Maxine Waters, the Democratic chairwoman of the panel, pointed out that the social network was the subject of an antitrust investigation.

She said it would be "beneficial for all if Facebook concentrates on addressing its many existing deficiencies and failures before proceeding any further on the Libra project".

Miners continue to declare bankruptcy and leave the industry, and IPOs and fundraising for new ventures have been put on hold. Prohashing's daily revenue declined from $260,000 on February 13, 2018 to $11,250 in early October (it should be noted that some of this revenue was mistakenly paid as a result of bugs that are no longer present as the system has become more stable, so the actual reduction in profit is not proportional to the decline.) Litecoinpool.org's hashrate declined from 100TH/s to around 22TH/s today. We recently contracted a person to write a report whose job is to sell miners to large firms, and he said that almost all of his business today results from liquidations.

Yeah, it always amazes me how a market with a supposed 19 billion a day volume drops 8% with a few million dump.

If you spin it around, you can also say that US is intervening with the market to kill Bitcoin. It would be interesting if any of the media go with that narrative and see how the US would react.

I m really wondering what are the reasons why freelancing sites using Bitcoin seem to not gaining good traction in this industry? Maybe if we can identity the problems and challenges with this situation some people can be coming up with possible solutions. Freelancing sites should be making the gigs economy alive and can be helping a lot in more adoption of Bitcoin as they are presenting many people with opportunities to earn some Bitcoin in exchange for performing some tasks. Sadly, there is really no Fiverr counterpart here in the Bitcoin industry. Had Fiverr made a decision to allow Bitcoin as part of its mode of payment then things can be so positively different. I am so sad for this development and I am hoping that something can be done to make those freelancing sites using Bitcoin to come back to life.

The Trump administration acted to deflate the bitcoin bubble of 2017 by allowing the introduction of futures products, a former official said Monday.

Christopher Giancarlo, who left the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) at the end of his five-year term as chairman in April, told CoinDesk in an interview:

    “One of the untold stories of the past few years is that the CFTC, the Treasury, the SEC and the [National Economic Council] director at the time, Gary Cohn, believed that the launch of bitcoin futures would have the impact of popping the bitcoin bubble. And it worked.”

In a speech at the Pantera Summit in San Francisco on Monday, Giancarlo elaborated further, saying bitcoin’s dramatic price run-up in December 2017 was the first major bubble following the 2008 financial crisis. That’s why the Trump administration acted in concert to address it in a pro-markets manner, he said.

Bitcoin futures listed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the CBOE Futures Exchange (CFE) were announced by the CFTC on Dec. 1, 2017 and went live on Dec. 18. Bitcoin’s price peaked at nearly $20,000 one day earlier, on Dec. 17, before falling dramatically in subsequent weeks.

“We saw a bubble building and we thought the best way to address it was to allow the market to interact with it,” Giancarlo told the crowd gathered at the Ritz-Carlton on Nob Hill.

Of course, there are different views on what ultimately brought bitcoin prices back down to Earth, reaching lows in the $3,000 range in late 2018. However, Giancarlo cited research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve that also credits the introduction of bitcoin futures for reining in a market driven by optimists.

Without shorts, a market has no pessimists. “If you do believe it’s a ridiculous price but you don’t own, there’s no way to express that view,” Giancarlo told CoinDesk, adding:

    “If you don’t have that derivative, then all you’ve got are believers [and] it’s a believers’ market.”

The lack of easy ways to short has been cited by other researchers as propping up prices in other crypto assets.

“The CFTC staff handled it strictly on procedural grounds, but at the leadership level I communicated with Treasury Secretary [Steven] Mnuchin and NEC Director Gary Cohn, and we believed that, should bitcoin futures go forward, it would allow institutional money to bring discipline to the value of the cash market,” Giancarlo told CoinDesk. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
Lessons from ’08

The bitcoin bubble of 2017 must be viewed in the context of the financial crisis of 2008, Giancarlo said.

In 2008, the former regulator was running GFI Group Inc., an over-the-counter trading desk on Wall Street that became one of the largest exchanges for credit-default swaps – the financial instrument that wreaked havoc on U.S. markets.

