Nothing compared to what Russian authorities did

As they simply declared that local officials are not obliged to declare their income earned with cryptocurrencies for the time being. In plain and simple terms, it means that cryptocurrencies are officially completely tax-exempt in Russia. And that is quite in line with the practice by which the Tax Service of Russia, a federal body responsible for taxing in Russia (like the IRS in the US), doesn't go after profits earned by individuals through currency exchange operations (apart from trading), which feels kind of natural

No, I don't think it's possible. I mean ordinary people losing their interest and leaving the market for good. I don't know how true the claim is, but I heard that the most of casinos income comes from ordinary working guys (like your grandpa and grandma in their youth) gambling now and then, not from compulsive gamblers. Of course, it is questionable if crypto is like a casino (though opinions vary), but if these people left the scene completely, the prices wouldn't be sustainable as manipulors would soon leave crypto too. The bottom line is that Bitcoin at 6k+ is not something to sneeze at even if it crashed 3 times from last December highs. Basically, these highs themselves were a crash played in reverse, so to speak, and we are back to where we started at (actually, a lot better than that)

I'd rather say it is the latter who abandoned crypto, and good riddance to them

The problem is not with manipulation as such

I'm curious if that dude, Kjetil Eilersten, understands that you are able to manipulate the market specifically because you have resources to do that, financial, administrative, technical, and so on, while others have not. Claiming that everyone should be manipulating to avoid manipulation is equal to saying that everyone should have equal conditions, first and foremost, financial ones. But anyone with a half functioning brain understands that it is impossible and even delusional. Still, there are dudes who put it somewhat differently, and presto! It no longer looks like a stupid idea

Healthy? There's no such thing in purely speculative markets

His "resetting capital" in practice means that people are moving money from altcoins to Bitcoin, and that explains why the former had been falling off the cliff when the latter remained stable, give or take a few hundred dollars. When the reshuffle of money is over, which we may already be close to, Bitcoin may start to fall again as it runs out of the fuel and support that the crash of altcoins provided. This is a real possibility, and there is no bottom like in, for example, commodity markets

That's how market fools naive traders

If you take any established market as an example, say, crude oil market, and analyze price dynamics over a sufficiently long period, you will see that most of the time prices are sticking around some base value with low or negligible volatility. In order to take advantage of it, you have to increase your positions dramatically. But when the price does change in the end, it changes abruptly in the range of a few or even a few dozen percentages. And no matter what end of the trade you are on, you will either lose the opportunity of earning big time by selling too much too early or will suffer losses and all your hard-earned profits will get instantly eaten away by this massive price move as you don't expect such a powerful change and get caught unprepared

In a few words, because there's no more free lunch in crypto



These days are over, get used to it


I understand why you are so angry and upset, probably even depressed and frustrated. But this is how "normal" currencies should behave (I don't mean some shit like Zimbabwean dollar or Venezuelan bolivar, of course). If you are looking for volatility, which is what you apparently do, go for currency derivatives like futures and options, or even volatility indexes if you have titanium guts and balls of steel. Bitcoin is just becoming one that currency, and I'm thinking that's good. Go hunt elsewhere, maybe, in altcoins?

I understand (more or less) how your system works

But this is not the direction in which decentralized exchanges should evolve as I come to think. Actually, I wouldn't call your system an exchange as there is no competition between traders that we see on centralized exchanges. So my question is, have you ever considered using Lightning Network or similar technologies to implement something more like a regular exchange with full-fledged orderbooks but without a central server (read, a third party) receiving, accumulating and sending all this data? In other words, a personal desktop wallet would serve as a part of a distributed exchange, with updates and order execution close to being instant. I understand that this requires strong cooperation between the developers of different coins in order to be done in practice, but it might be helpful to build an MVP enabling real time exchange between two currencies specifically modified to enable this feature on the blockchain (wallet) level

If you want my take on this, it smells fishy

As for myself, this story feels concocted and doesn't sound convincing. There are real chances to lose money due to a hack or an exchange running away with your dough (think WEX here), but they don't feel tragic and are kind of normal in the cryptoworld. Just like there are things which are too good to be true, there also seem to be things which are too bad to be true as well. I don't know but I have a feeling that this piece is written by somebody close to the ones who had been writing (in)famous tear-jerking Nigerian letters about "a terminally ill wealthy person with no relatives who deposited a huge sum of money in the bank just before dying in a plane crash" (as per Wiki)

That's the main problem with trading

You in fact need luck since trading as it is for the vast majority of traders, or rather players, is a variety of gambling. It is not about you personally (as you may not even trade at all), it is about statistics. If we look at trading as such without considering crypto specifically, we will see that most traders end up with losses, losing all or significant part of their balance and then quitting in tears and with curses. Crypto was different for the first years, but now it is more and more like any other market where this rule is fully applicable. And statistically, over time the only chance to win for the majority is by chance alone (pardon the pun). But luck doesn't love time (and vice versa), it comes all of a sudden and goes away as suddenly

It is easier said than done!

What can we really do? The only way to make Bitcoin great again, i.e. to decentralize it properly is to move it from the POW to POS consensus paradigm, but that would require miners agreement. Obviously, they are not going to kill the goose laying golden eggs, so the only way you can change things is to fork Bitcoin. But do you know how many Bitcoin forks have already been there during just the last year? At least a few dozens, so good luck and more power to you with switching Bitcoin to POS. And I don't think that many would agree that Bitcoin has died. Last time I checked it was still alive and kicking, probably more alive than the total majority of its competitors taken together

Thanks a lot!

