It's always good to point out scams, regardless of how obvious they look. Something that's an obvious scam to me might be seen as an actual opportunity by others because they have no clue about anything.

After two decades of massive growth of the internet, there are still thousands upon thousands of people every year falling for scams where they send their bank card with PIN number to an address they believe is from their bank. Result is that their bank accounts get emptied and people end up broke and have to beg the bank for a refund (which nowadays isn't as easy as it was back in the days).

I'll report the domains listed. The more people do so the sooner action will be taken.

Bitfinex is the prime example of how one company is fucking with people over and over again, and they still use that platform and their phony Tether tokens. If Bitfinex, isn't shady enough, then we can also use Hitbtc as an example of how a crap exchange on every possible level still attracts new people despite the hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of complaints easy to find when you search for it.

Another example of why reputation is meaningless in crypto; BTG has yet again faced a double spend attack some days ago, and the coin hasn't been sold off. It didn't even sell off when a major altcoin exchange such as Bittrex delisted it after a huge double spend attack. People in crypto are messed up. No wonder scammers can screw people over and over.

If exchange reputation mattered, we would be left with only the Coinbase's of the space.

Those are probably the dumb herd just following a bunch of "gurus" where one of them preaches total freedom, and the other preaches how important regulators are and how they can help legitimize this space. I wouldn't pay attention to those because they're here just to see their bags pump and shout BULL RUN or ALT SEASON whenever they see the price increase by a few %.

I rather focus on those who build cool and useful tools/services, and they are either for or against regulations, not a blend of both. Fewer regulations is always preferred of course, but we know that's not possible within a space that's enabling trustless value movement and storage.

In all honesty, I take my hat off to the platforms playing this game by the rules. They are attracting new capital. No or not significant enough capital enters through crappy exchanges such as Hitbtc, Huobi, OKEx, etc. Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken, Gemini, etc those are the exchanges allowing this space to welcome new capital.

That's right. It has become a trend amongst exchanges to offer OTC services because of the demand. Fee wise it's much more interesting because you can skip the part where you lose 10-15% in slippage by paying a broker a ~3% fee and get spot value without affecting the actual market price. Pretty neat.

I would just recommend people to consult the exchanges offering OTC services because they will be dealing directly with one of them. It's always better to get information straight from the source than to have people on social media or friends say something that might not be of any help to you.

It's down statistically, but that's all there is to say about it. 2017 bull run was driven by insane hype and fomo while current prices are trending up in a healthy manner without hype ($9000 without hype is pretty damn good). Also, we haven't spent all that much time around the very highs of the 2017 bull run, so it's pretty insignificant on that front as well.

As far as altcoins go, they will obviously follow and come to a point where they leverage well beyond Bitcoin's increases with how thin their orderbooks are. When that happens consistently, you know irrational buying and fomo is around the corner and therefore prices will shoot up to levels beyond what people deem possible. Crypto never fails to surprise people price wise.

The bad side of bull runs is that people lose their mind and scammers will effortlessly empty their pockets. People never learn. 

It really depends. Smart money definitely has exits strategies, but most people (dumb money) act irrationally during either bear or bull markets.

I have seen it happen around me where people aren't satisfied with the number of coins that they hold and think it's better to add to their position instead of unloading. I think it's safe to say that we all have gone through a time where we wish we bought more coins instead of being so conservative. It's tough to see the price go up a lot while at the same time thinking about how much profit you could have had if you bought more.

In the end, it's better to just have a big fat hodl stack and sit on it for 5-10 years than to worry about missing out on the next bull cycle. The base floor of the price keeps increasing steadily, but gets a massive boost after each bull cycle, even after the 70-80% bear market.

That's certainly possible, but the odd part is that Binance in the last 12ish months has been moving all its cold wallet holdings back and forth like a dozen of times, which not one single other exchange does.

Another odd part is that despite US traders no longer being able to use that platform, the volume on the BTC/USDT pair hasn't gone down much at all. One would expect the volumes to see a very firm decline if US traders compromised 30-40% of their holdings.

