the explanation from Changpeng Zhao regarding the data migration is plausible. i'd wait before assuming the worst. expected ETA for re-launch of trading is 5 hours. the ETH account is widely identified as binance's and the account activity isn't indicative of a hack.


if so, they aren't doing themselves any favors taking so long to bring the site up. there will probably be somewhat of an exodus when they are back on-line no matter what now.

and that was the bottom, folks. between twitter and bitcointalk, i'm glad we have good tools for sentiment reading.


as a general rule, don't wait for the price to drop 70% before selling. either sell into strength and be prepared to buy back higher, or hold through the panic.

it's possible this was just the first leg down, and we could go lower ($3000-5500). but if you've been in bitcoin for a while, you know: wait to sell the bounce. there's no way i'm selling anything below $10,000.

it's times like these that it becomes crystal clear: don't be in a rush to take a position. a lot of people thought $15k and then $10k was "the buy of a lifetime." the reality is that the old adage is true: the market will stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. the bottom is usually lower than you can possibly fathom when you are a bull.

with that in mind, bitcoin and crypto are definitely worth investing in. the question is, from what price? i think we've seen enough volume and a daily reversal candle to say that we've found an intermediate bottom. but it may not be the bottom. keep that in mind when considering where to buy and how much of your portfolio to allocate. the safest way to invest is usually to allocate only a small portion of your portfolio at a time (1% or less). so if the price continues lower, you can keep averaging into a stronger position in anticipation of the bullish reversal.

they aren't dictating what you can or can't buy. they aren't blocking debit card purchases or regular transfers/wires because those aren't loans from the bank. i think there would be much more of a consumer backlash if banks tried to cut off cryptocurrency investment as a matter of policy. they'd also be pissing away a lot in transaction fees.

to me, this is basically non-news. we should have seen it coming after the news from JP morgan and BOA. it's appropriate timing for the policy given the onslaught of bad news and price decline, too.

suicide always seems tragic to me, whatever the circumstances, because the root cause is usually social pressure from our fucked up dog-eat-dog society. and herd psychology is very powerful when it comes to markets, especially in an age where speculative finance has become so entrenched in the economy. people losing themselves in the hype and irrational exuberance of the market, then realizing they've lost nearly everything and killing themselves over it? to me, that's nearly the definition of "sad."

it's really no different to me than people jumping to their deaths from buildings in the 1929 crash. this kid's parents are probably heartbroken.


there's a lot of people involved in this market now who aren't psychologically prepared.

yeah, it's only possible in hindsight.

you can get a feel for the probability of a long term bottom based on volume, whether major price support levels were tested, and the length of time spent in the downtrend. but no technical indicators can ever tell you in a predictive sense when the bottom will be in.

there's no point calling the bottom until you've actually seen an uptrend formed. by the time this happens, price will be nowhere near the lows anymore. this is basic dow theory.

that's an interesting take. since money isn't moving on the BTC network when LN payments are made, it's similar to a hawala arrangement. however, it's not your friend (or his friend) making the payment. LN works because lightning hash pre-images can be pushed to the BTC mainnet if necessary; therefore they are fungible with BTC. so, money is actually moving on the lightning network. everyone transacting on LN needs to have BTC locked in custody, so it's not like hawala, where one person cashing in means another person cashing out.

there's a fundamental problem, though. BTC is highly dependent on fiat gateways (and altcoin markets depend on BTC). more than anything, it's used as a speculative asset (via fiat investment). so, BTC doesn't have any sort of circular or sustainable economy. in this context, banks (and governments) could probably affect the markets more than we'd like to think.

the international nature of some exchanges helps, but at a fundamental level, the banking system can be controlled if a handful of banks (or a handful of nation-states) wills it. that means that exchanges can largely be cut off from the banking system. that could have a pretty drastic effect on public perception and price discovery. it wouldn't destroy anything, but the effects would be greater than people anticipate IMO.

not really. it's sensible, in a way. bitcoin/altcoins are speculative assets. they are investments. nobody should be buying them on credit. and knowing how markets work, a lot of people probably maxed out credit cards buying on the way to $20k and are now sitting on huge paper losses. plus, buying with credit cards = cash advance fees, which is basically the highest rate you can pay.

if you really need to run a balance cuz you got that itch to buy some coins, you should at least shift your day-to-day expenses to credit cards and ACH/wire money to an exchange. screw paying cash advance rates. it's not like they are cutting off exchanges from the banking system.

with trading, it's getting riskier to keep money on unlicensed exchanges. what happened to btc-e could easily happen to other exchanges that don't enforce KYC. decentralized exchanges will help with no-KYC trading itself, but cashing out of BTC to your bank (or getting cash in hand) is difficult to do without giving ID now. this might be less of an issue for non-US traders. but after the coinbase/IRS case and all these cases against localbitcoins traders, cashing out in ways that avoid paper trails is pretty tough for americans.

also, don't you need to cover things like rent and utilities? medical expenses? other things that can't be covered in cryptocurrencies? aside from amazon and uber eats (via gift cards), my options are fairly limited.


not necessarily. in the USA, any transaction that realizes a gain is taxable, whether or not it involves fiat money.

why not? news cycles tend to follow market cycles. at the top, the media was reporting about $500,000 price targets and telling you how to buy ripple. naturally retail buyers bought the top and are getting completely rekt right now. during the bear trend and near the bottom, expect the media to be especially harsh.

