Please Samsung, turn Jihan's Bitmain into a pile of rubbish by taking over it's insanely large market share. Samsung has the power and the capital to achieve this, and this will directly function as an example of how that centralized part of the market will slowly become less depending on just one major entity. This is probably one of the best news articles of this entire year for me, and I'm not exaggerating things. Jihan's cartel is a poisonous entity in this market making a living off of Bitcoin, but at the same time doesn't mind to tarnish Bitcoin's reputation for his own hidden agenda plans, the bastard. I hope that Samsung's potentially successful entrance in this market will stimulate other manufacturers to do the same. I can't wait to see Jihan's empire shrink slowly but surely.

If so, then people should see it as the best possible opportunity available to accumulate as many coin as possible. Your only more worthless becoming fiat currencies will for once be able to consistently buy Bitcoin at practically the same price levels. Seriously, people should stop looking at stagnant periods as being something rather negative. For quite a long period of time last year, your $1000 would only buy you less coins due to how the price has been going up, and now there is a moment where you can enjoy buying pretty steadily within current range. Instead of ending up with less coins for the same amount of fiat, you can now almost buy the same amount of coins for the same amount of fiat - pretty good deal if I may say so.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Currently with how Bitcoin has been booming, and then mainly in Japan, the possibility of there being growth in Japan's GDP due to Bitcoin is almost a certainty. Estimation is that the growth could turn out to become close to 0.3%, but we have to wait for actual GDP reports to be sure of the exact growth percentage. Regardless of what that percentage will turn out to be, it's very impressive that Bitcoin itself can cause a major world economy to grow - that's something we as Bitcoin enthusiasts can all be satisfied about. With Lightning Network being there as an extra bit of incentive to make people spend their coins on goods, I have no doubt about it that Bitcoin will then push far beyond the 1% level in GDP growth. That's all concerning a major world economy - imagine what Bitcoin could do to smaller economies such as Venezuala.

Professional capital won't ever flow into something that only allows itself to be used through an app with very basic trading features. If you want to unlock more features, you have to upgrade to the Gold plan they offer as premium service. Another thing that has to be pointed out, is that crypto trading will (for now) only be available in just a few states within USA. I also read that Robinhood uses unused user balances to generate interest on the financial market as some sort of a passive income stream. It's something you'll have to dig a bit deeper into in order to find out, because Robinhood itself doesn't seem to find it necessary to mention it. Their obvious main incentive is to grow, but also to compete with Coinbase - very interested to see how Robinhood manages to grow in the forthcoming years. It won't ever be the Coinbase killer some people on social media refer to.

Funny thing is how this 'news' gets so much attention, while full verification (if you're a fancy person; real-name trading) has been part of the game for quite a while now. It's likely the general media points who try to make this look like a big thing to attract clicks, because otherwise it would just be a boring subject that isn't anything new. South Korea is a fairly new market, but one that's experiencing a rapid wave of growth. It's growth that surpasses the government's ability to keep up with fitting regulations, so for that reason there will be more regulations kicking in this year. I just hope it won't get blown out of proportion like what we have experienced with this real-name trading nonsense.

That's pretty short sighted. I do agree that the majority of the altcoins are nothing more than shitcoins, but there are certain coins actually solving a problem, where alongside that, they have various other decent usability features that Bitcoin at this point in time doesn't offer. Technical developments in the altcoin part of the market may eventually even flow into Bitcoin, and the best thing is that altcoins can be seen as a perfect testbase for Bitcoin's potential future implementations. Anoter important factor is that altcoin trading is largely based on BTC, which basically means that altcoin trading keeps an insane number of coins off the Bitcoin markets. I am happy that we have altcoins being part of the cryptosphere

The intention is partly right in your post since there is some effort put into your post, but it's too forced for the purpose of receiving Merit, and you confirm that when asking for Merit if people think it's worth it. Honestly speaking, I don't it's worth a Merit. Put a bit more effort into your post without asking for Merit, and who knows, you'll get it the next time.

Just NO. OP made the same mistake by saying that, and it is quite annoying how people think Bitcoin is like a cash cow that allows anyone to earn money just like that. Yes, signature and bounty campaigns and some other related options do offer the possibility of earning some coins, but it's not a job and for that reason shouldn't be seen as secondary income. It's a bonus.

I don't pay attention to what "experts" are saying anymore, and for that reason focus only on "ignorant" people since they seem to provide more on point analysis than all those "experts" combined. It has become some sort of a trend for self claimed experts and analysts to pop up and share their 'highly valuable' bit of informative thoughts on Bitcoin and this market. All these hype drivers were likely part of the massive group of skeptics that we had to deal with more than a year ago. Their input was worthless back in the days, and still is today.

How about Shell, the oil and gas giant with its headquarter in Europe? Shell is destroying and poisoning large parts of Nigeria with oil leaks and whatnot. People get sick and die there on a daily basis by drinking water that most people in well developed economies can't even take a tiny sip of without going fully KO. It has been going on for years and years, and nothing has been done to prevent it, and they worry about Bitcoin consuming too much Electricity? Hmm, oh wait, Shell brings in billions and billions every year, and Bitcoin doesn't, which is why the IMF, the baboon corporation of the western world, is following this route. Largarde is leading a criminal organisation, which is not only how people here think, but also the average joes.

That part of your post includes everything that's needed to be said about why holding has been the best option thus far, and still IS the best option in the forthcoming years due to the insane growth potential. I probably shouldn't have used the term always, because this directly implies that the market will always keep increasing, and that indeed can't be the case for ever. However, with what we have experienced in growth thus far, and with the potential growth that we can still gain, holding at this point remains the best and easiest way of getting that growth exposure.

