I doubt it unless they have their ways of mixing the coins to such degree, that these whales can dump their discounted coins on a fiat exchange to reap the fruits of their extremely risky investment.

Do you have any proof of this btw? I'm curious. I'm very sure stolen coins are being sold with a heavy discount, as it happens with anything non related to crypto in a similar fashion, but there is no way for me to actually prove it.

As for GBTC, it doesn't really surprise me that there is still money flowing into it---the amount of marketing Barry Silbert and his fellow co-shareholders do to attract institutional capital is next level. Definitely something to respect.

The SEC doesn't need money---there is a deeper incentive to block any attempt of Libra to gain ground based on how much of a threat it forms to the financial system, and let me tell you, it forms one heck of a threat.

I would even dare to say that Libra forms more of a threat to the financial system than Bitcoin will in its existence. It's simple impossible to ignore how powerful a company with billions of members are to potentially use a new form of money.

It's a good marketing stunt in the sense that they bet on people to donate more because the general sentiment here is that Bitcoin enthusiasts don't want to see the coins they donate be sold for fiat.

I sincerely hope that it works out for them, but I have my doubts due to the volatile nature of this market---the damage in case of another major crash (which is likely to happen) is that less people will be helped with that money.

Stablecoin donations could be stored for a long time, but with most non stable crypto assets that's not a smart thing to do if your sole goal is to utilize donations in the most efficient/effective possible ways.

Of course they won't adopt any decentralized currency, why else would they spend so much time and money on research of the creation of their own digital currency? It wouldn't make sense at all.

I consider countries not adopting Bitcoin to be a good thing---it means that in case some large countries are in conflict with each other, Bitcoin won't be attacked in an attempt to damage the country that adopted it.

The more distance there is between governments and Bitcoin the better. I see a lot of people hope that governments will choose Bitcoin as their currency, but there are more cons than pros to it.

IMHO, crypto being centralized or decentralized makes no real difference when it comes to usage in our daily lives.... you can choose to use it at any time of the day if it fits your needs.

The only major disadvantage of something like Bitcoin that's decentralized, is the fact that it won't likely scale to a level where hundreds of millions of people can use it simultaneously.

Overall, we don't need Bitcoin to scale big as long as most people only use it as store of value. How often do people look at their gold they use as store of value? Probably once a year? All because it's stored inside a bank vault.

Something being a store of value attracts more value than any other characteristic of an asset.

Utter garbage.... it's a massive disappointment---if they don't get to see some exponential volume increase in the coming months then we can confirm it being a failure. No point in defending them. Call a spade a spade.

It comes down to their insurance fee, profit margins, and so on. I would say that the higher storage cost should provide people an incentive to withdraw their coins from that plarform.

You are reading it too far.... I have been dollar cost averaging pretty much since 2015 with some breaks every now and then, and it worked out extremely well looking at where we are today.

What impact did the volatility have on me? Zero. It's a long term game, which you seem to acknowledge as well---volatility is a concern when you are short term minded, but then you don't get to benefit from dollar cost averaging....

As for dividends, I honestly have no idea why you even bring that up since you know we're talking about crypto here.... it technically doesn't even have to do much with stocks.

Bitfinex is an exchange to avoid IMHO. If you do some basic level research, it becomes clear that there are a lot of unhappy users with withdrawal problems of mainly dollars, and this has been the case for over a year.

Bittrex is better, but their compliance model makes them super paranoid to the level where they in some cases block your account to ask for new information to confirm your identity.

I get why they do that, but there are other compliant exchanges that bug their users far less often. I do however agree that Bittrex's exchange is pretty decent overall---an A+ score for their trading engine and overall responsiveness.

It technically doesn't matter who is behind what---key point is that whatever they deliver works as specified, and as long as that is the case, people will definitely use it. Not ever has there been such a large entity behind a project like this.

I'm more interested in how they could combat PayPal and other similar financial products.... if Libra can offer a looser payment environment, that is already a massive game changer and selling point.

People are sick and tired of PayPal, but thus far there hasn't really been much of a competitor to take over their market share, so I really hope that Libra can do that. I'm sure they can get something done to offer buyers protection too.

It's not that difficult when all it takes is the price to trigger stops and the uncontrolled selling starts---exactly what we have seen happen when we broke out of the descending triangle not that long ago.

Don't let the current stability fool you into thinking that we're doing fine.... the same stability is what we had around the $10k level and we went down anyway---we need sideways consolidation in a bull market, not bear market.

I find myself to be quire bearish lately, but not bearish enough to see the price fall that low. My lowest "worst case" bottom scenario is $5-$5.5k and that's low as heck already.... I'll definitely stock up on Bitcoin big there.

