It depends on whether you work for a firm or not. In that case you mostly have a basis salary, where you can add to that through bonuses and whatnot.

In the end, the most successful traders end up leaving their firm because the experience they built up throughout the years allows them to make much more on their own than to enrich a firm, and you are not subjected to a lot of contractual terms where you can't do x/y/z as long as you trade for them.

The cool thing about Bitcoin and crypto in general is the fact that you can be your own boss, trade currencies that allow you to also be your own bank, and make a pretty penny out of it. Once decentralized exchanges become more streamlined, liquid, have proper matching engines, etc you only need a computer and an internet connection. How cool is that? 

That grey area is tightening every month that goes by, where the end result will be that a whole lot of no-kyc users will be trapped inside Binance's ecosystem. The only way out is to hand over Binance your ID and whatnot, but after what happened with their third party kyc desk, I'm not sure if that's smart to do.

I'm sure that Binance has taken some extra security measures, but nothing guarantees you that they don't still use a kyc desk somewhere in India or other third world country.

I put much more confidence in Coinbase in that regard, and they haven't ever been hacked as far as I'm aware of, and they are less likely to hire a third party kyc desk.

Not reliable at all. It reminds me of a situation where I'm not exactly sure if it was this or last year, but there was an address with thousands of coins in it that people assumed were lost due to years of inactivity, but it turned out to be one of Coinbase's older cold wallet addresses.

All these 'x million lost Bitcoins' clickbait headlines are the result of news outlets trying to spin up a narrative to convince people of how scarce Bitcoin is. I don't even consider satoshi's coins to be lost. It may very well be that he is THE holder of last resort. Waiting for the day Bitcoin becomes a reserve currency and he directly the wealthiest entity in the world.

It is that the bcash fork made me move my cold wallet holdings in 2017, but if there was no fork, I today would have had a few cold wallets with 5 years of inactivity, and they would remain inactive until the price of Bitcoin hits $100,000.

Also don't forget the funded 2011/2012 casascius coins that news outlets are blatantly blending into their total number of "lost" Bitcoin. Currently there are 3 active 1000BTC coins, which according to "research" of news outlets are lost too. 

No one is manipulating the market. It's just the fact that the market has turned full bearish, which automatically translates into inherently bearish formations to have an even higher tendency of breaking down. 

There also isn't a central group that manipulates Bitcoin. If there was, that group would have a damn hard time steering the market into a direction that directly trades against the rest of the market. If we fall down like we have in the last couple of weeks, it's just an indication of lower demand. No point in blaming manipulators that aren't there.

What goes up hard must come down hard, which is something that Bitcoin is reminding people of almost every single year. Nothing new.

It reminds me of my gaming time where noobs called you a cheater if you beat them fair and square. Grow a thicker skin and get to understand this market better.

I hope for him that your speculations are wrong. Tom Lee's model of analyzing this whole market is flawed to its core, so if he put any money where his mouth was/is, he is probably close to broke, or at least, those who entrusted their funds to him lost a lot of money.

One would expect him to quit after being wrong so many times, but it seems that he is waiting for a new bull run to initiate so that there are fresh suckers to fall victim to his flawed understanding of the crypto market. People did better countering his predictions than to follow them, lol. Fundstrat has become Fundrat.

It might sound harsh, but they don't owe anyone an explanation for any of their actions. Bittrex has turned full shite long ago, so them clearly articulating what and when they are introducing these changes is quite nice of them. It just goes to show how retarded this space has become with how people signed up to their exchange regardless of the thousands of complaints and whatnot.

This crap exchange closed my account that I registered in 2013 after PROMISING to people that legacy accounts will not be as severely affected. Outcome is that they blocked my account.

Meh. You sign up to a service with such withdrawal fees. It's not that they forced high withdrawal fees upon their users, unless they out of nothing increased their fees, then the story is different. In Binance's case, they haven't increased their fees so there really isn't much to complain about.

