That's certainly true. However, a very bad practice, and definitely shady, of exchanges is that while some of them don't allow anyone to cash out without verifying, they still do allow people to deposit whatever crypto funds. What's the point legitimately to allow people to deposit without them having the ability to cash out anything? It's just an attempt to trap in people and give them no chance but to follow through with their personal information and ID scans, etc. I think in this aspect the governmental regulations should be more harsh, and punish exchanges for receiving funds without having verified people beforehand. It isn't only fair to the people, but it will also save exchanges so much time when it comes to allocating time to reply to the tickets being the result of all this.

That's pretty much an interesting development, especially now GDAX has also gone below the $10,000 level. I personally didn't expect it to happen, but just like the increase to $20,000 last year, things happen when people don't expect it. I must however say that I can't complain about these lower levels. I took profits at the right moments, and that's paying off right now. Bitstamp as conservative as it has always been, has thus far still managed to keep hovering just over $10,000, but for how long, that's the question. I probably have to set some well placed buy orders before sleeping, and all below $10,000 just in case it sinks down that far.

Of course it is low. People aren't willing to install a client that downloads like 160 gigs of data, and each time it starts up on traditional hdd's it takes time to load, and especially when you're switching wallet files. In my case, loading a different wallet file in the wallet directory means that the client will check blocks for nearly two hours straight. I run a full node because I want to contribute, but that's not somthing most of the recent people joining here are thinking about. They just want a light client connected to a server node, and that's really it, and honestly, I can't really blame them. The larger the blockchain grows, the lower the number of people are that do the same as what I have been doing for more than two years now.

It's not that weird honestly, and especially not when you consider how Bitcoin has been booming lately, so it's probably the best possible time to get involved in Bitcoin in that way. Sure, the fees may turn out to be an obstacle, but I am sure that people will not mind spending their Bitcoin profits on tickets of their favorite team.

He isn't really something I look to as being a respectable person, especially because of the fact that he is only looking for media attention with everything he is doing. However, as long as it is positive minded, there is not much that we can complain about. Everything bullish that can help grow Bitcoin further is a welcome addition, even when we personally don't like that individual.

Firstly, South Korea isn't going to shut down exchanges, and secondly, I can't wait for China to withdraw itself from the crypto space completely. I even find it quite interesting and weird at the same time that China hasn't already done so years ago already. If we look at how paranoid the Chinese government is, these 'China will do this or that' articles wouldn't even be part of discussions anymore. Also, the more governments are pushing people away from them, and with such measures it's definitely making things worse, the more people will dive into P2P markets. It's not for nothing that after the shutdown of the exchanges there, the P2P market has literally exploded, and this happened basically in every country with similar measures being forced through by their government.

It has been like that since the very beginning. The main point here is that whatever group of people are desperately trying to get this market to tank real hard, and that with these twisted articles that want to make people believe something bad is about to happen. In most cases it's nothing more than a warning that it is better to not use crypto currencies, but if you do so, you are fully responsible for what happens then with your money. This news is then twisted in the way that it looks that Bitcoin will get banned and whatnot, so people should just disregard this articles. Without all this drama, this market would be a whole lot less interesting. I seriously don't know anything other than drama since I have been into Bitcoin.

As long as the market remains supporting the $10,000 level, it's pretty pointless to speculate about anything lower than that. People shouldn't forget that we have gone up so much, which was all based on very bullish developments such as the future markets to begin with, that right now without anything to look forward to, it's difficult to motivate the market to move up. I don't mind seeing the price go down a bit further as long as the $10,000 level remains strong. It just requires one bullish trigger to see the market rocket up with a few thousand in just a matter of hours, so it's not looking all that bad. The thin markets can be held responsible for the large swings we experience.

No loss occurs until you sell at a loss. I seriously don't understand why people constantly try to "reduce" losses when the price has gone down already. It just doesn't make sense - accept that you are too late with selling, and that holding is the only right option for now. If you have some funds left, try to buy the market on the way down, and via that way lower the average buying price of your entire stash. It's just a matter of logical thinking, but that doesn't seem to apply to most of the people here. I have enough funds left to buy the market on its way down, and for that reason look happily forward to an even lower price. If you go all in and have no funds left, yeah, you are limiting yourself unnecessarily.

I have updated Electrum, and have directly generated myself a Segwit address to be part of the Segwit squad.


It's a shame that barely any service has adopted Segwit yet. Not even the more popular block explorers seem to allow me to look for my address.

You're not the only one. 1% is indeed massive. It wasn't all that long ago where Bitcoin didn't even account for 0.5% of Gold's market cap, and see today, even while Gold has gained value lately, Bitcoin accounts for 3% of Gold's total market cap. That's what I consider to be a massive achievement, and especially when I look back at screenshots that I periodically make where Bitcoin's market cap was still below $1 billion. If we take the combined market cap of all crypto's, which is nearly $700 billion right now, we need a small push forward to reach 10% of Gold's today's market cap. For an industry that was said to have reached it's ultimate all time high of $100 back in 2013, from which it would never ever recover again, that's just insane. And don't forget that we have so much more growth to experience in the forthcoming years.

Fiat is still unbeatable when it comes to smaller purchases, but it's just a matter of time before we can see people make use of Lightning Network for just a fraction of the cost of current transaction fees. I however have to point out that while people complain about the fees being an obstacle when it comes to conducting purchases, I don't believe this at all. As per the bolded part of your post, I believe that to be the main reason why people aren't spending their coins. People simply don't want to use their coins to buy whatever goods with, and that is something we have also been dealing with years ago, so it's not a new problem we recently have faced. Lightning network will mainly function to allow people to conduct micro transactions, and not really to enhance their spending on goods experience.

