yeah, that happens in all markets, though. maybe it's a bit more exaggerated in cryptocurrencies, but i think that's more a function of the times we live in (the internet, social media, etc). i remember when the yahoo finance forums were rife with similar get-rich-quick cheerleading for penny stocks. hell, they probably still are.

regarding the "rigged game": the truth is, i just don't know what will happen. when bitfinex and tether first lost banking capabilities, a big premium developed. i actually lost a bunch of coins (equivalent) because i had been holding some USD on bitfinex and USDT on tether. i exited those exchanges, fearing the worst. then i further miscalculated, expecting that the market would read further into these fundamental events.

instead, it seemed like traders began reacting to the unnatural price increases on bitfinex and poloniex. technical breakouts occurred on the charts. everyone simply forgot (or didn't care) about bitfinex's problems and prices kept pumping. it was really hard for me emotionally to overcome my old mindset. "what are you idiots doing? people are just buying because they are desperate to escape bitfinex/tether USD liabilities!" i lost a lot of coins and missed a lot of action keeping that mindset.

at some point it dawned on me that even if the willy bot was real, and USDT was naked manipulation, that this is just how markets work. at some point, feedback loops develop, and the manipulation doesn't even matter anymore to the market. price drives price. fomo takes on a life of its own. fundamental events tend just to catalyze and accelerate market trends.


it can be. but these are transitional times. these markets are incredibly inefficient. the ecosystem has horrible infrastructure, and no public blockchain (including BTC) is scalable as is. as they say, rome wasn't built in a day.

so we have these shitty, manipulated centralized exchanges. the gateways. the hope is that as adoption becomes mainstream, so will P2P usage. after all, it's a network.

this is awful. money really doesn't need to exist inside your body. i'm already weirded out by pacemakers and similar devices. at least those can be construed as necessary. this is either a total gimmick, or part of a grand conspiracy to further the surveillance state. you can say goodbye to any privacy mitigations because transactions are broadcast from inside your own body...


bingo. this is where the $5 wrench attack goes surgical. not cool.

it's not that i "don’t see that as a problem." i have no control over whether markets are manipulated. i am merely acknowledging that reality and acting accordingly. you expect me to ethically refuse to hold bitcoins because some assholes are trying to manipulate price? then you expect people to be irrational. that's a losing game. and furthermore, some stranger's unethical actions have nothing to with me. i believe in bitcoin's technology. i'm supposed to give that up because you think bitfinex is manipulating price?

in reality, i don't think tether's circulation is capable of "propping up" the entire cryptocurrency market, either. and even if it were, it's just the new "willy bot." temporary market manipulation that will be absorbed by the market. today's manipulation is still tomorrow's price discovery. if the demand didn't exist, the market would have crashed to zero by now.

if the "willy bot" was using fake dollars, but we're 12x higher now than the 2013 highs, what does that tell you? that investors were defrauded into buying bitcoins, which are now worth much more money? what difference do those fake dollars really make?

how are bitfinex's "fake dollars" so different than exploiting QE/easy credit and the use of toxic assets as margin collateral, which we see in the world markets? we can bitch about this stuff all day and shout into the void about it like this guy, or we can acknowledge reality and move on. you apparently agree with bitfinexed, who says that investing in BTC is ethically equivalent to fraud because you're participating in the bitfinex/tether manipulation. i think that's a joke.

in a world where fiat money is printed with reckless abandon, all dollars begin to feel fake, and deflationary currency looks attractive no matter what.

i read through the thread, including your excerpts and clicked one of the links. i didn't see any new information. i am well aware of tether/USDT and the precarious regulatory situation that bitfinex is in.

my post was specifically a response to the suggestion you made about "market manipulation." my point (see bold) was that none of that matters. all markets are manipulated. why would we expect BTC to be any different? once a trader understands that, he has two choices. he can ride with the herd knowing full well that the price action is not "natural"......or he can miss all the action.

if USDT is being used to manipulate the price, how is that any different than the "willy bot?"

were the bubbles in 2011 and 2013 "natural?" for that matter, is the never-ending bull market in US stocks "natural?"

one of my old trading mentors told me something years ago. he said that "all markets are scams" and explained that every market functions the same way. major players (institutions, whales) just replay the wyckoff cycle over and over. they have endless USD to hold the market up during its accumulation phase. then once they have cornered the market, they can easily mark up the price. this happens with tech stocks all the time.

but regardless of price manipulation, you have to admit: the market is still the market. prices reach certain heights because buyers are willing to pay that price. as such, i don't care if the "willy bot" was responsible for the 2013 bubble. even if people were "manipulated" into buying higher, adequate liquidity always existed to prevent a drop to zero. and here we are, 4+ years later and more than 10x higher.

i don't fight the market. it's completely irrational, but being irrational is the best way to make money in herd markets.

i'm mainly looking for two things:

1. high volume. when markets reverse, it's usually after very high volume. an equilibrium has been reached: every buyer has found a seller and every seller has found a buyer. these events are also sometimes called "capitulation." the shorters from the bottom finally panic and buy the top.

