Ugh.  I watched that statement on Youtube and then all the media reaction to it--and as much as I loathe Trump, he wasn't exactly suggesting that citizens pump themselves full of drain cleaner or somehow infuse virus-killing UV light into their bodies.

The fact is that Trump is not a scientist, and he was thinking out loud about things he probably should have kept his mouth shut about--but rarely does he do that on any topic. 

And OP, this is an intelligent thread about COVID-19, not some idiotic shitposter-bait one created by a signature spammer.  No worries from me about that.

I don't know if I agree with that assessment.  One of my favorite books is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which was basically a paean written to socialism--and that book is over 100 years old.  It certainly showed some of the pitfalls of a capitalist system where workers are at the mercy of not only their bosses but the owners of companies and all of the abuses that can (and did) take place. 

But that was in 1906.  Things have improved considerably for capitalism since then, whereas socialism/communism haven't exactly caught on around the world.  IMO there are far too many problems with a socialist structure, and I don't say that having just reviewed a textbook.  I say that having noticed how the world has been working for the past 35+ years of my life.

Having grown up in a capitalist society, I'll admit I'm biased.  I don't see anything inherently evil in socialism or communism, but when it's put into actual practice....oh boy, the abuses are legendary.

I generally tend to try to give merits to lower-ranked members who need them to rank up--but only if their posts are merit-worthy.  Often they aren't.  There are some threads I read through where most of the constructive posts which have obviously had thought put into them to be made by higher-ranked members--and more often than not, they're Legendaries.

OP, I don't know how important merits are to you personally or if you're looking to climb the ranks on the forum, but if either of those things are the case, you might want to either try to improve your English or post on a local board.  If you'd made a post like your OP in the middle of some other thread, I would have just skimmed it and quickly moved on.

Merits aren't supposed to be easy to earn.

A PM like that ought to be made public IMO, so you'll get zero criticism from me for quoting it here.

I have to admit that I don't know the entire situation, since I can't seem to muster up the patience to read this thread from start to finish, but I'd say you're right to tag him.  The dude seems hostile, volatile, and ultimately untrustworthy--and that's what the trust system is for.

Nice analysis of the history of the Reputation board.  I think it was originally intended for members to create their own threads in which other members would weigh in on their trustworthiness, but that all went by the wayside with the trust system (and the Scam Accusation section). 

That's not to say that it's not a useful section, because there are issues with individual members that crop up from time to time which are best suited for Reputation.

Yeah, I wasn't around in the early days from 2009-2014, but it must have been a huge pain in the ass to do that.  If I'm not mistaken, the forum was using the "scammer tag" at that point--and my knowledge of forum history fails me, because I can't remember when Theymos did away with that.  Must have been around 2014 or so when I was still a lurker.

Yeah, that would be my guess as to the data as well.  The bars and restaurants and average businesses being closed is only a temporary thing, and my guess is that most businesses will be back up and running relatively soon--and I would expect unemployment claims to drop as well.

The only thing that worries me is that big corporations like Coca-Cola and others that make up the Dow and S&P500 have taken some serious hits to their quarterly profits which have yet to be reported.  The stock market right now looks like it's generally doing OK, but I'm curious to see how the market is going to do the rest of the year and in 2021.  Those stimulus checks probably helped prop up certain asset classes, as I'm sure some people used the money to buy stocks, bitcoin, metals, or whatever.  That was only a temporary measure, however.  I'm kind of expecting either a crash or a major correction in the coming months.

Bitcoin's at around $8700 right now, and I think it's way too early to start calling this a bull market.  What it is, is a rebound from before the coronavirus outbreak happened.  Before all that chaos ensued, I was frequently declaring that 2020 was going to be a stellar year for bitcoin--and then the black swan reared its ugly head and then all of a sudden it didn't look like bitcoin was going to hit $10k this year.

As to your question if we'll see $12-15k early next month....no, I don't think so.  But I'll qualify that remark by saying that I've been wrong with my predictions more times than I can count--so you never know, and I do hope bitcoin gets to those levels.  Maybe not as soon as next month, but perhaps this year would be nice.

Yeah, those are questions asked by pretty much all investors--and it's the whole key to investing, i.e., when to get in and when to get out.  Only once in my lifetime did I see the perfect buy-in opportunity, and it was in the stock market in 2008-09 when the Dow had crashed to something like 6000.  I was absolutely sure that the drop in value represented "the bottom"--and I was right.  Unfortunately I was already in the market at the time and didn't have a lot of extra funds to invest more.

As far as crypto is concerned right now, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to chase this little bull run we're having.  At the very least it could offer you a chance to make some short-term profits.  I'm just not convinced this is the start of a bigger movement upward.

Yeah, I'd say a neutral would be acceptable for what OP is proposing.  I've left many neutrals for members simply saying "This member is a shitposter" or something like that.  If I'd left that same feedback as a negative, it would be a misuse of the trust system, but neutrals are supposed to be for general thoughts about a member that need not impact their trust score.

Man, I didn't even think bitcoin had a chance of hitting $10k at any point this year--but seeing as how it briefly exceeded $9k in the past 24 hours, I'm starting to have doubts about my doubts.  And I have to admit, I'm frequently wrong when I start thinking along the lines of "there's no chance bitcoin can do X this [month/year/ever]".  The market has surprised me more times than I care to count.

I don't know about whether bitcoin's going to hit $10k this week, but it's certainly possible.  Whether that price level can be sustained for longer than a week or a month remains to be seen if it does get there.

Ah, I think I'm way too old school and too set in my ways to try to go bankless--and I freely admit that this is a defect, a lack of adventurousness on my part.  I certainly can't say I like banks or even trust them, but they've been working for me for many years and at this point I don't have any desire to do things differently. 

