Not a surprise to be honest. If we look at how little time people devote to securely storing their coins offline, then similarly, they will not bother to care about other aspects of security.

I would say that a very large percentage of the people who leave their coins on an exchange, do that because they are too lazy to withdraw them. Prior to that they would have to search for a proper client, download the client, write down a seed phrase, and then store the piece of paper somewhere. To us it seems completely illogical, but this is how people are unfortunately.

People who choose for convenience thus far have always paid a hefty price for it. Losing coins is probably the only way for people to learn.

That (for the time being) people get a fee rebate.

People need to be aware of the fact that when you KYC verify yourself on that platform, you are basically doxing yourself to Roger Ver and his crew of evil scammers. Every (negative) word that you ever said about Roger, be it on this forum or outside, he now has everything he needs to sue you for that or do some other shit that you won't like.

We're already at a stage where in some cases the actual event no longer forms the dumping day.

People are front running the news by selling way ahead, which leaves the rest of the market wondering why the price is going down so much beforehand. The same we have seen with Litecoin in the runup to the halving, where a lot of people just couldn't fathom how their perfect buy the rumor sell the news tactic made them lose money. The same could happen with Bitcoin with how well prepared people are for it.

What markets in general have taught me is that when the majority gets overly bullish/bearish or confident that x event will lead to a massive price move, it's time to think of taking a different approach and go against them.

Bitcoin has more daily value throughput measured in dollars, but transaction wise, PayPal leads all the way. And yes, the difference is quite important too because most of PayPal's value throughput goes towards payments, while most of Bitcoin's value throughput goes towards speculation. People however love to present just one side of the story to strengthen their pro Bitcoin narrative.

If you're referring to accepting payments directly without a third party, then you're right, but most merchants aren't really interested in holding their coins, hence the reason they adopt third party payment processors that take care of the volatility risk.

It's something you won't be able to always exploit. Currently there is still enough buy support around that level, but the next time it might catch you by surprise and dump further. We're not that far away from seeing that happen as there is nothing bullish about retesting the same support levels over and over again.

The market tends to rekt people when they get too comfortable with repetitive bounces, which we have seen happen last year too. I made quite decent profits multiple times buying around $6000 and selling 5-10% higher, which made me so comfortable that I had to be punished for underestimating this market. I'm glad that I woke up from it, and I hope that you will too.

According to Namebio the domain has been sold for $4000 through Sedo on 2018-11-28.

I would practice caution here. A new exchange that is generating decent volumes is very suspicious. Not saying it's a scam, but exchanges usually need years to build up enough credibility for people to actually use them. It could be them generating volume through wash trading to lure people in, which is a common practice amongst exchanges nowadays.

If we have a look at their Twitter page, a lot of their likes and retweets come from bots and shills.  

The reality is that a minority thinks of it as a bad development for Bitcoin, while the (far) majority thinks of it as a positive development because price gains is all they care about. Majority will get what it wants in this case. I can understand both camps though, because there are definitely tradeoffs and benefits to be pointed out.

I'm leaning more towards the camp that wants to see the price go up. People can pretend to not find the price an important aspect all they want, but deep down they like it. It's just hard to admit for some because they're more worried about what other maxis think of them.

In the end, higher price leads to a more secure network, and more liquidity that can be used to invest in development or the ecosystem around it to make Bitcoin an even bigger phenomenon.

It's impossible not to pay attention to unfortunately. The laws aren't just strict to crypto to fiat ATM's, but also those that allow you to convert crypto to crypto. Governments have made it their top priority to figure out who each buyer/seller is so that they form a risk analysis and see if you are paying your taxes and whatnot.

We might even get to a point where banks will be competing with crypto businesses and upgrade their legacy ATM's to offer people the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin. The battle for the fees will be immense. Banks know they can easily gain an upper hand. KYC/AML isn't needed because they already have your information. Convenience wise this is going to be a killer service.

People like Ran are the biggest flaw of the crypto sphere. This toxic being has promoted a whole set of shitcoins including BCash which got a lot of people rekt hard. Now the alt bubble has popped and Bitcoin is the only one making moves he has become a soft Bitcoiner. Watch until the next altcoin bubble starts, he will promote them by pointing out how much better they are than Bitcoin.

In the end, explaining Bitcoin isn't that difficult. What makes it difficult is to explain people what the importance is of secure coin storage, how to do it, and that Bitcoin hasn't ever been hacked, but the incompetent services have, hence the importance of not storing coins on an exchange when you aren't trading.

People need to be aware of the fact that there isn't a centralized institution that can give you your funds back. If you lose your coins in crypto then they're lost for ever, unless you use EOS and bribe the block producers to reverse transactions.

People have no clue about how things work outside their narrowminded bubble. The dollars and euros people use on a daily basis as money is just one aspect of these assets. The far majority of the demand and use for these assets is related to speculation on forex markets. Speculation is what brings in the demand. It's not negative at all.

The ratios between use and speculation in Bitcoin might be farther apart because it's a new and upcoming asset, but it's certainly getting a lot of use as money. There is more than just buying a coffee with Bitcoin that people seem to forget.

My most embarrassing moment was that in late 2012 I heard that you could mine Bitcoin through your client, and then assumed that the process of downloading and validating blocks was the actual mining process. I was legit waiting for 25BTC to pop up, lol. You can imagine that I was pretty upset after like 8 hours of staring to a monitor.

My next also quite embarrassing moment was that I thought that Litecoin would take over Bitcoin because it was faster. I really didn't like Bitcoin all that much when I started. It was very slow when an exchange requires you to wait for 3-6 confirmations. Litecoin deposits came through much and much faster and for that reason it became my favorite coin.

