I think sooner or later SEC will approve Bitcoin ETF, but this will happen when they'll feel like most of Bitcoin's volume comes from well-regulated exchanges. Bitcoin's volume and volatility might also be a factor, as it seems like SEC thinks that some big price movements are a result of manipulation, which might or might not be true, since speculative behavior of the masses is also a big factor that can explain rallies and crashes.

This is just some bullshit propaganda, Ethereum has huge centralization problems and instead of fixing them they are just spreading lies. There's a lot of people running Bitcoin full nodes on this forum, but nearly all ETH users are using lightweight clients like MyEtherWallet and Metamask, because even with pruning it takes a lot of time to sync ETH blockchain, and it eats through CPU and RAM like crazy.

If anyone wants to dive into details, I've found a link to this study: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03998

So far there was no precedent of Bitcoin's price moving as a reaction to some negative economic events in the world. The news sometimes try to tie Bitcoin's price movements to economic events in some countries, but that is most likely just a coincidence. Bitcoin supporters generally consider it as a hedge against fiat economy, but it's not enough to it really being a hedge, because the whole fiat economy should share this view. If we'll have an economic crash tomorrow, will Warren Buffet buy BTC or will he still think of it as "rat poison"?

I'm not ready to cash out because I'd quickly go over the monthly transaction limit, which will attract attention from authorities. I seriously don't want to pay those ridiculous taxes, so I'll probably have to cash out slowly and via multiple routes to stay off the radar. I also want to see Bitcoin accepted more as currency, so I can avoid some taxes by spending it instead of selling. Also, would be great to have some two-way ATM's to sell coins for cash anonymously.

When LN will get full release and some adoption, altcoins will have really hard time. They will try to criticize it, which will be rare, or they'll try to adopt it themselves and will say that it works better with their network (this is what Bcash is planning to do). ETH is planning to have its own versions of LN, and together with its competitors like EOS and Cardano they will be claiming that they are better than Bitcoin because they have smart contracts.

I'm pretty sure none of them had any objections to trading, since free market is essential for the economy, and Bitcoin economy is no exception. Also, nothing in this world is created to be an investment, investing is essentially just finding undervalued things and selling them later, and things grow in their price because their demand grows, not because they were created to be a good investment.

Also, Bitcoin's success shouldn't rely on its users being strict libertarians/cypherpunks who use it because they are hardcore believers, ideally people should be using Bitcoin because it is objectively better than banks.


Because in the early days Bitcoin was a small cypherpunk community, but now millions of people have joined this forum and other platforms. If you want to have discussions like in old good days, you should search some IRC channels or other similar places.

Two weeks is too short of a time to tell for sure whether it was bottom or not. We already had two recoveries that have failed and resulted in a drop to $6k. To me all these statements from rich guys sound a bit like manipulation, they know that the public is hyped for ETF and they are playing along by making moon predictions for the end of this year and saying that the bear market is over. To me reaching bottom only half a year after the ATH and crash sounds suspicious. Buying a few weeks ago during sub 6k dip was smart, buying now is FOMO.

Because it's risky: no one knows how would full node hardware (read: desktops and laptops) evolve in the future - maybe in 10 years they will easily handle 30 MB blocks, maybe they will struggle even with 10 MB blocks. If your curve will grow faster than node resources, you'll end up with the same result as if you increased blocksize to some ridiculous number today: network centralization.

This risk also has very little reward: increasing tps from 7 to 30-50 won't solve the scalability problem, we need thousands transactions per second, and this is why we have Lightning. Also, there are more elegant on-chain capacity boosts that need to be implemented before any blocksize increases, like Schnorr.

The market always have cycles, so you can be 100% sure that at some point in the future there will be a global economic crisis. Also, individual countries quite often have their own boom/bust cycles. What is important in these kinds of predictions is timing, there are people who have been predicting the next crisis almost every year and obviously they were wrong. In my opinion the next crisis is most likely to happen within next 4 to 8 years.

KYC is bad even with regulations, remember the last year's Equifax data breach and the uproar it caused? And even without any breaches, there's a good chance all these entities are quietly selling your data which can be used for invasive ads, spying, blackmailing and other things. Privacy is a very serious issue that most people are very ignorant of, and it is especially important with cryptocurrencies due to their nature. You don't want strangers to know about your coins, because you can become a target for hacks and robberies, and you also might not want the government to know about your coins, especially if your government is corrupt and/or hostile towards crypto.

