the CFO said as much---their clients want a bitcoin derivative to trade. so institutional interest is obviously growing. i wouldn't jump the gun on declaring a bull market, though. trading non-deliverable futures is a lot different than investing in BTC. these contracts can't be indefinitely held and will be settled in USD. they're just for short term bets on price, not investing. when i first got serious about trading (vs just holding), i was consistently shorting the BTC market in 2014. some of their clients are only interested in that.

sentiment is a great indicator, but good traders usually bet against the crowd, not with it.

i never bought the "flippening" hype. i knew that both ETH and BTC were forming a blow-off top (not that i or anyone was able to call the top accurately). it was plain as day for anyone whose ridden bitcoin and altcoin bubbles before.

but by the same token, sentiment works in both directions. like you say, "the crypto community seriously discusses how Ethereum is going to die soon." sentiment has completely flipped. remember what happens every time people say "bitcoin is dead" and be wary of getting too bearish on altcoins after they've already fallen 85-95%. when the altcoin haters are celebrating in the streets, we're usually close to the bottom.

i'm not gonna lie. i feel a tiny bit of schadenfreude when i see stuff like this. it just makes me chuckle because i've been there as a noob trader/investor. as traders, we call it "paying tuition." most everybody gets rekt early on, blows up their account. one of my first experiences with crypto was chasing litecoin in april 2013 (because bitcoin was "too expensive" hahaha). it turned out i was buying into the first post-crash bull trap. i got massacred so much worse because i was in LTC rather than BTC.

these are lessons new investors and traders need to learn. it looks easy. you think, "i'll just buy low and sell high!!" right, haha. then you get greedy on the way up, refusing to sell. then you let your losses run on the way down. and you buy altcoins with no regard for the altcoin market cycle.

noobs get rekt---it's a fact of life. most traders lose money, then they give up and quit. and unfortunately, some are dumb enough to invest their life savings.

i try to impart whatever knowledge i can to help noobs avoid the pitfalls of new traders, but like i said, most of these people are gonna get rekt. they're greedy (that's why they came) and they don't know what they're doing. then they're gonna sell the bottom. at some point all you can do is shrug. this is how markets work.

i wouldn't say they don't care. after all, VPN users were the minority before the ban, so of course they're still the minority after. that doesn't really say whether the ban is working. i'm reading that most of the VPNs available in China before the ban are still available now, so they must not be enforcing it heavily. from an end user perspective, that's not much deterrent.

a survey earlier this year showed 14% of chinese internet users were using a VPN daily, or ~100 million users per day. i wonder what overall VPN usage looks like if that's just daily users. seems significant to me.

very true, although we can't assume that all energy consumed by bitcoin mining is excess capacity. that's why some localities where electricity is cheap are getting concerned.

for instance, quebec approved a rate hike for bitcoin mining businesses, and also temporarily halted new service requests for them. the logic is that demand for quebec's cheap electricity from miners has gotten so high that they'll need to start buying extra capacity (at rates unknown) to meet demand if they don't start upcharging miners or otherwise stop them from setting up shop. if they have to buy extra capacity to meet miner demand, that will drive up rates for residents, too. if i lived there, i wouldn't be happy about that.

it's inevitable. there's a lot of greed involved in investment, and particularly in crypto because huge gains and losses can happen so fast, and because people mistakenly think bitcoin/altcoin markets are zero sum---not true. altcoin markets are a boon for BTC because they suck up lots of bitcoin supply.

lots of people try to act like their shit talking is out of altruism ("it's for the newbs! they're gonna get scammed!") but it's mostly just sour grapes and greed. i've experienced it myself too many times to believe otherwise. when you get down to it, people be like "if they weren't putting that money into shitcoins instead of bitcoin, bitcoin would be so much higher!" hahaha. it's all about greed. i got into it for a while in 2016 when ETH was starting to make waves. "who are these idiots buying this non-scaling scam coin?! ETH is total shit for x, y and z reasons! look at the fundamentals you stupid newb shitcoiners!"

