This. I'm not aware of the exact threshold in the US, but every bank is legally obliged to not only investigate your transactions when they detect suspicious activity, but they also have to share your information with the authorities.

If you haven't been paying your taxes for example, and the bank ends up sharing your information, you're going to have some explaining to do, especially when your transactions are flagged as crypto transactions.

In order to avoid unnecessary problems, always read their terms and search for any mentions of crypto currencies. Better safe than sorry.

Even exchanges without KYC are not a viable option to use. They may either be shut down by the authorities where they browse through their database, or become compliant and you still have to pay the price for your ignorance.

I recall someone on Reddit like a year ago explain how he/she found the 'perfect' method to become anonymous, which was to deposit X coin on an exchange, trade it for Y coin, send Y coin to another exchange, then trade back to X coin.

People somehow still believe that as long as you don't have to submit your ID and other personal information to an exchange, that you are completely anonymous. People have to find out the truth the hard way I guess.

Not sure what banks you're using, but my bank doesn't sell gold. They do offer insured services to store your gold and other valuable goods for you, but that's about the closest they come to actually dealing with gold.

As for the crypto part, most newbies who end up using Coinbase never withdraw any of their cryptos. What knowledge is required when these people just want to speculate on the price and leave everything in their account?

The only thing I do somewhat agree with is that there are physical stores where you can walk in and buy gold, but mostly there are limits in place as to how much gold you are allowed to buy legally without ID verification.

I don't think we'll ever see governments be competitive enough in the world to not need taxation, but they actually can do a whole lot more to not subject us to insane taxation laws that are similar to theft.

Governments have become so lazy due to the printing of money, that they don't see the need to become more competitive as country. If you also have a secondary income through taxation, what more do they need?

Instead of getting taxed less throughout the years, we have been taxed more. We're nothing but walking bank accounts they can access whenever they think it's necessary. 

By what time frame? Before we break the $20k all time high we might very well test the $6000-$6500 range again. If we do happen to tank that far down, I'm pretty sure that will shake out a lot of moon boys.

People mostly don't get what they prepare themselves for. Last year they were expecting a bull run but got a massive crash instead. This year people were expecting the price to dip under $3000 but got a massive pump instead.

The same applies to the altcoiners waiting for an altcoin season with loaded bags. It's not going to happen until people lose faith and capitulate. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Schiff doesn't seem like someone who lies about his Bitcoin holdings. He's either in it or not, and he in my opinion clearly is not. He became a multi millionaire by selling gold, managing assets of his clients, etc.

If you're used to hard money, and rely on this shiny metal to perform well, then I can understand why he doesn't like Bitcoin. It pretty much threatens the industry that made him rich in the first place.

Peter Schiff isn't that different compared to a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist. Both sides in most cases consider everything that isn't gold or Bitcoin a scam or just a speculative bubble. Too bad there is so much animosity.

In hindsight it's always easy talking. I quite often see people say that they wish they knew of Bitcoin back in 2010/2011 so that they could go all in and be filthy rich now, but that's not how things work.

Most people back then just put a little bit of their money in Bitcoin to see where it goes-- money they didn't mind losing, which was a very realistic outcome with how Bitcoin was just a geeky experiment without any fundamentals.

I'm sure that even if people knew of Bitcoin back then and bought around $1 per coin, they very likely would have sold everything on the way up to $5-$10. Not many can resist the temptation of cashing out such profits.

If traders are really that successful, they don't need to make videos and 'educate' people just in return for some pocket change. You don't see any actual pro trader on youtube or social media because that's just a waste of time.

I'm always hesitant when people claim to be a highly profitable trader, yet want to sell you signals for like $50 a week. It's just an attempt to convince noobs to fill their pockets because with trading they aren't getting anywhere.

The profitable traders keep trading without whoring themselves on social media, while the wannabe traders actively promote themselves as such and try to sell you their rubbish signals and courses.

That's what I am thinking about each time I see people talk about how certain countries offer super low electricity rates or tax advantages to start-ups. They don't think about how unstable the governments are.

Belarus is an example of such a country-- they offer very low taxation to even no taxation at all, but who is going to take that offer knowing how unstable the government there is?

If the government decides to change the laws and you're trapped in, you're pretty much toasted. Aside from some local initiatives, I don't think any serious startup will settle there. It's just not a viable option.

That's what I thought initially, but this doesn't really seem the case. Sure, there might have been a slight uptick in use of privacy focused altcoins, but more than that definitely not.

Privacy focused altcoins might be more private than Bitcoin, but they lack the acceptance that Bitcoin has, and that by orders of magnitude. It's not easy to find someone to accept your XMR or Zcash.

An aspect that might have contributed to this is that exchanges have slowly started delisting these coins because they want to become compliant. I can't see this chance at all.

