And this is why BCH will die soon. Bitcoin is doing great when spam is gone (like today) and as people switch to SegWit transactions and LN being deployed, things will go even better. But lets imagine the doomsday scenario when Bitcoin fees skyrocket to the moon - would people switch to BCH? The answer is no, because there are thousands of altcoins, and many of them are much better than BCH - Monero, Zcash and Dash have privacy, Ethereum has big mining support and smart contracts, tons of other coins offer fees even lower than BCH, LTC has been around almost as long as Bitcoin. BCH doesn't bring any innovation, it's a mindless copypaste created by amateurs.

Currently Bitcoin is not illegal in Ukraine - it's in a gray area, meaning that people can use it freely as the government does not prohibit or regulate it (though it probably can't be used as payment method because there's only one allowed currency for payment in Ukraine). It's pretty clear, judging from this article and previous claims from Ukrainian government, that Bitcoin soon will be regulated, and those new laws would be similar to existing Bitcoin laws in EU or US. This is a bit bad, because people will have less freedom than they have now, but on the other hand it can be worse - some governments might just outlaw it or set up very harsh regulations.

The market will decide what is needed and what is not when it compes to blockchain apps. Right now lots of altcoins in their ICO's have some big value given as a credit to them, but very few present any real working results, and many of them are far away from 100% realization. Take even ETH for example - do you know any working smart contract apps? The first time they have tried to build something with it, the DAO fiasco happened. But what it is even worse is those private blockchains - they have almost nothing in common with Bitcoin and just trying to steal it's brand.

No, speculation is actually a very good thing. It helps to determine the real open market value of something, so economy can work properly. If prices were dictated by some central organ, it would be planned economy like the one that was in Soviet Union - time has proven that it doesn't work, because without market signals it's impossible to allocate resources efficiently. Those who hate traders are usually just envious of them, because it looks like traders are just making easy money. But in reality it's a very hard job.

In the long run forks like BCH and SegWit2x don't matter, if we are going to the moon the impact of forks would be unnoticeable in a year or two. This is why they are treated as airdrops by some people here, since you will essentially be able to increase your BTC portfolio by 10-20%. If this fork will be even more stillborn than Bcash and no exchange will support it (due to lack of replay protection for example), I will try to claim by B2X coins via Bitpay or some other service that will switch to 2x.

I personally don't think that insider trading is inherently wrong or should be illegal - this is not like stealing money from someones pockets, because people voluntarily agree to participate in open market. If there is demand from people for regulation (because they view such practices as fraudulent), it is possible to create voluntary regulation inside Bitcoin economy - i.e. exchanges setting up their own rules for the benefit of the market and not because the government told them. The question is, do people really want it, or maybe everyone is okay with totally unregulated markets?



Pump groups are not the same as insider trading, since they only influence price via market means. In traditional markets this treated as separate form of fraud.

51% attack means attacker is mining valid blocks with malicious intent - either a chain reorg to make a double spending or mining empty blocks to stop the network. This means that even full nodes are affected by it, while with hard fork full nodes just reject invalid blocks. SPV clients, if configured properly, also detect chain splits. Online services hold the power to decide for their users what chain to follow, which can be very damaging to either chain, but big exchanges would quickly suffer legal consequences if they'll try to force unwanted chain on their users. So, this kind of attack by hard fork is not as scary as it may sound, and it's definitely not the same as 51% attack.

It all comes to how much risk you can afford. If you have small amounts of money to invest, you may want to take bigger risks, and if you have bigger amounts, you should take safer bets. Bitcoin is the safest cryptocurrency, so it's very suitable for higher amounts. ETH and LTC are too big altcoins, they are more volatile than Bitcoin, but can be hodled together with it, in smaller proportion. Then you can choose coins that has some potential - it's important to do your own research and don't just blindly trust in whitepapers and hype. Coins like Monero, Golem, Sia, Steem, Golem belong here (from top 5 to top 20). They might succeed and return huge profits, but also might fail. All other coins (starting from top 20) are very risky and very likely to be just pump and dump schemes - they are bad for hodling long term in high amounts. Just remember to always research about coins you are about to invest, instead of blindly panic buying.

The crypto journalists are at it again with phrases like "$13 billion sell-off". Marketcap is a simple multipilication of price by total number of coins, but it in no way means that all Bitcoins in the world can be bought with those money or that if marketcap dropped by $13 billions, then some traders actually sold coins for that sum. Here's what really happened: there are buy and sell orders, and they have certain depth - for example, a total of 300 BTC in sell orders from $4,700 to $5,000 - they all got triggered when someone agreed to bought, so the price moved to $5,000 and traders made for example a total of 200 BTC in buy orders from $5,000 to $4,700 - and then someone started triggering those orders and the price went down. This means that the real amount of USD that moved in and out of Bitcoin is measured in millions of dollars, not billions or dozens of billions. Always look at volumes and depth before claiming that something has billions of value.

Just the same as everyone who knew about Bitcoin since its early days, but didn't hodl to this day, which is a huge number of people. The guys who bough pizza's for $10 worth of BTC could have invested some $10,000 during those days, and be billionaires now. Bitcoin grew 50,000 times since 2010 which is insanely huge for traditional investors - most of them sell when they see 5-10x profit in short term, very few held for 100x return. The only people who hold since 2009-2010 are those who have deep understanding of Bitcoins technology and its potential to grow into a major economic force, but normal guys were taking profits and quitting because of fears of a bubble.