now, i have no interest in that bullshit. what a waste of time and energy. it's too obvious to me now that altcoins aren't going anywhere, and that the next altcoin pump season is just a matter of time. that includes bcash. even if you believe you're helping newbs by constantly talking shit about altcoins, it's totally futile. the human propensity for greed is far greater than anything you could ever say. IMO, just let the markets be. no point getting angry over altcoins. when it comes to bcash, just take the high road.......

benefit, how? bitcoin is peer-to-peer. there shouldn't be any need for custodians to hold it on behalf of clients, and for banks to issue notes against it. that's what this is.

don't get me wrong. this stuff is inevitable. but it's not good. a deposit receipt is a piece of paper. it's not BTC. the benefits of bitcoin are lost when you reintroduce trust to peoples' finances like this.

for sure. the same people that were willing to do KYC on bittrex and poloniex will do so on shapeshift. and a lot of people don't even think about it; they just fork over their documents when asked. i'm still amazed at how readily people give up their docs to fly-by-night ICOs pushing vaporware when identity theft is on the table. hell, some people do it just for the bounties. sad....


i definitely like the idea of no registration. i've never heard of this site, though. anybody used it?

i wouldn't plan on it, as things have only gotten worse over the past few weeks. it seems like ZEC, PPC, NMC and other withdrawals no longer work. you can only withdraw USDT and XMR now.

it's been almost two months, and the admin has said nothing at all besides pointing out fake mirror sites. pure speculation: i think they got robbed from the inside in some kind of mishandled sale or administrative snafu, and tried to bide time in hopes that they could recover their wallets. but it looks hopeless now. who's gonna keep money on wex now if they ever open withdrawals? anyone still waiting will probably gtfo and never look back.

i think the bigger question is what would happen if early satoshi coins moved at all. to some extent, i think the market believes the satoshi coins are lost or otherwise won't move and has therefore priced that in. i could see panic ensuing over this, and whales from the early days bringing supply to the market. if even satoshi is selling, that puts a damper on the idea of hodling!

as an aside, nobody really knows how many coins satoshi mined. we assume that he was the only miner for many months, but we don't actually know. i wouldn't be surprised if some estimates (like yours) are exaggerated.

for BTC, that's totally normal for a crash following a bubble. take a look at these drops from ATH to bottom:

2011: 94%
april 2013: 83%
december 2013: 87%

if we compare to past bubble patterns, is a 90% drop really near impossible? i don't think so.


i'm not making any predictions here, just pointing out the possibilities. the only reason $2000 seems impossible is because of recency bias. we all think of "normal" as $6000+ now. but that's just perception. in 2014, the $600s became "normal" after months of trading there. then we crashed to the $200s and eventually below. and then the $200s became the new "normal."

it depends how often you'll need to access it. i prefer to put most of my coins into very cold storage--encrypted core wallet.dat generated offline and copied onto a few storage mediums.

then i leave the rest of my coins in electrum wallets that use the offline signing method, which is much safer than a desktop wallet connected to the internet, or an online wallet.

here's a tutorial on how to set up an offline signing setup with electrum: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3g16qy/i_made_a_tutorial_on_how_to_sign_transactions/

(note: it's best to use a camera + QR code rather than USB sticks, although i've never heard of successful bitcoin theft via USB stick malware + offline encrypted wallet)

i suppose your gripe is with the centralized exchanges, then.

as i see it, we're stuck with them until DEX's become easy to use with good liquidity, and crypto becomes more prevalent (so exchange to fiat currencies becomes less necessary). so to me, these centralized stablecoins are just an extension of what we already have. no big deal.

there are a couple potential positives though. so many exchanges hold lots of USDT---if anything ever happens to tether, we'll see huge losses across the ecosystem. i think it would be healthy to see that risk spread around to some other exchanges. the other thing is, i've never been able to register with gemini because of their ID requirements. it'd be funny if i could hold GUSD to ride out downtrends despite them refusing me as a customer.