Gold perma bulls aren't really that different from Bitcoin perma bulls. Both camps consider their asset to be the solution to all problems and that it will replace every form of money and everyone will have a prosperous future.

The problem is that even if we end up going back to a gold standard, we already know that central banks will continue creating more units than they have gold to back it. In other words, it's not a solution to anything.

I'm not even that anti fiat as long as the monetary foundation at which it is built doesn't drain our purchasing power too much. One example of a decent fiat currency is the Swiss Franc. Switzerland shows that it is possible to not screw people over too much.

I think the more likely scenario is that people do not touch crypto at all, and why would they? Most of the riskier assets like stocks will be sold off hard, so if people do that, why would they pump money in crypto instead of taking it out?

People can hype up Bitcoin as much as they want, and to some extent I can understand all that, but our thinking doesn't align with how the rest of the no-coiner world thinks. It's something people here shouldn't underestimate.

Most no-coiners just can't get to understand why Bitcoin is worth $10k without anything really backing it. It's healthy skepticism if you take into consideration that they are used to government issued fiat and stocks with an underlying business

I'm long term speaking bullish but in the short term that can change. Currently I'm short term bearish and spend some of my coins to not lose much in purchasing power, which can be seen as cashing out.

The thing with people is that they think bears are bears for ever. Rational traders/investors follow the trend and based on that trend they are either bullish or bearish. Nothing wrong with that.

People here consider bears trolls and fud spreaders while they haven't done anything of that nature at all. Just because you don't like someone's bearish outlook doesn't mean that this person is spreading fud. Makes little sense.

Well spoken. People think of whales as a group of wealthy individuals trying to constantly manipulate the price, while whales are actually trading against each other just as much as we trade against traders with a similar trading balance.

This market lacks liquidity big time. If a whale wants to buy or sell, the price organically moves a few percent to have their trades fill. In the process they may trigger long/short squeezes exaggerating the move even further.

No word about manipulation is seen when we go up because people like it and see their portfolio value increase. Only when the price goes down people start talking about manipulation, and that just because they are losing.

Hackers target all exchanges, not just the largest ones. OKEx holds over 100k BTC on behalf of its users and a large percentage of the circulating Ethereum supply. This is more than enough incentive for hackers to attack it.

At this point I find it hard to believe that an exchange (doesn't matter which one) hasn't been hacked at least once. Just because we don't read about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

If it only concerns like a few hundred or maybe few thousand coins, an exchange as OKEx can just continue working as if nothing happened because there won't be a situation where people simultaneously withdraw all their coins.

BitPay has recently changed its terms. It was big news. It's plain stupid for anyone to donate an amount like that through a compliant payment gateway. You're basically asking for problems by doing that.

No matter how much I dislike BitPay, they just did what they were supposed to do when it comes to amounts of that order. How can you expect them to process it? The person donating the $100k could have prevented this drama.

The only thing you can blame BitPay for is the lack of communication, but then again, this is nothing new-- it's getting harder and harder to get in touch with companies the larger they become.

I actually haven't seen anyone talk about $1000 levels after the April pump from $4000 to $5000. Most of the bears turned into bulls the moment we blasted through the $6000 mark which was considered an iron wall.

Looking at OPs reaction, it apparently still pays off for trolls to scare people by throwing around with ridiculously low prices. Probably loser trolls who didn't manage to buy in the $3000s and now try to drag others down with them.

I can be open minded about gold too and pull out its lows and highs and assume the same will happen again. The thing is that it doesn't have to happen just because it happened before.

Bitcoin isn't always going to be a hot low priced asset class. I consider its long term up side to realistically be $50-$100k, but after that the risk of buying it doesn't outweigh the risk of seeing it go back to current levels or even lower.

I just don't see the demand reach that far because most people in developed countries don't need Bitcoin. People keep holding on to $1 million because they calculate themselves rich already. 

Do they batch transactions using legacy or SegWit format addresses? From the 7k satoshi fee you're stating it looks like SegWit to me, but it could also have been a batched legacy transaction sent without much network congestion.

If they use SegWit then it's absolutely ridiculous that they dare to ask so much in withdrawal fees. It's probably done so that people no longer withdraw their funds but keep it in their account and potentially trade more.

I have always believed that this exchange is largely insolvent. They have waves where people easily withdraw and waves where there are a lot of complaints popping up regarding withdrawals that aren't being processed.

Meh. The volumes are not real and the market cap isn't real either. I haven't seen much indicating actual growth in adoption despite people thinking so because of the bull run we have had this year.

It's largely institutional presence that has driven up the price based on improved technicals. Bitcoin's transactions are going back down again, the number of active addresses, etc. The activity pop is slowly going back to pre April levels.

A good indication of incoming capital is to look at the stablecoins since they are public record. Tether and USDC haven't printed much lately so from there I wouldn't expect any major price movement higher.