Overenthusiastic support for cryptocurrencies might hurt fiat and banks, and since they are so big, even losing 1-2% would hurt more than profits from mining, at least in short term. The cost of manufacturing miners also makes it risky for governments, because if Bitcoin will crash, all that equipment will be useless, and governments really don't like doing high risk investments. They might jump in when BTC will grow bigger and stabilize though.

If you don't know, insider trading is a practice on stock markets when people buy or sell assets while having access to some nonpublic information about the asset. The question is - is there non-public information about Bitcoin, and are some traders using it to their advantage?

My list of suspects:

Developers. They can tell about upcoming updates to some limited group of people at first, which will give them and edge over traders who don't know that information. Some bull runs might be caused by leaks about major updates. For example, we might see Lightning Network go live soon, and this might have been priced in already.

Miners. Miners have their bluff card called hard fork. It can really scare the market, allowing them to buy cheap coins, because the price will bounce back as soon as it will become clear that there won't be any fork. For example, there was a big crash before SegWit signalling period, as BTC dropped to $1,800 because of fears that the voting will fail.

Regulators. Remember "China will ban Bitcoin" FUD? People from regulating offices can use or leak information that will have a significant impact on the price.

Exchanges - they see deposit and withdrawal flows and can react to them. If exchange operator notices a huge incoming BTC deposit, they might assume that those coins will be dumped, so they might try to open short position before that big deposit gets confirmed. Exchanges can also have some influence on the market in chain split situations.

I think "buy the rumors, sell the news" is a much better method of trading than watching on charts and applying technical analysis, which is essentially gambling with some small positive EV if you do it right. 

You can create as many copies as you want and store them in separate places - at  your house, in your backyard, somewhere in the woods, you can give it to some third party (just encrypt in with a strong password so they won't bruteforce it), you can even store it in a cloud. But my favorite method is just momorizing Electrum 12 word seed, so your brain will become your wallet. This can be a very strong backup, you just have to repeat the phrase each day to make sure you will not forget it.

I don't really like when people measure value of alts in USD and compare it with Bitcoin, alts are dominantly trated against BTC, and their USD price usually reflect USD price of Bitcoin - except when BTC rises, most alts react by dropping in their BTC value, but when BTC crashes, they rarely increase in their value to compensate for it. This means that performance of alts should be measured in BTC, because you usually have to give up some part of BTC performance for a riskier bet.

The village from your example has to be economically isolated from outside world for this bad scenario to work, otherwise it won't cause any big price rise, the larger market will just soak new money. Also, if people are poor, than they won't be able to gather any big amounts to invest, so even if their wealth will have some impact on their local markets, it will be short lived as soon as their money run dry, because their incomes hasn't increased, unless they actually work for crypto. And overall social inequality rarely becomes devastating - usually even poor benefit from economic growth, just not as fast as the other.

What's so special about 0.0005 BTC? The current minimum fee is 1000 satoshi, at $100,000 that would be $1. By that time transactions fees will be very important for sustaining Bitcoins decentralization, because block rewards will be lower and lower. Right now each block rewards around 14 BTC, which in return gets us a huge amount of hashpower to secure 77 billion network. As the price will continue to grow, so will out need for more hashpower to protect the network from double-spending attacks. The only way to get this protection is by having bigger fees. If Bitcoin will succeed in building new economy, it will be mostly a settlement layer for offchain payment systems, as mainchain would be used only for big transactions.

Seems like touching $5,000 has triggered a correction, as the price is now in $4,700-4,800 zone. I think what happened now can be explained some traders taking profits at important psychological level of 5 thousands, and since this response was too strong, the price dipped further down. Next we'll probably have a ground around $4,500-4,700, and than we'll either test 5,000 again, or 4,200 and lower. The later seems more likely, as everyone is expecting correction after a very long bull run. But I personally prefer to hodl and look for the longer perspective instead of trying to play the markets against people who might have more information than me.

"Pump and dump" usually refers to a specific scheme when one powerful entity manipulates the price to get profit. If the price is simply volatile and has huge swings, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's been manipulated. Also it's important to look at market depth before building and suspicions - the higher amount of bids, the less likely it is to be some sort of manipulation. And even if there will be a big correction, it won't mean that it's the dump from pumpers - rises and crashes can be driven by many different reasons.

It's happening, but very slowly, which is good, because we don't need any hyper speculation. Bitcoin and crypto market cap is still a tiny fraction of legacy financial system, and if full exodus to happen, the market would grow hundreds and thousands of times. But I don't think that this is realistic, more likely crypto, gold and fiat will continue coexisting. Most people will be using whatever is best for them for investing, storing and using, which will lead to different choices.

Current owners of "dirty" coins might easily deal with it by mixing -> selling BTC for XMR -> mixing again. But this doesn't solve the problem in general, since there will just be new owners of "dirty" coins. I see 2 soltuions for this - the weak one and the strong one. The weak solution would be to swap coins between people who need clean coins (customers of Coinbase and other exchanges that comply with US laws) and people who don't mind having "dirty" coins - people from some Eastern European countries, Africa, Asia, etc. This might be risky for the later, because just like it happened with BTC-E, the US government might seize some local exchanges from other countries or force local law enforcement to do it. The strong option would be to mix "dirty" coins with a big amounts of clean coins with a very high number of transactions and via some very trusted mixer. This would have huge costs in transaction fees and would require coordination from many bystanders. I can see it happening only if owners of "dirty" coins will organize this whole event and pay some bounties to people who are willing to participate in mixing with their clean coins.