be careful trading on your own sentiment alone. that leaves you prone to emotional trading (which might account for your accuracy). often the mind works like this: price rises, which causes your blood to boil as you're waiting for entry. price then reverses, filling your bids as you "buy the dip"---price felt low, etc. but then, price keeps falling.


the above is why it's worth learning technical analysis (TA). you need to learn how to recognize tops and bottoms to give you an edge in trading. left to emotions alone, you'll probably be left bagholding.

TA is not a crystal ball. it gives you some tools to recognize setups that have a probability of working out. nothing works 100% of the time, or even 80-90% of the time. that's why trading is hard work. TA is about providing setups to trade. then you need to employ risk management to ensure that you don't let your losses run. over the long run, if your setups are valid, then you should be profitable.

babypips is a good resource for learning TA and risk management basics. it's aimed at beginner forex traders, but the principles all apply to trading crypto: https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex

it's not complicated at all. because of the high fees on coinbase, i highly recommend GDAX.

it has a different interface than coinbase and allows limit orders and stop losses---that's about it. if you want to market buy or market sell like on coinbase, you can. it only costs 0.25% fees instead of coinbase's 1.5% fees. and you can use limit orders (orders that stay on the book until somebody fills them) with 0% fees. they offer free BTC withdrawals too.

coinbase is very simple and you don't need to worry about your order getting filled---they get automatically filled. for that privilege (and the convenience of direct buys from your bank account rather than depositing, transferring and setting orders), you pay ~1.5-4%. screw that! you can just transfer directly from your coinbase to GDAX account, set orders, and avoid those fees.

you should expect people to be rational.

but it's probably more accurate to shorten this to:


like i said:


but i know it's more compelling to talk shit about people rather than address arguments, so carry on.


calling this neutral is a bit of a stretch:

lightning is still a ledger system.

we may not be publishing every transaction on the blockchain, but the pre-images we exchange are literally ledgers of accounts between channel participants. they're basically "private" ledgers that eventually settle on the blockchain's "public" ledger. (hence the privacy benefits of LN)

sorry in advance for the length....


you might find---for the most part---the only people willing to pay per post are advertisers.


regarding the sig campaigns, it seems like a more obvious solution is to restrict or prohibit them or address negligent managers. or just disable the signatures.

regarding trolls, traditional moderation should be enough. i guess it becomes problematic when we have high-volume spam though.


what if the price people are willing to pay to freely discuss things tends towards ~$0? there's a spectrum between zero activity and endless spam, and your proposition might land near zero activity.


but as you say, you are a contrarian. how much forum activity do you realistically expect if we had to pay per post? i'm sure theymos has to find some balance if the extreme means a 99%+ drop in traffic.

if you want a forum that's just a circle jerk among a few dozen people---if an informative one---you can make a private forum elsewhere. why don't you do that?


i don't think anything will deter outright trolls. that's what moderation is for.

maybe the forum should hire more moderators. are there people with high report rates who are willing to do the job? i saw the recent posting about the politics board (and someone was hired), but that's it.


i'd much rather they delete signatures than requiring pay per post. i'd stay if signatures were disabled.

but i'd probably never post again if i had to pay for the privilege. maybe a small one-time fee to unlock forum-wide posting as MagicSmoker mentioned, but otherwise hell no. there are plenty of other places to waste lots of my time.


how do you keep the system from devolving into nepotism? consider the merit system and how merit is handed out among friends and social circles. merit is not objective.


it's like a walled garden.

it's like the bitbounce or earn.com models---spammers (and everyone else) need to pay to get your attention. the problem here is, there is no way to target and incentivize the quality posters to post in the first place. advertisers are still willing to pay for your attention. but what about genuine forum posters?

the only solution offered is rewarding based on the merit system, which i think is highly subjective, flawed, and prone to rewarding groupthink rather than useful and merit-worthy discussion.

the unlocked threads only have 1-5 pages. looks like they're locking huge spam megathreads. probably for the best. a lot of those megathreads just take up space---you get hundreds of shitposters just responding to the OP or even just the thread title (no real discussion).

take one of the screenshotted threads, Worried about btc future. check the last page. here's the first sentence of each reply:


it goes on like this.

i agree there's some subjectivity involved in thread locking and mods should err on the side of caution, but it's high time that something was done about this.


i don't think the early contributors should have their posts deleted just because of later spammers. plus, the topic may be perfectly legit, so they should be left for search results.

it depends what time frame you're talking about. a price chart = cycles within cycles within cycles. which cycle do you mean? are you sure we felt true despair---the ultimate bottom, like 2015? maybe we just felt short-term despair.

i get the feeling a lot of the renewed optimism is from folks who didn't experience Q1 2014.

consider how market psychology works. let's assume the recent wave of optimism is correct and $6425 was a major bottom. based on BTC's past bubbles, we could now bounce to $15000 or higher and still be in a bearish market. if that happens, lots of bulls will be trapped and we could see another downtrend similar to Q1 2018. maybe that will bring true despair.....or not.

keep an open mind. that's all i'm saying. this doesn't have to look like 2014, but we have seen multi-year bear markets before. don't just assume this one is over in a few months because "it's different this time."

that's not how it works. market interest in altcoins makes the price of BTC rise. that's because if you want to buy alts (except major alts like ETH and LTC), you need to buy BTC first. that means less BTC on the sell-side of BTCUSD = higher prices.