This could have been seen coming a long time ago already. The main thing to note here is that Bitcoin is jumping into governmental territory, and as per themselves, every entity, tool, asset, or whatever, has to abide by their rules, even if it doesn't make sense for the outside world. That's why I am not so shocked about this, and yes, I do expect this to be a requirement in every country within a few years. However, we all have the option to not agree with all these control freak behavior regulations by making use of peer to peer markets. If we look at how much volume there is available in these peer to peer markets, it is clear that a lot people have already made the shift away from the centralized exchanges. It will go even so far, that exchanges will be forced to hand over every bit of precious user information to the respective tax authority of each country. It certainly makes you think.

I am not a Kraken trader, so I am very interested to hear from those who actively use Kraken to trade if there has actually been an improvement noticed. If there is, and Kraken manages to keep its trading engine running smoothly and that consistently regardless of how heavy the actual usage is, then it can be seen as great step forward. If not much turns out to have changed, I think people who are actively trading should start looking for alternative exchanges, because there is nothing more frustrating than an exchange not delivering at peak moments. If you miss out on great money making opportunities due to the incompetence of an exchange, oh boy, that's bad, very bad. Let's hope they have indeed gone forward.

Not only that, but in some cases these wall street guys aren't even allowed to invest in Bitcoin or whatever other crypto currencies due to the policies they are subject to. It's nothing more than a mainstream media bit if nonsense article that they come up with due to the lack of interesting subjects.

There is no such a thing as bearish right now. People shouldn't keep focusing on the insane peak of $20,000 that we almost touched last year. It was a super exaggerated peak that had zero chances of being maintainable. I consider the $15,000/$16,000 level to be a better reflection of an all time high. If we look at the price starting January 1st of this year till now, it shows a pretty steady range between $13,000 and $14,000, which clearly fits in the category of a consolidating market. Draw a line on the chart and you'll see it being visible.

People with their downward trend nonsense. It's obvious that the market is consolidating, but then within a wider than average range. If you look closely, and see how repetitive the movements are between $13,000'ish and $14,000'ish levels, you will directly spot a great money making opportunity. If you time it right, you can make a decent bit of profit in just a matter of days, and quite often in less than a day. Learn to analyze the market and see how profitable these repetitive movements are for youself. As soon as we break out of this consolidation phase, these repetitive patterns will be no longer there, and thus it's time to just hold again. It's just a matter of logical thinking, really.

There is no such a thing as being a victim here. We all agree that the fees are too high, but we have been overloaded with so much usage, that the network got severely cluttered. Result is that people thinking their transaction has more priority will bid up the fees like it is an auction, where the top bidders (highest fee transactions) get included in the next block.

That not true. If we look at people having adopted to Segwit already, they seem to be on the side where they don't have to pay the fees people pay for regular transactions. Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to pay the higher fees to get their transactions inlcuded in the next block, and if we look at how the fees comfortably maintain the 0.001BTC level, it seems that a large group of people are willing to pay that. And yes, a large group of people will not agree to pay these fees, and choose to go with a lower fee and just accept having to wait longer.

In this case there have been several miners having said to look into alternative locations due to how hostile their government starts to behave against anything crypto related. That's why (at least for now) there is more "truth" in these miners leaving to x country articles than those having South Korea as subject. It wasn't all that long ago where people were saying it was pure fud that Chinese exchanges had to shut down due to their government forcing them to do so, which later became the hard reality. We'll see what happens, but if turns out that miners are actually moving away from China, I won't lose a single second of sleep over it. I rather have them go elsewhere than staying in a country with an unstable government.

This forum has been full of those articles pretending things far less severe than what those poorly translated articles try to say, that in some cases have been altered to cause panic amongst people. As far as I can remember, Indonesia (according to the sheer number of rubbish articles) has been planning to come up with a ban or more aggressive restrictions since the early days of last year. On top of that we have Russia saying one thing, where the other day they have changed their stance on crypto entirely, so there is basically nothing that grants people here factual information. Everything we see pop up is just vague information that more often than not turns out to be incorrect (i.e fud).

It doesn't say anything yet. I want to see how the network handles everything once at least 50% of the entire market makes and takes LN transactions. It's impossible to at this point say anything of value about LN just because a few users have used it with a big smile due to the lower fees, etc. If we manage to consistently use LN as how it gets 'advertised', it would be a major adoption booster, but the real test starts when the mass starts hopping on board. I will start this week by looking into Segwit to start transacting that way, which I am already excited for since people say that it helps taking down the fees as well. Not that I am transacting a lot (barely in reality), but I like to move forward with things.

Problem is that there are the hidden agenda motives of those who benefit from spreading such statements, which might even turn out to be political related after all. It basically fits in the category of insider trading and market manipulation, which in both cases are severe offences, and especially from high level entities being institutions, political figures, etc. I however can't say that I am shocked about this, mainly because of the fact that there is so much money involved, that we should expect these things to happen on a regular basis. Bitcoin's market by far isn't as severely regulated as stock markets for example, which grants those behind the scene enough freedom and low overall risk to abuse their position in order to get this market to move in their preferred direction. Jamie Dimon and his "Bitcoin is a fraud" statement is the perfect example of that. Let them figure out what is going on there, and we can focus on further growth.