At some point institutions will take over this market, and make current whales look like a small fish. It's something that is bound to happen, where we can't do anything other than going with what the market offers us. If Goldman Sachs ends up actually setting up some sort of a trading platform, which might potentially attract billions of dollars in capital that will then flow into this eco system, this market will get a boost that we can only dream of right now. We haven't seen anything yet, that I am sure of. Other than that, we shouldn't forget that this market is extremely speculative by nature, and thus shouldn't be surprised by manipulation from higher hand. After all, manipulation and speculation is nothing new anymore - it's part of the game.

Just open a support ticket (in case you haven't done so already) and explain them the situation. Isn't it common sense to do this by default when you walked yourself into 'troubles'? From that point you'll need a whole lot of patience before they sort out the issue, and trigger their understanding that what you have done was indeed a mistake at the time you signed up. Bittrex is currently being flooded with massive loads of complaints due to the governmental regulations resulting in accounts being blocked, etc.

Bitcoin till this day is still just a speculative investment option for a lot people here, and thus will its market mirror that, which basically means that some times the price is way overbought, and some times way oversold. People ride the volatility and adjust their mood based on that, and having the great potential of Bitcoin in mind, you can't exactly put the blame on people for that.

As I mentioned before, people see Bitcoin largely as a speculative investment option, and a damn pretty good one. People don't want to spend their $1000 Bitcoin to see that almost one year later, that Bitcoin has increased to a value of $6000. I can't blame them for that, because honestly speaking, that's not exactly giving me any incentive to spend again.

I think that Lightning Network will offer people a far better form of usability when it comes to the currency aspect, but we will likely always have to deal with the volatility, which on its own, will always form an obstacle to use Bitcoin as solid currency.

Governments launching their own crypto currencies isn't a problem at all. You have to understand that what makes this crypto market so interesting, is the fact that the government and whatever corporations aren't the central authority here. Also important is the fact that this market experiences a serious load of volatility, and is subject to an insane amount of long term growth. Governments will never be able to offer these very important aspects, and for that reason, crypto will remain holding its importance. Another thing to keep in mind is that the average joe is more and more looking for a way to store its wealth outside the reach of governments and banks, and that's exactly where this market (especially Bitcoin) will play a very important role.

You might find that altcoins are 'suffering' right now, but I still find the majority of them to be far too expensive - especially when you consider that they don't actually serve a purpose. Other than that, with Bitcoin going through an extremely bullish period, with the sentiment peaking at record highs, the chances for an alt bull run seem to be on the far lower side. Unless something happens that will temporarily cause Bitcoin to tank, or at least remain stagnant, I don't see alts taking off at all. It's safe to say that people at this point prefer to hold their Bitcoins instead of converting them to whatever altcoin, and risk seeing that altcoin lose value against Bitcoin, which obviously, is quite likely to happen.

I get really annoyed by articles proudly sharing that Bitcoin has surpassed Gold in value. How can a crypto article writer even say that Bitcoin has surpassed Gold in value when 1) they use Gold's troy ounce (31.1GR) value versus Bitcoin's whole unit (1BTC) value, and 2) Bitcoin's market cap is a complete joke compared to Gold's market cap. It's an unfair comparison in basically each and every aspect. They should wait for Bitcoin to at least surpass Gold's 1KG price before pumping more rubbish articles into the net.

That. It has even gone so far, that I seem to add more value to reddit as 'news' source, than these garbage sites that constantly push annoying ads in your face.

I expected Bitcoin to reach $10,000 at some point in the future, when the price hadn't even touched the $1000 level yet. For that reason I have set up a cold wallet back in 2013 with a few coins that are not meant to be sold in the coming 10 or so years. Result is that this action has turned out to be more than rewarding from me, but technically, you only gain when you spend or sell, so it's just a gain on paper. The article points at a price of $4300, which is obviously an article from a short while ago, but it's not much of an achievement anymore when we do happen to reach the $10,000 level. I see it more as a statistical achievement rather than something ground breaking. In order to call a certain price level ground breaking, it will need to be in the near $100,000 range.

People are used to it by now. News sites are only looking to move articles in high quantity to scoop up ad revenue and to keep their site active, and because of that, they will grab every price increase as reason to report about it. It has gone even so far, that they also report about tweets and other social media profits from celebrities and such. It's not for nothing that the overall quality of the crypto news sites has gone down significantly in the last few years. It's almost impossible to find an article worth reading nowadays. It's the sad but true reality.

This is what people were dreaming of back in 2013/2014, but now it's not much of an important matter anymore. Bitcoin doesn't need large merchants to hop on board to make its price shoot up hard - current levels are the perfect example of that. You also have to keep in mind that Bitcoin in its current form, isn't suitable for Amazon and Google to be used as payment form. For that to happen we need off-chain solutions (think about Lightning Network) to take care of insane number of transactions. And as long as these off-chain solutions aren't there, there is no way they will hop on board. We just have to remain realistic - if things aren't possible for now, then accept it at least and focus on something else.

That's exactly why I never talk about the 'earning money' aspect when explaining Bitcoin to people. It shouldn't come as a surprise that there isn't such a thing as making easy money. People who think like that are nothing more than gamblers hoping to bank on a short term pump. If they finally buy themselves into Bitcoin, and the price happens to tank after that, they act like something bad has happened to them, and that unexpectedly. There are even clowns blaming Bitcoin for being a scheme, just because the price goes down after them having bought. These are the sort of people that will never be able to contribute to anything. I call them blind chickens. We need people actually understanding what Bitcoin is, and not ping pong gamblers.

