It's funny how when the price was hovering between $12,000/$13,000 people were just relaxed, and now the price has gone up to $17,000, and went back down to sub $15,000 levels, people start talking about what happened. It's just the market bouncing up and down like it has been doing for weeks now. It's perfectly normal considering that there is no news or other signals for people to hold on to, so the market jumps up and down within a fairly large range. The market last year had the future markets to hold on to as extremely bullish sign, which we don't have anymore today, so there isn't a clear direction.

Every wall street bank has a not so clean past if we look at things a bit more in depth. The thing is that they all have enough cash to buy out every of their malicious actions of the past, and just continue with a clean sheet to demolish something else. It's a never ending cycle that keeps them on track for basically plenty of more years. As long as they know that they make more in profits than potential fines, it's a well worth action for them. Paying billions in fines is nothing more than collateral damage for these mighty institutions.

Every trade is taxable in theoretical sense. What matters here is that you declare your holdings and profits at each new tax year as totalling number. If you are a senior day trader and have like 50 trades per day on average, which means 365x50=18,250 trades per year, it doesn't mean that you have to declare all your 18,250 trades. You just declare your total holdings and profits for that year in fiat terms, and done you are. If you made profit, you pay tax over your wealth and profits, and if you didn't make any profits, you just pay tax over what's left of your holdings. The only occasion where the trades in particular may matter, is when the IRS doesn't trust your tax reports, and thus you have to come up with evidence.

I think we will find out. At this point it's waiting for Lightning Network to get ready, because that's what we really need now. Once LN is in place, Bitcoin won't have to suffer from a low per second transaction processing power, confirmations won't form a problems anymore, and fees won't form a problem anymore. In other words, the only thing that will continue to give altcoins some sort of value, is their speculative nature. If we put the speculative nature aside, and look at the fundamentals of what altcoins have to offer, then 98% of them will miserably lose and become nothing more than a redundant altcoin. The only altcoins being able to actually have fundamental value, are those that are actually solving a problem that Bitcoin doesn't solve. One of my personal favorites is Monero.

XRP is nothing more than a temporary hype driven coin. Last year when it reached an all time high and surpassed Bitcoin's market cap, people were talking about how it would affect Bitcoin and whatnot, but as soon as the XRP balloon popped, people quickly dropped that coin and focused on something else. People here are as volatile as the market with their nonfunctional mindsets. What happens if the far majority of the total coin supply is sitting in offline storage, and just a few percent available on-exchange to be bought? Right, the price will basically have no short term limits, and that's exactly what happened to XRP. XRP won't fail, but just deflate, basically like all other altcoins in the long run in terms of their Bitcoin ratio.

I have experienced this too quite frequently lately. Most PM's are related to them wanting me to help them to get their stuck transactions confirmed, and that they will pay me (likely) dust as reward. It's definitely a good thing to have some restrictions, but in this case it won't help much since they will still be able to contact some people to seek for *potential* support. I just ignore the PM's. The only PM's I end up reporting is either ICO spam related, or spam that was related to Gunbot (which I am sure of that in reality they aren't related to Gunbot at all).

It's a good move in the way that other new users don't have to suffer from their incompetence, but this incompetence prevents new money from flowing into this market, which is what people don't seem to understand. Exchanges have had plenty enough time to hire more capable staff members, but the problem is that they don't won't to invest too much into expanding their service, which is a shame. Infrastructure upgrade is one thing, but hiring staff members is equally as important. If you want to be a major player in this market as service, then act as such.

It's part of each developed asset class. I don't see entities going short on Bitcoin as a bad thing, mainly because of the fact that to a certain extent, it might actually make the market stronger. At this point it has yet to be proven, but at some point the different markets might end up taming each other. Bitcoin won't always remain in its current form, where I am confident in a more stable overall market in the very long run. This stability will then give people more incentive to start spending their coins, because that right now is severely lacking.

Visa and of course their other centralized fellow services just show how they rule this market. People don't want to understand how these corporations are controlling almost every aspect of our financial life, which is a horrible and ignorant thing to do. In digital form, there is no way that we can transact without being subject to a corporation validating the transactions we make and take. If they decide to block us from their platforms, we're basically limited in each and every way, which is something we shouldn't allow to happen. That's why I am thankful to have Bitcoin. It's time for people to value what level of freedom Bitcoin is giving to us, because at this point people only focus on the increasing price.

That's what I have been thinking about as well. I have seen various exchanges now that are closing their registrations, and even some local buying and selling services aren't able to cope with the demand, which is why they they temporarily disabled their services. To make things even worse, the local services have to buy people's coins at premium levels in order to have some stock, and when they do have stock, it gets sold out basically instantly. You have to refresh the page constantly in order to see whether or not there is new stock, and when you do get to reach the buying moment, it tells you that there is nothing in stock anymore, which means that you were too late. Money is desperate to enter, but it can't enter, grrrrr.

Altcoins dominance in terms of market cap doesn't mean anything, people should understand that by now. Market cap of altcoins are waaaaay inflated due to their large total supply. If you create an altcoin with 1,000,000,000,000 in total supply, and the exchange rate is just $1, that directly translates into a $1000 billion market cap. With this cheap way of obtaining massive market caps, Bitcoin is obviously going to lose this meaningless "battle" versus the entire altcoin market. Bitcoin speaks for itself in terms of usage, its insanely secure network, the massive ecosystem, adoption that's only growing, etc. What do altcoins have? Mostly only usage in speculative terms.

