Will there be a Coinbase crypto that eventually becomes available on various exchanges? If yes, I think that it's worth to keep an eye on it and maybe invest shortly after the initial hype is over and people get their time to dump the coins. With such a high initially set price, there's a chance it drops significantly shortly after it appears on exchanges and starts to actually be traded by people. So I think that investing right now would be premature and just following the overall hype which is unjustified. But perhaps investing a little later after seeing how it performs on exchanges is a good idea because strong coins backed by big companies tend to do well in terms of their prices.

I don't think it's possible. Bitcoin is already worth 3 times as much as its former ATH, and that's a big step forward after years of struggling to maintain even 50% of the ATH price. I agree with others that it doesn't really matter how far Bitcoin goes this time, and that its current accomplishment is already a lot. I'd be happy even if Bitcoin starts falling now, and falls as low as $20k. It would still be a big achievement and a way forward. I think that now we should focus on more use cases and on friendly regulations of cryptos rather than on the price.

The deposit profits that banks offer are indeed very low. I think they're so low that they're insignificant. If you have little money, you'll just have marginally more, but it won't make a difference to your situation. If you have tons of money, you'll get another significant sum added to it, but it once again won't make a difference to you because you're already very rich. However, while giving money to a highly reputable bank is a very low-risk choice, with Bitcoin you can profit a lot if the price goes up, but you can also lose a lot if it goes down, so it's a high-risk investment.

Those who keep hodling BTC since they started doing it years ago aren't the ones that are driving the price up because they're not actively participating in the market. Those who are selling their BTC during the ATH are actually contributing to the downward price movement, but since there are clearly more people who keep buying even at such a high price, the price keeps getting higher anyway. As for those who're driving the price up, I think these are companies that start to see potential in Bitcoin and crypto newbies who are buying BTC due to FOMO but will sell at the first sign of the bull run being over.

Some altcoins have already experienced positive dynamics and some will probably join in as well. However, I think the change in BTC dominance is still minor to talk about a general tendency, and I don't think that there is anything similar to the 2017 altcoin boom happening in the near future. Back then, there were ambitious projects making big promises and people investing in ICOs due to FOMO. With people being disappointed after that time, I don't think that it's possible for altcoins to suddenly bloom again. Some of them might (Ethereum, Litecoin, Polkadot), but it's hard to predict the overall tendency now.

I wish there were more non-institutional options as well when it comes to rent. I'm renting an apartment, and I would love to pay the rent directly in BTC, but people see it as something high-risk, so they always prefer fiat. And when I did some freelancing before, I stated that both local fiat and Bitcoin were fine as forms of payment for me, but again, people chose fiat because they didn't even know how to use Bitcoin... I guess eventually with more news like this the situation will change. Bitcoin might not be suitable for small payments right now, but something like a monthly rent payment is a great use case because a transaction will be big enough for the fee to be okay and there's usually no need for it being confirmed immediately.

Similarly to a few other people in this thread, I don't understand what the op means by gold being banned. People buy things which are made from gold all the time, and they keep jewelry as a form of an investment sometimes. I haven't heard of gold being illegal, but to be sure I've just checked that it's indeed perfectly legal to buy and possess jewelry as well as gold bars in my country. As for some context from other countries, I see that there was a ban for US citizens on owning or trading gold from 1933 till 1975 due to Executive Order 6102, but I guess it's currently legal in the US as well. And to answer the question regarding Bitcoin, I think that most democratic governments won't ban Bitcoin because it could cause public unrest, but I think that over time more and more countries will regulate cryptos, setting some requirements and restrictions.

Op, if you're not sure if a website is good or bad, you can try to find their representative on Bitcointalk and just check their trust summary. If there are no active red flags, it's a good sign, but honestly, I wouldn't go for a casino that has zero trust points either. Just focus on those that have positive trust because such a casino cares about its reputation, and so even if some uncomfortable situation occurs, you'll be able to write about it on the forum and there will be a very good chance of their representatives reviewing it. Even though this thread is old and locked, I recommend to look at it to get the general idea of the market, but click on the owners yourself to check if the trust summary is accurate.
Also, apart from choosing a trusted casino, please make sure you're not breaking their rules and are aware of their policies. Pay attention to their KYC policy, withdrawal requirements, banned jurisdictions and remember that multi-accounting will almost certainly get you in trouble. Good luck!

It really depends on the specifics of the currency. If they make a decentralized crypto, then its value will depend on the demand and supply, so people will indeed be the ones giving value to it. However, there's no sense in creating such a crypto for banks and governments because many such cryptos already exist, and they could just adopt one of them. So I think that a bank's crypto would be centralized, with the supply under control of the bank and the price also regulated as much as possible. As for storing it in one's own wallet, I think it would probably be possible, so it's still better than storing fiat in a bank.

It was my birthday yesterday, so I didn't have time to follow the games. Turns out, they went pretty well for me. Of course, I didn't guess that Leeds United would win against Manchester City (I still cannot believe it happened, but congrats to Sojourner who picked it exactly right), but I got Liverpool vs Aston Villa exactly right and was close on Crystal Palace vs Chelsea. West Ham vs Leicester City is looking very bad right now as my pick was 0-1 with Leicester winning
What do you think about Tottenham vs Manchester United? I picked a draw, but I know it's unlikely.

