It's impossible nowadays to use Coinbase for anything without KYC verification. Also, Coinbase could end up blocking transactions similar to how BitPay has been blocking transactions recently. They're not going to do anything that their banking partner would force to cut ties with them, so they'll rather kick you out before any 'damage' is done.

While Coinbase doesn't charge any fees for their ecommerce services, you will have to pay a Bitcoin network fee to send the coins from your ecommerce account to your regular Coinbase account, and then pay another fee to convert to fiat, and then likely another fee to have the fiat be transferred to your bank account. In other words, their 'zero fee' service is just a gimmick.

Contrarily, sellers continue to suffer losses due to the bias towards buyers.

Scammers know how to exploit that system and there hasn't been much done to defeat them because these market places are too afraid to lose customers. Payments through PayPal can be reversed months after the transaction was conducted. It really sucks for sellers to see PayPal debiting the whole amount from their balance.

We don't necessarily need a decentralized market place, but more Bitcoin adoption on existing centralized market places would suffice too. Just having that option is power to the people.

I add more viability to the scenario where we do not cross the $10,000 level again this year if we don't quickly get a bounce back up. If we get that bounce, I'll wear my imaginary moon boy cap again, but I have opened quite a significant short because of how this market action doesn't look good at all.

Last year I ignored all these signs, but I'm not doing that again. Being more rational helps looking at the market without thinking about your big hodl stack. Long term speaking everything is bright af, but the short term can be very nasty, especially with how short term price action doesn't factor in fundamentals.

Bitcoin can stay overbought/oversold for quite a long time. Remember that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent!

It would offer a DCA opportunity, but nothing more than that. It's bearish to see the price close below the 200EMA on the daily without bouncing off it first. In most cases these movements provide a glimpse of what the longer term trend will look like, so unless we make a massive bounce back above $9300 and close a few daily candles there, there is not much point in pushing a bullish narrative.

I expect the price to plummet to $7000-$7500 which will be my first DCA entry point and from there I will reassess the market's behavior for my next move.

This is the stage where shenanigans like that still work. Eventually that will no longer work where governments will look away and let financial institutions suppress the price just like they are doing with Gold as we speak. Governments have more incentive than anyone else to have Gold not rocket up because they're planning to add more Gold to their position for many more years to come.

Most Bitcoiners aren't too keen on Gold, but the people holding it know very well that it's only a matter of time before the house of cards starts to collapse. If you ask people what the main benefit of Gold is, they'll firmly answer by saying hedge against inflation. In other words, the government ran out of clueless souls manipulate, hence the reason they allow JPMorgan & Co to play a dirty game.

Inventions should solve problems and make our life better. Bitcoin does that. The blockchain industry people currently hype up is creating problems instead of solving them, not to mention how many billions have been vanished already. More of this money has been invested in sustaining luxurious life styles than in actual development. Says enough.

If we're looking at the businesses using blockchain tech, which in most cases isn't even a blockchain but a data-base on steroids, they clearly use the term blockchain to attract capital from clueless investors thinking they're investing in the goose that lays the Golden eggs. The goose's name is Bitcoin, which they are missing out on due to their 'blockchain not Bitcoin' attitude.

Miners aren't traders. They at most use futures and options to hedge the risk of seeing the price go down. I haven't seen anyone clearly articulate how miners are actually "manipulating" the market. If they were manipulating the market, it would make more sense that they would be steering the price up instead of down.

If we're looking at the current price action, it couldn't be more bearish with the price hovering under the 200EMA. If it falls below the 200MA that's holding it up right now, the manipulation you're referring to has horribly backfired on them. If we don't make a move back up, we'll get a very ugly monthly close with much lower levels to be visited.

Perhaps it would help you to read the posts above to understand that there was not a loss in hashrate at all. What we experienced was a minor fluctuation due to the variance in block times.

Diversification is a horrible advice within crypto, especially in the very long term. If you diversified your portfolio this year, the altcoins would have severely suppressed your percentage gains because Bitcoin outperformed most of them in dollar terms, and also in satoshi terms (which hurts people the most because their main target is to stack up satoshis).

Altcoins are interesting vehicles to ride out an overall altcoin season, but as long as they keep going down, I would recommend people to stay away from them. Without retail fomo money entering the altcoin market there won't be an altcoin season, unless exchanges as Binance collectively pump their altcoin prices to trigger retailers to flow in, but that's just wishful thinking at this point.

Diversification is something people do with stocks and some other legacy assets because it actually works there, but in crypto it does more harm than good.

That's actually a major inconvenience I haven't taken into consideration yet, thanks for pointing out. It's another problematic aspect that adds yet another obstacle for the average joe to actually utilize it. There is no possible way for average joes to freely open their browser and have a first look at what is being offered, and if it is of any use to them.

I'm pretty sure that a site can be built to offer people remote access, but that defeats the whole purpose of OB as decentralized market place. 

I know a lot of people in this space for years now, but never have I seen any of them use it after their initial test transactions. If Bitcoiners don't use it, why would average joes use it?

Ripple the company has been doing quite well, but that's mainly the result of businesses using their xCurrent product, which they don't need XRP for.

Another thing is that Ripple has been selling insane amounts of XRP to entities well under the spot price, but with a contractual agreement that only X percentage of tokens can be sold annually. It translates into a constant flow of selling pressure, and while dozens of entities are only able to sell a small percentage, combined, the small percentages add up to a large percentage, hence the price that keeps going down.