2. time. let's say the price of an instrument has been flagging for a couple weeks. then the price breaks out to the upside. eager bears will often try to begin shorting almost immediately. but since the flag took weeks (during which time all traders were building positions), the next leg up should take at least several days to play out. in other words, you can use time analysis to avoid calling the top too early.

realistically, you can only know when the real "top" is in long afterwards. this is more about taking profit and managing risk.

i think this sort of price speculation is natural. we see it with other technologies (via the companies building them). investors are speculating on future development and utility. bitcoin's ecosystem is rather undeveloped. it could never be self-sustaining at this point, especially since it's inefficient to use for everyday transactions. the actualization of a scalable network ready for mainstream adoption is still very far away.

and yes, the exchanges are never going away. but remember, exchanges and futures markets arose for all commodities (including food/agriculture commodities) for a reason. not just to get rich. the market needs price discovery, and producers need to hedge.

it depends. you may be able to find wallet files, but what percentage of them will be unencrypted? that adds another layer of risk here.

the earliest wallets are less likely to be password-protected, but they are also the most likely to be inaccessible due to data corruption. years of storage under less-than-optimal conditions (and outright exposure to the elements) can easily foil these plans.


i agree that as price rises, the cost/risk to engage on wild goose chases to recover bitcoins becomes more sensible. for example, this guy is fighting to get the government to allow a search of a landfill for a hard drive containing bitcoins.

the scary thing is that if we are truly seeing "the s-curve" of technology adoption (like with televisions or phones), this problem is going to get much worse. at any given time, the average user is becoming less knowledgeable about cryptocurrencies and computer security. that's the nature of exponential adoption. the entrances have been flooded by more noobs than ever before.


i don't know the specifics, but i have heard of hardware wallet bugs where private keys were exposed. personally, i'm a bit paranoid to use them. but i was relying on electrum too, which has now just seen this critical vulnerability. still, i feel more comfortable signing transactions offline than using a hardware wallet as recommended.

i'm also curious about how this works, though. do new versions retain the descriptions that we have kept on all our addresses and UTXOs? i'd rather not try to re-piece everything from memory. i'm bound to fuck up my privacy somewhere.


i'm sure that reports will start coming in over the next few weeks. now that the vulnerability is exposed, people are probably building websites to exploit it as we speak. and you know how slow people are to upgrade. i would also expect phishing attempts since there is a panic to download the patched version.

i'm waiting until the dust settles. i'm hesitant to rush anything. in the meantime, i have a very strong password. i'll migrate everything in an offline environment over the next few days.

yeah, it's pretty surreal. people who laughed at me for being involved with BTC years ago are now trying to spam their latest shitcoin holdings on me. i'm not sure how to feel. on one hand, i'm happy that cryptocurrency is hitting the mainstream. this is what we all prepared for over the last few years.

at the same time, it almost feels "trendy" now. frankly, i'm tired of people asking about bitcoin. i saw a flyer plastered to a telephone poll yesterday for a "bitcoin consultant." people had pulled off all the tabs. i guess business is good. maybe i should start monetizing this stuff instead of letting people pick my brain for free.


don't worry. if the market makes another wave down to new lows, or we have another year-long bear market, we will be overwhelmed with comments about tulips and popped bubbles. just wait for it.

these are some pretty misleading headlines and ledes. a more realistic perspective on the above is that ~ 4% of the surveyed bitcoin buyers bought with a credit card and didn't pay off the debt. 78% of those who used credit cards pay off the debt, and the vast majority of buyers don't use credit cards at all.

credit cards are one of the fastest (if not most expensive) methods to buy bitcoins. for some people, they are the only way to get them instantly. when you account for those paying their balances off, there are less people buying on credit than i would have thought!

i didn't read his words as "facebook will add bitcoin" but that's possible. if it happens, i'm not sure that bitcoin will be the only currency added. given their massive network, grabbing market share in the payments space seems like a logical choice. i also wonder if facebook is considering rolling out a currency of their own.

i wouldn't read too much into it, though. this is a bit like "amazon is going to add bitcoin because X, Y and Z!" i've been hearing that since 2013.

i also took what he said as an admission that encrypted communications are the future. he knows that facebook needs to embrace emerging technologies to stay relevant.

