Not shocking at all given the fact that the recent turmoil made even the most hardcore common joes aware of how rotten this system actually is. It's a no-brainer for people to not choose fiat as that yields a guaranteed loss of ~20% in purchasing power after 10 years. Bitcoin yields not only a dazzling increase in purchasing power, but also financial sovereignty.

Gold isn't a bad option either as I'm confident that the metal will do well, but given its immense $9 trillion market cap, it's not going to do as well as Bitcoin.

The dollar's purchasing power chart looks much worse than most shitcoin charts within crypto. South it'll keep going.

With little financial resources you can get the price in Argentina to break the $20,000 all time high in a minute. Thin orderbooks and massive spreads are the cause of these premiums, nothing else, premiums that market makers happily exploit; they let you sell into their low buy order, and let others buy these coins much higher up. Very common tactic in any illiquid market.

Premiums only mean something with thick orderbooks and very tight spreads. That's indicative of demand. This $11,600 jump in Argentina laughable.

It can cost you a lot too when a lot of liquidity disappears because it was never meant to provide any support, just to make the orderbook appear healthy. There have been various instances where people ended up selling waaaaay below what they thought they would sell at. I rather just sit it out and wait a bit than to market sell amidst the massive panic selling that's happening.

It's less likely to happen on exchanges such as Coinbase, but not every trader and their dog are using that platform.

It could be for the following reasons;

1) They artificially generated searches, which happens quite a lot with scams because they want to make it appear that there is a lot going on.
2) There have been some popular news channels or tv shows covering this scam, which generally makes people curious and search for it as result.

It has been on national tv here not that long ago, so it wouldn't really surprise me if it generated a decent chunk of searches for them. The victims had one thing in common, they all had the iq of a donkey.

It's more like a brief overview, lol.

I'm very hesitent when it comes to anything that wants my API keys. People often think they are safe because it's mostly not possible to withdraw through an API key, but it happened before that people's accounts have been used to pump an illiquid coin where the hackers then withdrew Bitcoin from the exchange(s) concerned.

I doubt there is much demand for such a service anyway, mainly so because most skilled traders steer cleer of services like these.

I wonder what single person/entity funded this article to be distributed so widely.  

When a noob gamer gets outclassed by a more skilled gamer, the first thing you'll hear the noob gamer say is; you're a cheater! People supporting the legacy financial system are exactly like that. Bitcoin is a fraud, it's being manipulated, all transactions are fake, nobody is using it, bla bla. At one point you expect these sore losers to give up but they are persistent as fuck.

I'm ready for the insightful breakdown of the next bull run from $20,000 to $100,000. Must be one heck of a good read.

Perhaps, but we have enough evidence to counter that argument at the same time.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of people still remember how Veriblock just dumped a bunch of data into the Bitcoin blockchain for its own personal business model. By upping the block size we'll see them come back, and have more of the same type of businesses trying to leverage the cheap immutable storage that Bitcoin offers just to sell others some crappy products.

We only have one shot at bringing the world financial freedom with Bitcoin, lets not have that shot wasted.

It depends on what your definition of being controlled by miners is. In a sense, every POW network is controlled by miners because that's the economical security model. If you refer to a few miners controlling the network, then that's not entirely true either because every large pool consists of hundreds/thousands of smaller individual miners.

That's what Lightning and other layered scaling solutions are for. A lot of the innovation within the ecosystem will be related to Lightning as that is the most logical path to follow. It allows businesses to scale larger themselves because there essentially is little resistance when you don't have to communicate with the main-chain every single time.

In the end, I think people greatly exaggerate the potential rate of adoption of Bitcoin or any other crypto. There is no one single global currency, neither is there one global financial institution. We have various currencies in the world and orders of magnitude more financial services each doing things a little different to attract users. Gold isn't the only precious metal either. It just happens to be the most valuable one.

There is more resistance to an increasingly more digital payment field from the younger population than most people here think. The awareness of how important physical cash is in our society grows the more freedom people lose conducting transactions digitally. I sincerely hope that we'll never reach a state where physical cash is completely banished from usage.

The thing with people is that they only realize what they lose when they are actually in the process of losing it. I have seen enough around me to know that people are well aware of how dangerous a cashless society actually is. I was a proponent of cashless society as well until I became aware of the risks attached to no longer having the ability to utilize physical cash.

I have much more respect for what physical cash represents even though it's still government issued money backed by farts and whatnot. I'm glad that Bitcoin helps opening people's eyes and become more interested in economics, a field of interest that most common joes haven't explored before.

Everyone should be skeptical. If we look at assets closer to us, namely stablecoins, they are being issued by entities who's goal is to make a shitload of easy money. The way they accomplish that is to have the stablecoins be so distributed and difficult to cash out, that the majority of the holders of these coins will never seek to cash out because it's too much of a hassle.

Tether has 4 billion USDT issued as we speak, for the sake of argument assuming that every USDT is backed by a dollar, at least a billion will never be cashed out because it's floating on some shitty non compliant exchanges. To cash USDT out, you need to kindly ask Bitfinex to buy them from you, and with their reputation people rather steer clear of them.