Have the owners expressed their intention to continue with the campaign yet? I mean beyond this last week starting today?

In fact, you can read different opinions, sometimes very opposite

Another fact, which is called selection bias, is that the supporters of the HODL approach may be just a little more vocal than those who silently follow other strategies. In this manner, you may inadvertently come to a conclusion that "hodling" is a dominating avenue of pursuing profits in the cryptoworld among the local population, while in reality it may be quite the other way around. Recently this strategy hasn't been very profitable (mildly speaking) and so you hear a lot of noise about it as those who actually earn money are typically not very much inclined to tell the world about their success



As the saying goes, silence is the sound of money talking

I full-heartedly support this view

And it is not just about trading or anything related to investments as a whole but virtually about everything in life. For example, after a break-up with your partner, you will be feeling down and depressed - just like missing the opportunity to buy low or sell high - but if you allow yourself to brood over that and continue to cry over the spilt milk (which is understandable and kind of normal), you will be missing new opportunities springing up here and there, even better ones. To put it simple, never allow the setbacks to make you lose focus on your goals because you shouldn't shut yourself down as in "why bother". Instead, you should keep your options open at all times and be ready to jump at a new opportunity when it presents itself, and then it definitely will

I don't think it will be Bitcoin itself

As it is not very useful overall as a universal means of payment, I mean on the highest possible scale. And one of its major problems lies with the fact that its transactions are irreversible, so a fat finger may ruin a whole corporation in just one click. The problem can be mitigated a little by using Bitcoin notes, where no actual bitcoins get moved around pretty much in the same way as gold was and still is used for final settlements between countries (e.g. like the late USSR had been buying wheat for gold in Canada in 1970's). Further, why would any corporation like Apple or IBM rely on a bunch of rogue and crooked miners who are quite unpredictable in their behavior? If it ever comes to that, I'd rather think of a corporate coin or a bank coin if there is no more trust in the US dollar but not until then

Unless Bitcoin proves itself as an established means of payment, all its derivatives will be irrelevant. Derivatives are deriving their value from real value of an asset. It can be said that they are exploiting this value or even abusing it (see oil as an example). But if there is no such value as is in case of Bitcoin (well, at least not to a required degree), its derivatives will have no such support of the solid underlying asset. You can build a home only on a firm base as otherwise it will be a house of cards built on another house of cards. Besides, as others and I have previously said on numerous occasions, cash-settled derivatives are not an instrument of influencing the price of the underlying asset simply because there is no underlying asset, only its price across the market

In other words, can the tail wag the dog if this tail belongs to another dog?

I disagree with your last words (lol)

Actually, it is not about tech only. For example, myself I'm mostly posting in Economics, Trading, and the boards related to these two topics. And the number of interesting posts dramatically decreased during the last two years, while the authors writing them are mostly gone and likely for good. And the merit system didn't change anything for the better, as you may see many die-hard shitposters among merit hunters who stick around Meta threads where your chances of receiving a merit are the highest (and yes, I've been there)

That's not a good idea, honestly speaking

Indeed, you shouldn't depend on luck. In fact, you should do everything to make your profits independent of luck as much as possible. In this way, you will be able to make consistent profits, provided you find the right approach. But while this approach may have a lot of benefits, it has its downsides too. It is all psychology. When you put yourself in this mode of thinking, i.e. excluding luck completely, you may be losing perspective and focus (or rather shift it) as luck plays a very important role. If you set up yourself this way, you will be inclined to discard luck when it presents itself. And that is not a good idea as luck is basically a shortcut to what you may be craving

They are the wolves of Wall Street

And that is likely the reason why they are not getting their feet wet on Bitcoin cause they firmly know their limits. In other words, Bitcoin is so much speculative, dancing upon nothing, figuratively speaking, that their tricks won't work as they work with regular goods and commodities like oil and to a lesser degree gold. People will just keep their bitcoins tight no matter what, and these dudes will be losing money, and that's why they won't losing it. Besides, cash-settled futures are meaningless for big-time manipulations, everyone knows that and doesn't give a fuck

But where is this underlying spot market located?

Obviously, if it is located within the US boundaries, it kinda makes sense. For example, there's a sugar spot market along with sugar futures, but does it mean that the CFTC has jurisdiction over sugar spot market somewhere in Shanghai, or elsewhere outside the US? This is meaningless as they don't have jurisdiction there by any means possible. If Bitfinex excludes the US residents from trading Bitcoin, it is beyond the jurisdiction of the CFTC. Of course, this doesn't in the least prevent Bitfinex from being seized by the FBI under whatever pretext (as it happened to BTC-e) but then the CFTC would have nothing to do with that. It may oversight Bitcoin markets as well as altcoins but only those in the US as far as I understand it

What was the outcome of these late 2017 investigations?

Also, what does Bitfinex have to with CBOE/CME futures if these are traded on CME (in Chicago) and not on Bitfinex (who knows where but definitely outside the US territory), when Bitfinex has nothing to do with both Bitcoin futures and US residents probably trading these futures. I don't see a connection here. In short, how does the launch of Bitcoin cash-settled futures traded on a specific exchange (not Bitfinex) put them under CFTC jurisdiction all of a sudden? Care to explain?