Lots of negative posts on the Bitfinex reddit in the last 2-3 days:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bitfinex/

Many people apparently got completely wiped out by the recent flash crashes of NEO, OMG and so on.
It is noteworthy, that Bitfinex was the only exchange with a flash crash like this, other altcoin exchanges
like Poloniex, Bittrex or Binance weren´t impacted.

In a similar situation Coinbase covered wins and losses caused by the flash crash (I think it was ETH)
as an accommodating arrangement.

Bitfinex didn´t do anything at all except introducing trading pairs for yet another scammy looking altcoin:
https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/936371313182158849

You have to be more specific here. The 3+ hour delay could be caused by Nitrogensports,
because they haven´t processed your withdrawal at all. But is is entirely possible that they already
processed the withdrawal and you are waiting due to a filled mempool of the BTC network.

I assume that you have received the withdrawal in the meantime, otherwise you could try using
one of these transaction accelerators if you are waiting for confirmations. If Nitrogensports is responsible
that of course won´t help.

The exchanges probably made a killing in the last week. Due to the high volatility the amount of traded BTC
has gone through the roof.

During the crazy 2k swing Coinbase/GDax, Kraken and Bitstamp were completely unusable. This should
tell you everything you need to know.

I´ll try to back up my claim with a statistic that has been shared by Bitstamp this week.
According to them their overall trading volume has grown during the period from January to November by an incredible 1,384%.
I assume that exchanges like Coinbase have seen even larger increases in trading activity due to
their popularity in the US.

The NASDAQ bitcoin futures are not live yet. They are aiming for a launch sometime in 2018.
This implies that they have lost the first-mover advantage to CME Group unless CME group has
to postpone the launch of their Bitcoin futures for some reason.

In my opinion the most interesting thing will be on which exchanges NASDAQ will base their BTC price.
This is particularly interesting, because CME Group decided to ignore the biggest exchanges by volume
(Bitfinex and Bithumb).

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

This is especially true, because investing in an asset like Bitcoin is literally the opposite of buying Vanguard products. It is pretty
obvious that he is not impartial regarding Bitcoin when he is running one of the largest investment companies in the world.

Interestingly, BTC has outperformed every single product that was offered by Vanguard since its inception. Bogle may be right
that we will see a correction, but his overall critcism is simply irrelevant, because he is too biased.

I would have expected that N26 would be more welcoming to a new technology like Bitcoin.

Could you quote the § 19.3 of the N26 terms? I looked into the terms at the following website,
but I couldn´t even find this clause:
https://docs.n26.com/legal/small/en/account-terms-and-conditions-latest.pdf

Maybe the real reason wasn´t the transfer from Kraken, but simply that your account was pretty inactive
aside from receiving the Kraken transfer. And you incur certain costs for N26 if you don´t really use
your account, because they have to pay partners like Mastercard irrespective of your actual usage.

Most other dice sites offer the ability to invest in the site bankroll with leverage.
This has several advantages in particular the ability to keep a large percentage of your
coins off-site.

Are there any plans to introduce this feature at Crypto-Games?

Even with the current drop Bitcoin is still up more than 11 % today. I assume
this drop was just some people locking in their profits. The high volatility is probably
caused because currently very few coins are being sold at the exchanges.

I´d even argue that probably most miners have started to hoard their coins instead of selling
them to pay for their expenses, because of the huge bull market. Why would you sell your BTC for 7k in order
when you can sell it for 11k a few weeks later? I assume most miners have sufficient reservers to be
able to pay electricity bills and other expenses for quite a while without having to sell
their newly mined Bitcoins.

This could change in a heartbeat.

Just imagine a "black swan" event like:
-high-profile ICOs get exposed as scams or can´t deliver on their (huge) promises
-Tether gets exposed as a scam, people realize that the BTC rally was heavily influenced by this
-Bitfinex announcing bankruptcy as a result of the Tether shakeout
...


During the current bull run many newbies entered, who will be easily weeded out
by a 30% or even higher correction. The people, who already survived the Mtgox bull run
and other big events in the history of Bitcoin will not be concerned by this. But people, who bought
BTC on credit at a price near the current price level or invested an irresponsible large part of their
networth are going to be weeded out pretty quickly. Besides, the mainstream media coverage would
turn from reporting new ATHs to quickly pointing out the huge losses of BTC investors.

Interesting article!

I think that Iran is more incentivized to embrace BTC than most Western countries, because of their
suffering under the imposed economic sanctions. These restrictions have heavily influenced the economic growth
of the economy of Iran. A settlement system like Bitcoin that is less controlled by the US than the
traditional banking system is really an attractive option for them.

Besides, there aren´t really any other promising innovations aside from Bitcoin
that promise to challenge the status quo of a banking system that is heavily subject
to directives of the US administration.

This is indeed an unprecented event in the history of insolvency law. I´m pretty sure there has never been a situation where a bankrupt company had
assets that appreciated as much as the BTC owned by Mtgox did.

However, the ICO plans of Karpeles are completely delusional. He and the rest of Mtgox lost all trust years ago when they started
to buy BTC with funds that were simply entries in their MySQL database. He could have handled the whole bankruptcy much better and
will probably never regain the favor of the BTC community.