Bitcoin won't get overtaken you coin jumper. With Lightning Network coming closer it's going to be a challenging time for altcoins - which ones will become even more redundant than they already are, and which coins with an actual purpose will manage to keep growing. I wouldn't want to hold any shitcoins with this in mind.

The problem with people paying attention to "Bitcoin's dominance" that's based on an utter nonsense metric as market cap, is that they don't understand that Bitcoin can ONLY lose in this aspect. It's the entire altcoin market versus just one single coin called Bitcoin. Do you seriously think it's fair for people to keep referring to Bitcoin's shrinking market cap dominance?

It's easy to throw with assumptions, but I have the impression that it was an insider as well. I however have been reading various articles, and the majority of them hint towards a hot wallet that has been hacked, and not the cold wallet.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/28/coincheck-nem-hack-unlikely-last-for-cryptocurrency-space-analyst.html

The only question that I keep asking myself is why on earth does an exchange have $500M worth of crypto assets sitting in hot wallets?! It's not that NEM is so insanely popular that they want to provide people instant withdrawals. It's so suspicious, that this strongly reeks of an inside job, where the crypto assets have been made easily accessible for the "hackers".

No. The Nigerian Naira is managed and backed by the multi million dollar checks people get in their email box from the Nigerian Prince.

It certainly is. In ten years time the Naira has lost a significant amount of value, which is a pretty shocking fact that they don't like to talk about. Ten years ago 1USD would get you ~115NGN, where right now 1USD will get you ~360NGN. In other words, even if you as average Nigerian working class person save a certain amount of money every month, it still won't be enough to break even in purchasing power. If this trend continues, which will definitely happen, 1USD will at some point be worth beyond 1000NGN. Bitcoin is the perfect hedge to avoid further loss of purchasing power.

I constantly see articles regarding this or that retailer in Japan accepts Bitcoin (which is great obviously), but I wonder if anyone has actual statistics of how much usage these Bitcoin payments enjoy. In most cases it's BitFlyer acting as gateway, but they don't seem to release any figures concerning merchant revenue in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been booming in Japan for quite some time now, and I am interested to see if that even stretches out in the way that people use it as currency (especially with the fees) to purchase stuff, and not just to nurse their investment greed.

Bitcoin for the sake of governmental easiness should be put in the same category as Gold, especially with so many similar characteristics. Gold is quite often considered to be a currency as well, and that while it doesn't enjoy any use in that specific category at all. For me personally the name (asset, currency, commodity, etc) people think Bitcoin should have doesn't matter a sigle bit, since it's only the usage that matters here. Not sure if people will ever actually start using Bitcoin as currency with how the price keeps going up and down, but at least (with LN to enhance the experience) people will know that Bitcoin itself won't be the limiting factor. From that point it's just a mindset thing that people need to get over.

It has become somewhat of a normality here. The majority of the people here just see what they want to see, and it has been like that from the moment I entered this market years ago. Some people even refer to Bitcoin's transaction speed that's slow, while they don't even understand what the difference is between transaction speed and confirmation times. Another thing to take into consideration is the high number of faucet and bounty farmers, and everything else that's similar to earning micro amounts of coins. The "work" they need to do in order to obtain x amount of coins, is in current days not even enough to cover the transaction fee to move it. They look at the $10 fees as in them being massive, but they don't see how $10 looks like peanuts when it comes to +$1000 transactions. Again, they see what they want to see.

Where do you see that people are waking up? The few people telling others that it isn't the right thing to invest in cloud mining are nothing more than a tiny grain of sand in comparison to the Sahara full of newbies investing and reinvesting in this garbage. If PBmining (search for it) did a better job in maintaining its operations in a more professional manner (ahum, ahum), they till this day would still be operational. Genesis Mining in that regard has done everything literally perfectly in each and every aspect.

Impossible.

The point is that anyone who decides to invest in cloud mining, or basically anything else, does proper research as to what that person is dumping his money into. If you aren't capable of doing that crucial bit of research, then you shouldn't invest in the first place. Greed however is the front driver of people's intentions. 

I personally prefer to focus on these two entities over the third involved entity. As you pointed out, main net usage isn't depending on one of these entities specifically, but the main point should be that aside from testing purposes, LN in 'beta' (let's put it that way) carries too much of a risk and may even harm the public image of the development that's happening behind the scenes. I definitely understand that people get excited about LN (I am too), but it just needs to be released for main net use when it's near 100% certain that all potentially critical bugs are taken out. Bitcoin can't and shouldn't be used as a testbase that easily/blatantly, we have shitcoins for that.

People shouldn't have used Tether in the first place. It was something that a lot people were looking at as being something that would/will at some point collapse. To add; Tether's sole purpose of existence (maintaining a 1:1 ratio versus USD) has been debunked (i.e proven worthless) several times before already, last year. Some people even speculate about how Tether is being used to fund Bitcoin's massive rush of last year, but that's not the case, or at least, not entirely. Bitcoin's growth has a legitimate and justifiable growth source, which is increasing adoption on a daily basis, and further growth as utility. But I have to say that regardless of how much we end up seeing the price increase, Tether will always be a concern that might spoil things badly.

Exchanges and users have personally helped this garbage get distributed widely in this ecosystem, and that's their biggest mistake so far.

The influx of brainless newbies is so massive, that the few people actually paying attention to these sites are on the very low side. It's not for nothing that genesis mining and a few related garbage holes managed to keep operating for so long. I rather have someone create a list of scam sites and potentially scam sites on Bitcointalk, and then have that thread be stickied on top of the page of the marketplace section by a mod. It will probably have a very small effect, but at least it might translate into less people falling for obvious scams that they see as legit operating 'services', especially with an eye catching clickbait style title, where in this case it isn't clickbait.