bit premature, don't you think? "will not recover" implies what happens after the bear market---a bubble that pops and never goes up again. we're right in the middle of the bear market now, no different than 2014 really. if 3-5 years go by and we're grinding below $1000, i'll agree that maybe "this time is different."

i think proudhon was sort of trolling here anyway.

how do you know they've bought back? i'm hoping they haven't. a good short squeeze would play nicely here.


i'd say it's a natural part of the market cycle, but i'm not sure about that second bit. distribution usually propels a bear market (as we've seen the past several months) because it traps all those new buyers into losing positions. they then sell into the bounces.

apparently not all ICOs are securities, because he wouldn't comment on ETH in the same breath. he seems to be stressing the distinction between a "decentralized currency" and a "for-profit venture."


more of the same, really. i think the intention here is to gently scare ICO issuers into compliance.

i think it might turn out win-win, but maybe i'm being optimistic. on one hand, you'll have regulated trading with full KYC through a more traditional broker-dealer relationship. regulators are happy, accredited/institutional investors are happy, broker-dealers are happy.

on the other hand, since we're talking about securities tokenized on decentralized platforms, you can likely invest into said securities on secondary/p2p markets and avoid regulated broker-dealers entirely.

fully regulated markets bring thick liquidity, and arbitrage opportunities will probably incentivize some of that liquidity to spill over into the secondary/p2p markets.

ah, i see what you're saying. i was focusing on the "poloniex refusing to pay creditors according to their agreed upon terms" angle, which i see as a breach of contract, not a matter of extortion (civil or criminal).

that's an interesting take, at a time where personal data has such an obvious dollar value now.


i believe that poloniex willfully violated its terms---they breached contract, which is a civil tort worth your deposited money + possibly additional damages. they have refused to pay creditors in spite of good faith compliance with their terms. if they make the argument that they were overwhelmed by customer verification queues or other such nonsense, i would counter that they were grossly negligent in complying with their own stated terms.

like i said, i believe that waiver of your right to sue would be laughed out of court.

the irony here though, is that you would need to identify yourself (to poloniex and the courts) in order to sue poloniex. if the ultimate issue is shielding your identity, you can't get resolution from the courts at all IMO.


i think it's a breach of contract. it's something you can sue over (with the above catch-22).

not a lawyer by trade so take what i say with a grain of salt.......

it's not extortion because there's no demand for money, property, services. it's a breach of terms/contract issue.

requiring customers to waive the right to sue (without recourse) won't be looked upon favorably by any court. if poloniex willfully violated its terms (eg refusing to pay creditors in spite of good faith compliance with their terms), or did so with gross negligence, that waiver will be laughed out of any respectable court.

writing an absolute bar to a lawsuit into a contract is totally unenforceable, period. not a lawyer, but i know that for damn sure. the only reason poloniex includes this kind of waiver is to deter gullible people from legal action and discourage them from even talking to a lawyer. it's not built to hold up in court.


that's the breaks when you're a resident of a sanctioned country and dealing with an american company. i sympathize with syrians for sure, but the people running bittrex aren't brazen enough to violate sanctions. here's why:

one of the things people don't get here, i think, is that poloniex and bittrex don't give a fuck about consumer affairs departments. they want to deter as much legal action as possible, sure. but they're probably much more worried about being accused of facilitating terrorism and money laundering, and i suspect federal law enforcement/regulators are in regular communication with them.

let the gold rush continue. the shovel salesmen are all setting up shop now!

this is what patrick byrne is trying to do with overstock's subsidiary, tZero. in q3 last year, patrick byrne said tZero would be the first digital securities exchange in compliance with SEC and FINRA guidelines.

looks like coinbase and circle are both trying to beat them to the punch.

this all tells me one thing: people saying ICOs are gonna die out have got it backwards. i think byrne is right---tokenization of securities on decentralized p2p platforms is only going to get more prevalent with time. ICOs are just the beginning.

no point making predictions while it's ranging. we need to break $6500 or $10k to know where the market is headed next. anything in between could just be noise. i stopped trading this chop a little while back.