Giancarlo said:

    “Coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, the legit criticism of regulators was along the lines of: Where were they during the expansion of the real estate mortgage bubble, and why didn’t they take steps to pop that bubble when they could have?”

That view informed regulators acting quickly on bitcoin’s ascent, he added.

To Giancarlo, the lesson was clear: Regulators mustn’t be complacent when faced with a bubble – but they must act in a way that keeps markets free. In the case of 2017, permitting bitcoin futures presented just such an opportunity.

Giancarlo concluded:

    “I believe it shows the power of markets to bring discipline to prices.”

I found in privacy policy of one particular exchange that it transfers data about me to credit organizations. Actually the same is true for banks.
In what cases do they do this thing? If I make big enough trade volume at exchange, say $50,000 for year, is this information transferred as well? I suppose it happens only if you do margin trading or something... don't know much about it, except that you take loans from brokers...

Yeah I realize $50k is not big for you

I believe so, that's one reason that Congress was a bit hard on it. If it wasn't for scandals like Cambridge Analytica, they probably wouldn't have scrutinized it as closely.

Not to mention it's election season. These politicians likely saw how the public reacted to Zuckerberg and want to capitalize on that.

The crypto sector can make it easier in the payment sector because of the ease in transacting online and blockchain technology provides new offers from payment systems that are still available today and in my opinion when looking at conditions where more and more are interested then the number of users will always increase every year

I have no doubt that if a central bank develops a cryptocurrency, it will be centralized (or at least federated) and they will track every cent that you spend.

The most interesting part is that central banks seem to have totally forgotten what the value of paper money was once based on: gold!

Altcoins future is going to be good especially the coins are in the list of top 10-20 in the coinmarketcap. I am not worried about those coins.

The Euro is a joke, and I'm using it every single day, which is the worst part.... I rather hold anything nominated in USD value than EUR value, because it's bound to keep falling with no end in sight.

If you held an asset nominated in EUR throughout the last couple of years, you lost big time, while most assets nominated in USD saw their value increase. It's clear that the USD is where you can find most of the confidence.

It's more likely that we will fall back to the gold standard than see a EUR standard become a real thing, especially with how I believe that there isn't a single fiat currency that can do well with the USD imploding.

I think the main part contributing to that is how widely discussed this subject has been, where we have reached a point where a lot of wannabe investors have prepared themselves for a crisis to unfold once again.

The general rule however is that when there is such a mass scale preparing going on for a crisis, you can be close to certain that it won't be happening any time soon, especially not with how much money is being printed.

Money printing can keep the economy up and running for another 5-10 years.... the thing however is that it only makes the crisis that will eventually happen even more of a danger, and it will hit everyone when it isn't expected.

 Every well established currency has been replaced after some time especially when it failed to convey value reliably for the population of users.   The problem we have is within our lifetimes we have no reason to doubt it will continue as a standard as previously but historically it would be normal for transition to another standard.

I was hoping to see something in that article talking about them using solely sustainable energy. I see that they're using wind and solar power, would have been nice to see a commitment to them using a % percentage minimum of renewables. I think it's a pretty big problem how much fossil fuels a lot of these large mining operations use up, if we want to stop Bitcoin from having insane negative externalizes we really need to get on top of that (and to be fair, even in China where regulation is quite poor, a good proportion of energy used by mining ops there is renewable).

Good to see that the hashing power of the network will be coming less centralized in China, though.

Suicidal goes by how dangerous life is. In countries where is war or lot of criminal and poverty no one will suicide. Because they see dying and what comes with that all the time. In countries with high living standards there is tones of suicides, because people simply dont cherish the life.

To be honest, facebook currency or Libra is very unnecessary in our economy. We already have a lot of fiat currencies in different countries and we already have a lot of option in terms of having a virtual or digital currency like Paypal. We are already all set in becoming a cashless society so having Libra coin as a new project related to currency is useless because we already have that system a lot of years ago.

I really agree with idea of Libra tapping into remittance market. Indeed Bitcoin is very much convenient in that regard and cheaper too. With the size of Facebook and its wide usage. If they are to get regulatory approval in future. These initiatives are most likely to take the market by storm which ever strategy they choose to adopt regarding Libra coin.