Bitfinex's past exodus was not only evident from their cold wallet holdings that were shrinking month after month, but also from their much lower volumes, which makes sense if fewer traders are left on the platform. Binance either artificially inflates its volumes, or some other shady stuff is going on there.

People tend to always focus on the negative aspect of mixing and whatnot, while they completely forget that the same privacy hackers enjoy, is also beneficial to all of us normal folks. Criminals use what they deem useful (Bitcoin, cash, gift cards, prepaid debit cards, Gold, etc) and whatever they deem useful is also useful to us. In that regard, I'm not bothered at all by articles like this.

I'm very much looking forward to how upgrades such as Schnorr will change mixing in general. It shouldn't come as a surprise that authorities won't like to see such advancements in Bitcoin because it took them years to get to the point they are today, so imagine how long it will take to catch up this time with much more privacy enhancing functionalities baked into Bitcoin.

Even if we ignore the 'not your keys not your coins', hacks, and government seizing their coins parts, it's still bad because most people have their coins ready to sell in their accounts. Only users who use the vault feature offered by Coinbase can't sell instantly because there is a 48 hour waiting period for your withdrawal to be processed. In other words, there is nothing good about this.

I find it actually more shocking that an exchange such as Huobi has 255,000BTC in its cold wallets. Currently ranked 1st in Bitcoin's top 100 richlist. Binance once held +400,000BTC, but currently only 250,000-300,000BTC can be found in its cold wallets. Where is the rest? 

In crypto land 4 years is like 100 years in legacy market land. In that regard, it's pretty safe to say that the halving after the halving this year is not priced in.

I personally do not believe the current halving is priced in fully, but even if so, it's extremely lucrative to initiate a rally beforehand because it immediately makes people believe that we're having a halving pump. This pump I however do not deem sustainable and will very likely be sold off to levels that are more in line with the current mini uptrend.

It doesn't take all that much money for institutions to shake up the market and then sell the news. Every major event in the more recent years has been sold just before/after happening.

I think that every one of the assets will sink deep to lows people thought to not be possible anymore due to the fundamental growth and whatnot.

Fiat will always be a safe haven, especially in times where fiat is the only form of money that gets the bills paid, and in times where people lose jobs, sell everything to pay their bills, fiat will most likely be the only in-demand asset. People usually only focus on the USD, but there are more large currencies that are able to function as safety net.

I sincerely hope that I am wrong on that and Bitcoin will do well, but given its speculative nature, it's very hard to believe.

There is some degree of privacy, but no anonymity, regardless of how much steps there are in-between each and every movement or attempt to obfuscate source.

I'm confident that governments are already at a point where it's quite easy for them to expose most people conducting "shady" transactions, but they are so insignificant that it doesn't pay off to chase after those people. It costs more than you can extract from it.

In that regard, I expect governments to open up more and have Bitcoin and other crypto assets grow within an already quite centralized ecosystem of exchange/wallet platforms. If the user experience of crypto doesn't quickly improve, most people will not store their coins themselves, but solely rely on centralized entities to do it for them.

The problem however is that the level of monitoring happening on these cards is huge because the underlying financial institutions subject the issuers of these cards to extremely harsh/strict policies. I wouldn't want to risk visiting a country to find out that the card has been blocked due to "suspicous activity" and stay without funds for days.

In case people plan to go on a trip, make sure you cash out your coins before the actual trip and use a legacy fiat debit card instead of the crypto debit card crap. It's centralization on top of even more centralization. Relying on anything related to crypto is just a pain in the ass. Not worth it in my opinion, but people are free to do what they want of course.

Meeting up with someone in person would be the very last thing on my list. I don't want to signal to anyone that I own Bitcoin in person.

I have legit not once paid attention to an orderbook before placing a trade. It's just not a viable metric (if you can call it even that) with how easily it is to spoof, plus exchanges some times tend to fill up their own books just to mask the gaps between certain price points. What do you think will happen when the price reaches near those orders? Yep. They will be pulled back in an instant.

