i always preferred the "wild west" situation where services and fundraisers operated in a grey area. fundamental uncertainties (like possible regulation or prohibition) always allow for high risk/reward opportunities. once the uncertainty is removed, everyone on the sidelines piles into the market and potential gains diminish.

in a couple years, the USA will probably have a relatively clear regulatory regime for crypto and ICOs. i wonder how much trading volume that'll push onto more legit (KYC-abiding) exchanges.

the more bitcoin ATMs they pass by, the more curious they might become. these ATMs are like straight up advertisements. i love seeing them in highly-trafficked areas, and i've definitely seen heads turn as people notice one for the first time.

i'm not a huge fan of the fees, so i wouldn't use them myself, but i'm all for increased accessibility and awareness.

great point about risk/reward. i also generally aim for 3:1 or better. lots of new traders are so anxious to get in and out of the market, they overlook basic planning that ensures a profitable strategy.


in my earlier years, i was the same way---and i still am sometimes. but i've also found that automatic stop losses can help cut emotion out from my trading. they kill the temptation (or actually, the ability) to let losses run. to each his own!

hmmm, didn't expect this from coinbase. when did they launch that? it does look like they're ready to go full shitcoin.

i thought they were avoiding securities, but that's not clear. one example requirement from the "digital asset framework":


but then, you read further and see:


this makes me go back and consider the words of SEC chairman jay clayton earlier this year: "I believe every ICO I've seen is a security"

it should make for some good altcoin pumps......

as far as scalability goes, there is probably some overall benefit because coinbase handles the fiat conversion in-house. so there are no on-chain transactions required past the initial deposit into your coinbase account. if they had to process it through eg bitpay, that wouldn't be true.

i prefer to be my own bank. i really don't like keeping any BTC on exchanges---USD is justifiable while waiting to buy back in, plus it's FDIC insured. i wouldn't worry about the effect of your own transactions on scalability. i think users should just be rational and pay as little as possible. that's how bitcoin is supposed to work.

for now, their debit card seems pretty cheap: no transaction fees on domestic transactions for a limited time and no conversion fees. that might change in the future and it might not be economical.

yup. that's exactly when it sunk in for me---when bitfury released their address clustering research. it was sad to see. i guess once operations get big enough, it should be no surprise when they start branching out into less savory activities. greed is a powerful thing.

stay safe out there, y'all. use VPN, manual coin selection, a reputable coin mixer, swap to XMR as needed, and avoid KYC.

BTC is backed by nothing. in some philosophical sense, you could say it's backed by code, or math (or rather humans' paltry understanding of math).

but the truth is, it's backed by nothing at all. the reason people use it is because other people use it. it's based on faith. it's a token that people trust (until they don't). its value is determined by nothing more than demand vs its limited supply.

satoshi said something about this back in the day:

it is correlated. the thing is, a lot of people believe that price follows difficulty---that's totally absurd. nobody gives a shit about mining costs, they only care about the price. difficulty follows price, not the other way around.

in a very bearish scenario, it will just take a while (probably years) for that reality to set in. the relationship between price and difficulty is very inefficient. for now, miners and mining chip producers are obviously still bullish and have the capital to back their operations. they're betting on the long term.

it doesn't really matter how much it costs to mine. like any business, miners can be wrong about their investment and go bankrupt. miners can continue driving difficulty upwards and therefore the cost of mining too, but they make no direct investment into BTC. since they aren't buying BTC, it doesn't drive the price upwards.

at most, miners can withhold whatever coins they can afford to from the market supply. but in the end, they need to cover their overheads. so the price hinges on market demand. miners' costs don't matter---unprofitable miners just get squeezed out of the market. just like losing investors and failing business owners.

as the years go by, i just become more and more detached from my trades, which is great. i just look for my tried-and-true setups---it's pretty mechanical now, and that's on purpose. if a profitable setup isn't there, i don't take the trade. if it is, set stop loss and walk away. rinse, repeat.

having hard trading rules and sticking to them wasn't easy at first, but it gets easier over time. prior to trading, i played a lot of poker so i'm familiar with emotional "tilt" and the damage it can do to your bankroll. it's taken years of consciously striving to cut out emotion at the trading desk, and i still can't say i'm 100% free of fomo. every once in a while my bids get missed and i still chase, getting in some horrible r/r situation that usually ends badly. i don't think any trader is completely free of it.

the 2% rule means you don't risk more than 2% of your account on any one trade. if you have $100k, you don't risk more than $2k at a time. it's definitely applicable to crypto. it's a basic risk management strategy that hedges against variance.

