A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow - you'd rather get your tax bills refunded earlier and have that liquid cash to play around with rather than having to wait until the asset goes up in however many years it takes for prices to recover and then realising that capital gain.

I think that's the main advantage.

There is no real "monetary gain" other than the fact that you get some liquid cash earlier that you can just put towards a savings account to pay off your CGT later on and some more.

Not even legal tender. Just some small tweaks to the currently cumbersome and draconian tax code surrounding BTC would help.

In Australia, you can use BTC as a "Personal use asset" to buy stuff online up to a certain threshold without having to pay any capital gains tax (so long as you are using it to transact and not actually invest).

Something similar in the U.S. would certainly boost adoption for BTC as an actual currency as opposed to just a stagnant asset, given the amount of people currently holding coins based in the U.S..

These centralised thought leaders come and go and are inevitable.

But in the long run, there is no single entity that can manipulate the masses when it comes to bitcoin adoption. If people see value in BTC, which I think a lot of the world is just now waking up to the potential of blockchain technology, then they will adopt it and push prices up no matter what.

No one can force grassroots level adoption to happen. Not even Musk.

Right now, it's all speculative play from Musk. It'll die down, just give it time.

When something goes awry, would you rather deal with a vendor that is in the same legal jurisdiction as you, or someone who is thousands of miles away from you in a country with weak regulations when it comes to crypto?

Probably the former.

But you're right, it's not a deal-breaker and so long as the vendor's rep is legitimate, it's usually okay to go with them if they've got good rates. They may just have a subsidiary operator in your country that is handling these trades.

Completely agree with your bullish long term view.

Not entirely sure about the prediction of BTC hitting $100k by the end of the year, though. There just seems to be a lot less momentum now compared to even months before when the FOMO was through the roof. People are a lot more cautious now in general.

Timing wise, we're reaching that 1-1.5 year mark after the halving event when bull markets usually taper off - so that is no good either.

I remember Dan Larimer coins were all the hype back in 2017. BTS, EOS, and STEEM all had huge bull runups.

I personally don't think that these old coins can survive. There is no real use for them anymore, there is very little real adoption of their platform and in general they were quite overpriced in their heydays.

Essentially, they're stuck in this no-mans-land. They don't have the first mover's advantage like BTC that brings with it recognition and trust, nor do they have the new technology that is now all the rage. Pump and dumps aside, they will likely taper off eventually just like the previous generation of alts.

In my country they're legally obliged to collect a bunch of information, including phone numbers.

I'd imagine rules around the world to be somewhat similar. Bitcoin ATMs themselves would want as little information as they want given that the more information required of them, the more costs of compliance are.

So long as you are using a reputable service, they won't do anything with your phone number. They have far more to lose in reputation and potentially their whole remittance licence than a measly few hundred dollars they can make by selling your info.

People have to realise that periods of relative stability when it comes to inflation are exceptions rather than the rule.

I see a lot of people that are comfortable with parking their funds in a high interest savings account that pays less than 1% when inflation was literally 5% YoY last month in the U.S.. There has been no fiat currency that has survived the test of time, regardless of the method of downfall - whether that be political or financial.

BTC should therefore be in the portfolio of anyone who is serious about preserving their purchasing power over the long run. Gold is clunky and archaic, yet BTC has all of that and more.

Absolutely no effect in my opinion.

BTC's long term health does not depend on Chinese interest or miners. This has been proven over and over again.

The same people who are concerning themselves with the current dump and attributing it to Chinese bans are the same ones who panic sold in 2017 when Chinese regulations tightened and yet BTC went up to 20k shortly after. People are really myopic and don't appreciate the true nature of decentralisation - to combat precisely these bannings.

Don't believe in the TA.

Focus on the long term picture here. Do you personally believe that BTC will be adopted as a long term store of value in the future?

If your answer to that is yes, then you should buy the dip and keep dollar cost averaging because even if prices do go down substantially, they will recover in the future given sufficient time as we've seen time and time again. TA and all the death-cross business is just a bunch of wishy-washy BS that people make up to seem intelligent.

Companies such as Stake have been doing this for ages now.

