I would agree with you if tether wasn't facing so many problems with audits. What you are saying is the model under which tether should work, but we just don't know if that is true. There is no way to know if they everything single tether in circulation is really backed on a 1:1 ratio with the USD. This is there the problem starts, and the reason why tether doesn't bring any confidence to the market, as you are referring. It's quite the opposite right now, and tether brings a lot of doubts, even on the bitcoin price itself, because some people claim that maybe tether was printed like fiat, out of thin air, and used to pump bitcoin price. Without audits, we simply cant know for sure. This is why I don't really like tether, and I don't use it.

No one knows what will happen, but you really shouldn't see bitcoin as a money making machine. If you see it this way, and others see look at it the same way, then I must say that the future won't be that good. I think bitcoin will have a bright future, if people finally start looking at it, as a potencial decentralized and trustable payment method, both for international transactions, or simply to buy a cup of coffee on your favorite coffee shop. It will take a while for us to get there, but if LN continues developing and getting adopted at the same time, like we are seeing now, the future should be promising. We also see companies like Microsoft maintaining it's interest in the technology, and those are great news as well. Even in the bank sector we are seeing some positive news, and the same thing goes for regulation.

Bitcoin looks great, and yes I do expect its price to go up, specially because of the halve in 2020, but that's not the main reason why I'm holding my coins, and investing every time I can.

I'm not so sure about this. Not saying I don't agree with you. To be honest I don't really like ripple as well because it's not decentralized, and it's not really a coin either. It's just a tool that banks are considering using, but even then see no real value on the token itself, just on the technology. As for coinbase not adding them because of that, is where I don't agree with you. They don't really care about what ripple is, they just care about profit, and ripple has decent volume in trading. So if users are interested they would surely add them. I would prefer them to add stellar for example, but it's probably going to be ripple.

If it's not ripple, then the coin will surely dump in the next weeks because of these false rumors.

Although I love sports betting, and I actually have some profit on it, I must say I'm way far from a pro bettor, and I do it in at a recreational level. Even doing it as a hobby, I do a lot of research, because I actually think that some of the fun in betting, is testing how good is your knowledge in sports. I try to get some valuable odds, but in the end I just choose the bet I think it will be a winner, and I don't search for the best odds on every bookmaker. I know I'm losing a lot of money here, because finding the best odds is a must if you want to be serious in sports betting, but for now I don't care.

As for the type of bets, I prefer single bets. I tried parlays, and I found them appealing but it's hard for me to win them, and I got tired for losing some got bets just because I combined them and missed one hit.

I need to say that is a "safe" trading method if you are a good trader, otherwise you better stay away from it. Don't forget that from your income you should also get some money out for savings, so maybe 10% for savings and 5% for trading, although that is already 15% of your income, and most people cant even afford that, because they spend almost all their salary in essential needs, and they can't even get money for savings.

Anther option would be to spend an entire year getting 10% out for savings, and then, after that year, if nothing had happened and you still have your saings intact, you could take 5% of that total amount for trading, and see if it helps you get an extra income. Instead f withdrawing your profit, your could just try to increase your bankroll from there. If you are good, you should never have to take money from your salary ever again, and you will soon be able to take money out o trading as profit.

Well the "partnership" between casino industry and bitcoin is not new, and they definitely work well together. To be honest, since we still don't have many merchants using bitcoin, the only well established bitcoins industries are trading and gambling. They look like a perfect match, and it wouldn't surprise me to see the online gambling industry increasing it's bitcoin offers. Of course that if regulation starts going strong on crypto casinos as well, then it's big advantage vs fiat (anonymity) will somehow decrease.

I don't know. I personally don't have a big amount of funds invested in crypto, so I'm not using a hardware wallet for now. If I do get more coins, I will probably buy one, but I don't know why you would need several wallets. If they malfunction you can recover your coins with your seed, so what's the point in having more than one? If one gets hacked, which is unlikely, then your other wallet could get hacked as well. Maybe having more than one brand makes sense, but it's probably not necessary. Anyway, they are not that expensive, so if you have a lot of BTC then it's probably worth it. On worst case scenario it won't add any extra level of security, but it won't make your coins less safe either.

Hello denis-z12, I read your posts and there is nothing wrong with them and I will leave your post here for other users to visit it if they want, but I will not "pin" the links in this thread. I did enjoy the discussion about litepay, and I was trying to find time to dig a little about the project, so I ended up doing so after reading your thread. I will continue to do so, and I will participate in your thread again if I find more information about litepay. It was a good discussion topic for me, so I gave you merit for that one.

Thanks for sharing.

Well since Litepay is an "independent" project, an when I say this I mean that although it's related to litecoin since it's the coin they are using, it's not a service that is being developed but LTC team itself, so I think it's ok for them not to promote it. They re-twitted information about it, showing they are not against it and they support the project, but I don't think they could make any official statements since it's not their project.

As for the project itself, it really looks like a good project, although I do agree with you, and they don't offer that much information in the site, and it seems they are lacking strong partnerships to go through with all their goals. A big example of that is lack of Visa support, that continues to battle crypto, by not allowing them to use their cards.

Well I completely agree with you. There is nothing more anonymous than cash right now, and that's why the argument that bitcoin is used for criminal activities is a complete nonsense. Of course that it's hard to make some transactions with cash in an anonymous way, like international transactions, since you can't just walk around with a bad full of cash and travel to another country to make a payment. The amount of things you can buy using cash only is limited, at least in my country it is, and it's exactly because how anonymous cash is.

As for 85% of tx being made with cash, I would say it depends on what you consider a cash transaction. I don't think that 85% of tx are maid with live cash since most users prefer to use debit cards, and those are not really anonymous. They are for tax purposes, if you don't use your financial number, but they are recorded by your bank.