if up, i'm targeting $15k or so. if down, i'm looking at $3000. too early to tell.

only the true bitcoin believers.....even among people who say they'd buy at $1000, the vast majority will cower in fear when the time comes. they'll pull their bids and figure that BTC is dead. that's just how markets work; very few people are permitted to buy the bottom.


yup, it would break the long term log trend. that would kill a lot of dreams!

yeah, if i see a waterfall through the last support area before the 2017 bubble ($2500-ish), i'm gonna have bids staggered throughout $950-$1250. that's one knife that's worth catching. probably the last chance to buy the dip ---like 2015 sub-$200.

ah, the weekly "bitcoin is a bubble" thread. i was wondering when someone would post it.

$1000 means a redux of 2011.....certainly possible. but assuming it will happen?! beyond foolish. this long sideways on the daily looks like a recipe for a measured move to 2017 supports in the $2500-$3000 range. i'm not betting on any lower than that; the odds are too low.

i'd say there is a 5-10% chance of $1000 happening, at most. but yeah, it's a possibility.

unfortunately, it's a very lagging indicator. it's not that informative from a trading perspective. but it does help us understand where we are in the market cycle and why (from a supply/demand perspective).

public interest plunged just as distribution set in: certainly indicative of a bear market. then again, dropping from $20k to $6k could have told us that!

i think bitgo and greenaddress both offer a similar online wallet solution where you solely access the decrypted private keys.


this is a good resource to start delving into mining profitability: https://whattomine.com/


i know many people who use them. keep in mind, they were hacked last december and lost about 4700 bitcoins (belonging to customers). they are slowly repaying everyone back---as of june 1st, they have repaid 45% of the lost funds.

i would never touch them again. but it seems guys in the CIS countries, their options are slim. there's exmo (same guys as btc-e) and there's wex, and there's small local exchanges. not sure what else, but that's the impression i get from my russian friend.

i don't consider it an exit scam. i saw the DOJ press release and got my 55% back. lost a lot (not as much as you). but easy come easy go, i guess.....

bingo. we can go on and on about underlying fundamentals but even under the best conditions, there are larger market forces at play. you don't simply have bubbles without severe corrections. supply must first be exhausted before a bull market can emerge. we haven't had the "boring" phase yet, that period that usually precedes a bull run. that period where everyone has forgotten about, or given up on bitcoin. (remember 2015?)

bounces aside, there's a decent chance we haven't seen the worst of this bear market yet either. as masterluc (probably the best analyst to grace this forum) reminds us:

sounds like you're talking about mainstream (late) investors. hence "near the top of the s-curve."

i'm not disagreeing with what you're generally saying, it's just not what people usually mean by smart money, at least in crypto: https://www.reddit.com/r/Silverbugs/comments/4q5p6i/the_market_cycle_smart_money_vs_dumb_money/

when every tom, dick and harry working at wal mart is accessing bitcoin instruments through their retirement fund, i imagine we're officially in the "dumb money" stage.

what i was actually getting at was the trader's perspective. i've been trading this market for years, and let me tell you: 4-5 years ago there was so much money on the table. the days of easy money are long over in this market (outside of shitcoin pump and dump riding).....bitcoin trades much like gold and other chop fests now because the smart money arrived years ago IMO.


what made you think lightning and rootstock are the end-all-be-all of crypto? if anything, lightning makes inter-protocol use cases more interesting.

and remember, sidechains are just altcoins that can interact with bitcoin. they're shitcoins, not bitcoins. they have different security/trust models, they can have different supply/demand models than bitcoin and they can certainly carry different value. interoperability with bitcoin is good for shitcoins---not the other way around. in any case, i assume (based on the incentives involved) that shitcoins will continue integrating features far faster than bitcoin will. that's actually good for bitcoin. bitcoin is our rock, and we don't want it integrating every gimmick for no good reason.

bitcoin moves slow, and i think that's actually what the market likes.