i'm surprised that virtually all the providers of non-US cards (bitpay, bitwala, cryptopay, wirex, tenX) were using wavecrest to issue them. i guess this is another example where market concentration and lack of competition hurts consumers.


i don't see how using a prepaid card (funded by BTC or not) fundamentally changes anything. in order to issue the card to you, this is the kind of information required:


this business definitely requires money transmission licenses and KYC procedures. any business issuing cards without enforcing them is likely to get shut down or removed from major payment networks like wavecrest was. this information is more than enough to get your prepaid accounts locked down if the courts come knocking on the issuer's door.

what's your point? i said that the nature of lending is not changing, just the top-down monopoly on credit providers. if anything, you're literally arguing my point:


anyway, SALT was just an example of a potential credit lending model. the decentralized nature of cryptocurrency expands the potential liquidity pool for lending because it lowers the barriers to entry for lenders and could make micro-loans more viable.

and are you so sure that smart contracts can't be leveraged to mitigate counterparty risk in P2P loans? comparing BtcJam to the smart contract technology of today and tomorrow is laughable. why can't multi-sig contracts be used to secure collateral? why can't smart contracts be used to detect loan defaults and automatically liquidate collateral? outside of the context of fiat money, all of this seems possible to me.

i don't think SALT is viable from a regulatory standpoint, but i think a similar (but P2P) infrastructure could be viable if you entirely remove fiat money from the model.

that's not necessarily true. the decentralization of money makes localization and decentralization of lending practices possible. indeed, would-be borrowers still need liquidity and would-be lenders still want interest payments. there's no reason that banks/lenders and credit lines can't exist in the context of BTC. it's just that the current monopolies held by the financial powerhouses can be dismantled because crypto-based alternatives can compete with them.

there are several cryptocurrency projects that are building platforms for P2P cryptocurrency lending. one example is SALT (Secure Automated Lending Technology). it let's you use cryptocurrencies as collateral to obtain cash loans:

there are no good options here. this is the slow legacy banking system in action. once you get verified, kraken does not accept deposits using ACH; wires only. coinbase/GDAX does, but they don't support XRP, so you'd have to wait for the ACH transfer to complete, then buy BTC (or BCH/ETH/LTC) then send it to another exchange that supports XRP.

apparently you can now buy XRP directly with a credit card on bitstamp. i'm guessing you would need to wait for verification to complete, though. and the fees are probably high. when they first offered credit card purchases for BTC, fees were 8%!

you're going to consider what fees you are willing to pay. the fastest option is localbitcoins (buy BTC instantly) --> send to binance (cheapest exchange fees) to trade for XRP. but premiums on localbitcoins tend to be high.

i generally like to see signs of longer term accumulation, like months of range-trading near the lows. accumulating in the range after a downtrend is usually the highest-gaining strategy, but if it breaks below the range you need to stomach pretty heavy drawdowns. alternatively, you look for signs that the range is broken to the upside. use price pivots and horizontal resistance for this, as well as other tools like %BB.

remember, "overbought" and "up 50%" don't mean that much in altcoin markets, when the trend is up. we are talking about exponential gains. it's tempting to ignore a coin because its price has already doubled, but sometimes that coin will end up gaining 10x or 100x.

as long as we define "cryptocurrency" as "decentralized," then it's useful because no central authorities can prevent payment, so sanctions cannot be easily enforced. centralized currencies like XRP/ripple or USDT couldn't be used, though, because they have centralized administrators and validators who could enforce sanctions.

because BTC is highly transparent and not anonymous, it might not be ideal for dodging sanctions, but combined with elaborate networks of shell companies, it could certainly help to give russia an edge in the "cat-and-mouse" nature of sanctions enforcement. when more private cryptocurrencies like monero have higher global trading volumes, they could provide a further layer of obfuscation to their sanction evading strategy.

it's not clear what you mean by "used" for trading. if you mean on-chain atomic trading using the BTC blockchain, of course it's not good for that. block space is too precious. if it weren't, there would be little to separate BTC from centralized payment and messaging protocols. and the lightning network (as is) doesn't supply a reliable trust model for atomic trading. that could take many years to develop and implement in BTC, if ever.

here's the answer: we don't need bitcoin to be be the backbone for on-chain trading. there are decentralized exchange technologies emerging. one DEX model is for all currencies to be deposited into one wallet, controlled by the user. using smart contracts and timelocks, you can use those currencies as collateral for trading on a separate blockchain, which isn't subject to the limited capacity that bitcoin is. since the collateral is all time-locked, you don't need to pay BTC miner fees to trade it.