Thanks for sharing. At a time like this when the market is suddenly very low (although only when compared to recent months) it's important to remember not to let emotions rule over logical trading decisions.

Stay strong and stick to your strategy, even if there's a temptation to react strongly to dramatic turns in the market. You'll thank yourself in the years to come.

This is why when I pick coins for investment these days I look most closely at the leadership team.

Ethereum is strong with Vitalik, and their list of partnerships continues to grow. So I'm definitely confident that this coin has a future if it continues in the direction it has during the past few years. The same can't be said of most Bitcoin forks, or even hot new coins that don't have such an established track record of stable innovation.

This is generally a low time of year, and also there is a lot of negative or uncertain news about regulation in certain areas (China, Korea, US with Tether). Once all of these issues pass by and it gets later on in the year I expect the sentiment will turn around again. Before we repeat the cycle

Instead of wondering what *time* the coins will go up, I suggest wondering *how much* they will go up by when they do.

The timing can vary. Sometimes there's bad news in the market, sometimes there's good news. Trying to be too impatient and sell at a particular point in time could result in bad decisions.

But given a good, solid coin you should be able to rely reasonably on the fact that it will go up eventually some time in the future. So then it's more a matter of determining what the actual market value is likely to be, so that you're ready when it does go up to sell at an acceptable profit margin. You won't necessarily sell at the top, but sell at a point where you've made enough profit that you're happy taking the earnings and walking away.

Interested in the bounty campaign once it arrives! What bounty projects are you going to have available?

The project site says that XSPEC includes native Tor integration. I'm not convinced this really adds much to privacy though - there have been plenty of instances in the past where Tor privacy and anonymity was compromised by coordinated bad actors. I'm quite confident that several governments have programs in place to track and identify Tor users on a regular basis.

What I'm more interested in is technologies like ring signatures (used by both Monero and SPEC) that provide forward secrecy, rather than just routing tricks to try and avoid detection. Look forward to hearing more about the ways XSPEC is implementing this to improve the security over the coming months.

You could also learn about different altcoins that could give you better investment returns than Bitcoin. This'll give you an opportunity to diversify and reduce the risk of holding only Bitcoin, and at the same time learn what makes Bitcoin different and unique compared to other similar technologies.

This is why the best strategy recommended by many is simple: whatever your strategy is, *stick to it*. Make a decision on what to trade, and make a decision on when to exit that position (taking a profit/loss). Then stick by that decision, no matter what the market does.

Sure, sometimes your second-guessing might help you make a bigger profit. But on average you're going to have a bad time if you let your emotions reverse your previously made decisions after entering a position.

The website has shown the whitepaper as "Upload soon..." for weeks now. The "News" section doesn't even link anywhere.

If this fork does go ahead, it's extremely unprofessional and I doubt it'll get any decent valuation from the market.

More than likely though, the previous rumours about the launch being cancelled are true, and this project will probably return at a later date as an ICO to squeeze some more money from people.

I'm not going to be paying much attention on January 19th either way.

Great work! There are online trading interfaces you pay $20/month for that don't even support as many exchanges as this app. Definitely good value for money

Now that Kraken is back online again, I'm considering day trading as a viable strategy (until the end of January). The site is now offering zero trading fees for all clients, so it's suddenly much more economical to make lots of small trades on a daily basis without having to worry about the fees piling up.

Many exchanges don't actually have a "base currency". They just have sets of trading pairs - e.g. USD/BTC, BTC/LTC, ETH/LTC, etc.

Sure, they usually have a lot more trading pairs where BTC is the base paired against some other altcoin. But there are also plenty with ETH base, or LTC base. So as BTC becomes more and more unwieldy for transactions I expect to see more of these ETH and LTC-based trading pairs gaining increased volume.

No exchange is totally safe. But right now, HitBTC seems like one of the more reliable and safe websites. If you want the best safety I'd say go with Coinbase/Gemini, otherwise HitBTC is a good alternative that supports many altcoins.

A coin that suddenly and dramatically increases in price, jumping into the top 10 altcoins with basically no warning, is a sign for me that someone should be investigating it more closely. Either it's got a huge value to bring to the table (and the whole world suddenly realised that), or it's a scam being propped up by price manipulation.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter, but my translation skills aren't good enough to reach a solid conclusion when reading the linked articles

I've heard good things so far, and was glad that I could sign up and start trading (with a small balance) without needing any verification first.

The referral system is something that makes me skeptical of most reviews (since people are getting paid to promote the site). Nonetheless, it seems like a promising exchange from my experience so far. I still have most of my funds on other more established sites for now.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of regular startups (not blockchain-related) also fail within their first year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups-will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/

So this may simply be reflecting the fact that most blockchain projects are startups, and most startups fail.

Of course they will. Even Coinbase and similar sites are already acting essentially as banks (but without the legal guarantees). They keep your private keys for you and provide the paper trail, in exchange for convenience.

When it comes to the financial world, if there is demand for the service somebody will build it (and charge you for it)

I wouldn't suggest investing more money into a smaller coin like BitBay unless you're very familiar with the development team, their vision, and have good faith in their future prospects. Then in addition to that you should look at the network effect that the currency has (is it already popular enough that people are sharing it with their friends and growing the possible user base?). Only then can you come to a conclusion whether it's worth investing in for the long term or not.

Personally I wouldn't go for BitBay, but one of the others that seem to have more mass appeal and established teams, such as XMR, NEO, LSK.

Most of the time the altcoins follow the Bitcoin sentiment. So it only needs the one reference currency to decrease in value for this to trickle on to most of the other altcoins.

And as others have mentioned, at the end of the year many people are probably consolidating their positions from the previous year, and also cashing out some BTC for spending on gifts and holidays. Considering that we just had several all-time highs in a row, it's not surprising that all of these conditions combined together should lead to a significant correction in the market value.

30% drop from the yearly average might be considered a "crash".
30% drop from the all-time high (that just happened recently) is not called a "crash", it's called a "correction" and is quite normal and expected