For the liquidity that they offer, and the wide variety of coin pairs, 0.0005BTC in fees isn't even that high. On top of that, whenever the network goes through some severe congestion again (which increases the fees for every user of Bitcoin), Binance got you covered with that 0.0005BTC fee.

Even when the on-chain fees jump above 0.0005BTC I'm sure they won't increase their fees immediately because the profits they generate from trading easily covers their withdrawal expenses.

Still? It's a fantastic time to dollar cost average! Every lower price you buy at means more satoshis that you can scoop up. I can assure you that dollar cost averaging feels MUCH better on the way down than on the way up. It's the only time where fiat is gaining purchasing power, so why not utilize it to the best of your ability before that opportunity is gone again?  

Also lower highs, which means that the range within the price can freely move will tighten and lead to a larger breakout.

Not really that surprising. Facebook isn't a private entity that just drops a new payment protocol and suddenly the whole world is using it.

Facebook is a company that has to abide by every single regulation of each jurisdication they plan to operate in. This is where Bitcoin obviously shines, because there are no rules to abide by. It's truly borderless, near impossible to curb down on, and there is no entity behind it that profits from its existence such as how Facebook profits from Libra's existence.

I like the fact how Libra has made some high level politicians almost hype up Bitcoin to trash talk Libra. 

Their first mistake was to distribute their Gold geographically. Their second mistake will be when their request to have the Gold withdrawn be denied.

I'm pretty certain that we're already at a point where countries are afraid to request their Gold to be withdrawn, because that indicates distrust and you don't know how the other side is going to react to that. In that regard, they rather continue with the promise of owning x amount of Gold, where they can sell that promise to another sucker entity in the worst case.

I'm sure there are a lot of economical factors that play a role of importance too, because you can somewhat force other countries to not walk over you because you own a certain percentage of their Gold reserves. The more Gold you allow to be withdrawn, the more you put yourself in a disadvantageous position.

I rather wait for full node clients to become less taxing on the specifications of my device than to go by what a corporation wants me to use.

I don't want to follow HTC's "truth" of the network state which can change at any time, but go with what thousands of unbiased nodes confirm as truth, which I have been doing for nearly two years now with my full nodes. I'm pretty certain that every person running a node thinks that way. HTC creates a potential attack surface if the owners of the devices don't have the freedom to make any changes.

I totally get your frustration. To some extent we can blame governments for not triggering people to become more aware of proper internet etiquette, but on the other hand, it's in their best interest to not educate people to the point where they become smart enough to take proper security measures enough so that they don't fall victim to phishing, viruses, etc.

The more untaught people are, the easier it is for governments to exploit vulnerabilities in their operating systems or hardware to retain a certain level of surveillance, which hackers obviously will be able to exploit too. If you aren't curious enough to explore various fields of interests that play a big role in today's society, which the internet is a huge part of, then you're basically fucked.

This is a major reason why the mass adoption of Bitcoin will probably take decades. It also translates into wealth inequality because the dumb will end up being as poor as they have always been, where the smart money and those who are technically adapted will be the new elite.

All it means is that this exchange will broadcast your withdrawal within 15 minutes. If they fail, your next withdrawal is free, which basically means that it can go on endlessly until they actually broadcast your withdrawal.

This is such a lame exchange statement. Definitely not something I would expect from an exchange with 250,000 customers (OP's claim).

Just broadcast your withdrawals right away, or state that you are batching withdrawals so it can take a bit longer because you're waiting for more people to request a withdrawal. Or even better, offer people the option to choose between instant (slightly more expensive) single withdrawals, or batched (slightly cheaper) withdrawals.

It could have several reasons, but what I think it comes down to is Poloniex trying to wait for the right moment to broadcast its transactions so it can cut down on fees significantly. If you process thousands upon thousands of withdrawals on a daily basis, it becomes quite an interesting way of increasing your operational profits without doing much.