and do you really believe that consensus forks are obsolete in bitcoin? what was the point of bip9 and bip8 then? fixing tx malleability in future versions doesn't address everything under the sun by any means. unless you think lightning is somehow a catch all for all use cases imaginable?

further, there are features/mechanisms that would be highly controversial to integrate to bitcoin, whether by their nature or because they'd require hard forks---replacing POW with less energy-intensive means, removing the public blockchain, integrating full on-chain privacy, etc. there would always be a market for crypto that integrates things that simply won't be ported to bitcoin.


i never argued that bitcoin is bearish or that this can't happen. i was just responding to your claims that shitcoins will go the way of the dodo cuz segwit and lightning, that shitcoins won't have regulated futures markets, etc


uh, you made some claims (some baseless, others unclear) that i either disagreed with or wanted clarity on. so i posted a reply. this is a forum BTW. now i need to provide you a thesis? lol?

ah, the proverbial "smart money." what exactly do people mean by this?

hedge funds have been here since at least early-mid 2014. that's when HFT algos started dominating, particularly in the chinese futures markets. lots of former goldman, etc traders brought their bot game to the markets. from 2015 on, this market is highly algo driven as a result.

traditional institutions and fund managers create spinoffs for this sort of thing---they don't expose blue chip balance sheets to unregulated markets. hedge funds and VC capital has been with us for years, though. i'm not sure what people are expecting---GS and JPmorgan to list actual spot BTC on their balance sheets? that's a meaningless metric, and it'll probably happen near the top of the s-curve.


fortunately for shitcoins, bitcoin consensus moves at a snail's pace. if bitcoin could incorporate the plethora of shitcoin features (or would want to, in the case of alternative consensus modes, sharding, etc) within multiple decades, i would be very surprised.


who?


maybe, maybe not. these things move very fast. the CME just announced a partnership with crypto facilities ltd to supply a real-time index and reference rate for ETH.

i point this out because the Cboe and gemini struck a similar partnership a few months before the Cboe brought their futures product to market.

also, the Cboe's president hinted they might launch ETH and BCH futures markets. so there's that.

there may be lots of scam ICOs, but i wouldn't paint every one with that brush.

i also don't think they're going away---at all. people seem to think there's going to be some new regulations that outlaw ICOs or something. on the contrary, ICOs will just be brought into the regulatory fold, at least in the major nations. just like with cryptocurrencies, governments can't stop these p2p transactions. they will adapt and conform to new standards.

don't use the scam ICOs to hide the fact that ICOs break down important financial barriers. they make retail securities investment far more accessible to people---even in poor and less developed countries. lots of VC capital seems to recognize the importance of this. yet lots of bitcoiners seem to think everything besides BTC is just going to disappear one day. fat chance, methinks!

i think an ICO implosion spells blood bath for BTC as well.

most people note that the crypto markets are broadly correlated, but few discuss the macro effects of altcoin markets on the BTC supply side. since most altcoins (and nearly all ICO tokens) trade predominantly against BTC, this creates latent demand for BTC: anyone who wants to buy these tokens generally needs to buy BTC first. as long as every BTC bought on the altcoin markets isn't dumped immediately back to fiat, this is a net drain on BTC supply and therefore a boon for the price.

here's the flip side of that: let's say the ICO market becomes a stampede headed for the exits, with everyone dumping for BTC. at least some of that BTC is going to get dumped on the BTC-fiat markets. that's a net drain on the price.

the markets should be correlated in both directions.


yeah, altcoins/tokens rise harder and fall harder than BTC. more volatile in both directions.

i wouldn't pay any attention to the korean or chinese exchanges. they're known for washing volume. either that, or they have no trading fees (which renders the numbers meaningless).

one thing to note here is that BTC has a much more robust OTC market than all other cryptos. those numbers aren't publicly disclosed for the most part, but the OTC market has been reportedly growing rapidly over the past few years.


i'm guessing the global spike in EOS volume has to do with the vulnerabilities that were just disclosed: https://twitter.com/cnledger/status/1001335269180653568?s=21