Well said. It was a brutal massacre when the bubble finally popped.... no one could have seen that coming, not even the whales people always think manipulate the price. It's hard to think of anyone who didn't lose.

Even hodlers lost out because they saw their stack lose +80% of its value from the top---value no person likes to lose despite it being a hodl stack because we get used to that value and think of what we could do with it.

Mike Novogratz, who is a billionaire, lost like $80 million with his fund, so the smaller fishes definitely don't have to blame themselves for anything---losses are inevitable once the craze people got used to comes to an end.

It might be true, for now, but I want to see them again when the price takes some more beatings. It's a volatile market so it makes sense to convert at least half of what they get to fiat, otherwise the donations lose utility.

They are a charity, not speculators on the price.... unless they quickly put their donations to work after receiving them, it could turn out to be a bitter experiment even though their intentions to hodl and spend are respectable.

I have never seen anyone state that 24% annual interest is low---this is the first time. Common sense would tell me that it is too good to be true, so if anyone is looking to invest in this.... don't be shocked if it backfires on you.

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, it just isn't viable long term speaking---you're way better off offering lower interest rates so that you can sustain this business model because people aren't feeling it this way.

I agree. People severely underestimate the current market, which they have always done because when you want to see your coins go up, you will come up with bullish bottom scenarios to please your thinking and reduce some stress.

Longer term speaking, bouncing off some important moving averages is what I find quite bullish, which is why I'm looking forward to ~$7k because that could potentially be a level at which the trend reverses.

I do however believe that we lost the $10k level this year, so after a major correction it will be a slow grind up to break $10k before to block halving to hopefully never see such levels ever again. It's a great time to have fiat ready now.

Extremely unlikely if we don't see the price regain strength by closing above the 200 daily moving average. It's not looking good because whenever we close below it, we tend to hover below it at least for a couple of months.

The same applies to when we close above it, so that's what I am waiting for in order to change from bearish to bullish---for now I'm expecting lower lows where $7-$7.5k is a very realistic scenario even though people don't want that to happen.

It's great and all to give calculations your own spin, but a lot of people hodl Bitcoin solely for the purpose of selling it at a much higher price---for some that's after a 100% increase while others wait for a 1000% increase.

This aspect of Bitcoin won't appeal to people for ever because there is less to gain the higher the price is---do you think gold will do a 10x from where it is today? It's not going to happen no matter how bad the world economy is.

Currently there is a lot of potential upside so the risk to reward ratio favors the investors, but that will change the moment we are near the $100k mark. People will look for other investments or coins to capture more upside potential.

The 'right' time to scale was when the blocks became full in 2017 and that's still the case today---the only economical incentive Vitalik satisfies here is that of the miners because they absolutely love scooping up high fees.

Tether has been an absolute stress factor on the network lately. It drives the gas price up for every user, which isn't something that people couldn't have seen coming, especially after the token boom in 2017 and some part of 2018.

I can see Tether only further drive gas prices up with how more and more USDT shifts from Omni to Ethereum. It's a serious problem that grows bigger and bigger. It's better to have it be more distributed to take some stress off Ethereum.

I doubt that unless the hacker somehow managed to obtain the password of your friend's bitcointalk account, because otherwise there is no way to exclude the original owner of the account without his password.

Either way, did your friend open a thread in the meta section of this forum to ask admin(s) for account recovery? That would be the logical step to follow if it wasn't a throwaway account.

The wicks above the 200MA have indicated extremely strong bearish momentum with how swiftly they were sold down, and I expect it to happen until the price resets lower to where we have to shift to the weekly chart.

Short term speaking the price is standing on its last legs so it's a matter of weeks or maybe days before we see continuation to the downside. Moon boys will be up for an unpleasant surprise.

Did you see the insanely low volumes? This isn't just calmth before the storm, but calmth before the hurricane. If we close this month in the red, it means 4 consecutive bearish closes.... last year the 4th red close resulted in the dump from $6.2k to $3.5k.

The chances of seeing Bitcoin ever reach $1 million are extremely slim---there is not enough demand for that to happen unless the dollar loses so much of its value that this black swan event can push Bitcoin to $1 million.

However, in that scenario it only means that your Bitcoin is worth $1 million, while the purchasing power is probably 5% of today's purchasing power, so you technically haven't gained anything.

To make things even worse, the dollar losing that much of its value will take the whole world economy down with it. No economy will be safe because everything is pegged to the dollar. Definitely something to keep in mind.

Nothing wrong with dreaming big, but Bitcoin at $1 million in a strong world economy is just a joke.