Kraken, like the majority of all the exchanges in this market being subject to KYC and AML policies, are all suffering from major delays when it comes to verification requests, resolving matters, answering questions, etc. To add; you having done everything just a few days ago is too early to expect your verification to be settled. There are enough people out here who are waiting for more than a week, even up to a month in some extreme cases, so just give it some time. If before Friday of next week still nothing changed, then contact them again.

The major difference is that Jamie Dimon sits comfortably on a seat as CEO of the largest and most poweful wall street bank. If the market reacts on what the CEO says of such financial institution, it's somewhat understandable that people have the urge to panic sell, which also seemed to happen at that time. It however won't work again. All empty headed noobs here talking about crashes can't do anything in terms of influencing the market. If anyone here takes the words of a bunch of noobs here seriously, that person itself is even a bigger noob that should seek for mental help.

Not? I thought that it was the general way of thinking on this forum in the last year.

People should understand that there is a major difference when it comes to user/investor adoption picking up, resuling in booming markets, which is the easiest side realizing growth within this ecosystem. Everything else that's more directed at building up e-comerce layers, building applications taking advantage of the underlying technology, forcing through the necessary regulations, etc, takes the most time of everything. In other words, the growth in terms of adoption and price has greatly outperformed everything else, and even Bitcoin itself. I however still can't understand why there is still no major Segwit adoption. According to everyone the need for Segwit was essential to move forward, and now it's here, there is suddenly no need for it anymore?

Domino effect. It definitely will result in more wall street entities to follow, especially if they find out how much money there is to be made in a booming new market. We don't have to forget that most of these wall street entities were major skeptics before the major recent growth, and this isn't all that long ago. It's a positive shift, that will even get JPMorgan to take a drive into the Bitcoin sea. I can't even imagine how much demand there is from wealthy individuals to invest in Bitcoin, but these banks don't allow them to benefit from the major crypto growth. It must sting that you see a bank playing around with your money on the financial market will only yield you a mere 3-5% annually, while Bitcoin has been up nearly 2000% last year.

What if the Chinese government is behind Bitmain and they let all hardware burn externally? These what if theories don't hold much value at all. Bitmain at the end of the day is dependent on Bitcoin's success, so if they do anything to harm Bitcoin, they are harming themselves. The entire Jihan squad is talking big that Bitcoin Core isn't the real Bitcoin and bla bla, but at the end of the day they aren't willing to cash out their entire Bitcoin holdings for their trashy BCASH. If you so badly believe that you own shitcoin is the real Bitcoin, then what's the point of holding any Bitcoin Core coins? They are just playing a game with everyone to make BCASH look more valuable than it in reality is, and make most of the noobs here major BCASH bagholders.

Funny thing is that the general opinion (way before the massive increase) was that Ripple is just a centralized scamcoin, a bankster coin, that people shouldn't touch it, etc. Looking at the general opinion right now, people seem to go full for Ripple, and that even at cost of their *lovely* Ethereum. It just shows how instable people's mindsets are. One day Ethereum is the Bitcoin killer, and once another coin increases in value, which in this case is Ripple, it's suddenly better than Ethereum, and also a potential Bitcoin killer.

It depends. If we look at how altcoins have been performing against Bitcoin, they have mostly all (of course some exceptions there) lost big time. But if we look at how they have been performing based on their USD value, they have done exceptionally well, which largely is also because of how Bitcoin has gone up. The coin I was seriously considering buying for a while, but didn't do since I don't mess around with altcoins anymore, was Reddcoin at 5 satoshis per coin. Could have resulted in some killer returns.

It's working, but in some time frames there are so many individuals trying to accelerate their transactions, that it basically results in a situation where like thousand people battle to get one of the hundred hourly accelerations. To add; these people also have to battle against those who run scripts, which more often than not are making money from it. That's why you see them always state that your transaction will confirm within x number of hours, and never exactly within two hours for example. It will leave them enough room to gain a spot in ViaBTC's accelerator if the first attempts don't work out.

Realistically, LN is the only thing that can make Bitcoin appealing as actual currency again, which is something that we really need right now. Bitcoin's utility is very important, and due to the fees, the utility gets limited significantly. We have been talking about Bitcoin doing this and that and eventually will function as solid alternative against fiat, but this is only slipping away further. LN is the answer to all current limitations of Bitcoin. Imagine how Bitcoin could boom in adoption basically instantly if people in third world countries will start using Bitcoin as their main way of settling transactions, instead of their on SMS based services, which are heavily centralized and corrupted. We need the mass, and Bitcoin should be able to serve the mass.

It's pretty shocking to see such a major difference in price between the USD and the KRW markets. Especially because of the fact that South Korea isn't a third world country where people are buying the market up at all cost due to the low supply of on-market coins. Sure, it's a clear demonstration of how free this market in reality is, but also shows its weakness. I can definitely understand a difference of max $1000 between different continental markets, but this $5000 gap is just insane. And before people start pointing at arbitrage opportunities, I wish you good luck with trying to take advantage of this difference.