In the end, Ripple is doing what pre-mine altcoin schemes have been doing for years, which is to dump their bags. Shouldn't be too surprising. 

It certainly can. Bitcoin's market cap being $170 billion doesn't mean you need $34 billion to dump the price down by 20%. The actual orderbooks are so thin, that even a $100 million dump can easily wipe out 10% of Bitcoin's whole market cap. It's even worse when it comes to altcoins where a $100 million dump on Ethereum will probably flash wick the price 75% lower at the very minimum.

The same pretty much applies to stocks. Microsoft's market cap is $1 trillion as we speak. $1 billion in stocks being dumped in one go is enough to wipe out $100 billion of its market cap. Market caps are severely leveraged metrics, especially when it comes to altcoins.

I gave it a shot as buyer like two months ago, and I was actually surprised by how convenient it really is. I initially had the impression that it was a hassle to use and whatnot based on experiences of people on social media, but I think that people mostly say that because they have heard others say so, likely also people who haven't used it.

I think the main problem here is that the demand for a decentralized market place isn't really there at this stage, because most of what's being sold on OB doesn't require anyone to skip centralized market places for. Another aspect is that it lacks marketing, which in crypto is very important if you want to gain ground.

I really wish OB to gain more ground but if it hasn't been able to do so in the previous years, chances are that it won't take off in the forthcoming years.

Volatility isn't that much of an issue if the bids are based on BTC rather than USD. I have seen enough examples of how these BTC based auctions have worked quite nicely on this forum. I have ran such auctions too in the past, and didn't bother too much about the price because it's due to go up in the very long term.

In the end, it's the responsibility of the person starting the auction to factor in the aspect of volatility. You know that the price can either go up or down once people start bidding in BTC, so if that's not an issue, then I don't see why it would be more complicated. Also, most people participating in these auctions want satoshis more than USD.

You can also just nominate auction start and bid in USD and then have the transaction settled in BTC afterwards. Plenty enough options.

I don't think it's as bad as you think it is. It's somehow hard for people to fathom that the price of Bitcoin isn't based on anything but what we see happen in the charts. There was no 'real' reason for the price to go up from $3000 to $14,000, but there was (still is) way more reason for the price to go down from where it has been hovering around lately. Profits have to be taken.

If you look at Bitcoin's historical performance, we have always pulled back by at least 50% after a major bull run, which we haven't done yet, so this might very well be that 50% pull back that shakes out a lot of people. It's impossible to say where we will bottom out, but it's quite easy to say that we'll be back stronger than ever before. Patience is key here. Slow accumulation is what I will be focusing on.

People have always tried to link news articles or other events to price drops/increases. It's something people will continue to do because they have no clue about how the charts have turned bearish af in the last couple of weeks with every touch that confirmed the bearish triangular formation. Statistically, the probability of them breaking out to the downside is 75ish%.

If you also look at the extremely low volumes, which is another solid indicator that a huge move is near, mainly because of how the range has been tightening (tigher range = less volatility = less volume), the market was due for a big move. Unfortunately for people, it went down instead of up, but it shouldn't have come as a surprise. Lower levels are due. DCA the market down is the way to go if you want to grow your stack.

In reality, the hashrate dropped MAX 5% if you calculate based on a longer span of blocks, which is very normal. If we go back to the silly metrics a lot of news outlets use, the hashrate PUMPED 30% after that FLASH CRASH. Why don't they report about that? Clear example of how news outlets want to scare off their clueless readers.

Estimated difficulty increase in ~2 days is +7% lol.... What a flash crash that was....  The only REAL crash was the price today that went down by $1500.

Definitely not a fake-out. The volumes that are being generated are too high for this to be a fake-out. The support levels that were holding the price above the horizontal support of the descending triangle will now form massive resistance. We'll have a very ugly daily close, and with the month coming nearly to an end, we might even get a very ugly monthly close if it does so below the $8500 level.

Some people have been speculating about the price to break up because the mass was so overly bearish, but it seems that the increasingly bearish charts and the higher probabilities of going down were spot on this time.

I doubt that. People who wait for a "perfect opportunity" are usually the ones who are missing out the most. If they right now are waiting for $7000 to start buying, they will lower their target once the price starts to come closer to that $7000 level, because they then expect it to go down more. That's how these "perfect opportunity" buyers will keep missing out.

If you're really bullish on Bitcoin, you dollar cost average every now and then to stack up satoshis.

Are you kidding me? They're not dumping anything. Bakkt actually benefits from a price that's going up because people aren't too keen on buying into something that's going down. You're basically saying that they are destroying their own market. Nah.

We're just witnessing a continuation of the bearish momentum. We tested the very bottom of the descending triangle perfectly. It's going to be interesting what will happen from here, but it's not looking too good. The sellers have plenty of ammo to sell while the buyers will back off more and more, especially when we definitively break down.  

This is fantastic adoption to have because they're not messing with shitty cash settled contracts, but spot coins. The more of these platforms are active, the more perceptible it becomes for people how scarce Bitcoin really is. Another positive aspect is that the exchanges such as Coinbase holdings a lot of coins right now will bleed some of it to competitors that weren't available before.

https://www.coindesk.com/germanys-no-2-exchange-launches-bitcoin-spot-trading

People shouldn't expect these newly launched platforms to bring in liquidity right away. It takes time to build up clientele. Another thing is that most retailers don't bite unless they see the price go up a lot, which we haven't lately. Patience.