here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFr1ooaVPjY

I'm sure that some people might have done it, but the media always likes to exaggerate everything related to Bitcoin. How often do you see the mainstream media report about how especially in Asia, people lose their entire mortgage loan on the stock markets there? I don't ever get to read or see anything about it in the media here, and that while the amount of money that people lost there is in the trillions.

The mainstream media sources are mostly all part of a main company listed on whatever stock exchange, so they don't bother to report about it because it would only work against them. People taking out mortgage loans will help them boast their stock value in the end. To add; more than half of the stock market is bought up with debt, which is quite worrying development. It's nothing new in the end, but the difference is that the debt to non debt capital ratio that's invested in stock market has exploded. It can't and won't end well.

Definitely, but the investment aspect is an inevitable side effect of Bitcoin's success in terms of adoption. The whole world is literally trying to obtain as many Bitcoins as possible, while the availability of Bitcoins is decreasing due to its finite supply. If you also add that the adoption will keep increasing, the next batch of adopters will enter at higher levels than the previous batch of adopters, and this cycle will repeat itself in the forthcoming years.

Don't forget that Bitcoin growing larger means nothing more than the regular economy experiencing an outflow of capital due to trust issues and whatnot. I am fairly sure that there will even be a time where people don't want to sell their coins for fiat anymore, unless a crazy premium is paid to motivate them. Eventually when Bitcoin becomes a developed asset in every way, stability will make sure that Bitcoin's currency aspect will get the use it deserves to have.

It's a common misconception that if governments haven't legalized or regulated Bitcoin, that you don't have to pay tax. Bitcoin in all cases holds value, and regardless of what the status of Bitcoin is in your country, there is always a category you can fit Bitcoin into. It's the government we're talking about; they won't ever allow you to have one single tax advantage, period.

In the tax form there is even something that I call a dump corner, where everything that isn't mentioned explicitly, or you don't know how to properly declare it, you can have it be subject to tax in that category. There is literally no way to legally game the system. Governments have had centuries of past history to set up a proper and working tax system. Governments are more mafia than the actual mafia itself.