the "professor bitcorns" tend to come out at these times, gloating about how the end is nigh and they were right that the BTC price is headed to $10. that goes hand in hand with bad news (even inaccurately reported news), as media sources search for reasons to explain the falling price. as usual, their explanations are ridiculous and sometimes downright inaccurate. the price fell because demand dried up and people who bought significantly higher began to feel squeezed into selling. falling price begets falling price, panic develops......and here we are. same shit, different day. bitcoin will be back.

torrents didn't fundamentally threaten governments; they only affected intellectual property holders. i don't think there's much of a comparison. still today, we see MPAA-backed DMCA actions and takedowns of services like KAT. if the US government were particularly interested in disrupting torrent infrastructure, i'm sure they could do much more.

i'm still not sure i believe that BTC is the "nail in the coffin" for governments. decentralized money is attractive for various reasons, but that doesn't mean that citizens will completely abandon sovereign-backed money. in fact, they can't.... not without overthrowing national tax regimes entirely. some bitcoin supporters say, "just stop paying taxes! taxation is theft!" famous last words before prison....

bearish sentiment has definitely taken over, although that makes me think that the correction is nearly over. lots of these armchair analysts like Boockvar are cheering for bitcoin's demise right now.

and fittingly, we've had a rash of bad news. there is new talk of halting korean cryptocurrency trading. facebook just banned cryptocurrency advertising (including both bitcoin and ICOs). and news just dropped that bitfinex and tether received subpoenas from the CFTC last month. those warning of a USDT collapse are shouting from the rooftops today.

when the market is bearish, bad news matters. people have been looking for any excuse to sell. but it goes to show you how these bull/bear cycles work. get ready for a monster bounce after we find a bottom over the next couple weeks!

i’ve been expecting attacks from the environmentalist angle for a while. when compared to the energy consumption of the banking and coin minting industries, the argument is bullshit. someday, bitcoin mining might compare, but by then i think we’ll have lots of data to argue that the energy consumption is justified.


true, but it’s in the interest of major global powers (and their proxies like the IMF) to push whatever propaganda they think can keep their power in place. unfortunately, the word of the IMF probably carries more weight than we’d like to think.

there are now hundreds of nodes on the main net. there are multiple vendors (like bitrefill, torguard, the blockstream store) who are accepting lightning payments. so it’s definitely coming along.

but in general, it’s still in a testing phase. developers are suggesting caution and that people only commit small amounts to channels as wallet devs build for edge cases. even devs are still losing money in channels right now, so i wouldn’t commit anything you’re not ready to lose. hopefully in a few months, it’ll be ready for regular end users.

given how excited bitcoin and lightning developers are, and how much time they’re putting in, i’m sure it will be successful. it’s just a matter of time.

is that so? i prefer using a cheap offline netbook for signing transactions and broadcasting raw signed transactions from an internet-connected PC. i'm skeptical of the security guarantees of hardware wallets, especially after the meltdown and spectre vulnerabilities. meltdown/spectre highlighted the truth that devices are only secure insofar as our security assumptions are correct.

those security assumptions may be proven wrong overnight. just ask intel about that.

the bottom line is, do you really want to have all your crypto stored on one device? and further, do you really want all your private keys being plugged into an online computer? i don't care what ledger or trezor or anyone else says; that's just irresponsible.


that's a strange golden rule considering what we know about some hardware wallets: https://twitter.com/evoskuil/status/953455494705774592

the ledger/trezor mania is painting a big target on the backs of hardware wallet owners. the attack surface is wide and exploits are highly likely to be found eventually. plan accordingly. use dedicated cold storage. hardware wallets are fine for a limited amount of funds, but people should really stop treating them like they give you bank-level security. they don't.

why do we need to "force" third parties to implement segwit? wasn't it sold to us on the premise of being a voluntary, opt-in upgrade? it seems to me like the problem is resolving itself. the high fee environment has essentially forced services to optimize their transactions. the cause of the recent network congestion is largely due to bad fee estimation and inefficient (non-batched) transactions by large services---not lack of segwit adoption. it's probably more important that services implement transaction batching than anything else.

if anything, i think an aggressive campaign aimed at exchanges, etc. right now will just exacerbate the already terrible situation with customer support backlogs.

that might be the case, but it overlooks one thing. are high quality posts actually generally rewarded by the merit system? that's the intention, but i'm curious whether that will be the outcome. nothing forces anyone to give sMerit for high quality posts, but i think there are strong social incentives to use merit as a social reward for group-reinforcing behavior. i.e. receiving merit is probably more a matter of a) posting what someone wants to hear, or b) social status, than it is about high quality posting.


indeed! i was potentially only ~115 activity from ranking up to legendary when the merit system was implemented, so it's definitely a setback. oh well, at least i'm not losing rank. i do feel bad for those people who had like 476 activity and now only have 250 merit, mainly because i don't know how effective merit will be at rewarding high quality posters in general.

it's only been a day, so we should wait and see how the situation develops. hopefully it'll improve.

but yeah, off the bat, merit seems to be following the course of default trust and the cliques that formed around it. there are exceptions, but i'm often not surprised when i see who's giving merit to who. i definitely expect new members to rank up to hero/legendary much more slowly now (if ever). but maybe that's a good thing. i'm guessing merit will be used less to reward high quality posting and more as a social reward for group-forming and group-reinforcing behavior. i'm guessing new members will need to be extremely high quality posters to ever attain the higher rankings. that is, unless they get cozy with a merit source's social group, or engage in merit trading.

i don't think there's a thread explaining it yet. not sure if it's fully implemented either. it seems like our current merit rankings correspond with our activity rankings (legendary, hero, and so on).

this is the only explanation i've seen:


this could be related: