The most common Bitcoin question that I get are, "When is the best time to buy" and my advice is always the same. I tell them that it is always a good time to buy, because it is better to have your foot in the door than having it slammed in your face. 

Let's say the price is at $3000+ now and they bought some bitcoins and the price drops to $2000 before it goes back to $19 000, then you will never regret the $1000 per coin that you might have received, if you waited for it to go down to $2000. If you wait and it goes back to say $10 000, then you will surely regret not buying at $3000. 

A lot of these rating agencies are just making waves and headlines for no reason. Will they retract this statement, when the price drops lower or if we see no increase in the price for 2 or 3 years? Remember... before the 2017 spike in the price, we had a 3 year slump. 

It is easy to make a prediction, but a whole other story to back that statement with facts. Yes, the price dropped by more than 80% and most people would make the logical assumption that it is low enough to be a bargain, but when will the price increase again for that to be a huge bargain? 

It will not surprise me if some anti-bitcoin group are doing this, because they know bad publicity like this would turn more people against Bitcoin. I hope the authorities and some white hat hackers might be able to track these people and make an example of them.

People are quick to judge the technology, but they forget that the technology is just another form of money. These people could have demanded a cash drop and they would never be able to catch them. <Cash <circulated> are more anonymous than Bitcoin> 

This "victim" mentality is really pathetic. Did anyone hold a gun to your or anyone else's head to make you buy bitcoins? Did anyone force you to sell your bitcoins prematurely? You only become a victim, if you are forced to do something, not when you use your own common sense or just pure logic to do something.

What about the millions of people who made a ton of money during 2017? What about the millions of people who are using bitcoins daily to send money home to their family and who are paying less than $1 in fees, no matter what the amount is.   Are they all victims?

This forum has been generating income for 1000s of people, who might not have any other way to generate an income. So stop blaming other people for your mistakes.  

Bitcoin is like a virus that mutates and adapt to the changing environment, so why would it fail? Yes, before Bitcoin we had other centralized money that failed miserably and Bitcoin broke that mold and opened the gateway to a new form of money that cannot be stopped.

We should applaud the accomplishment and support the freedom that it brought to the world, because we can now achieve much more financial privacy and a lot more freedom to protect our wealth.  

It will be hard to sell this to them, because most of them are already fighting hyperinflation and a massive decrease in the value of their Fiat currency and then you want to sell bitcoins to them, which nearly dropped in value of over 80% in a year?

It is easier to sell the idea of Bitcoin to people, if the hyperinflation losses is much more than the drop in the Bitcoin price, but we only have that kind of scenario in 1 or 2 countries at the moment.   <The argument being that they will lose much less, than having it in their local currency with higher loss percentages.>

I will go even better, by buying bitcoins for them and giving that to them for a gift. I would tell them that it will be a delayed gift, because they will have to wait for the price to skyrocket, before they can buy the gift that they want. It would be like a gift voucher that increase in value. 

I did this with my brother in 2016 and he sold those bitcoins in 2017 <when I told him to> and he said it was the best gift I ever gave him, because it was worth a lot more, when he cashed it out. 

We used ChangeBit when they were still around and we did it through Reddit. I see there are a new Lightning Network tip bot that works with the Lightning network now, so micro tipping with Satoshi's are more practical now. I think it is called "lntipbot".

You should just stay away from doing this in /r/Bitcoin because it is against their rules to promote services in that sub-reddit.  Rather try one of the FreeGiveaway subreddits. <https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinAll/> 

This was to be expected from any government that wants to protect the value of their local reserve currency and also the impact on their economy. Everyone knows governments are manipulating the value of their reserve currency to artificially stimulate their economy, so it is naturally for them to react in this way, if something wants to replace their manipulation tool. 

We will get strong resistance from governments if we continue with the goals and visions of replacing Fiat currencies, we should rather promote co-existence with fiat currencies and then let the people decide what they want.   

" For now, only German residents can go through the KYC [know-your-customer] process. Very soon, hopefully already in January, this will be extended to other jurisdictions inside of the EU. " - It is a good start. 

I always said, if one Bank are willing to gamble on losing their Banking license by being the only Bank that are going against other Banks, then this Bank will surely garner a lot of support from the Crypto currency community.

We are seeing a lot of Banks that are closing people's accounts, when they find links to Crypto currency business and these Banks does not deserve our communities support or our money. 

