It's quite an achievement for such a not-serving-any-purpuse-tool to contribute to growth in the GDP of a major country. It's not a lot, but it's a first step the way I see it. Japan is clearly a proper benchmark country in the way that they function as main example of how everything should be done, and how a friendly Bitcoin approach can even contribute to economical growth. Imagine how much impact Bitcoin could have had in much smaller economies as the one from Venezuala if adopted in the same way Japan adopted Bitcoin.

In all honesty, I am already happy with the price sitting above the $10,000 level, which is a pretty decent achievement. Of course, I wouldn't complain if we would hover at any levels higher than $20,000, but we also have to remain realistic. If we look back at how the price has gone up in the last months of 2017, it's pretty safe to say that the market was exhausted, and ran out of steam. People with high expectations are the one being disappointed now, and see the decrease from near $20,000 till where we stand right now as something rather negative. I only look at how much we gained, which is +1300%, and not at how much we have gone down from the peak. We have done extremely well, and we can look forward to much more candy this year.

It is part of the game, and it will increase further, like it has done all the time. The main problem I see nowadays is that people tend to apply traditional market logic on Bitcoin's market, which means that an increase of +10% is a massive gain in traditional markets, while the majority of the Bitcoiners here don't even pay attention to such increases. In the same way it comes down to decreases. 10% decreases in this market are ~$1400 at current levels, which looks like it's a lot, but in terms of percentages, it's still a normal market movement for us. If traditional news sources make such a big problem out of such decreases, why don't they pay attention to high value stocks such as BRK-A? It's a near $300,000 stock, which means that even a 1% decrease translates into a $3000 lower value. They are hypocrites, especially in the way how they say that if Bitcoin goes down people will lose all their money.

While waiting might end up in you saving a few bucks in transaction fees, it's pretty much a time wasting action. Instead of waiting a few days for the transaction fees to potentially drop, you can just send the transaction with a below average fee and just accept having to wait like 5-10 hours. Some pools tend to pick up transactions with below average fees if it isn't too crazy. With isn't too crazy I am referring to transactions having the standard byte size, but then with below average fees. If your transaction weight is like 5KB due to all the dust and whatnot, and you just include 0.001BTC in fees, your transaction has close to zero percent in chances of getting confirmed.

In other words, avoid this service. I don't even understand why people are willing to go through all this in order to obtain a shitty altcoin token that represents itself as a USD equivalent alternative. It's making you miss out big time on buying opportunities due to the queue, and it heavily contributes to even more centralization. The less this pest gets distrubited throughout this market, the lower the eventual damage will be once this service and their fellow Bitfinex exchange implode. It's just a matter of time.

Who aside from a bunch of noobs and traditional media sources are exactly worried and disappointed? I don't see a 15% decrease at all. I look at the market from a more longer term minded perspective, and it shows me a 1300% increase this year. People till this day still don't see how short term fluctuations don't mean anything to the long term price, which is quite embarrassing to be honest. It once again shows that people aren't investing in this market, but purely gamble blindly in the hope of attainting a bit of the massive growth we have experienced last year. These are the sort of people that will end up being eaten by the market, and cry themselves to sleep with big losses. Stupidity.

Actually, it's already happening. Regulations are meant to maintain control over something that in reality can't be controlled at all, and that's quite a move in the right direction. If we didn't have governments regulating crypto currencies in general, we wouldn't grow this large. People have been talking about institutions entering this market, but for that to happen regulations are a necessity. Institutions are tied to very strict rules, which basically means that without regulations there will be no institutions entering this market. If they at some point in the future decide to make Bitcoin account for at least a few percent of their portfolio, people will smash their head against the wall for not having bought at current levels.

CNBC Fast Money is a complete joke. If you have a host who refers to Monero as being the one used by criminals, you obviously can't expect from that news channel to contribute to a worthy and unbiased discussion. It's basically the same as saying Mixers are only meant for criminals, where they completely disregard how many (non criminal) people look for an extra layer of anonymity. I am however glad that these idiotic hosts are being hammered down in the comment section of basically every Youtube video. It's pathetic how their general tone towards crypto currencies is so negative, and that just because of their own ignorance. It shows how used they are to this system, and directly that everything not fitting in that category is just a scam or temporary hype.

If we look through this cloud mining market, there isn't such a thing as genuine mining services, because all of them know that the far majority of the buyers won't see even 50% of their initial investment back. Those who do manage to ROI, are amongst the very few ones having had just pure luck. In other words, cloud mining is just a waste of time and money.

Point is that you shouldn't trust them. Even if certain services are actually mining, they are still just gaming their users. It's a scheme that people throw themselves in, and they can only blame themselves for that. It's a scam infested market all the way through, so no one should be surprised to see whatever service shut down or run away. Cloud mining just like gambling is the poor man's attempt to become rich, and this only works against you.

Correct. Point is that I am sure the core devs don't even know when it will be ready for actual public use. I strongly hope that we'll be able to use it before the end of 2018, but that might turn out to be wishful thinking. Till that time, we just have to nurse ourself with these articles where LN has been tested successfully.

Bitcoin isn't losing popularity, stop taking nonsense from whatever news site or trolls for granted. Instead of looking at the fall in value, look at how we have gone up from $1000 in January, to $13,000 where we stand right now. People should learn to understand the market, because if they did, they would understand that the peak to near $20,000 levels was a greatly exaggerated panic buyers peak. Before the market even broke through the $19,000 level, it was already clear that it wouldn't break $20,000, so profits were taken by smart players.

