This impression is definitely not true

Bitcoin had been rising since the early fall of 2015 and started as low as $200. In this way, the bullish trend lasted for 16 months. This is not what I would personally call a short span of time unless indeed you were too late to the party. But then it's your fault, not Bitcoin's. Just in case, we have been in a downtrend only for 14 months since December 2017, so we have something like 2 months in reserve for a new cycle to start and still remain in the long-term uptrend which had begun in 2015

That's not the case with Bitcoin

I think it's a little bit too much for a simple pump and dump as Bitcoin rose from 2k to almost 20k within 4 short months. I could believe that Bitcoin Cash was pumped (as that looks plausible and reasonable) but you can't pump Bitcoin that hard due to some fork. My point is that without this hard fork Bitcoin would have likely grown well beyond 20k and then have stayed well above 3k

It doesn't feel like that

Though I understand why it may look like a minor aberration to you but not to me. The thing is I actively trade Litecoin, so I keep a very close eye on such things. Yesterday the lending rates went parabolic and today Litecoin surged, while everything else remained essentially the same. Not much but enough to make a difference for me. This is definitely not a coincidence, though it may look this way to an outside observer who is not involved it trading lites




I think it is not much different at Bitfinex

There are a few gaps in your reasoning

If support was so strong as you say and the price never dropped below 6k no matter how hard the whales tried, then why did we fall so heavy, actually 2 times? Isn't it a bit too much for just fear mongering? Further, if it were whales shorting bitcoins, then we should have expected a strong rebound after these shorts got closed, right? But this didn't happen and we didn't rise substantially above 4k ever since

And last but not least, if this fall was due to Bitcoin Cash controversy, we should be seeing extreme volatility now, but this is not the case. In other words, price behaves as if it truly belongs to the current range for the time being, and that gives you plenty of room for doubt regarding how much the Bitcoin Cash apocalypse is actually involved in all this

Well, that in fact remains to be seen

I don't mean to say that the case described here has anything to do with what I speak of further, but it is in fact a real problem with "math being perfect" as in real life it is far from being perfect. In real life we are dealing with physical devices like random number generators which may or may not be entirely random (as with physical dice you refer to in your post). And I'm not even speaking of purely software ones which are called pseudo-random for a reason

Are you sure about that?

As far as I understand it, the market price of a company stock has no direct connection with the percentage of profits the company pays out to its stockholders as dividends (though the stocks of dividend paying companies are valued higher as dividends typically reflect profits earned)

Most likely you refer here to the fact that a company's stock typically rises in price temporarily when the company announces dividends but it doesn't work in the way you imagine it. All in all, the company can't "grow" its stock other than by earning profit (real or paper), which is then revealed in the market valuation of that company and its stock

Crypto as such has nothing to do with it

As this showing off has more to do with people's ego, while Bitcoin was only instrumental in disproportionately inflating it (which can be huge if there is a reason to, see the Craig Wright case). But it might have been anything else, like an Olympic medal, winning a lottery, hitting a jackpot in a casino, inheriting a fortune, i.e. anything which can be summarized as jumping from zero to hero



Or from shithouse to penthouse (and back again)

Actually, that guy got off pretty cheap

As many people in his position (e.g. after winning a lottery) end up really bad and die under the bridge as homeless drug addicts. Regarding your question, we should understand that we can't really say anything specific or certain unless we have actually been there, in his shoes. Indeed, many of us are thinking about reinvesting so much money and earning as much. This is what we all think, now. But it is not in the least guaranteed that we would be thinking the same if we actually had so much dough in our hands. Money is a dangerous thing on its own, while huge money can be downright fatal

Yes, there's definitely some pattern here

As every year on this very forum there is a thread popping up about the effects of the Chinese new year on the Bitcoin price. Do you also think it is not an entirely random event? Kidding aside, I suspect that what we are dealing with here is called selection bias. You see, it is normal for Bitcoin price to drop every other week (and rise on odd weeks), so you can take any year and find out that Bitcoin price always drops within 2-4 weeks before the Chinese new year. Just like 2-4 weeks after it

I think we can't make such claims yet

They are a little premature as the real effect will be seen and felt after the platform starts operating for real. As I've written before, it will trade real bitcoins so its impact on price will be direct via supply and demand. In this way, if there is a lot of volume at Bakkt, the influence on Bitcoin's price will be substantial. And due to this, we won't be able to say if it was really overrated as it could actually turn out that we might in fact have been underestimating it

