Bitcoin has done well even back when it was worth a few hundred dollars. It was being used as payment tool more often than is the case right now. Even without governments "support", Bitcoin will work well.

People think Bitcoin has to be worth a lot to succeed, but it can work just as easily without being worth a lot. Satoshi even said that there in the future will either be a lot of transaction volume or no volume at all. Very striking.

Bitcoin can have a lot of transaction volume without being worth $50k or $100k. People nowadays however don't care about transaction volume but judge Bitcoin by its price action.

Can we first hit $100k before making such outrageous predictions? $1 million is $990k above the current price.... It really seems that people have gotten so Bitcoin gay that they can't think straight anymore.

Nothing wrong with setting certain targets of course, but this is so unrealistic at this stage that it makes little sense to even talk about it. This of course is a very unpopular opinion here, but that I don't care too much about.

You seem to be more optimistic than I am. I just get the impression that the developers are too conservative and think that we shouldn't implement things that are new because who knows what effect it will have on Bitcoin.

If you're completely honest and take off your perma bull cap, how long do you think it will take before we see taproot and Schnorr signatures implemented?

I was referring to how after nearly a decade we so far have only had SegWit and LN as scalability/upgrades. That's what I consider a poor show. Not even a block size increase. This isn't what I consider progress.

The on-chain transaction throughput is capped at ~400k transactions on average with SegWit not gaining more adoption.

It's just news outlets as always exaggerating the stats to make Bitcoin look like an in-demand asset in Turkey. The same happened when they were praising Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenia, etc. It's just one big media circus.

As what I have seen from Turkish people, they're too afraid to openly mention that they don't have confidence in their Lira, so from there I doubt a lot of people would participate in a survey.

I know a few westernized Turkish people and what they have told me is that their family is mainly buying gold jewelry. It's widely available and buying jewelry isn't frowned upon by either the state or their direct environment.

I think that will lead to a lot of complaints one way or another. It's just not a wise option. Better option is to follow Coinbase's path where their withdrawal fees are dynamic and purely based on the congestion level of the network.

The benefit is that in most cases your withdrawal fees hover far under 10k satoshis, but when the network gets spammed or there is a lot of activity due to high price swings, the fees go up a lot.

I get your point though, it's frustrating to see exchanges unnecessarily charge you 0.0005/0.001BTC to withdraw your funds. At today's prices that's a fair bit of money, especially when you send your coins to your wallet after trading on a daily basis.

Rakuten CEO has been pretty 'close' with Roger very early on. It's Roger who sold (conned) Bcash to Japan as being the real Bitcoin that works as cash, so yes, this is definitely one of his accomplishments.

Bcash enjoys more merchant adoption in Japan than Bitcoin does thanks to Roger. The only thing is that these merchants will start to wonder why nobody is using it to pay for their stuff. 

The reason XRPs volume is lower, relatively speaking, is because that coin is used less for speculative purposes because of how delusional people are and think it's going to be adopted by financial institutions one day.

Very interesting, thanks for pointing that out.

Do you know when they started blocking US residents? I recall youtubers shilling Bybit not that long ago referring to it as an alternative to BitMEX for US residents. That clearly no longer applies according to Bybit's TOS.

I wonder if it has anything to do with BitMEX's CFTC probe, which would make sense considering how similar they are to BitMEX as a platform. Bad news for BitMEX would directly mean bad news for Bybit and other platforms.

It's even going to be a real challenge to get taproot and schnorr signatures implemented in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has become a store of value and a transactional layer for high value transactions.

If we at some point in the future unexpectedly see an upgrade be implemented in Bitcoin then that's great, but it's pointless to expect any significant upgrade to be implemented in the coming 12 or so months.

We're stuck with SegWit well under 50% adoption and have to hope that LN grows further, which after nearly a decade of existence is a poor show. Being a perma bull doesn't mean you should ignore this.

Poolin has found the second most number of blocks today, which doesn't indicate much of a hashrate loss. I also looked at their previous daily number of blocks found, and there is no serious difference, just regular variance.

I get the impression that this has been used as some sort of a marketing stunt. Yes, it really seems that a small mining facility has been affected by the mud flood, but the whole story around it is greatly exaggerated.

I doubt the small facility that was affected accounted for more than 10% of its hashrate. More like 5% looking at their stats prior and after the flood. If they don't have spare gear I just hope they don't use Bitmain to purchase new gear.

I have seen quite a few users move from BitMEX to Bybit and people seem to like it. It allows you to use the platform even with other crypto currencies where BitMEX derivatives are strictly settled in Bitcoin.

The problem is that people assume that Bybit is safe from potential regulatory intervention, but it really isn't. It's only a matter of time before Bybit is going to exclude US residents. Most competent platforms follow that path.

If you end up creating an account, make sure you read their TOS (I know it's boring but it's very important) to make sure you don't get surprised by any of their policies that might affect you negatively.

How exactly did he contribute to this space? Is scamming people a contribution? If that's a yes in your book, then his contribution as con made a lot of people consider crypto a scam and therefore not touch it again.