Most Gold holders are just as aggressive as Bitcoin holders when it comes to being the sole owner of the asset that you hold. I'm sure that they would reject a Gold backed crypto just as hard was we reject it.

https://goldprice.org/ this site offers a chart of Gold that's going back to the year 1973.

The first stage indeed looks like how Bitcoin and a lot of speculative assets have performed. Boom and bust cycles happen in every market, regardless of the asset. The only difference between legacy assets and Bitcoin is that legacy assets some times need a decade or more to end one cycle, while Bitcoin only needs 1-4 years to do so.

Going back to Gold, it had a peak of $750/oz in 1980 where after the correction that followed needed 27 years to break it! That's nuts lol.

You know why people focus on store of value instead of payments and whatnot? It's because they have started to understand that Bitcoin is too precious to spend.

I am clueless as to why you think it's the sad reality. It has been like this for several years now, so why has it become a problem for you just recently? If payments we're so important to people, they would have switched to 1001 different altcoins, but that's not happening. I think you've watced a few too many of Roger Ver's videos.

What bull run do people expect now? From $9000 to $100,000 before the end of 2020? That's unrealistic because there is so much heavy on volume historical price activity between $10,000 and $20,000 that an attempt to touch the current all time high is the most we can expect before 2020 ends.

Most of the major moving averages on the weekly time frame will take a long time before they finally pass the $10,000 level to support the price would it retest them (which will happen eventually).

The 200 weekly moving average that supported the price in december of last year around $3200 currently hovers around the $4800 level. It took almost 11 months for that moving average to climb up $1600 and it only did so because of the run to $14,000 we had this year. It's great and all to be bullish, but it's also important to not forget the technicals.

At last, the CME gap has closed. The price of CME futures experienced a mini flash crash to $8360 to jump back above $9300 quickly.

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=CME%3ABTC1!

https://cointelegraph.com/news/manipulation-cme-bitcoin-futures-flash-crash-to-fill-85k-gap

Whether it was an intentional fill or a fat finger (I'm leaning towards the first option), it's super bullish that we have that gap filled and can now move on building on a complete chart.

Nothing too shocking.

If you're a us trader and use an exchange that hasn't yet booted us residents from its platform, then you're begging for problems if you don't withdraw your funds beforehand. It has been a trend amongst exchanges to follow this course of action, so better just use an exchange as Coinbase. You'll get to sign up there eventually anyway because the non kyc options are running out quickly.

The worst part about using non kyc exchanges is that they don't have to justify any of their actions to their users, so you're at their mercy completely. It's not worth the stress and hassle at all.

It's always a good thing to follow what the smart money on platforms is doing, and the big whales have withdrawn over 100,000BTC from Bitfinex in quite a short period of time.

Most exchange addresses can be found in the top 100 richest addresses, so when you're in doubt that whales or traders in general are withdrawing funds from an exchange, it can be noticed quickly. It's basic level research that doesn't require insider knowledge on how bad the situation is within an exchange. Everyone can look into it. You got to love Bitcoin's transparency.

In the end, an exchange getting hacked isn't directly a death sentence, but a lot will come down to how they deal with the situation and work things out. Bitfinex definitely failed in that field.

Bitfinex is on fire!

https://blog.bitfinex.com/announcements/support-for-bech32-addresses-now-available-on-bitfinex/

After supporting bech32 withdrawals, Bitfinex today announced that they now also support generation of, and deposits to bech32 addresses.

Healthy growth of adoption; https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/segwit-usage

I think you're mixing up wallets and addresses. Wallets are clients such as Bitcoin Core and Electrum, while an address can be generated by any wallet. It's not necessarily so that people are recommended to use different wallets to 'store' their coins, but more so that people should spread their coins amongst various addresses.

Important factor is that whenever you download a client, you have to make sure it's from the main source only, and to verify the signatures provided. Unfortunately, most newbies and even some people who've been here for a long time don't verify the signatures, either because they don't know that it's important, or they don't know how to do so.

With all that in mind, it once again points out the importance of hardware wallets as these tools provide easy and safe storage without requiring too much knowledge to use.

Hard but not impossible. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to locate your mining farm very close to for example an aluminum smelting facility, which generally tends to purchase a lot of power in bulk where quite a significant percentage of that goes to waste because it's not being used. How about allowing miners to benefit from that at a super low rate?

It doesn't only help the facility make money while they aren't running their regular smelting process, but also helps the miners because they get to reap the fruits of a very low power rate.

Precious metals are something we all have in some form of shape.

I can't think of people around me who don't have some Gold or Silver jewelry. People don't directly relate that to money, but it obviously has weight to it, and when it has weight to it there is scrap value at the very minimum. The only thing is that in some cases people are emotionally attached to their jewelry pieces, but I think in cases of necessity, they'll be used as money.

In the end, it will all come down to what people find convenient and are used to use as money, which is cash. Governments have however started to slowly take the larger bill nominations out of circulation, which I expect to conintue until we are left with the most commonly used smaller nominations.