People who come up with such predictions should be discarded by default, and get marked as eccentric clowns. Nothing in the world justifies the market to climb up that much in such a short period of time, that's even enough for people with a basic form of common sense to understand. Funny thing is that these 'high level' people are hoping that their influence will stretch out far enough to make people buy Bitcoin like there is no tomorrow, but it obviously doesn't work. The same has been the case with KimDotCom and his M2 Bitcache project. It's a lot of talk, but no action to actually back up what he is so loud about. How difficult is it to remain moderate with everything you say and do? Bitcoin is a booming market, for sure, but some people just expect too much.

I think the first mentioned is the better overall option, especially for those who don't know what they are doing, and for that reason don't know how to benefit from up and down movements.

Not necessarily. If we look at how things have gone lately, people move back and forth based on what Bitcoin does. In other words, if Bitcoin goes up in value, alts tank, and if Bitcoin tanks, alts go up in value. The altcoin market has taken a few major steps back in the recent months due to Bitcoin only increasing in value. At the end of the day, if you buy the market down, you'll get to lower your overall buying price, and that's exactly what people should focus on, but don't actually do so due to their blind panic.

I doubt that. It was obvious from the very beginning that this Chinese "ban" was nothing more than a temporary occurrence. You can look at it as being an attempt by the Chinese government to buy time when it comes to getting their regulations ready and sorted out. I am quite sure that these regulations were already planned to happen, but due to the sudden exploding market this year, they were overwhelmed and were seeing no other viable option than to shut down their exchanges. I just hope that the market keeps holding its distance from the Chinese market, especially because of the fact that they are (for quite some time now) no longer the leading factor in crypto terms. The sooner people here realize that, the better it will be.

You'll likely always be tied to this system in one way or another, but that doesn't mean that you should convert your Bitcoin holdings to fiat. You can perfectly have your regular fiat income to live off, and have Bitcoin purely aside as alternative currency/asset or whatever you like to name it. I do exactly that. It's quite some time ago where I actually cashed out Bitcoin for fiat, and as we speak, I am not planning to cash out anything anymore in the forthcoming years. My fiat income gets the bills paid, feeds me, allows me to buy things if I need it, and still I have money left that goes straight to my savings account. I chose to seperate fiat from Bitcoin because I am not a fiat centric person, and I believe that eventually Bitcoin will gain even more importance in the financial world. It's an escape from this on debt based system.

And then what? Save yourself a few satoshi's? People (at least the majority) at some point will want to convert their coins back to Bitcoin, which happens on-exchange, and thus you'll end up paying the trading fees, and on top of that the withdrawal fees. People should learn to look everything through, and prioritize what actions are actually worth taking, and which not. Yobit's fees are higher than other exchanges with their 0.0015BTC, but this is something you can figure out before actually depositing any coins. In other words, it's pointless to complain.

Because people love them. It's of course impossible to prove, but I suspect the Jihan cartel to have something to do with this. It's in their benefit to discredit Bitcoin, 'slow down' Bitcoin, etc. It's not for nothing that Antpool has been minting a few near empty blocks yesterday (they have a habit of doing so from time to time to troll the users), and that while there were a huge load of transactions waiting to get their first confirmation. To add, did you even notice that the average generation time for a single block has gone up to almost 14 minutes? And that while blocks should get found close to once every 10 minutes on average. High difficulty changes, and that in a frequent manner, causes blocks to take longer to be found than usual. Regardless of whoever is behind this, and whether or not it's legit growth, or purely an attempt to troll Bitcoin, its effect is being noticed.

Are you referring to one of these search results? -> https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bitcoin+lambo

It's all cool with me, and I hope that more and more people will be able to fulfull their dreams with their crypto wealth. I have a great respect for people who kept holding their coins through each and every drama situation that we went through. I personally find it far too early to start celebrating already, which is why I am not spending any of my coins. I must however admit that some times it's quite tempting to start using my coins to buy something with, but I have enough patience and dedication to continue to hold my coins firmly. No matter how 'high' the price might look for some people, it's still peanuts for me. People buying a lambo at current levels will look back after six or so months, and see that if they had more patience, they could have bought themselves two lambo's with the same number of coins.

It's actually very simple. If you want to have more control and force people to pay tax over their gains for example, then force exchanges to submit user information directly to the government. In the same way they could force other services do to the same. I am quite sure that it's just a matter of time before these kind of regulations will be utilized (give it two years at most). Governments are catching up, which costs time, so we have to prepare ourself for what has to come, and potentially focus on other means of exchanging Bitcoin (P2P) for those who don't want to go through all of this. That being said, I don't really think the average joes will see any problems when it comes to paying tax. Their wealth gets taxed, their gains through whatever non crypto investment gets taxed, their income gets taxed, etc. For them it's nothing strange at all.

It's not that much of an achievement if you consider how small that company is. If we take into consideration the growth they have gone through after their 'name change', then it's still a small company. Currently, it has a market cap of around $450 million, where if another institution decides to buy itself into on-line plc, it can add another increase of a few hundred percent. That being said, institutions are far better off directly investing in crypto itself, than in whatever business claiming to be involved in blockchain technology and whatnot. Basically every more popular crypto currency has massively outperformed any sort of investment directly into whatever crypto related business. Is it really that difficult to figure out after so many years?

Greed is indeed the motive, but it won't cause Bitcoin any harm, at least not in a significant manner long term wise. These forks are nothing more than money making opportunities for those behind them, and that's really it. After everything around the 2x hard fork has calmed down, general interest is reaching bottom lows, the same malicious entities will come up with something else. People shouldn't discard the fact that people like Jihan and Ver (who are both massive holders), will end up with at least $100,000,000 in instant profits, per person, at the time the split has been initiated. And that's calculating from a value of 0.10BTC per coin. No way they would ever discard such an easy money making opportunity.