I strongly suspect that the rise of BTC and the major altcoins is heavily correlated to the issuance of Tethers.
In November roughly 230 M USD$ of Tether have been issued - 30M $ of this sum have been lost in a "hack" -, which
have found their way into the Margin markets of Bitfinex.

https://www.bfxdata.com/swaphistory/usd



I know that correlation doesn´t imply causation, but this looks heavily suspicious. Bitfinex loses their banking relationship
with Wells Fargo and Tether issuance goes through the roof. Ever since Tether started to issue huge sums of money BTC
and the major altcoins have been on an unstoppable rise. I love the BTC price rise, but I´m also humble enough to still
be able to see that a huge part of this rally can be attributed to the Tether situation.

I don´t think this is necessarily true. The blockreward will become pretty small in our lifetimes. In 7 years the block reward will be only 3.125 BTC.
This equates to a block reward decrease of 75 % if you compare it to the current block reward. You can easily see that you will still experience
a time when the BTC block reward will be pretty small if you have a remaining life expectancy of 20-30 years.

Nonetheless, one BTC could be worth several hundred thousand dollars at this point, which would keep up the incentives
for the miners. As of now roughly 8-9 % of the miner revenue are coming from transaction fees. If the BTC price
doesn´t increase substantially after the block reward halvings this number needs to increase if we still
want to use a secure transaction network.

However, I think Satoshi set it up beautifully in the initial Bitcoin design. As the block reward decreases the selling pressure that is caused
by miners also decreases, which should lead to a price increase that should offset the losses for the miners.

You misunderstood the problem of the OP.

Skrill and Neteller allow Bitcoin deposits (for a 1 % fee), but the funds are restricted compared to money
that was deposited using another payment method.

E.g. if you deposit to your Neteller account using bank wire, you can:
-pay merchants
-send P2P payments
-withdraw funds using the Net+ Mastercard

However, if you load your Neteller account using Bitcoin, you can:
-pay merchants
-sent P2P payments

It is not possible to withdraw funds that have been deposited using Bitcoin with
the Net+ Mastercard. You can theoretically circumvent this rule by depositing your funds
to a gambling site and then withdrawing it after reaching a certain turnover. Now your funds
can be used for everything, because they are not directly related to a Bitcoin deposit anymore.

This could also be explained by the fact that all of the coins that you mention have USDT trading pairs. If you take
a look at the huge increase of the outstanding Tether supply in November, you will find out that this new money
(backed or not backed?) is actually driving the surge of all these coins.

Margin markets at Bitfinex are at all-time highs and have increased a staggering 50M $ in the last 24 hours.
This could get even crazier if they release even more Tethers in December.

Great!

I also had another feature request, that may be a popular suggestion. Currently it is possible to
prevent empty markets with no offers at all from showing up (by changing your settings). However,
it would also be great if you could exclude certain sports from showing up at all - irrespective of the matched
mBTC amount.

E.g. if a user never bets on Tennis, the tennis markets take up space unnecessarily and clutter the user interface.
Therefore it may be an interesting feature to exclude certain sports from showing up at all.

However, it may also be possible that this is not in the interest of Fairlay as this would probably hurt overall liquidity.
It is entirely possible that parts of the Tennis Liquidity come from people, who didn´t even intend to bet on Tennis,
but stumbled upon it while browsing the site.

Therefore I´m not sure if it´s a good feature request, but for me personally it would definitely be a nice addition that
would improve my user experience.

Very interesting study, thank you for sharing it with us.

However, I´m wondering about the accuracy of their methodology. A huge part of the BTC wallets that they classify as "inactive"
may simply be paper wallets or hardware wallets of long-term BTC holders. Many of these intend to keep their holdings for several
decades and aren´t even remotely interested in claiming any additional value from possible BTC forks. Therefore
I´d argue that a non-negligible percentage of the wallets that are inactive to Chainalysis are actually still active
cold wallets of long-term investors.

Nevertheless, I think their overall estimate is quite likely to be true. This obviously has interesting ramifications
for the Bitcoin economy, because this makes the remaining (and still accessible) Bitcoins more valuable.

All of these changes should reduce the total load of the Bittrex trading engine. This implies
that the user experience for the remaining users will be much better after they are done with these measures.

The only people that really should be upset about these changes are the guys who made lots of really small trades.
Otherwise I think these changes are beneficial for every Bittrex user.

Additionally, the order books should look a lot cleaner in the future. An orderbook where every order is 1 satoshi above the next
order is simply too cluttered. Therefore I think instituting minimum tick sizes is a very reasonable change.

In which country do you reside?

Maybe you are sending your SEPA deposit from a high-risk country where Kraken has to deal with a higher level of fraudulent
transactions compared to other countries. This could explain why your deposits seem to be delayed.

Another possible explanation is that you have crossed a certain threshold of deposits (which in my opinion is
quite likely given the huge amounts that you deposited) and therefore will be asked to provide additional
documents in order to comply with KYC/AML requirements.

I think it is possible to argue both positions.

Many altcoin additions to an exchange can be a good thing, because:
-they attract more users
-they offer more profit opportunities due to more available trading pairs
-they increase the profits of the exchange, because of more trades, which equates to more income in trading fees

However, many altcoin additions to an exchange can also be a bad thing, because:
-they often lack real trading volume and therefore are prone to market manipulation
-they clutter the user interface, which makes for a less pleasant trading experience
-they cause unnecessary server load, which decreases the reliability of the platform
for traders of the high volume currency pairs like BTC as well

To sum up, I´m strongly inclined to say that the approach of an exchange like Bitstamp
is superior to the approach by Kraken, Binance and Bittrex that add nearly every shitcoin
under the sun.