I'm curious if you really don't see how contradictory your statement is

At first you question whether an exchange (the biggest one at that) can manipulate the price and then you proceed to assert essentially the same in respect to another exchange ("If binance gets all litecoins and starts selling, the LTC price will crash very soon"). It kinda looks you should first make your own point more consistent and coherent before coming up with objections and disbeliefs. But you are always welcome once you are ready

From my perspective, this is nowhere near enough

Even if there is less speculation (which is a contentious assumption on its own anyway), it doesn't mean  more real value came about in absolute terms. On the other hand, lower prices and higher stability may actually lead to greater adoption and real life use over time as factors preventing this adoption may have finally got removed

But here's another catch. We can't be sure that these prices are here to stay for any significant amount of time. And while daily volatility may in fact have diminished dramatically during the last couple of months, it is too early to tell about long-term volatility. In other words, the price being stable today is no guarantee that it won't crash 2x tomorrow (again)

Obviously, I referred to what we see now

Not what they had to do at the moment of the fork if they had to do anything at all other than promising to unleash hell on the heads of their foes. And don't forget that the fork had been planned long ago and threats were thrown before it. All things considered, it would have made sense to prepare beforehand, i.e. sell bitcoins when Bitcoin was still high, not at the last moment

With that said, however, there is no strong evidence that would exclude the possibility of Bitcoin Cash supporters massively selling bitcoins to support ABC and SV blockchains, and some certainly did just that, while others might have been just looking to make quick profits. But the question still remains, i.e. how much of the recent Bitcoin crash was actually due to this showdown. Personally, I don't think that much

But how exactly is this gross income defined?

And it is still income, not money received. Income can be synonymous with profit (as well as revenue, which is not synonymous with profit), so we should look further into how income is defined exactly. Further, as I wrote in one of my previous posts here, we should also look into the income tax deductions part of the Code, which may specifically mention the condition according to which you can legitimately reduce your taxable income for the expenses incurred (so-called tax deductible expenses)

Care to read what the whole thing is about?

Do read, not write. Or at the very least, read first, write later if you can't help writing (and try to understand in between what the point in question is). This is not about playing thousands of bets for its own sake or whatever you might think of, it is about finding out the odds of hitting jackpot, the thing which you chose to ignore but didn't ignore to write your "wise" comment here

It's not quite clear what you mean by abusing decentralization, care to explain?

Basically, you start with claiming one thing (as per thread title) and then turn to a quite different one, making it look like it is decentralization which is to blame for people being "scammed and robbed in broad day light". Not a good way to start your thread here if you ask me. Regarding anonymity, it is not what Satoshi himself was talking about. He didn't even consider Bitcoin an anonymous cryptocurrency in and of itself. So share with us what your point here actually is

Is there a Tax Code in Romania or anything to that tune?

I don't know what kind of papers you actually read, but I guess you should be looking in the local tax law as the primary source of authentic information on such questions. It would take me a few minutes to find the relevant part on the income tax to see what tax deductions are applicable to what types of income tax and thus remove any doubts regarding this issue. In simple terms, you may have been misinformed

As I said yesterday, we would see today

And it turned out that Litecoin really surged this night while all other coins have been stagnating as before. So my assumption seems to have been proved correct after all. The short sellers were forced to close their positions which led to a price surge. This initial price rise likely triggered liquidation of other short positions which then also contributed to a higher price. Things should return to normal in a day or two, with Litecoin price returning to where it had been before this surge began


You first empty the lending book making shorting prohibitively expensive for some time. When the price rises due to shorts being closed, you dump these coins causing the price to crash. If you are an exchange and a top one at that, it will be easy money for you

This is a really lame excuse you could ever come up with

As you don't need to track "those 8888 numbers" at all. If you hit the jackpot in the process, your balance will be increased immediately. The house edge is known, it is equal to 5%, and with so many rolls there will be very little variance. Therefore, if you wager 1 satoshi at each roll, your losses should be around 5000 satoshi on 99999 rolls. The jackpot cost is also known (with the lowest being 2 satoshi), so the whole thing will cost you around 205k satoshi minus the jackpots you may hit along the way. So more power to you in your testing journey (though don't forget to share your results here)

Can anyone explain to me why everyone here thinks that forks actually lead to price surges?

Why does everyone think that if the Bitcoin fork coincided with Bitcoin's price rise, this rise was necessarily caused by the fork? Did anyone ever ask themselves that without this fork occurring Bitcoin would have reached a higher price? That it was the right moment to steal value from Bitcoin and not add to it? Was it a mere coincidence or an accurate calculation, if it ever comes to that again, it will most likely lead to a price crash like it should have happened and actually happened with the Bitcoin Cash fork itself a couple months ago