Nah, I am not involved in altcoins anymore, and I am definitely not planning to do so right now. That however doesn't mean for the time being altcoins can't function as a decent hedge in situations like these. It's understandable that people look for some sort of temporary safe haven, but I rather convert my coins to fiat than having to convert them to altcoins. I am already prepared for whatever is going to happen as I have a decent amount of fiat ready to be put in action when needed. Another benefit for me is that the Euro is gaining value against the USD which will definitely play out in my advantage.

It's not just today, but the whole last weeks that the price started to bounce up and down due to the hard fork speculations. If you look closely at how the price behaved, then you'll notice that each time the price went under $1000, it found its way back up to the $1000 level. Current drop to under $1000 isn't anything special. It will bounce back up to over $1000 in the coming days, no worries. Instead, you could even look to buy back some coins in case you cashed out profits around the $1200 level.

It's not that these users are flowing into Bitcoin, but more that they move from the well known traditional banks to new banks aiming to be user friendly and open for youngsters to develop themselves. It has been happening for years that newly started up banks gain quite an impressive number of younger users as they completely lost faith in the well known larger banks. Funny thing is that at some point, the major banks these users look to avoid, will be buying up these smaller banks, and thus nothing will change.

Yobit is an exchange pointed at noobs. I would never ever make use of an exchange like that. 1) most of their coin volumes are fake, and 2) you pointed it out as well, their "business model" is to earn from shit coins getting listed to their exchange for a certain fee. I understand that they are looking to make profits, nothing wrong with that, but why at cost of people that sign up to their exchange? Noobs obviously lack common sense and knowledge in relation to crypto, and thus they invest with full believe in one of these shitcoins, where they end up losing big time. There are more altcoin exchanges that do this. Yobit is definitely not the only one.

No. In order for Bitcoin to come even close to the weakest fiat currencies, it must offer a better form of usability in all kinds of scenarios. Do you already see you using Bitcoin as a local currency for your daily purchases? You'll be forced to include a proper fee ($0.50-$1 best is closer to $1) in order to have a payment processor such as BitPay accept your transaction without any confirmations. Another point is that you can only do this with relatively low amounts (I believe it is $20-$25 valued transactions as limit). Everything higher than that will make you wait for that one confirmation to come through, regardless of the fee you include. No convenience at all.

This reminds me a bit of people asking; why if I buy the price always goes down, and why if I sell the price always goes up?. Actually, your "strategy" is basically the same as from the majority of the people here - it's that trading is a losing game for them. Many of the people here don't have the balls to admit it, but you are an exception here. In some cases people just aren't made for trading, but you seem to realize that you are doing wrong, and that's already a good starting point. Is it BTC/fiat that you trade, or BTC/alt?

In fact, they are. This thread is more or less Bitcoin VS PayPal, and thus every detail counts.

That definitely plays an important role, but if you look at PayPal in its totality, it does exactly what the consumer wants it to do. People can send/receive money instantly and for free to people, friends, etc. It doesn't cost them anything to buy whatever they want from webshops. They enjoy buyers protection, etc. Everything adds up to what PayPal is today.

Sure, but that obviously won't be the case as Bitcoin simply said, isn't a good currency tool in its current form. Other than that, PayPal has been building up its brand throughout the years to something so solid, that whatever happens, it will remain larger than Bitcoin in the coming plenty of years, in the aspect of offering a proper payment platform.

I have quite often stated that regulations put in place aren't solely meant for tracking down money launderers, financing of terrorism, etc. It's just an excuse that governments hide themselves behind. People should stop believing that nonsense. Government is just looking to extend its reach by 1) analyzing who owns what in Bitcoin, who is potentially trying to sneak money out of the country. And 2) they want to push back Bitcoin where they try to make things a whole lot more difficult for people when it comes to buying and selling Bitcoin.

If you're referring to countries where PayPal isn't allowed to operate from, then you're right, but still, PayPal has over 200 million active users. There is no precise way to figure out how many active users Bitcoin has, but I don't think I am very far off if I say that in best scenario Bitcoin has around 3-4% of PayPal's number, at most. Another thing is that Bitcoin usage tends to increase when the price increases, and get less active when the price decreases or remains stagnant for a certain period of time. PayPal enjoys a constant level of usage. Big difference.