It took me until late 2014 to figure out that Bitcoin is the shit to focus on. Prior to that I lost a lot of Bitcoins investing in altcoins, and they mostly all turned out to be a scam, and I lost a lot of Bitcoins playing dice. I had almost no Bitcoins left due to the bad investments and bad choices, but luckily the bear market hit the market and I managed to refill my cold wallets by buying the market down from $300 to $200.

Since then I haven't touched a single altcoin (aside from the forks that I cashed out to Bitcoin) and never gambled again. Best choices of my life.

Don't underestimate people. China has made the practice of exchanging Bitcoin (or any other crypto) to fiat illegal by law, yet the local markets there count millions upon millons of traders who are still involved. In other countries the reaction to a ban has also lead to a massive boost of local trading volumes. Once people get involved, they mostly don't go back.

Hard drugs are a great example of how fully outlawing something doesn't help. In some countries using/owning/selling/buying hard drugs leads to a death penalty, yet it happens continuously. It's a global market worth hundreds of billions and growing rapidly despite how every single country is doing what it can to curb that growth and come up with even harsher penalties.

Prohibit something that people like or somehow need, and they'll go there where you don't have much oversight as government to get it.

Gold has definitely been extremely bullish, but that's not too surprising with how it broke out of an ascending triangle that took years to play out. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the bullish sentiment comes from that, which then makes people believe that everyone is looking for Gold as a safe haven, which I doubt at this stage.

As long as the stock market indicates that it wants to go up, which is definitely the case, Gold will not bloom as much as when investors are looking at Gold to park their capital there because they are wary of a looming recession. Speculative investments are hit the first, and that's something I'm waiting for as confirmation.

On top of that, when the mainstream media is screaming RECESSION IS NEAR, and even the average joes share that sentiment, it gives me reason to believe that the actual recession is still relatively far away.

That's not a problem at all. Nowhere does it state that we have to please miners by pumping the price just to keep them on board. If they aren't efficient enough, they'll be forced to either mine at loss until their financial buffer runs out, or they will stop immediately and wait for the price to recover.

The hashrate has yet again gone well ahead of the price action just like it did back in 2018. Time will tell whether the situation is different now in terms of price action, but it wouldn't suprise me if we see the hashrate take a 25ish % dive over the course of a few months if the price plummets. The decending triangle that we're in suggests move of $4000 up or down.

Miners will either jump off the ship or celebrate having made a good decision to increase the scale of their operation.

Scary times for Chinese citizens. At first they might not realize that with how used they are to platforms such as WeChat and AliPay, but they're definitely going to notice when people are being censored when sending money to recipients the government doesn't like. Another thing is that they can easily analyze your spending behavior to either sell it to third parties or abuse it themselves.

People in China should do everything they can to buy themselves as many Bitcoins as possible locally while physical cash is still a thing. Bitcoin will be the only bit of financial freedom that they have left.

As for the impact on crypto, I think it will be negligible at first, but may prevent future adoption from Chinese citizens if every single mainstream exchange ends up on their blacklist.

Perfect example of how whales rekt themselves is to look at all the institutional crypto funds that were set up during 2017/2018 and failed hard. They had balances of $100 million and upwards to invest but lost the majority of it, which left their clients regret ever getting involved in this crypto hype. A fool with a lot of money is still a fool at the end of the day.

People always talk about whales as if they are collectively trying to manipulate the market, but they are trading against other whales just as hard as we trade against people with a similar balance to us. Whales rekt other whales, and then the masses who panic sell or buy rekt even more whales. Not even the largest whales come out unharmed. This market is brutal af, even more so if you are into leverage trading.

It seems that yet another exchange has stopped providing service to non-verified users. In that regard there isn't much that can be done to counter this, but I find it not so much of a smart move that you have sent them your ID and whatnot. Coineal is a notorious wash trading exchange that has been artificially inflating their volumes to rank up on index sites such as CMC.

Another possibility (if what's written above doesn't apply) is that you participated in one of their KYC token airdrops.

It's at least a good development in the sense that shorters can't short more than there are Bitcoins in the reserves of Bakkt. CME allows anyone with money to short Bitcoin's entire market cap over and over, which isn't possible with Bakkt. Naked shorting is what has destroyed Gold's aspect of scarcity market wise, and for now it's fantastic to have a player as Bakkt on board to counter that.

CBOE leaving the cash settled futures space has done Bitcoin well. Their volumes may not have been super duper high, but less naked shorts is always a plus.

One way or another, these entities do get involved in this space somehow. Warren Buffett is invested in Goldman Sachs through BerkShire Hathaway, and let that financial institution have settled Bitcoin futures contracts for their clients, and they are still looking at launching their a crypto trading desk.

There is a trend amongst these old fashion investors to ignore the underlying asset or technology, but do focus on the ecosystem around it by building businesses generating an income and profit stream. This is their field of interest so it only makes sense for them to keep doing what they have always been doing.

Then people tend to forget that these billionaires have several advisors that may see value in certain technologies. If the risk-reward ratio is favoring a good outcome, even when a billionaire doesn't have much interest in technology, a small allocation is most likely going to happen anyway.

Fair point. I have toned down a lot lately with my anti Gold narrative just for that reason. It has very strong properties that many people here tend to overlook because they are just focusing on the aspects they care about, and not so much on the aspects that make Gold be profoundly different from Bitcoin.

Another thing is that if people are truly honest to themselves, there isn't all that much about Gold that you can doubt because it has proven itself in almost every facet, while Bitcoin is still in its infancy as asset and has a lot to prove in the forthcoming decades. Gold will never be a worthless piece of metal, that's a fact. Thousands of years of empirical evidence support that claim.