in my eyes, breaking $6400 makes sub-$6000 inevitable. the downtrend will already have been confirmed. i definitely plan to be short by then if that's how things go. i hate shorting the corn, but i'll have no choice.


correction phase done? $20>$6k may have just been the first leg down.

how are you so sure? i see all the higher lows, sure. what about all the lower highs? we're all waiting to see which side breaks first. i'd say if price starts getting below $6400, you have lots of new sellers who bought over the last 3 months and will now see a downtrend forming.

i'm hoping for a rally here but i'm not married to the idea. can't trade hope.

thanks for sharing that. i figured the master agreed, the situation is quite bearish. when the long term moving average supports (like the weekly ma20) have curved down, it's time for bulls to hibernate.

and the daily chart... the way we're consistently (for many months) holding the negative portion of the bollinger band and grinding the lower band---very bearish and really reminds me of 2014. not just the look of the chart but the hopeful sentiment mixed with dismal action.

back then i was much better at switching gears to bear mode; this time it took me a lot longer to recognize what was happening.

2019-2020 is reasonable, but it could be even longer than that. i got into bitcoin in 2013, and the market moves noticeably slower now.

at the very least, after a major bubble pop, we should expect the consolidation to take the better part of a year. mid-2013 is the shortest example---less than a year. after the 2013 bubble, it took 3.5 years to make new ATHs!

it's too bad we don't really have any resident perma bears left. anyone remember MatTheCat? i haven't seen kwukduck around in quite a while either. most of the old hands are gone now. nowadays we just got these thin-skinned newbies who come off like they bought at $19k and are shitting themselves.

alste comes to mind too. "$99 dead serious" ha....those were the days!

looks very worrisome for anyone with money at okpay. it looks to me like an overnight rebranding, and anytime i've ever seen that it means old customers getting stiffed.

if you check the google cache, it was reportedly organized as "OKPAY CY Ltd." now, the site lists the operator as "Weezzo CY Ltd." they both list the same electronic money institution license in cyprus, which seems wrong.

on an okpay page, they had previously listed weezzo as a "partner."

this is just speculation. i assume weezzo is just another Mayzus company. knowing Mayzus, i'm guessing things are getting "hot" and he is cutting and running. he runs an elaborate web of shell companies, payment processors and brokerages. most of the companies are fly by night. they are intended to exist only for a number of years until things get too hot (law enforcement, financial regulators) and they are shut down and disappear.

hoping for the best though.

a POW change with wide support would be extremely detrimental to any industrial miner because they've already made significant investments into SHA-256 mining. last year, bitfury george made open threats of lawsuits against those promoting a POW change: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/60ast5/bitfury_george_pledges_to_sue_all_involved_with/

so while a POW change may target bitmain, it would also probably decimate most of today's mining outfits.

i also think a POW change doesn't solve this problem. nothing stops this exact same scenario (monopoly in ASIC chip manufacturing and high concentration of mining power) from happening again.

the definitions used in bitcoin/cryptocurrency development slightly differ from conventional FOSS definitions. conventionally, a hard fork breaks compatibility with older clients, while a soft fork retains compatibility.

in bitcoin development, we consider a soft fork as adding new, more restrictive rules. a hard fork removes or relaxes rules.

this differs from conventional FOSS definitions because bitcoin can have soft forks that break compatibility with older clients. this happens when your client soft forks but a majority of miners do not---resulting in a chain split. 


correction: soft forks can be backward compatible, but are not always. (hard forks cannot be backward compatible)

nope, the eGifter swap trick no longer works. it was taken offline in the last couple weeks, and apparently there is no ETA on bringing it back. it's annoying too, cuz they still advertise the swap method right there on the amazon GC page. that's how i ended up with a few hundred bucks in gift cards i don't need...


AFAIK it's mandatory. i had set the fee to "economy"---10 satoshi/byte---which was the lowest possible in the wallet. but when i went to use the amazon gift card service, it forced me to increase the fee to at least "normal." the fee rates seem to be variable based on (i assume) bitpay's algorithm, could be lower now.

as others have mentioned, they don't accept BTC directly. they also recently changed their gift card policies so that you can no longer buy gift cards through gyft and egifter.

there is one solution: the copay wallet (https://copay.io)

there is a service built into the wallet to buy amazon gift cards. it works great---just used it the other day. one word of warning: you have to set your miner's fee to "normal" or higher, and it's a very high fee. it's totally overpaying. i paid over 100 satoshi/byte last time.

the upside is it's instant; no waiting for confirmations.

this is pretty misleading. it makes it sound like they are requiring tax IDs from all users. they responded to that assertion:



yeah, i avoid bitfinex like a plague, though they were my main exchange a few years back. the US subpoenas, the tether funny business, the long term banking delays, the recent polish government seizure which is believed to have ties to bitfinex...... the list goes on.

