That would really suck, and affect the service initially, but I'm sure that mixers will find a way to make their mixing process look more like an organic form of economical activity commonly taking place on the network already.

The thing however is that you can't just ban mixers simply because you can't prove that the coins have gone through a mixer. If you boot someone just based on the assumption that he used a mixer, that's very bad business.

Every mixer is unfortunately a target, but the 'positive' side of all these agencies chasing mixers is that the mixers are pretty much forced to become even more anonymous (relatively speaking) than they already are.

Result is that mixers will be more difficult to shut down and that we as privacy respecting users can still use them to get rid of taint.

I'm not a criminal. I for example use a mixer when I need to make a purchase in Bitcoin and buy these coins through my local exchange. It gives me a peace of mind knowing that it provides me a layer of privacy I didn't have before.

Exchanges increasingly start to look at what you do with your coins after withdrawing them-- their banking partners can demand them to boot you off their platform, and they will definitely not go against that.

An example is Coinbase that has booted hundreds or maybe even thousands of users, all because they withdrew coins to a service their banking partners don't agree with. Mixers come in very handy here.

I hope you're right but I have my doubts. A large part of the capital within the stock market can be categorized as risk capital, which I think also applies to Bitcoin from the perspective of an institution or legacy investor.

Gold will serve its purpose as safe haven much better than Bitcoin will simply because of how speculative this market still is. Bitcoin definitely needs more years of maturation to grow on people as being a non correlated asset.

We have gone up simultaneously with gold in the past, have gone up while gold went down, have gone down while gold went up, and so forth. I think the current correlation between Bitcoin and gold is just coincidence.

I don't see it being that difficult to be honest-- we have years of evidence that the lending aspect on this forum has been thriving really well-- so well that due to the competition the interest rates here are very low.

It's probably not very rewarding, but at least it's a convenient form of semi-passive income and people with sufficient collateral benefit in the way that they get the best possible deal in form of lower interest rates.

The lenders on this forum have proven to provide better quality loans than banks have done in the last decades. It can work in a honest way, unlike banks that keep extorting people even far after they ended up broke.

Bitcoin has already had a lot of mainstream media attention, and it doesn't seem to be over yet as long as the price manages to hold around current levels. Bitcoin did well, altcoins not so much and that's the reality of the day.

The thing here is that when Bitcoin dips below $10k again, and stays there for quite a while, the media attention will decline and you'll be back to square one. This is why I don't like focusing too much on the media side of things.

The media is just a price surfer and has its own agenda to cover Bitcoin related news-- they know exactly what kind of news coverage they want to push, and this is something we shouldn't contribute to.

Bitcoin this year has gone up from its low all the way to $8000 without much media coverage. Only because of how more likely it became that the price would break $10k the mainstream media started to cover it again. 

It's definitely going to be interesting to see if it has an actual impact on crypto to begin with-- it really seems that everything that's happening currently is pointed as the reason Bitcoin is going up.

I'm more leaning towards a technical bull run rather than people around the world using Bitcoin as safe haven asset. It's obviously something people here would love to see happen, but we shouldn't blindly assume that's the case already.

The very few people who do actually use Bitcoin as safe haven asset aren't wealthy enough to stimulate the market into going up like it did this year so far. Being unbiased helps to see the other side of the story.

If the technicals turn bad, no amount of geopolitical tensions will help Bitcoin not to fall lower.

They should have bought Bitcoin years ago already-- the relation between Hong Kong and mainland China has always been a sensitive issue that was on the brink of erupting into mass protests and whatnot.

I however think that the more likely scenario is that people (even some of the smart ones) will wait for things to escalate into a way more serious problem. This is how it has always been in shaky countries.

Even if people aren't too familiar with Bitcoin, gold is an option too, or us dollars. I would say that us dollars are the more likely option to go for because it's the easiest asset to obtain and way more people accept it as form of payment.

I don't see any problems here. I like the fact that the 5-6 exahash they added lowers the dominance of Bitmain's mining pools, and this is just a start with how I expect Blockstream to keep increasing their hashrate.

All the anti Blockstream propaganda comes from the Bcash camp-- they do not control Bitcoin development nor have they ever done so. I wish them good luck with the future contributions they have in store for Bitcoin.

I have never tried Blockstream satellite, but when I have some free time and the right equipment, I'll see how it works and have a geek-out moment. They added LN support too so I'm kinda looking forward to it.

That's not really possible at this point. If we put POW to the side, then there are various governance models which inherently are centralized and therefore not secure, and then we have POS that is centralized and not secure.

POW might not be the most pretty form of securing a network, but it has proven to be the most secure one for almost an entire decade now. No protocol has proven itself being more secure.

If you see protocols pretending to be more secure than Bitcoin, they are just trying to mislead noobs into making an investment in their token. It's one big shitshow where noobs are the center of everything because they don't know better.

It blew my mind when I saw that BTG didn't even react aside from its own regular fluctuations.

If I held any BTG after finding out about its 51% attack, I directly would have dumped all my coins hard to never look back again, which would make me the fool instead of those who kept holding on to their coins.

