any historical insight re: how this expected price action might unfold? i'm especially curious given the current trend velocity. the "expected price" is continually ramping higher, but the "expected date" is 9 months out. is there an expectation that the downside target will be much higher than the $7000s?

there's some interesting horizontal support/resistance levels in the $7400-$8350 range (bitstamp). i'm just not sure how relevant they are given the timing of everything.

everyone's been saying that futures don't affect the spot market, but today's action seems to prove the opposite. upon CME futures launch, the futures market instantly dumped $2300 in ~2 hours on high volume. the spot market reacted to it immediately, dropping about $1500. given that this happened right at the market open, i tend to think it's not a coincidence. the spot market followed CME.

and that volume profile looks like some big guys are shorting the CME contracts. not sure how wise that is.


i beg to differ. altcoin prices are highly correlated to bitcoin. if bitcoin crashes, the altcoin market will crash even harder since BTC is the primary base pair and due to thin books.

did the bubble burst in 2011, and 2013? sure, you could say the hype ended and the price reversed. after 2013, the bear market was particularly long. and after we have another major top (next year?), all the bears will come out of the woodworks and proclaim that "bitcoin is going to $0" and "it was tulip mania" after all. this is natural in a bear market.

but after every successive bull/bear market cycle, the trend always continues higher---always higher highs followed by higher lows. this won't continue forever, but based on the signs of mainstream adoption i'm seeing (NASDAQ/CME futures, square cash, jp morgan saying bitcoin could be "the new gold"), i think we really are seeing the "s-curve" of adoption. this is like telephones, cars, television, smartphones.

if true, that means that the uptrend could continue until we have reached the "top" of the s-curve, and the world has completely adopted bitcoin like other technology that we use everyday.

i'm not sure that's actually true. as a company they've claimed some impressive numbers, but i've seen some compelling arguments that they are drastically exaggerated. they use unverifiable things like "number of wallets" as data, when many of those wallets are abandoned and inactive. i've had dozens of blockchain.info wallets over the years, used as throwaway wallets. they're probably counting all of them. they also count transactions that use their "broadcast" service as being transactions made by blockchain.info "users." i use their push service all the time, but i'm using my electrum wallet to craft and sign the transactions.

i'd avoid web wallets altogether. if you must, use greenaddress. they are recommended by bitcoin.org, they have implemented segwit and multi-sig, and they are generally more secure and reliable than blockchain.info.

as i implied, though, i prefer a lightweight desktop client like electrum myself.

yes, it leaves no trace on the blockchain, but it does leave a transaction history that will like be stored by larger "hubs" like exchanges or payment processors. the reason big companies might store this data is for a future bargaining chip, so they can comply with law enforcement agencies when the time comes. this is why even if/when LN is viable, i think it'll be important to use TOR and other methods to obscure physical location, browser cookies and other identifiers.


fortunately, the price of BTC has appreciated so much that it's created a lot of new funds for development. it also creates more urgent incentive to get LN operational as mainstream adoption hits.

that's not true. the last couple years have been a somewhat typical bull market, the tail end of which has built a parabolic rally. many markets go parabolic, including stocks/equities and commodities. just pull out a monthly chart of gold or oil and you similar market structures. moves in bitcoin/crypto may happen faster, but that's about it.


money still seems to be flowing in too fast for a real crash yet. all the exchanges are like, "please bear with us! 100k new customers a day!" i'm hoping for a deep correction to buy, but i imagine we could keep rallying through january.

why would you think "the world economy is over" though? people said the same thing after the 1997 asian financial crisis, which similarly prompted fears of worldwide economic meltdown due to globalization/economic contagion. after that, 2007/2008 was supposed to be the great economic collapse that gold bugs have predicted for decades. but it wasn't. in both cases, the crises were driven by unsustainable debt. in both cases, the contagion was contained and confidence eventually returned to the markets.

i don't think the world economy as such is sustainable. but i learned many years ago to stop predicting collapse all the time. it's a waste of time and energy and you're usually wrong. just hedge your assets and keep stacking bitcoins. it'll pay off eventually.