* in before paxful gets an earful from regulators and quietly mandates KYC, SAR reporting and other goodies *


i'm a millennial, and my impression isn't that most have lost trust in banks. i know that's an angle the media pushes, but most of the surveys i've seen indicate indifference more than anything. sure, millennials "like" big banks less than previous generations, but they mostly don't care or think about them.

it's more about technology than anything else. young people like new tech more than old people---big surprise!

i could see bitcoin dominance continuing to trend downwards over the long term. the proliferation of new shitcoins adds to that effect, and market cap is inherently misleading for crypto. i could also see bitcoin remaining #1 forever (and i believe it will). those scenarios aren't mutually exclusive.

anyway, why do you think ETH will have such great utility, but BTC won't? the time of BTC smart contracts, LN and sidechains is upon us. the time for ETH hyping seems long over....


no? if bitcoins are a store of value, then i suppose they are.

this does come across a bit spiteful, or perhaps grounded in misunderstanding. i think the red trust should be reserved for scammers. do you really think it's necessary here, Vod?

as for the original feedback, it doesn't seem tag-worthy. publicly bidding on your own auction is basically an undisclosed reserve. does it explicitly violate any forum rules? if anything, just deserves a warning to disclose a reserve in the OP. admittedly i only glanced through the reference thread, so correct me if i'm wrong.....

yikes, i wish i revisited this thread before i went to swap for an amazon GC last night. i'd done it without problems a few times, and they still list it as a method to buy so i didn't think anything was amiss. now im stuck with a $300 home depot card. haha, i guess my garden will be lush this summer.


thanks, i went and did this and the process was super easy. it's nice that you can do exact amounts too.

too bad they jack the fees so bad in the copay wallet though. minimum 10 sat/byte, and to use the amazon GC service you need to spend "normal or higher" fees, which was 102 sat/byte!! i haven't paid those kinds of fees since december.

no other complaints than that. i always wondered who the hell was paying these 100+ sat/byte transactions that are always in the mempool. the copay wallet is one source of bad fee estimation for sure.....

it doesn't necessarily require much hype. trends don't move in straight lines---consider the $995 and $685 bounces in 2014. those were 100-160% moves in the midst of a bear market. it's more about temporary exhaustion of sellers than anything else.


i did say if we break the $11700s. i'm not predicting it.

i was just pointing out a scenario where we hit $15K by summer, per the OP...

personally, i love markets. i love the emotion, and analyzing market psychology and reading sentiment. i allocate more than 90% of my holdings to cold storage---but even if i didn't own BTC, i would still chart it just for kicks.

so i'm a hodler but i'm also a technical analyst and trader. when the market dumps, i'm perfectly fine holding 90% in cold storage and using the rest to churn out more BTC. i'm in it for the long term.

it's just an old wives' tale, like the "weekend dump." people think crypto should pump into (and during) major conferences, because of hype and what not. but these conferences are just industry circle-jerking; nobody in the real world cares about them. the attendees are crypto people who are already heavily invested. there's no rational reason why they should pump the price..... and they don't.

namecoin isn't intuitive or easy to use. the wallet sucks; there's just no usability to drive adoption. people squatted lots of domains on the chance that it would take off, but it never did. based on my last look at the protocol a couple years ago, there was hardly anyone in the world set up to actually view .bit sites. a few thousand people maybe. i think it's safe to say that namecoin is a dead project.

in reality, most people just don't care very much. it usually takes the government years to shut anything down or force compliance. once that happens, people tend to just hop on the next centralized alternative.

you can lock/delete them, but that doesn't solve the problem. many more similar threads will pop up in their place the next day. and it's a lot of work for mods to stay on top of.

these bounty spamming farms are quite mechanical; i think some of them are even employing bots now. i think they'll immediately build new megathreads in short order.


the only scalable (read: automated) solution i see here is self-locking threads after a certain number of pages. but it's probably a bad idea, as it will arbitrarily cut off ongoing discussion in the case of non-spam threads. otherwise moderators need to address it manually, which probably isn't sustainable for any real length of time.