I'm really glad to not own any shitcoin. My holdings currently consist of 95% BTC and 5% ETH and that's more than enough. Both coins are the most secure POW networks within their own segment. Nothing else is needed.

That's the sad reality. Common joes aim to book large gains very quickly and therefore discard the risks involved, which is very stupid. They don't think about paying back their debt, that comes after they lost it all.

I'm not really keen on financial institutions preventing people from investing in crypto with credit, because they should also prevent them from legacy forex brokers, but at least people are protected against themselves now.

People could withdraw their credit through an ATM and then deposit the money on their bank account and then wire it to an exchange, but I'm quite sure that these people aren't that clever to think of this themselves.

I'm pretty sure that most competent traders have been paying attention to leverage platforms for years now. Bitfinex's ~$160 low in 2015 was the result of a massive long squeeze. Other exchanges followed but not as deep.

Back in China's glory days their top exchanges were generating millions of Bitcoins in leveraged volume every single day. Traders are used to how important these platforms are.

Leverage in general (at least within the crypto space) has become the next big thing where even the most common joes know how to open a leveraged position on platforms such as BitMEX. People are more adapted than you think.

The lower overall volumes have surprisingly held the price pretty firmly around the $11.5k mark in the last couple of days.

People think it's bearish because the price keeps falling below $12k, but I find it super bullish that we see very strong support with relatively lower volumes. It might be an indication that bears are running out of coins to sell.

Currently it's waiting for a breakout, which I expect to happen before the weekend ends. If we break up $13k is what we can expect, where if we break down we might revisit sub $10k levels again.

In case of a sub $10k visit I would probably turn more bearish depending on whether we fall below the current local lows or not. I hope we don't, but if so anyway, I'll accumulate some more satoshis on the way down.

Benefit of OTC is that you don't necessarily have to stick to offline transactions where you pay with cash. There are some platforms that just connect buyers and sellers where the exchange acts as an escrow.

The benefit is that you don't have to meet up and expose yourself to any risks, and you're not affecting the spot order book at all. Most of the high value OTC transactions happen this way. It's the most secure and liquid option.

Looking for ways to buy and sell without an intermediary is time consuming without the right contacts, which means that the price might have drastically changed already and therefore your opportunity is gone.

Bitcoin might have booked some serious growth throughout the years, but fundamentally speaking, neutral investors haven't really changed their mind yet-- to them it's still something that could lose its value overnight.

I would say that the larger your allocation to Bitcoin is, obviously the more risk you expose yourself to, but also how much confidence you have that it will be the revolutionary new gold that will take over the world.

It's essentially a bet on a good outcome, but one that has already been through so many hurdles. I'm personally not decreasing my Bitcoin holdings until the price has gone past the $100k mark.

By the time we have gone past the $100k mark I will take out some and very likely allocate it to gold or certain stocks of well equipped companies that pay out dividends so there is some form of a passive income.

Binance claims that the selfies posted were obtained from a third party they outsourced the KYC verification part to. I don't have much reason to question that given how large Binance is and how many new users they onboard.

The only question is how the hacker managed to gain access to the servers of this third party. It could just as easily be a bunch of Indians they hired to do this work, which isn't that uncommon even for large tech corporations.

It's such a non argument. An example of that are the countless datacenters corporations such as Microsoft and Amazon operate. These consume way more electricity than Bitcoin, but nobody complains about them.

Nocoiners complain about Bitcoin's electricity consumption because they don't like it and think it has no value. If people think something has no value then it's by default a waste of electricity.

Back in the early internet days people were skeptical about the environmental impact of tech companies too, but now they somewhat depend on them, their electricity consumption is no longer an issue. 

Considering that you already used an exchange (Coinbase) to send and receive Bitcoin, why not look for another exchange that allows you to send and receive Bitcoin without the KYC part?

Binance has a daily withdrawal limit of 2BTC without KYC. It's one of the most reliable exchanges that still allows you to withdraw without KYC, while the rest of the exchanges are unstable or very shady. 

Another alternative is to use a mixer.

It's at least a step in the right direction if you can provide the evidence that will satisfy the tax office. If I for example claim that I no longer own the private key of a certain address, the tax department doesn't really care.

I am obliged to pay tax over whatever the amount is inside the address. In other words, you are better off not bringing it up, which is just retarded, especially when you have to pay taxes over that amount every single year. This needs to change.

If this Australian tax rule stimulates other governments to look into their tax policies and change where necessary to cover this specific subject, that would be a more than welcome development.

It wouldn't even surprise me if this turns out to be a competitor trying to make them look bad. The competition between the countless services within crypto can turn real ugly real fast.

It's not a secret that a few exchanges are trying to benefit from Binance's US exit, and why not go a step further? OKEx has been very friendly towards BSV right after Binance's delisting announcement.

If we go back in time a bit, CZ actually worked for OKEx but ended up leaving to compete with them. It's somewhat of a conspiracy theory, but not completely unrealistic after their sudden BSV support hoping to onboard their users.