Currencies are investment and speculative tools as well. If we look at the forex markets and their volumes, then it's safe to say that currencies such as the US dollar and the Euro are generating more speculative volume than volume by usage as money.

If currencies weren't used for speculative purposes the demand for them would decrease, and so would our purchasing power. Speculation brings liquidity to the table. Where would Bitcoin be without that liquidity?

The price of Bitcoin has grown tremendously because people are speculating that the price will keep booming. If we were to solely rely on the currency aspect of it, we could just as easily hover below the $1k mark without problems.

Fact is that the depreciating currencies will save themselves eventually by imploding. It's only a matter of time before this happens, but then we get another shitty government currency people are forced to use.

At the end of the day, we don't have to be dragged down by fiat to the fullest and painful extent. If people by now haven't allocated a portion of their net worth to Bitcoin or other assets they're just begging to lose 99% of their purchasing power.

Also, Bitcoin doesn't need to be saved. It has shown growth in terms of price and hashrate consistently throughout the years, and that while people thought this concept was doomed to fail. That's extremely bullish.

I agree, this is more exposure for Bitcoin. Can't complain about it for that reason. The far majority of the people don't know about this, which is why Cointelegraph and other news outlets can pull this off.

I use a subsidiary of Takeaway to order food almost on a weekly basis and pay for it in Bitcoin. Not sure when they started accepting it, but I started using them back in early 2018, so at least 1.5 years now.

Cool thing is that payments in Bitcoin are accepted instantly as long as you use a sufficient fee. I know people here don't like seeing merchants accept zero fee transactions, but you'll like it when you are on the sending-end.

I like the fact that Poolin allows you to pay with multiple crypto currencies instead of just Bcash and credit cards like Bitmain and ViaBTC offer. They still haven't changed anything after all since they started offering their service.

Prices seem to be high in my opinion. People are being charged more than what the pool would actually generate by filling up its blocks with organic transactions. I know it's an optional feature, but it would attract more use of priced fairer.

My question then is, if the network is less congested, will that dynamically lower the price for an acceleration that Poolin charges? Would make sense if so.

I don't think Binance will drop Bcash, especially not after the shit they went through for delisting BSV. Delisting another controversial fork will only make their case stronger because it is somewhat similar to censorship.

Another thing is that when you delist a coin from a liquid exchange such as Binance, it becomes much easier to control and pump. It's better for Binance to keep it listed so that Roger's scam pumps can be exposed nicely.

I have to say that the rebranding of bitcoin dot com looks shit. From a site resembling Bitcoinness to a site not resembling Bitcoin aside from its domain name. Great job Roger!

As long as you have to log into a service and your data is stored at their servers, there is no way to operate under the radar at all. All the data you allowed them to collect will be used against you at some point in the future.

Another thing is that in some countries financial institutions have teamed up and share data with each other about clients to curb any activity they deem fraudulent or suspicious. In other words, your data is stored on many more servers.

I even think that all the security measures financial institutions so far have implemented are just a fraction of the measures we'll be bombarded with in the coming years. Bitcoin is the only way out it seems.

If you look at the bigger picture, the bull mode has already started. It's perfectly normal that we have a phase of consolidation after a mad increase all the way to the $14k mark, that's not healthy growth. It resembles greed.

People here think that a two month consolidation phase is long, but that's an absolute joke when you compare consolidation in traditional markets. People here are too greedy and think it's normal to go up by 400%. It's not.

There is also a bearish case where the bull run what we have seen is a bull run within a longer term bear market. Perfectly possible but less likely. I think that we'll take out the $20k high next year after healthy weak hand capitulation selloff.

In this case it doesn't really matter since the big money happens to be in the institutional accounts. I think it's even better because it gives retailers the incentive to storm into spot exchanges and buy there. People should take care of their own coins.

This will balance things out nicely until this ETF gets approved in full, which might figure out pretty soon with how this is the moment of truth. No more further delays. We have had too many of them already.

I still don't think that this event is enough to prevent the price from making lower lows. If we see a big selloff tomorrow that's probably a sign that some institutions have bought in before the event took place to sell the news.

I don't see much difference in the trend-- people are overly optimistic about the price going back up above $10k, which is very much in line with the overall bearish formation that's getting nicely shaped with more confirming touches.

I consider a sub $9000 visit more likely this month than anything else. Major indicators of fresh capital flowing into crypto are the stablecoins, and none of them saw an increase of significance.

It's largely the same capital that's being traded back and forth, so from there you can't really expect the price to surge beyond its current resistance levels. No new capital entering means no new demand.

Just because they work with a wide variety of worldwide known companies doesn't mean any of them will bother to conduct transactions in Bitcoin. Makes little sense to me with how volatile the price is.

I think it's more of a publicity stunt rather than them actually expecting a serious surge in revenue. They know better than that. On the other hand, exposure for PwC is also exposure for Bitcoin, and this time it's positive.

I might sound a bit like a skeptic, but that's more like me being realistic, which means to look at it rationally rather than looking at it with my perma bull cap on. Bitcoin just doesn't get spent much. It's too scarce for that.

The same applies to the XRP army. They still believe that once financial institutions start to use xRapid that the price will soar well above the $100 mark, which is completely retarded given the 100 billion supply.