It's indeed much easier to keep holding coins without selling for those who are financially secured. If I was in the same position years ago when I started out, I would keep holding to see where this market would bring me, but I as well had to cash out some, which looking back now, was a bad thing to do, but that's life. I made some stupid decisions back in 2013/2014 having cost me a lot money and coins, but that's all history. I am thankful that I now have enough financial backup in savings (thanks to Bitcoin) to last me for a pretty long time, which means that I can keep holding through for plenty of more years without selling even a single satoshi.

It's definitely a limiting factor at this point, but the main thing is that Lightning Network is coming closer and closer, perhaps even so close, that we might see it functional before the end of this year. We really need it to happen this year, but on the other hand we can't just blindly assume that it will come this year just because we need it. Initial testing seems to be going well, which is something we can definitely be happy about, but again, it doesn't say anything about the public 'release'. At this point the main price driver will be more institutional adoption taking place, and that on its own is pretty much an ultra bullish trigger for the market. Bitcoin is lagging behind the massive demand, and something definitely needs to happen, that we can all agree on. We'll find out in 2018 how much of a problem Bitcoin's limitations will form for its price.

Very simple, if x person thinks Bitcoin will go down badly from current levels, then go ahead and open short positions. If you're so confident in yourself, then put your money where your mouth is, and bank on your 'knowledge'. People initially didn't like the future markets because they offer short exposure, but in these cases it comes quite handy. If a skeptic isn't willing to put money on the line to back up his words, it should be clear that no one should take him seriously (not that anyone is doing so right now, but still ). Actions speak louder than words!

There are definitely cycles where one time alts get pumped badly, and then Bitcoin, but I don't think it's going to happen any time soon, unless whales start to group up and artificially dump the price down. We just have to remain realistic and be happy that we are able to somewhat maintain current levels, because even though people don't see the market go up, it takes a good level of buying power to get the market bought up again. As long as we see $10,000 being supported, there is no need to even consider the market to fall back to four figure levels again. If we do end up falling down below $10,000, we might go down further, but it's all empty speculation at this point.

Poloniex is heavily in need of more staff, but that's obviously not what they are willing to invest in. It's for plenty of months now that they are struggling with properly taking care of users trying to verify themselves. Bittrex fits in that category as well. I am not exactly sure how things work on Binance, but from the volumes they are generating, they are a big deal, so it's not that hey have loads of time to spare, which might indicate that they have an appropriate number of staff members taking care of everything. Overall, Poloniex and Bittrex are similar to each other in how they operate. Poloniex was the top tier altcoin exchange with ridiculous volumes, but messed up big time, and it seems that now Bittrex might be heading in that direction as well.  

Take a look here https://www.bunq.com/ It allows anyone to open a bank account without the need to verify yourself with ID and so forth. There are several paid plans you can choose from, or just free if you want to keep it simple. It will require your mobile phone number, but that's pretty much the only main requirement, which isn't all that unreasonable. They have an official banking license as well, so it's nothing shady or whatever. It's pretty much a last resort option, but better than nothing if your own banks aren't cooperating.

That's not a problem at all. I personally barely used any physical money in the last few years. If I think back and try to remember when the last time was that I had physical money in my hands, it's probably six or seven months ago, and that was because my barber was only accepting cash. Now I can pay there with my bank card or my smartphone, I probably won't have to make use of cash anymore. In other words, Bitcoin doesn't need to suffer at all. If I have to believe a report containing data from more than thousand brick and mortar stores, digital payments make up 75% of the sales there, which indicates a massive decline in cash money usage. I am sure that after ten or so years, it will be 90% digital payments and 10% cash money.

What's the difference between the first two tiers and the higher ones exactly? In most cases it's the withdrawal limit and fiat deposits/withdrawals, but Kraken might be a bit different. That being said, Kraken has been suffering from major outage problems for quite a while now, and as long as that isn't taken care of, it's not really an exchange people should work with.

That's insanely fast. In more realistic terms, it is a pretty decent job if the verification request by Bitstamp is approved within five working days. Major annoyance is that they quite often want higher res ID scans, which only further delays the verification request, so the friend you're talking about has had the best of luck on his side.

In most cases stock markets can't be compared to how Bitcoin's market behaves, but in this case it's pretty easy to assume that the same applies to Bitcoin. I have read a well written article where it describes how 95% of the people end up losing, and the other few percent are the 'smarter' traders taking advantage, and the top 1-2% are institutions and other professional parties scooping up the extreme majority of the profits. In other words, 95% of the traders fill the jar with money that the other 5% starts eating from.

It's nothing more than business as usual for criminals. The only thing they see is that person is in a position to hand them over millions in funds, and that's directly also their main motive. Bitcoin isn't anything special in this case, because it could have been Gold, diamonds, cash, or expensive artworks, or whatever other items holding massive value. It's however a weird exchange in all honesty. It can't officially be proven, so it can't be taken for granted, but there have been various similarities and potential links between EXMO and BTC-E, making things a bit suspicious. Either way, glad that he is released and all fine despite what he has gone through, because no money is worth being badly farmed for.