That's the hard reality when it comes to people jumping into altcoins. In general, there are a lot people that look for insane profits in a very short time, and that's exactly why they refer to either altcoins, gambling, scams (e.g. doublers, cloud mining), etc. People are taking huge risks with a relatively low starting capital - It's a poor mans way of trying to get rich. In reality, the opposite happens, where they turn out to lose everything they had. You would think that they would be a whole lot more caring about where they put their last bit of money in, but that's obviously not the case. Greed wins.

I will be holding my coins anyway (Core and BU) in case of a fork. I have enough confidence that at some point everything will return back to normal (in terms of the price). I will just use the panic that goes through the market to trade against the volatility, and to increase my holdings in case the price falls down deep enough. I think that's the best possible way of dealing with this entire situation.

I think that's exactly the reason as to why there isn't any real demand for such exchanges. It's great that you can trade crypto for another crypto, but people want fiat trading pairs in the exact same decentral manner. I was looking at Tether (USDT) to see whether or not it will be a great addition, but even here you depend on a central authority, plus you are subject to KYC policies, and thus it trashes the decentral aspect of such exchanges. I don't see how this problem will ever be solved.

It won't do much as I don't believe the SEC will re-think its rejection as they were pretty clear when listing up reasons of why this ETF was rejected. In the same way I believe the SX ETF will be rejected this month. The SX ETF offers a major advantage in form of insured holdings up to $125M, but that's not enough to convince the SEC to approve it. It's also an image matter as it would make them look bad if they first reject the WV ETF, where they not long after that approve the SX ETF.

If this was 2012/2013 I would agree with you, but in current times Bitcoin is more expensive than the majority of the payment services. Especially when it comes to the ratio of transaction value vs the included fee value. If you are familiar with PayPal, then it's obvious that Bitcoin is completely outruled when it comes to transacting instantly and free with family, friends, etc. PayPal is also free when it comes to buying goods. Nah man, Bitcoin severely lacks in that regard.

Governments have been well aware of Bitcoin right from the start, but they didn't seem to take it very serious at the beginning because Bitcoin was just a joke for them. Now Bitcoin is constantly growing larger, governments realize that something needs to be done, and that's exactly why you see them put all kinds of regulatings in place.

If the price goes up a few dozen bucks after a dump, people directly assume it is a recovery. If you closely look at this whole fork situation, then there is no such a thing as a recovering price in the last few days. I wouldn't even be surprised to see the price sink below the $1000 level today or in the coming days. In that regard, just to benefit from potential sharp dumps, I would be setting up various buy orders in the range of the $800-$950 levels. Just leave them open. If they don't get triggered you haven't lost anything.

I personally don't find it worth to buy and sell one Bitcoin where you look to make just around $30 in profits. It's only worthwhile if you have a massive number of coins that you are using to scoop up such small profits. If you would do that with 100BTC per time, it would mean that you gain 100x $30 which nets you $3000 in a relatively short time taking current volatility into consideration. In that regard, you are better off just holding that one Bitcoin for a longer period of time. I would just wait until I at least have made 30-50% in profits, otherwise it's not worth selling.

Horrible article. Once again an article just published for the sake of generating ad revenue. It's very difficult nowadays to find decent articles regarding Bitcoin. I all the time stumble over the noobish'ness of those that come up with nonsense analysis and also things that simply aren't true. Aren't these article writers supposed to fact-check their article first before publishing?

Don't let others get the better of you. So far nothing has changed compared to how things were days ago. In most cases it's fud that you are dealing with, all done to convince rookies to believe their nonsense and to sell as result. May I know what companies you are referring to? So far I have seen one article from a non Bitcoin news site, and they are predicting a doom scenario to follow very soon. I just laughed at how amateurish that article was set up, because it was obvious that the person in question just doesn't know what he is talking about.

In general, if you look at how the altcoin market is set up in percentages, then we have around 2-3% that are coins really adding something, having solid developers on board, support from market movers, etc. Then we have like 8-7% that are coins started up as legit minded projects. After that ~90% are all shitcoins. If you invest in coins fitting in this ~90% shitcoin category, it's gambling. You enter the market at a certain price, where after that you wait a while to see what the price at that later time frame is - If the price has gone up, you win, if the price has gone down, you obviously lose. These coins don't have any future potential, and thus only drive on pumps and dumps.

In the long run the price won't be much affected, but in the short term this potential fork can turn out to drive the price down to possibly sub $500 levels. In that regard, it wouldn't hurt to liquidate some of your Bitcoin holdings to have a good sum of fiat aside for when the price reaches such low levels. Traders always prepare themselves for every possible scenario, and this whole fork situation is definitely not an exception.