the existence of altcoins might dilute prospective investment in BTC---money that otherwise would have gone into BTC sometimes goes into alts. but that doesn't drive the price of BTC down because those people aren't selling for fiat.

that's inaccurate, and it's a shame that people keep repeating this. the reason to use a hardware wallet is trading security for convenience. they're probably more secure than encrypted software wallets on online PCs, but that's not actually clear. it is not truly airgapped cold storage, though it attempts to simulate an airgapped environment.

keep in mind that a security researcher recently broke the security model of the ledger nano-s. these things are not infallible.

whatever you do, don't put all your coins in one wallet. nothing is 100% secure. i do prefer true cold storage over hardware wallets---i'll say that much.

that could be a goal of some off-chain mechanisms, but the primary goal of off-chain transactions is moving transactions off the blockchain---no need to store them or wait for miners to publish them. lacking internet is a whole different issue.


sure, you can update state that way (assuming you have an open channel). both parties just need to sign. i think the problem is, how do you protect the state of your channel when your not connected? i don't want my life ruled by timelock.

as ETFbitcoin says, you'd only want to do this with timelock expiration far in the future---in case of unexpected circumstances. no matter what, it will always be safer (and less headache) to control good old UTXOs. i like the idea of opendimes, etc as bearer bonds---good for offline transactions.

i like this idea. i get SFR10's point about the ANN threads, but the larger a coin is, the less useful the ANN thread. i especially notice ETH technical support threads peppered around the forum. (i know bitcointalk is not the ideal place for ETH discussion but the fact remains)


if you take away the discussion board, all sorts of irrelevant and general stuff will start getting posted in other boards. that's why it exists---it's also why bitcoin discussion exists. you might ruin the technical board (or in other words, make no difference at all) by lumping it in with general discussion.

they're full nodes with virtually constant uptime that carry out special tasks like coordinating coin mixing and voting on budget funding. they're generally required to have a certain amount of crypto collateral (eg 1000 DASH for a DASH masternode), a dedicated IP address, and have pretty constant uptime. in return, they get a regular cut of mining rewards.

whether they are good or bad..... they're bad because they add to centralization. if they mix coins, there is an element of trust regarding whether any given MN is compromised (by blockchain analytics companies, law enforcement, etc). the governance structure is good because it can resolve disputes, but it creates centralized decision makers. people like MNs because they create economic incentive to hoard coins (because of the required collateral). that causes price to increase, all else equal.

any ETA on the electrum wallet release?

edit: BTX airdrop received---very generous, thank you!

whatever went down with TF, there's no way he would sue quickseller. that payment to quickseller tied TF to a cloud mining exit scam, so TF be like




to be fair, this is from the same paragraph:

there is a difference between a) the buyer being defrauded entirely and b) the buyer being defrauded out of an escrow fee he intended to pay anyway. that wikipedia article is about the former, not the latter.

it's a recovery. but the context is probably a larger trap.

nothing moves in a straight line. we could be in a correction for years, in which case there will be significant rips and runs in both directions. i think we've formed a double bottom on the daily chart, and it's time for price to rise for a while. it could end up being a bull trap, but i'm back to trading the long side. no shorting for a while. i think we should retest the $11k zone and probably run further.

they're talking about ID documents like passports and proof of residence like utility bill.

don't join any bounty that requires KYC. full stop. you have no way to verify that they are properly complying with securities/AML laws---some campaigns just use it as an obstacle to avoid paying you.

more importantly, why would you trust them to properly store your data? they might even steal your identity! a lot of ICOs are just scams anyway, so you should expect them to steal and resell your documents.

i wouldn't say that. there were solid signs that this was an accumulation/bottom phase.

over a period of ~2 weeks, sellers made 3 solid dump attempts visible on the daily chart. each one was rejected hard and sellers couldn't force new lows. 3 attempts in 2 weeks, rejected? that means accumulation was occurring and demand at these levels was overtaking supply.

there were signs on the lower time frames too. there was an intraday dump attempt shortly before that $1000 hourly candle. it was almost instantly fully retraced. that was the sign to close my short---glad i did before price exploded!

it looks like a standard adam/eve double bottom. i agree with that. we're not in a bull market yet, but it looks like one is being born with the current explosive daily candle. not necessarily a long term bull market, though. it might just be a mid term correction to the $20k>$6k trend. i'm not confident that we're going to new ATH. there is soooo much resistance above.

but it looks like i'll be avoiding shorting for at least the next few weeks. mighty painful squeeze last night for the bears.

i think the appeal of gemini is its focus on compliance and licensing. kraken doesn't have that, and they also have a worse trading engine than gemini. so there are some trade-offs involved there. i still recommend GDAX in this situation. they're licensed in every state, and i trust them (due to their compliance overhead and VC backing) to do right by customers. similarly shitty trading engine vs. kraken but slightly edges it out, and also has 0% maker fees.


they're trying to bootstrap what they hope will be the biggest US-facing broker in the world (coinbase). as a result, they're desperate for market makers on the underlying exchange (GDAX), especially during high growth periods.

remember the ETH flash crash disaster last year---where there was a margin cascade and they refunded those whose SL triggered and honored the trades for those who profited?

yeah, they need that order book depth pretty bad.

why not? asia (at least east asia---china, japan, korea) is a massive market. chinese and koreans in particular are born speculators and gamblers. and given the region's population, the market is still largely untapped.


that's nothing by poloniex standards. if you get the issue resolved within a month, i'd consider it an improvement. every time i click "withdraw" on polo, i say a little prayer.