when you trade cryptocurrencies, you need to decide what your "base" currency is. that depends on your goals: are you trying to earn USD and are mainly concerned with preserving your USD capital? or are you trying to earn BTC?

i learned early on that it was only healthy for my mindset to trade BTCUSD with the intention of earning USD. i consider my BTCUSD trading account as a USD income source and my BTC cold storage as my long term portfolio.

you need to take the same approach with altcoin trading. if losing BTC is going to drive you mad, then make sure that your system is built to preserve BTC capital rather than USD capital.

it's not really worth considering because the difference between the segwit discount and the variance between mempool/spam attacks is negligible. right now, the segwit discount only ~ halves the required fees. at the very most, this could approach 4x in theory, but that's an edge case and is unlikely to happen outside of a literal computation attack intent on slowing down block processing across the network.

the fact of the matter is that fees will keep rising to replace the halving block subsidy over time. this applies to both standard and segwit addresses. in both cases, the fees i paid today vs. 3 weeks ago is a 40-fold difference. imo, that has nothing to do with legitimate transaction demand, but rather spam attacks. that's why i wouldn't worry about segwit vs. legacy.....at least not until LN takes off.

i'd be curious to know how much liquidity and trading volume argentines represent. i've been hearing about significant adoption there for years, so it's possible that such sell pressure could spill over into the global markets.

however, 15% per year is not unreasonable for capital gains taxes. if you have an income of up to ~$420,000 in the US, 15% is the long-term capital gains rate. short term capital gains can be much higher: up to 40%! compared to the united states, argentines don't have it that bad. so maybe there won't be much sell pressure after all.

there are two things happening:

1) the market doesn't care about fees. if there are people selling because fees are too high (perhaps to buy other cryptocurrencies), then that supply is being absorbed by speculators who expect a higher bitcoin price. price is all about supply and demand. if speculative investors are in control of the market, it doesn't matter that small BTC payments are becoming uneconomical.

2) there is also another consideration: high fees prevent people from spending, encouraging holding. this lowers supply, increasing the price.

the government could issue a prohibition on bitcoin mining. that wouldn't deter 100% of chinese miners, nor do we know exactly how much hash power controlled by chinese pools actually comes from chinese miners. but i think the effect would be significant. network disruption would be the top concern, but a drastic drop in hash rate would significantly lower the reliability of confirmations. a 51% attack in this context is certainly possible.

i recall there was a lot of talk of selling hardware amidst the recent ban rumors in september. and bitmain certainly has a target on their back in that case. i imagine that major industrial miners would move their operations to new jurisdictions, but i wonder what would happen to the hash rate in the meantime.

first off, take anything you read on this forum with a grain of salt. we have our share of trolls on both sides: permabulls who think BTC will become the world's reserve currency next week, and permabears who are still talking about triple-digits.

personally, i hate when people ask me for advice about entries. in a long term speculative sense, i think it's always a good time to buy some BTC if you don't own any at all. cryptocurrency will transform the world economy and at some point, i believe there will be a very large transfer of wealth from today's economic powerholders to the crypto-rich. on what timeline that takes place? i don't know. the 2013 rally is a good example: buying at $1000 looked like a great idea on the way up. but then you had to sit through 3 years of market action to see any returns on it.


it's impossible to say when it will happen. i wouldn't be surprise to see a blow-off top into $25,000+ first. but i think there will be an epic crash in the next couple months. i have $$ waiting on the exchanges to buy the blood.

i can agree with that. the CBOE and CME futures in particular are cash-settled and completely removed from the crypto markets. i don't find that the spot markets follow okcoin and bitmex. and with japan and korea entering the markets, each exchange has increasingly smaller effect overall.


yeah, there is increasing talk again of an ETF with all the hype around futures markets. i can't wait.

regarding manipulation... in theory, why couldn't they manipulate the spot exchanges directly? i guess the main problem is counterparty risk, but it we ignore that, what's stopping them from funding spot exchanges like bitfinex, coinbase, etc. and suppressing the price? they could do so with dollar collateral on margin.