even if your trading system is profitable, you could have a run of bad trades. if you trade 20% of your account at a time, you could blow up your account and lose your shirt after only a handful of trades. the 2% rule allows you to survive an unlucky run, and live to trade another day.

the opposite approach is the "all in on every trade" method that's so popular with crypto traders.

the prices of everything else would be calculated in bitcoin. bitcoin's value would equal its purchasing power, just like we think of USD today.


dollar collapse doesn't mean the collapse of all fiat currencies. people would just use the new global reserve that replaces the dollar---CNY, EUR, whatever. i assume that would be the primary base currency for BTC, and BTC would continue to be the base currency for altcoins.

yep, supply is only one side of the equation. all else equal, when supply drops, price should rise. but if demand for bitcoin is actually dropping by the time the halving comes around, that'll be reflected in the price as well.

given the long term uptrend, i'm assuming the halving will take place in the context of a bull market. but i try to keep an open mind about these things. one truism about markets i've learned over the years is that when everyone expects the same thing, it doesn't happen.

wouldn't you expect this sort of decline after a bubble? interest has declined everywhere you look. it's not about bitcointalk or coinmarketcap in particular. check out google trends for bitcoin---searches have been sliding downwards all year.

we're not in a bull market, the mainstream media isn't hyping things everyday anymore, and the ICO market is pretty dead. no need to check CMC or ANN threads everyday when your entire portfolio is rekt!

it's nice to see numbers that contrast the narrative that the bitcoin supply is completely concentrated. i'm glad to see BTC is getting well distributed and that individual activity has actually grown since the top in december.

however, it's a little disturbing to think about how they determine what constitutes an "active individual user". that requires wallet analysis. chainalysis probably knows a lot more about our activity than we think.....

central banks aren't a united front. you have to consider geopolitics, and the fact that nation-states are competing against one another.

if one superpower prohibits BTC, they might put their industry and population at great disadvantage to the rest of the world. this is a nascent industry where there is potentially massive economic growth and transfer of wealth. it would be outright foolish to purposely get left behind.

if all the superpowers and most of the others all agreed to ban BTC, maybe you'd be onto something. but that would never happen!

it's a real tossup at this point though, which is why the risk/reward on pot stocks is so high right now. it's super speculative, and the situation is so nascent that market share can change very quickly.

in a few years, we'll have a much clearer idea of who the dominant players in the industry are. investment will gravitate towards them, and the potential gains will get smaller over time.


yeah, and i'd actually say more than 50% is speculation.

it's really difficult to say exactly how big the market will eventually be, or what the regulatory landscape will look like if/when the federal government establishes a regulatory regime. and it's becoming a highly competitive market for producers. i suspect most companies are overestimating the percentage of the market they can capture.

i know from my online poker days that you can calculate you gambling income in terms of sessions. that was confirmed in a 2008 IRS memo:


bolding mine for emphasis. given their rationale for allowing calculation of gambling income by session, i think capital gains could be calculated by session as well. if there are no rates provided from the treasury department (there aren't), then you need to use a verifiable source for the bitcoin price and to be consistent about it. personally, i would use something like the daily closing price at coinbase. that should make it simple.

don't quote me on that though. you should probably talk to an actual tax professional.

i've never seen a compelling case for proof-of-stake being solved in the first place, let alone that it's superior to proof-of-work.

it doesn't adequately address malicious intentions, since it doesn't cost anything to attack the system eg with a malicious fork. in POW, a miner must choose only one fork to mine on top of, otherwise there's a huge waste of resources---it's unprofitable. that's a huge deterrent against attacking the network. in POS, malicious node operators can back multiple forks without incurring any costs. that gives advantages to malicious nodes with large holdings vs. nodes with smaller holdings or those who vote for only one fork. in POS, it's even possible for a majority attacker to erase the entire blockchain.

but we can table that whole discussion. it's irrelevant here. the real issue here is that the consensus algorithm (POW vs POS) forms the entire economic basis underlying the network. you can't just rip out the roots of the entire economy---especially one as large and diverse as bitcoin---and think the fork will go smoothly. that will never happen. the network will split, miners will continue mining on the POW chain and they'll take some or all of the userbase with them.

sure. the early bitcoin users were mostly cypherpunks. the emphasis was on trustlessness, decentralization, cryptography and privacy. today, most newcomers are investors---they don't understand the technology and operate mostly off buzzwords. it's annoying, but i think it's also part of the original design. i can't find the quote, but i'm pretty sure satoshi acknowledged that if it ever caught on, BTC would become extremely valuable.

after climbing from $0 to $20k, it's only rational that some people are chasing the price. it's a distraction, but it's also a natural side effect of exponential network growth.