Another thing is that nowadays more exchanges provide additional features to their whale traders that regular users can't tap into. Hidden orders is such a feature. The only way for you to know that there is a hidden order is when there is a lot of buying/selling happening at a certain level without the price actually moving.

I think you are referring to dollar cost averaging plans? They generally do work out pretty well, but what people should keep in mind is that the moment of entering is important, and how frequently you buy. People tend to only show you the bullish narrative of dollar cost averaging, but it could also work against you if you buy the market down during a longer term down trend.

Instead of blindly buying in, make sure you know just enough about technical analysis so that you know where the potentially best possible entry points are. Buying every single dip is an easy way to burn through your capital and end up stressed, simply because you see the price go down further but have no more funds left to buy Bitcoin with. That really sucks hard.

Also, most successful dollar cost average stories pop up when the price has been going up for a good while. Currently most people are desperately waiting for the price to reverse trend and see their dollar cost average plan pay off.

People hoping for wars and recessions to see Bitcoin's price go up are retarded. We have a decade of history telling us that Bitcoin thrives extremely well when the regular markets thrive well, so why hope for doom scenarios to play out? I'm pretty sure that most of the people hoping for doom scenarios to play out own like 0.1BTC and hope it goes up x1000......

People are far gone. Bitcoin's price will be sold down so hard during a recession that people wish they just held on to their 'scam' fiat monnies. Nobody wants to hold a bag of a risk-on asset that has done multiple 80-90% crashes with thriving legacy markets. I certainly don't want to be left holding a super-mega-heavy bag during an actual recession.

There are plenty of exchanges with these coins listed, so the same 'success' can easily be replicated on other platforms since trading is more a technical thing rather than an exchange thing.

Ah well, a few bots buying/selling into their own orders does miracles. 

At least they seem to have a pretty decent Alexa ranking, but even that can be manipulated quite easily nowadays. Yobit, despite how shady it is and how many people here rightfully dislike that exchange, has not jumped on the wash trading bandwagon. I can only have respect for that, especially with how easy it is to artifically get your volume to do a x10-50 to get a higher CMC rank.

As long as people fall for Nigerian Princes who inherited $50 million but need your $5000 to unlock the bank account, people will definitely fall for scam giveaways.

People haven't figured out yet that free money doesn't exist, expecially when it's too good to be true. If you are sitting on your lazy ass all day, you don't know what the value of money is. In other words, you don't know how difficult it actually is to make money. These people are the easiest victims and represent quite a large group at the same time.

Quite often there are live videos going on on youtube where scammers pretend to be Coinbase or Ripple CEO and give away huge sums of money. In real time you can see how many fools are sending coins to their addresses. The worst part is that youtube hasn't done much to combat these scammers, while they were fast to strike legit crypto content creators on their platform. 

The thing is that people badly want him to start embracing Bitcoin.

I cringed hard back when Peter Schiff received a lot of donations to his Bitcoin address, and all those donations came from imbeciles thinking that they can change his mind on Bitcoin. Instead of actually spending their coins and help the ecosystem, they sent their coins to someone who will use it as ammo to trash talk Bitcoin.

People need to accept that even if Peter Schiff secretly likes Bitcoin, nothing will make him publicly admit that because his main business revolves around Gold. To make things even worse, I'm pretty confident that a lot of the businesses he partnered with will cut all ties when he changes his anti Bitcoin narrative.

I think accepting Bitcoin will serve you well, especially around schools where you are dealing with a lot of youngsters who surely know what Bitcoin is and likely own a sat or two as well.

What I find lacking is that there aren't all that many local places where we can spend our coins, and that's something you can start to change. I'm pretty confident that it will motivate other stalls/merchants to follow, especially in times where the price isn't all that far from its next parabolic cycle.

I do wonder what the goal is with the coins that people will be spending at your stall. Hold? Convert to fiat?