ah, that'll all be sorted out in time. this is one huge spam attack. did you notice how we could send with 2 satoshi/byte fees a couple weeks ago, but people are spending 300 satoshis/byte today? that's some serious spam....

well, we saw it on a large scale with bitfinex. my impression of that case is that wells fargo was happily processing high volume bank wires for years without any issues. the fact that they abruptly cut bitfinex off via all correspondent banks at once tells me that the order came from on high. i suspect some regulator (maybe FINCEN, maybe the Washington State DFI or NYDFS, maybe some other federal agency) had something to do with it. it wasn't just an internal decision that wells fargo made.

and i think that's exactly the kind of situation UK banks have been trying to avoid. being a financial hub also means being closely watched by financial regulators. bitstamp has long been licensed and works closely with regulators/law enforcement, but banking has not been nearly as smooth for other exchanges like bitfinex, okcoin, cex, wex and others. altcoin exchanges like poloniex and bittrex continue to act like they will add fiat markets any day now, but the truth is they couldn't get the required banking volumes if they wanted to.

that table seems to be missing important context. bitcoin experienced massive growth in 2011 and 2013. in the context of price action from 2009 to the present, this kind of growth was not unexpected by true bitcoin believers.

the question for me is this: is this another hype cycle followed by a long term bear cycle, as we've seen several times before in bitcoin's history? or is it possible that we are actually seeing the S-curve of technology adoption unfold before our eyes? if we really are following the S-curve like cell phones and the internet, the price is going to go much higher---and fast---due to the extremely limited supply of bitcoins.

a year ago, i never thought i would say this. but i believe million dollar bitcoins are only a few years away. what a time to be alive....

nobody knows. it's pretty scary. cryptography itself is the science of coding and decoding messages. does that mean that by definition, encrypting wallet data would be considered "attempting to hide" it?

if it's simply a matter of declaration e.g. at the border or something, that's not a big deal. it's pretty unenforceable. but i can't tell, are they trying to build a database of cryptocurrency wallets linked to ID? that's pretty scary if so.

we can take some solace in the fact that they tried to pass another version of this bill in 2015 and failed. but now that bitcoin has the attention of regulators and the FED, i'm worried it might pass this time.

i'm not sure which update that refers to exactly, but i recall they were removing some lower volume markets around that time. i don't think there was a major overhaul to the infrastructure/trading engine at that time, though.

kraken's CEO announced the site upgrade just a couple weeks ago, saying that the improvements would be rolled out during the first week of december. i guess it hasn't happened yet?


all of the exchanges have their drawbacks. i'd recommend bitstamp -- trustworthy, SEPA transfers, more reliable than kraken and coinbase, good customer service. however, they convert your EUR deposits to USD to establish more liquidity in the BTCUSD market. they don't have that many coins, but they do offer LTC, ETH, XRP, BCH in addition to BTC.

there is no way they can recover from this. and i find their announcement very disturbing. if i am reading this correctly, they kept most or all of their BTC in a hot wallet. what kind of legitimate operation stores thousands of BTC on an online server in this day and age?

for that reason, it appears to be an exit scam. they are trying to appear incompetent to make off with millions of dollars and go live on an island somewhere. this is the classic exit scam formula we have come to recognize in this space.


i don't think it's the same as BTC-e. in that case, the US government immediately issued a press release about indicting BTC-e and arresting one of its alleged owners. i don't think BTC-e was an exit scam at all, and i was pleasantly surprised when they partially refunded customers. they've also refunded ~10% of the debt tokens they issued to cover the losses.

that's definitely lower than i thought---it's roughly in line with bittrex's limits. i didn't realize that cryptopia verified people at all beyond the signup information. i thought it was like yobit.

i haven't seen any major complaints about shapeshift besides the typical complaints about BTC network fees. i definitely prefer shapeshift to changelly. there are lots of complaints about changelly having stuck transactions and lengthy refund timelines.


the limit is per 24 hours (daily withdrawal limit). that limits you to ~ 0.3 BTC per day, so i wouldn't keep much more than a couple BTC in your account if you aren't planning to verify.