I know some traders who use Poloniex quite regularly, and they have to deal with mixed withdrawal times, and there seems to be a correlation between them broadcasting transactions and low overall number of unconfirmed transactions.

My two cents about the 'bad' that you specified;

Binance; They did suffer from security problems, but they are fixed. Any new security problems that may occur are just as much of a risk on other platforms.

OKEx; It's a crappy Tether wash trading exchange. Too many promotions is the last "problem" to worry about when using them.

Bitmex; I do agree that there is an increased incentive for the exchange to manipulate the prices and front run orders of other traders because of their in-house trading bots.

I personally would never use or recommend anyone to use OKEx because they are just a shady exchange. BTI report about wash trading can be found here.

6000 transactions per second is actually quite low. I'm pretty sure a crappy exchange such as Yobit can handle that without any problems.

Binance last year upgraded its platform to handle 1 million transactions per second, so how about that? I'm pretty sure that most of the other competent platforms can do at least 100,000 transactions per second. This is the advantage of centralized exchanges that work with a database infractructure. Using blockchain technology is just a convenient way to slow yourself down a lot.

It's quite difficult to have something so precious as Gold to become the standard of money again, and even if it turns out to happen one day, it's not going to last long before we're subjected to the same shananigans of endless money creation, debt, inflation, etc. As long as the same governments are responsible for creation and regulation of monetary policies, we're not going to move forward at all.

I like that with Bitcoin we don't have to wait for a new monetary system, it's here already and we're using it. Yes, it's priced against the us dollar, but so what? It works exceptionally well and it provides an indication of value, which is extremely hard to do when you start from scratch.

Another problem is that governments going back to the Gold standard will never be able to fully back every single unit because a lot of their Gold is stored in other countries. Not your keys not your Bitcoin is similar to not your physical Gold = you have no Gold. They're way better off hoarding Bitcoin because it's much easier to store. You can store trillions of dollars worth of Bitcoin in a $90 Ledger Nano hardware wallet. 

That was quite shocking for a lot of people. One doesn't expect that the legitimate application they downloaded from the main source forwards popups indicating that people should install an update which later turns out to make them lose all their funds. I truly hope that it made people so paranoid, that they will never have to go through that ever again.

I was already aware of similar tricks with other software applications, so I never click links or follow instructions as indicated by the popup, but visit the site myself and if needed download the actual software from there. I have to admit myself that being so paranoid is quite exhausting because every application needs to be verified and whatnot, but it's all worth it in the end.

It's also a reminder that crypto as a whole in no shape is even remotely close to mass adoption of common joe type of people. 

That's what moving averages are for in my opinion. It's obviously not bullet proof, but what is?

If we're above the 200MA on the daily, we're generally quite bullish and vice versa when we're below that moving average. Currently we're hovering below the 200MA on the daily, where one more dump will make me shift to the weekly time frame to reassess the market. The 200MA on the daily is ~$8800 while the weekly 200MA is gearing towards ~$4700 as we speak.

Back in 2018 and 2019 we had a bounce off the 200WMA twice which ended up being the perfect bottom to buy. It's important to state that between 2016 and now we have never had a weekly close below the 200WMA, so it should tell you something about how important it is for long term trend recognition.

We're currently far above the 200WMA, so the longer we consolidate above that moving average we're going to get a higher floor even when we move sideways for a whole year.

That's certainly true, but what we don't have is a regulated platform at which people can safely do so. There is CME, but the minimum order is a 5BTC contract, and you don't actually get any Bitcoin at all since everything is cash settled. This is exactly why I like that we have a platform such as Bakkt now, where people as time goes by can enter very easily and they can get actual Bitcoin delivered.

1BTC contracts may still be quite steep for a lot of people, but at least it provides some variety and much needed legal recognition, and who knows, if the demand really picks up, Bakkt may introduce smaller contract sizes.