Well in terms of regulation, I think that if more countries start accepting bitcoin as legal tender, like Japan, Switzerland, and now Germany, it will help adoption, because merchants will have more incentives to use it. Since in terms of development, bitcoin is getting better, all we need are good tax regulations, so that it's adoption increases.

If adoption kicks in, and big names like amazon move into crypto, we will see a huge boom in it's price, like we saw in 2017. There is a chance that these thing take time, and that we will see a hole year of consolidation where nothing happens. Let's not forget the halve in 2020, so that could work as a catalyst as well. Not really worried about that though. We had plenty of periods lie this, where people thought bitcoin was "dying", and then we had the 2017 boost.

Nice thread, I think that now that the fees are low again, and segwit adoption is increasing, and lightning network is also increasing it's number of nodes and channels quite rapidly (if you consider it's still in beta), we will definitely see the number of stores and merchants accepting bitcoin as a payment method grow in number. I don't understand why steem is not accepting bitcoin again already. Hopefully they will change their mind soon, as the big names start moving into bitcoin.

Wow how did you come up with such idea? I know Facebook is interested in crypto but they are thinking about creating their own token if I'm not mistaken, so why are you saying that they will buy litecoin? Right now bitcoin dominance is increasing and I think it will continue to increase at least until it reaches 45% or 50% again. People were all around ICOS and altcoins, but now they know that some projects are simply not worth it, and will go back to the most stable ones, like bitcoin, and ethereum, etc.

And the interesting thing is, for spreading this FUD material, we being the users of bitcoins are outlives involved in this. If I listen any news about bitcoins that can harm the notion of bitcoins, better is to keep that with me and not to share it on social media or any blog. But unfortunately we are creating this FUD and then we are ultimate sources for sharing it with others. Don’t just bother such fake news.
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Well by doing that you are only not contributing for the fud to spread, which is a good thing, since many others try to spread ti for profit, but it's still not enough to actually try to decrease it's effects. I know what I'm doing is not enough, but maybe it will help, since there are new users coming to the forum in order to use it to gain some knowledge about crypto. So if they tumble a thread like this, or any similar threads, maybe they knowledge will increase and they will help to spread the word in a positive manner. I think not spreading the fud is good, but it's not enough.

Hello DrShackie, I don't have a lot of different things to say about this site, than what has been said already, but since you asked for input, that probably means that you might look at this thread as a market analysis, so I will provide some feedback as well.

I think it's a great idea, and it's much better than just doing parlays on a bookie. The problem is that your fees are incredibly high in my opinion, specially the fees for withdraws, I have no idea why you would charge so much, as no gambling site do that. It would probably be impossible to get profit from this site in the long run, because of the fees.

Finally predicting correct scores normally have big odds, so I'm not sure if a playing wouldn't simply get more profit from placing a normal play on those three correct scores, instead of trying to win the jackpot, that can be divided among other winners.

Those are great news, and it's the second time I see them today. It's good to see how positive news are now spreading out instead of the past fud news we where having. It's also mentioned there that they are interested in creating their own crypto currency. The same desire was expressed by many other countries, and I still don't know the effect this will have on bitcoin. It's still a centralized system, but it has the potencial to become better that the current one, because it will be more transparent. Let's see how it goes.

By the way, if you are interested in more positive news, check this thread, and participate there as well.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2865338.0

The point is to spread the good news, and fight fud.

I've seen the Germany related news but didn't had the time to update the list yet, but I definitely agree that those are excellent news. They surprised me a bit, because I had the impression that they didn't like crypto very much, but this measure is a good step towards regulation and it helps BTC a lot in my opinion. Hopefully others will follow, and the US will come closer to this approach.

As for Switzerland, it doesn't surprise since they have already shown us in the past that they support blockchain and crypto, and see the potencial in it, which is great.

Thanks for sharing, I will update the list.

Also, if you checked the list recently, it wasn't updated and you might have missed this post from u9y42, that is full of great news.
It's already in the list now, but you can check it (Here).

That is very risky in my opinion, but if it's working for you don't change it of course.
I use a much more conservative approach, maybe it's because I first started with poker, and then did some forex trading, and only after that I went for sports betting, and I also prefer doing sports trading, than just "blank bets". Probably because of my background I'm always "obsessed" in limiting my losses at all cost, so I can stay in the game for a very long time, and keep adding profit.

Thanks for your comment, and it makes perfect sense what you are saying. I do bet at betfair, because like I said I prefer to follow a "traders" approach, intead of a punters approach. In some games I just bet live because I use strategies to trade live markets, where my preferred method is to go live on big tennis matches, and scalp the market. It's been working for me, and that's why I do it.

This is why I never looked to carefully to the differences between the odds, since I always make multiple live bets, to make profit, and I don't need the team I bet to win or lose. Sometimes, specially in tennis matches, I start on one player, and I end up getting more profit if the other player wins, because I made the necessary adjustments after my live analysis.

I will start paying attention though, because I might end up going live already with profit, and that will help me even more.

Thanks for submitting those articles. I do believe bitcoin will continue having a huge impact in undeveloped countries, or countries facing financial crises, and it will also provide a great service for the unbanked. So news like the one about bitcoin adoption if Africa doesn't surprise me.

I was actually surprised after reading the article stating that bitcoin is actually faster than credit cards. It actually makes perfect sense all that was written then, and although it might not change much in a practical way, it does provide a more fair comparison between bitcoin and credit cards. So people should actually try to compare LN to credit cards, and if we do that, there is no discussion on what system is better and faster (even in a practical sense).

Thanks for sharing.