yeah, i totally get that. but there are some legacy players who are at least exploring real deliverables. i know ICE plans to offer physically delivered daily futures contracts. i think they announced that back in august. i also saw today that citigroup is working a new physically backed instrument similar to an ETF: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5025696.0


yeah the bright side of non-deliverables is that they can really only follow the unregulated spot market. not useful for price manipulation. they're only pegged to spot prices by arbitrage traders.

ok fair enough---but that all boils down to investor demand. the actual cost doesn't matter---only the perceptual effect on buying/selling pressure. there is a flip side to that: if the market holds below the perceived "price where miners will prop the market" then that could reinforce fear and increase sell pressure. i could easily see price crashing to the $2000s or $3000s, miner costs be damned.

all that is to say, there is no magical bottom like franky1's $5800. there is only supply and demand. and the lower we go towards miner's true pain points, the more likely they will capitulate at high volumes far, far below $5800 or any other magic number.

in the same sense, the news from goldman sachs didn't actually do anything. at most, it just helped trigger a down move that was already going to happen eventually. the reason a selloff like that occurs is because people are ready to sell; sentiment is negative and the market is bearish.

last year during the bull run, nobody would give a shit what goldman sachs was doing. it would have been an afterthought. it's only because the market dropped $1000+ in a day or two that people are searching for a cause, after the fact. "oh, it must have been the goldman sachs news!" no, i doubt it!

the cost to miners doesn't matter. miners have overheads that must be paid. they have much more risk than spot buyers who can wait for price to come to them. miners can definitely be squeezed into liquidating their operations and selling their coins below production cost---why not? and difficulty will drop if net hash power is dropping due to unprofitable miners shutting down. that $5800 figure can drop until it's profitable to mine again at lower market prices.

and about users refusing to sell for less then they paid for it..... what about all the coins bought in 2009-2017 when price was lower than now? lots of bitcoiners can still take profit at these levels. as for the bagholders, they might end up selling much lower in a capitulation.

how can this really be quantified? it doesn't matter how many people have heard of "blockchain." what matters (regarding monetary supply) is how many people own cryptocurrency. what is that, 5% or so of society? and that's for developed countries.

if we expect mass adoption (like e.g. cell phones or televisions), then we have a long way to go before most people actually own crypto. the difference between 5% and 80% or 90% is massive. and the low liquidity nature of cryptocurrency on spot markets can lead to exponential price growth under bullish market conditions. does he think there's no more bull markets coming in crypto? i think 2017 just blew his mind and he thinks it can't happen again. i remember feeling that way in 2014.

yawn. looks like more of the same---just cash-settled futures. if the contracts are non-deliverable, then no one will use these instruments as a way to buy or sell BTC. like the regulated futures markets that already exist, it won't affect the spot market.


i wonder what their criteria is. i know coinbase's recently launched product is marketed as institutional-grade. same with bitgo and xapo. bit insulting for them, eh?

the way i see it, news is always secondary to the actual underlying fundamentals. for example, if bad news triggers a major selloff, that indicates very weak bid support and lots of supply that was ready to be sold. in other words, the sell pressure was already there, and demand was already weak. 

as another example, as pooya87 points out, bad news can't put a dent in a bull market. that goes to show you the important thing is whether you're in a bull market or bear market. you might see a selloff following negative news and think therefore that news drives the market. but most traders will tell you, that move was going to happen anyway.

that just goes to show you---the market didn't dump because of goldman sachs. if it did, price would have recovered on the "fake news" announcement. instead, it's still $1000+ down from the last high. that tells me the market was ready to dump regardless of any news.


that's basically my position. this was a natural reaction to lots of supply entering the market. people weren't selling because of goldman sachs. that's just a silly rationalization.