Then there is a part of the XRP army believing that $589 (which is a very specific number) going to happen one day. That's a clear indication of how delusional people can become when they hold large bags of it at peak bull run prices.

That being said, XRP has actually managed to see its market cap surpass Bitcoin's market cap twice so far, but at a time where people didn't care much about market caps and dominance as they do right now.

Nowadays that's highly unlikely with how much money there is to make by filling up the precious block space with organic transactions. If you want to test things as miner you can use the testnet do to so. It won't bother anybody in that case.

The only more recent instance of a miner not utilizing the block space was Antpool, where they for some (probably toxic) reason mined a couple of empty blocks a day, and that without there being two blocks found nearly at the same time.

Thank you for your explanation. It makes sense now. If they can't even maintain a peg to the US dollar, that just tells you how problematic the situation in that country is. What a joke. Who's ever going to trust that government again?

The premium you pay to buy Bitcoin in order to finally be free from that horrible currency, is a small price to pay for long term price appreciation and financial freedom. It's an opportunity of a lifetime for them. Literally.

We can't fathom how much stress these people go through to find out that their fiat buys them less groceries today than it did yesterday, and that for years straight. Much respect to these innocent people who fell victim to their mafia government.

Zimbabwe printing US dollars? That's probably one of the biggest crimes there is from the perspective of a government. I don't think that's what happened, otherwise it would big big news covered worldwide.

It might be that some crime syndicates there have printed fake US dollars and that it came into circulation, but the central bank of Zimbabwe doing that is highly unlikely in my opinion.

Last year I saw news coverage that some local governments in Zimbabwe have created their own currency, only usable within their state. This is quite an ingenious way to stop losing purchasing power.

People traded their near worthless Zimbabwean dollars for these non official state currencies, which looking back now, was a fantastic move. It's a big f-you to the main leaders of Zimbabwe.

I can understand why you think that with the block halving coming up next year, but don't discard the possibility of the block halving price being priced in already-- we went from $3k to $14k to right now $10k. That's a 240% increase.

Bitcoin has always been full of surprises, on the way up and on the way down. If too many people expect the price to either go up or down, the price tends to break out in the opposite direction liquidating a lot of positions.

If you're over-invested it is better to sell 25-50% so that you have some fiat left in case you need it-- benefit is that if the price drops and you don't need the fiat, you can buy back a portion at lower levels to decrease your average entry point(s).

Even if we have another decade of bull mania, that still doesn't say anything about Bitcoin being a safe haven asset. What we see happen is that people front run Bitcoin's potential, and as long as that is the case, nothing will change.

In order to truly understand where Bitcoin stands, it needs to be much further in terms of adoption. It could stay a speculative asset for ever and remain in people's basket of risk on assets until it's time to convert to fiat or gold.

Bitcoin isn't going to be a deflationary currency until the last Satoshi is minted somewhere in the year 2140. The same applies to gold. It's not a deflationary currency as long as gold is still being minted and thus inflate the total supply further.

I wouldn't call gold deflationary anyway, especially with how technology keeps improving-- gold that isn't being minted today because that would be too expensive, will likely be minted profitably somewhere in the next decades.

People here seem to be overly optimistic about Bitcoin doing well during a crisis, but I wouldn't really count on that as long as it is perceived to be a very risky asset class. Bitcoin has a lot of catching up to do in order to be a safe haven asset.

Gold has served people for thousands of years, so there definitely isn't anything 'too old' about it. People will more and more appreciate hard assets such as gold the more digitalized the world becomes.

Gold is pretty much the only smaller physical object that allows people to store a lot of their wealth in it. Gold won't be going anywhere. A lot of Bitcoiners seem to be out to diversify their holdings into gold when their high price target is met.

It depends on the actual definition of a currency, but putting it against fiat currencies, Bitcoin doesn't stand a single chance today. How will you serve the mass with 5 transactions per second?

It's just going to be a digital store of value and transfer of value. Characteristics of gold, but then more convenient.

I know someone who has 4 large 4K monitors displaying all sorts of charts while he isn't even trading much. He pretends to need it in order to get an idea of the overall market and trade more effectively.

Spending nearly €12k just on the monitors for the sake of taking a few trades a week is a waste of money and overkill, especially when you know that his PC cost him like €5k as well. People apparently pay big money to feel important.

Not anymore. My mistake in the past was to try to trade even when there wasn't much to trade at all due to low volatility and a very tight range. Scalping just isn't my thing.

I'm only focusing on buy low sell high type of trading. I don't have a time frame in mind within I want to profit. If it takes a day then it takes a day. If I takes weeks then it takes weeks. I have patience.

Ripple this year has been selling billions of its tokens below market value to institutions and other interested parties. What do you think happens with these coins? Right, they'll be sold to cash in the easy profits.

Another thing is that the contractual agreements between Ripple and certain large holders have expired, which means that they no longer are forced to hold their tokens. Result is more tokens flowing into the direct circulation.

I do however think that XRP is due for a pump in the coming weeks or months with how the entire XRP community seems to be losing faith. Maybe that one more capitulation dump will make the last holders panic sell.