VIP hosts are great, but personally I think it will never exceed the allure of physical Vegas butlers and hosts. It is one of the few remaining areas of the gambling industry that will probably never be fully replaced by new online solutions.

But I'd say that a lot of whales would rather keep a low profile these days as opposed to being courted overtly, which makes VIP treatment arguably not as important as people may think.

Absolutely not.

1. There is zero enforceability when it comes to gambling taxes. Most of the gaming platforms that are commonly used are currently unregulated by any responsible board - and most of them aren't even in the jurisdiction of any single country.

2. You're forgoing a bunch of tax revenue that could have been collected by having a low tax. When you raise tax rates too high, it actually achieves the opposite effect on revenue as gambling operators simply move out of the country/go underground to dodge taxation laws.

I think that partially, it is also due to Musk's reacceptance of BTC in Tesla.

He certainly holds a lot of influence over the cryptospace these days, and changes tune evey so often. Which is why I think that you shouldn't put that much weight on his words like the rest of the market does.

Also, U.S. inflation data is very concerning which means that lots of people are looking for a safe haven to park their funds in long term. BTC is certainly one such asset class receiving attention right now.

What is the time horizon of this call?

With all the concern regarding inflation, people will want to get their hands on an asset that is completely out of the fiat ecosystem.

BTC fits this bill perfectly and has far more upside potential than gold.

I think that all the signs are here to suggest that BTC will continue to move around the $30-40k corridor for the foreseeable future. A sub-$20k BTC is very unlikely and looks quite absurd right now.

Absolutely ridiculous.

The gambling industry is going to exist one way or another, regardless of whether or not there are 0% taxes or 20% taxes.

But when taxes are that high, it makes it completely impossible for these businesses to survive. So what do they do? They move underground and become unregulated entities that are more risky for individual retail players to deal with.

Is that something that the country's government wants? If the answer is yes, then they can go ahead with precisely what is proposed.

It would be foolish to concentrate your holdings into just crypto, as good of a long term value proposition the cryptocurrency market currently is. Crypto is way too volatile to be the only asset class you hold, as you'd be severely out of pocket if you needed to liquidate your holdings for whatever reason over the short run.

I personally hold global equities, precious metals, and REITs on the side.

Essentially the strategy is to diversify as much as possible so that if one asset class goes up/down, it'll be dampened by the movement of the other asset classes and over the long run the net balance of the portfolio should grow with very little fluctuation.

I think that it's certainly a good buy for the long run, but that does not guarantee anything when it comes to short term profit/loss.

Markets are still very volatile and even though there is seemingly a bottom being built at the $30k mark, things can come tumbling down as soon as any piece of regulatory setback comes out. That, unfortunately, is just the nature of the BTC markets.

You don't want to be caught in a position where you are also panic dumping along with the rest of the weak hands. This is why I suggest you DCA as opposed to buying with your full power - sure, you forgo some potential profits, but in the long run it's going to be negligible and you have liquidity to snap up cheap coins if markets continue to slide.

Seems like a pretty risky proposition, imo.

They reserve the complete right to conduct KYC on anyone and seem to have it in their TnCs. I personally wouldn't risk depositing if I wasn't comfortable with giving KYC even when keeping inside the 2,000 euro limit.

This is quite sad, since I do think that the site is great and its domain name could rival some of the bigger players in the scene right now just from a mainstream marketing perspective. But bringing up any chance of KYC basically destroys any shot of rivalling the established, non-KYC firms.

Don't forget that China has done this plenty of times before.

The Bitcoin market is extremely resilient and we have seen it bounce back substantially from these regulatory constraints before. It would be incredibly stupid to bet against BTC prices going up in the long run just because of further restrictions on bitcoin mining in China when the whole industry has essentially moved underground already.

This current bear market is simply a natural phase of the bitcoin market cycle that occurs every 4 years. All the bad news are being magnified, and the good news ignored.

This makes no sense.

Sure, with one bet you could recover your streak of losses, but how did you end up in this predicament in the first place? It was through the martingale system, and doubling down on each of your previous losses.

Your EV is precisely the same whether or not you play through the martingale system. Your chances of recovering from a loss does not change whatsoever. The speed at which you do so does not change either.