This anti-ETH sentiment is caused by competitors like EOS and Cardano who market themselves as Ethereum killers. Last year everyone loved ETH and criticism was very rare, but now that competitors have launched their networks, the FUD bombardment has begun. I personally wouldn't be 100% bearish on ETH, I think in some very long run it will lose to BTC, if Bitcoin will get smart contracts, sidechains and other features, simply because Bitcoin is more decentralized and secure, but in the shorter perspective ETH at least has some proven track record of developers doing their job, while its competitors are still very young.

As far as I know, smartphones and tablets are more secure than desktops because the apps are more separated from each other and there's not much shared space. But it's possible to have similar security on desktops with virtualization tools, there's even a whole OS called Qubes that allows users to easily create isolated boxes, so you can put your work, finances and entertainment into different containers that can't infect each other.

But regardless, it's not a good idea to have your saving wallet on any kind of online device, those devices should only be used to access smaller daily spending wallets.

Bitcoin can be quite susceptible to manipulation and panic sometimes, so if we'll return to more bearish market, prices below $6,000 are possible for short periods. A good example of such crash can be the one that happened last year when China banned exchanges. 

But also it's too early to say that this bull run is over, the market is still waiting for ETF decisions and there's a lot of hope.

This.

Cryptocurrency ad bans were mostly a good thing too, because a ton of those ads were malicious stuff like cloud mining, ponzi's, malware and ICO scams. The few legit ads were probably exchanges, but then again, I don't think it's good for the ecosystem to have newcomers introduced to cryptocurrency via exchanges and ads rather than some decent educational materials that learn them all the necessary basics. Often those noobs become victims of hacks, scams, poor investment decisions and other misfortunes.

Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to be used for many purposes, including consumer purchases. Also, the current centralized payment systems are not perfect for consumers - they lack privacy, they require trust (banks can and do freeze accounts for whatever reasons they want), fees can get big with international transactions. Maybe it's not a problem for the majority of population, but there are definitely those who would use crypto over traditional payments for their daily purchases.

Charlie Lee's quote about XRP and diamonds from the article:

“There are many possibilities (of finding and altcoin to resemble value), but Ripple is somewhat like a diamond because its supply is also artificially controlled. And diamonds are actually advertising … If you want to buy a Ripple for marriage, it is very valuable, haha.”

So, it doesn't necessary mean that he thinks that XRP is precious, to me it even sounds like he's saying that XRP is overvalued.

Without timing this speculation is not very useful. Bitcoin is very likely to eventually reach those levels regardless if there will be ETF or not, and if the ETF get approved, it might rise for other reasons. Imagine if ETF will get approved and launched in the next year and the price will reach $40,000 in 2020 - some people would say that it is thanks to ETF, but there will also be the next halvening in 2020, and LN is going to be released soon, so there can be many factors working together. Also, there were similar predictions with futures, and maybe they were the main cause of 20k rally, or maybe they only helped a little, we can't know for sure without proper study.

That sub is full of bagholders of various shitcoins who never miss a chance to shill for their coin. Or maybe that's just paid shills, altcoin marketers will do anything to pump their projects.

Also, what people on that sub have in common is their hatred towards Bitcoin, they all dream that it will die and their shitcoin will become number one, lol.

If I want to read some discussions about altcoins, I usually check Medium or Twitter.

Winklevoss ETF got rejected recently and the price dropped by $300. If all the other ETF will get rejected in the next months, you'd need a huge miracle to see a bull run in this year. But even if ETF will get approved, the price won't necessary skyrocket, because traders are buying the rumors and selling the news, and the rise from $6,000 to $8,000 could be the whole gain from ETF. So, the market can turn bearish any moment, and being bullish now is a big risk, unless you have strong hands to hodl no matter what.

Privacy coins are going to be in a trouble, the first thing the governments will do in their crypto regulations is to prohibit exchanges and other companies from doing operations with them. Japan has already made their exchanges delist those coins, and some other countries too, if I remember correctly. Bitcoin is very interesting in this situation, because regular transactions are notoriously bad in terms of privacy, but with upcoming protocols and Lightning things will change, and its unclear how would regulators react to them.