It's one thing to abandon the use of banks out of a desire for financial freedom and another thing entirely to do so out of necessity.  I'm not sure even the world's unbanked has turned to crypto as a solution.  If there are a significant number of people who can't get banking services for whatever reason and use bitcoin (or some other crypto) instead, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Good luck in your quest, OP.  I am by no means trying to disparage your efforts.

Sure, it's way easy to make money if you're using 100x leverage--as long as all your trades go your way, which frequently doesn't happen (you found that out the hard way, unfortunately).  

Don't feel too bad, though.  You're in good company as far as the number of traders who've gotten blown out when they're over-leveraged.  Even some of the most experienced, highly capitalized traders have been wiped out.  Anyone remember Long Term Capital Management?  If not, at least check out the Wikipedia page on them and how they almost screwed up the banking system because of how much leverage they were using.  It's incredible.

OP, as far as recouping your losses, I don't have any sage wisdom to give you.  You just got an education that cost you a lot of money, and I'd probably just take a break from trading until your mind is right.  And I would definitely not use so much leverage next time--maybe none at all.  I've never traded on margin myself and while I'm sure I could have made a tidy profit on a few trades had I employed leverage, I don't have that kind of mindset.  I don't like borrowing money, especially for risky things like trading.  Good luck to you in the future.

Sure, why not lose the rest of his funds?  Very few people get out of "altcoin pumps" early enough to make a profit.

I'm not so sure about the part that I bolded above.  Yes, bitcoin does appear to be moving distinctly upward, but we all know that it could crash down to $6k or lower by the end of the week--and that's just how bitcoin behaves.

I tend to think there's a wee bit of FOMO in traders' heads at the moment, and that's driving bitcoin's price higher.  Not sure how much the halving has to do with it, and I don't think there's any good way to tell except for the fact that it's quickly approaching.  It'd be great if bitcoin could get to $10k this year, but I've had my doubts about that ever since the viral outbreak.  Still, the market looks kinda-sorta promising right now and I think it could happen.

Yeah, I don't access bitcointalk that much on mobile anymore but I wouldn't use one of those unofficial apps/mods/whatever.  And yeah, there's been quite a bit of discussion about this topic.

And the discussion is not without merit, either.  It would be a nice, modern touch if Theymos would make the site mobile-friendly, and it's puzzling to me why he hasn't done so.  I don't mind what others say is an outdated look to the forum, but making a website that looks and functions better on smartphones seems like something that should have been done a long time ago. 

Same here, except that I haven't broken the 5k mark (but I'm pretty close I think).  After all the reporting that everyone's done, sections like the altcoin ones are still a complete mess, so I figured I'd stop wasting my time reporting posts that were only a drop in the bucket even if the reports were acted on. 

I was never that enthusiastic about Theymos creating a reporter badge, and I've seen much better suggestions that I wish he'd implement--but he apparently doesn't like making many changes, even cosmetic ones. 

Wowza!  I checked the price earlier today and it was just above $8k, so that's a lot of movement in a very short period of time.  We'll just have to see how sustainable it is.

I have to say, gains like that are precisely what cause FOMO, and there might be some of that emotion in the market right now.  Given how crazy life has gotten in the past two months, I'm kind of surprised bitcoin hasn't taken a bigger hit (which it looked like it would at the start of the COVID-19 crisis).   People are probably becoming more optimistic about going back to work and things going back to some semblance of normalcy--so they're buying bitcoin again.  It's all good to my ears.

I don't buy that reasoning for one second.  If countries are contemplating the burning of oil, it's not because they don't have anywhere to store it (unless someone can convince me otherwise).

Oil has been nothing but headache after headache ever since it started being used for oil lamps, heating, and in the production of gasoline and other petroleum products.  It's caused political, environmental, economic, and all sorts of other problems and I'll be happy when the world is finally powering itself with cleaner forms of energy. 

As far as whatever burning takes place because of the "storage problem," my guess is that it won't be done under ideal conditions and there will probably be some consequences to the environment.  The whole idea just rings silly in my ears.

Hmm....I never tried that, and I've had the same problem OP described many times.  Every time the synchronization stalls out, I just close the wallet and restart it and that usually does the trick. 

I've never had the problem be so persistent that I've had to restart my computer, and it's happened with pretty much every Electrum wallet I've ever used--bitcoin, Dash, LTC all have had synch issues in the past, but just restarting the wallet has always worked for me.

Just checked preev, and bitcoin is $8179 at the moment--not bad, and I wasn't expecting it to break through $8k anytime soon so it's a nice surprise.  The real question is whether it can stay above that mark and whether this might be the start of a trend (perhaps in anticipation of the halving).  Who knows? 

Bitcoin is notorious for its volatility and for extremely unpredictable price swings.  If you're a short-term trader, I'd be cautious about trying to make a quick buck by buying now.  In any case, this was a nice wake-up surprise for me this morning.

You might be getting carried away here.  It isn't like the entire world needs to be revamped because of the COVID-19 outbreak.  It did expose some weaknesses in a lot of things, but a serious contagion with serious consequences is not unheard of.  Maybe in the average person's life, but not in the history of the world.

I'm getting a little tired of trying to search for COVID-19 news on Youtube and having most of the search results dealing with the stupid shit Trump is saying.  And other politicians. 

This thing is going to get better on its own; it just takes time.  Those people who were out of work when businesses got shut down will probably be returning to their jobs, so I don't think unemployment is going to be a lasting effect.  The economy certainly did take a massive hit, but I have faith that it'll rebound.  And hey, bitcoin isn't doing too badly either.  Things could be a hell of a lot worse.