With a little more than one day left till the end of the competition, I've passed the 20 bet threshold today. How about you, are there still people like me who haven't been making lots of bets here?
I'm also wondering about the stats. Mine were only updated for my first 11 bets, and the win/loss column was updated only for the first 3 bets that I placed for this competition. I can see that there are others whose stats weren't updated for a while as well, but I guess it's understandable that it's an overwhelming amount of work for one person, so no worries there. It's just that without actively updated stats, it's very hard to see how everyone's doing so far, and how close or far from winning the competition I am in comparison with others.
I won 9/14 bets that were already settled if I'm not mistaken, but they were largely on pretty low odds, so I have no idea where this puts me.

Bets 15-20:



https://sportsbet.io/sharebetslip/a21087d5-a395-4487-b575-624389772a1b
https://sportsbet.io/sharebetslip/6884e8fb-7f77-4234-8510-19a6ea083389
https://sportsbet.io/sharebetslip/08751c00-687d-4ccc-9a1a-0ca78a90faa5
https://sportsbet.io/sharebetslip/d0236921-0af4-4ae5-81ab-a04e2cb49372
Bet ID: 60707856b7f4c4499541f597
Bet ID: 606dcb37b7f4c43d623d4208

I think it's better to have some sort of organizations that lobbies crypto-friendly policies than none. Sure, they're first and foremost interested in the well-being of their corporations. However, for that well-being, they need mild taxation of crypto profits, full legality of crypto usage, friendly banks that allow users and companies who deal with cryptos to be able to process fiat when they need to buy or sell something and stuff like that. So their fight might also have some positive impact on the lives of ordinary crypto users because the corporations are interested in their customers being happy, so that they can make as much money on this as they can.

Op, I don't know your financial situation, but if $150k is literally all of your savings, it's already a very solid sum, and why risk losing it? Why not take half of it to spend on something now (in my country, one could buy a great flat in a good neighborhood for that money), and then use another half for this long-term hodling Bitcoin experiment?
Nobody knows how high Bitcoin can go or how low it can fall in the future, but I do think it's likely that we'll see it growing at least 5x over the next few years, so the idea itself might not be so bad. I just don't understand why you'd go all-in if you can enjoy some wealth you've already accumulated AND invest in BTC.

I think it's hypocritical to say as the article does that China's fighting these secret mining farms for environmental reasons:
Clearly, being the country with the highest pollution rates in the world, China doesn't and never cared about the environment, and their attempts to fight Bitcoin have nothing to do with eco-friendliness.
I also wonder why people do their business illegally in China if mining isn't illegal there but is only prosecuted in some regions. I do, however, think that regions like Inner Mongolia should find other ways of meeting their energy consumption goals.

I don't think XRP stands a chance, to be honest. Initially, it seemed promising because of its strong willingness to collaborate with banks and to generally be somewhere in between real crypto (decentralized ones) and fiat money. However, I think that the best times of XRP are in the past. I'm talking about the 2017 boom and XRP costing more than $3 per coin. I don't think it will set a new ATH, and, more importantly, I don't think it has a future as a crypto which is truly supported by traditional financial institutions. It's been around for years, and even though it's very much willing to compromise, there doesn't seem to be a bunch of institutions willing to work with this project.

I think that employees should be able to make their own decisions about the preferred currency (fiat or crypto) because their money is their choice and responsibility. As for the risks, I think the salary would still be fixed in fiat, just paid in BTC. And in that case it would be easier for people to send money to relatives who live in other countries, and it's not like when you're paid in Bitcoin you cannot convert the money you need into fiat. It's also very interesting how many people are indeed interested in such options because a screenshot of an image from social media doesn't say much.

I wonder how representative this research is because even though 61,000 people participated, it doesn't automatically make it unbiased. I was surprised to see that 38% use cryptos due to distrust in the current financial system because I thought there were way fewer people who cared about things like that.
But then again, the research says 60% of people store coins on crypto exchanges, and that's a very sad number if this is true since it seems that it was already stressed a lot of times that it's important to own your keys...
It was also surprising for me that 78% favor fiat over stablecoins. I think it's a good thing if there's such low trust to coins like Tether, but is that truly the case?

Op, in a sense, Bitcoin already created many careers and jobs. Because of Bitcoin, there exist various crypto companies like exchanges and other projects, and these projects create jobs. As this article mentions, we're talking about thousands of jobs already, and probably way more if you consider less formal things like people engaging in trading and earning money this way. Bitcoin also gives a possibility to hodl money and to send money to people without turning to an intermediary like a bank, and it allows having money which isn't affiliated with any particular country. It also allows having money which won't inevitable devalue over time because, unlike fiat, it has limited supply.

What's with the US-China-Bitcoin discussions lately? China using Bitcoin as a weapon against the US was discussed just yesterday, and today we have basically the opposite case in which the US should use Bitcoin as a weapon? Bitcoin is quite popular and powerful, but the US and China are two of the world's biggest economies with no other country getting even close to their power. I don't think they need Bitcoin to stay powerful, and neither of their fiat currencies is in immediate danger right now. Moreover, neither is particularly pro-Bitcoin and willing to fully embrace it, so I don't think they'll try to use it as a weapon against each other or that such an attempt would be successful because Bitcoin is quite decentralized for that.