The US policy changes hardly make the news, because it happens so often.  

A real Bitcoiner knows government policy changes will not stop Bitcoin, so they are not really bothered with that at all. We saw how the US tried to stop "alcohol" in the prohibition era and they failed miserably.

Yes, positive regulations does make a difference, but people are too focused on the "Price" crisis now, to bother with government policy changes.  

Well the truth is in the pudding and the pudding will be the signing of these addresses that are mentioned here. This is where CW claims of being Satoshi also failed, because he could not sign those addresses.

What would the goal be to reveal Satoshi's identity? <Fame?> You know the person who reveals the true identity of Satoshi would be ridiculed by this community, right? Dorian Nakamoto's life was made a living hell, when that reporter made false claims that he was Satoshi and people nearly crucified that reporter for doing that.

Do you want to be that reporter? 

Your post seems to be addressed to all the "newbies" but I think most of them are not ready to answer those questions.  

Let's take the stock market as an example. A lot of companies list on the stock exchange and people invest in them and then suddenly something bad happens and investors start to pull out their money and investment out of those stocks. Some investors see this as a good opportunity to buy these stocks at a reduced price and they start buying it again.

Bitcoin is going through a transition period where speculators are withdrawing their investment, because they are not willing to wait years for a return on their investment. As the price goes down, some new investors and some old timers will start buying again, because it is much cheaper to buy these bitcoins at a reduced price.  

That will stop it from going to zero. 

A lot of people seem to think that a economic collapse of the Fiat system will push people to Crypto currencies like Bitcoin, but early signs point to the contrary. The latest stock market instability did not push a lot of investments into Bitcoin, which is widely regarded as a good store of value. 

Investors tend to run to safe havens like precious metals in troubled times, but the Gold market is also not showing any signs that people are panicking yet. <I think they are over confident that the Stock markets would recover> 

I hope I am wrong and people will flock to Bitcoin, when things turns bad in 2019. 

Wow, now that was a gruesome exercise to read through all of that! <Wall of text> 

You have a way with words, but your views and opinions borders on science fiction and should be read in that context. <Read it like a story book> 

I am currently watching a science fiction series <12 Monkeys> on Netflix, where they jump back in time to change the future. <Stopping a virus that almost destroys humankind> and this got me thinking if Satoshi might have been from the future, trying to stop a inevitable global economic collapse and WWIII. 

I previously heard that exchanges are charging Alt coins to be listed on their exchange, so this is a quick method for Coinbase to make a few millions by just listing these coins. 

They also need some other "new" revenue of income, since transactions are on a all time low now, with the Bitcoin price being this low. So, the quick solution to pay the bills are just to add some other coins with some trade volumes. 

Does this makes sense?

They hardly have more than 50 transactions per Block, so why would they need all that scaling? ^sarcasm^ 

Moore's law will not even be able to keep up with the storage requirements that this scaling would have in the future and the majority of the people running full nodes, will not be able to afford the biggest and fastest hard drives on the market. How many of the people can afford the Samsung PM1633a – 16 TB now? < priced at around $10,000 >

These guys live in a Utopian dream world, where everyone is filthy rich. 

 

It is all about control. The government wants full control over every aspect of their citizens life and one way of doing this, is to control their "money". They know people cannot do a lot without money and if they can control or track it, then they can control the people who owns it.

Try moving all your money from one country to the next and see what happens.  Also try to buy a large quantity of weapons and explosives and see what happens. They want to know what you are buying and how much money you have and also where that money is going. You have ZERO financial privacy in the FIAT system. 

Bitcoin gives you financial freedom and also financial privacy. 

Who are the people who are benefitting from a low price at the moment? Even if these people bought at a low price <lower than the price is now> then they are still losing out on more profits, if the price is this low. Everyone <early & late investors> wants a high price to get a higher return on their investment.

The only people who will benefit, are the people who has not bought bitcoins yet and wants to buy at the lowest price possible. These people are unable to manipulate the price, because they have no bitcoins to dump.  

I think this is a very smart move, because everyone is saying "Buy the Dip" and almost nobody is doing this. IF the market recovers and the price goes back to the ATH and these people bought at $3000+ ...then they will make huge profits and it will be a life changing moment for MANY people who are fighting hyper inflation in those countries.

This can even lift people out of poverty and into the middle income group, if they can invest their profits into small businesses.