What bothers me more is that even the more prominent Bitcoiners seem to be cool with this retard. Probably a sign that these Bitcoiners aren't entirely sober or trustworthy either. Cons like to hang out with other cons after all.

His predictions are meaningless too with how he has denied having made certain ridiculously high price calls in the past. He keeps denying having made specific price calls until he is right one day.

Peter Schiff is known to be a gold bug. It's also known that he doesn't like Bitcoin because of how his whole business revolves around gold. In other words, even when he likes Bitcoin, he will pretend to not like it at all.

I'm fairly sure that he isn't that bitter and knows how there is a lot to gain by having a 1-5% allocation to Bitcoin, which he might have, but he will never publicly support that what goes against what made him wealthy to begin with.

Realistically speaking, he can be totally right by saying that Bitcoin won't ever hit the $50k mark. We all just assume it will, but nothing guarantees that it will actually happen. Healthy skepticism isn't a sin.

There is very little liquidity within this market, so if there actually is debt flowing into Bitcoin, it will have a massive impact. I however don't think there is much of it flowing into Bitcoin. People hope it is, but that's just how they are.

I do however agree that every form of safe haven capital that is being pumped into Bitcoin will be taken out immediately when investors see the early signs of an improving economy.

This is why I prefer that Bitcoin isn't being used as a safe haven asset by the more traditional investors. People here love it when the price pumps, but as they have proven more than once already, they can't handle large corrections.

I know that BitPay for example charges an extra fee for paying with Bitcoin, but that's more related to their anti Bitcoin stance. Bcash payments don't require a single penny in extra fees. It's a disgusting form of marketing.

I have actually seen some merchants offer discoints when you use Bitcoin as payment option. It helps them not pay the 3-4% credit card fees, and a part of this cost saving is offered to you as discount.

Overall, most merchants use a payment gateway to do the conversions so that they aren't exposed to the volatility themselves. People here don't like centralized payment gateways, but they offer a very useful service to merchants.

My thought as well. I like what LN aims to do and use it myself from time to time, but the network is so small and largely still unknown, that I don't see how it would benefit those who hold Bitcoin but don't know what LN is.

In order to utilize the LN, they have to fund a channel which requires a regular transaction fee. If you just use Bitcoin to pay for things once or twice a month, you don't need the advantages that LN offers.

To add, a lot of payment gateways for convenience sake accept lower value zero confirmation transactions if the transaction has a sufficient fee included. In other words, your transaction is mostly accepted near instantly.

Unfortunately, news outlets as hungry for clicks and views as they are, they will continue to report about people who claim to be satoshi but aren't in reality. News outlets know that too, they just use it as an opportunity to create content.

And then we have crypto related social media influencers who create podcast style videos on YouTube where they read news articles. This makes fake satoshis gain even more exposure, which is exactly what they are after.

So far it has always paid off to pretend to be satoshi and I can't see it change due to what I wrote above. At the end of the day, we talking about it here is a form of exposure too, and this has helped Craig Wright gain a lot more followers.

I tried it and this is an absolute scam.

This is the address they forward to me to send coins to-- 14iFzgaa2HcYQ3PiZtsHUxrZzx2LGiWypX

I can't believe how stupid these scammers are to give everyone the same address. How difficult can it be to give people a unique deposit address to make it look less like a scam. This is retarded.

Agreed. Their main goal is to trick average joes into thinking that this is a fantastic alternative to the fiat they usually spend, because hey, it's a hot new crypto thingy, right?

They have wisely leveraged the momentum around crypto, which I can't blame them for because their roadmap is clear-- they want your data and sell it to the highest bidder. It's what Facebook has always done.

Too bad people as stupid as they are allow themselves to be used as a product. I don't have a Facebook account and never will have one, or at least, not with my personal information attached to it.

In other words, you prefer buying at +$13.5k levels than buying at $10k flat and have a 35% profit when we finally surpass the previous resistance? That sounds like you're a fomo buyer.

There is no guarantee that we'll keep going up from there, so if you buy at $13.5k you might still end up holding a bag of expensive coins. You're much better off slowly dollar cost averaging at current levels.

I honestly have seen more skepticism when it comes to Bakkt than positive stories. Not many believe it will have much of an impact nor do they care about selling this news, which won't yield you much to begin with.

We're just bouncing up and down within a large descending triangle. Pretty normal market activity in times where the bears are gaining more strength week by week. Not related to Bakkt.

I really hope that the lease contract of the @Bitcoin handle doesn't have a clause that makes it impossible for the one leasing it to reveal himself. If that's not the case, we should be seeing a reveal announcement pretty soon.

Roger always denied to have access to that Twitter handle but the way he constructed his Tweets and his wording was identical to the Tweets of his main Twitter account. Not only is he a scammer, but also a pathological liar.

I like the fact that it makes the Bcash community feel bad about this playing out. The whole community apparently finds Roger's scamming practices not unethical, which makes them untrustworthy as well. We'll see where this goes.