Another 'well-thought' article. /s

Anyways, I won't be confident on investing now if I want to hold it for the short-term, but for long-term prospects, this is actually already a good entry-point. Bears are still calling for a $2000 bottom and overly-enthusiastic fudsters suggest that we will be seeing 3 digits come next year. Bakkt will be one of the reasons the market will change its tempo but like you, I also doubt that they would be getting their launch ready come next month, seeing that the market is still in distress and they don't want to operate to a loss.

This means that I will have time to buy coins and leave them again for a few months/years before being frantic about checking the prices every now and then.

I'd like to add that aside from the traditional economic dynamics that affect currencies, since bitcoin is a highly speculated currency, it also depends on the current market conditions and on how people feel about bitcoin (or confidence, if you may). Seeing that bitcoin is seen and used more as an asset than a currency, it does not follow the path of traditional fiat currencies that depends their value on traditional economic activities that you've mentioned. Supply and demand plays a big role, yes, but market sentiment, IMO, was one of the major reasons why bitcoin's price declined and is staying where it is right now.

IMO, bitcoin has already been in these developing countries sooner than we ever thought they would. Well, some of the people in the said countries have had their lives changed for the better, which is good considering that it redistributes wealth in a lot of hands instead of just the minority. Being in a 3rd world country today, it's quite amusing that a lot of projects, gatherings and talks have been in place regarding bitcoin and crypto just for the past two years, to which I became a speaker to some talks.

While having more and more people use bitcoin in today's world, an undeniable fact remains still: market movers would always be the whales, and the newcomers from developing countries would be their assistants to push the prices to new highs.

Could this be related to the teen who saved up hundreds of thousands of $ in BTC who was then nabbed after authorities found out about his schemes? I think there is a good correlation between the two, and that's the first thing that sprang to mind upon reading these headlines. It's certainly painting a bad image for bitcoin being linked with scammers and bomb threats, and good thing no one wants to pay up.

Completely opposite of what you're trying to imply IMO. Traders selling for cash is not an indicator of a price rise. There literally isn't a reliable and consistent indicator for watching price rises as most of them failed on determining bitcoin's actual movement. 2019 should be good due to the lined-up events and launches that could potentially shift the interest of the traders to bitcoin once more, but then again we've seen the similar scenario on 2015 to early 2016 but then the price performed poorly until getting to a low of $150.

I just use Paypal - bank transfers without a hitch for a few years now, and have also looked into messing with AUD and GBP for quite some time since I saw some potential for those currencies but never actually used them. Paypal - local bank takes one or two working days before the deposit, and I am yet to discover a trusty, same-day bank transfer that I could enjoy with of course, less fees. Being a freelancer as well (if anyone might find this useful) Payoneer - Paypal - Bank is much cheaper than Payoneer - Bank directly, and idk why or at least this is just on our local banks.

This is also one thing I noticed when bitcoin is opening its doors to a new year: price tends to be somewhat stagnant as most traders are still in the holiday hangover and a lot are still returning from vacations. Should the first few weeks of the year turn out to be positive, it's a great indicator that the market is in for the greens, though this should not always be taken religiously as we all know that the bitcoin market is so weird and is entirely different from the stock markets that we are so familiar with.

This was done by a local exchange some time in 2014-2016 until Wavecrest holdings (which the exchange gets it prepaid cards from) suspended its operations dealing with cryptocurrencies and exchanges. I'd use one if possible, though I have to put a certain amount of trust to the facilitator if ever, which is a compromise I'd gladly take if I can use crypto for something else. The number of merchants is not increasing and I see that debit cards are a way to go if people want to spend their crypto for something.

What they're doing is just understandable IMO from an economic perspective as they're still promoting the circulation of money and still accepting e-payments. If people start to not accept physical cash anymore, this will hit the economy hard and might urge people to not do the same and be discouraged to receive and spend cash, causing a domino effect that could destroy China's blooming economy. They are not turning cashless or leaving physical cash behind but rather accepting another payment method that could co-exist with their cash.

Bitcoin is doing fine and dandy up until the market is flooded with get-rich-quick dudes who always believed that the market will always rise. Fortunately they were wrong and bitcoin isn't always in the greens. Bitcoin is supposed to be a tool to free us from the banks and governments but when people realized that they could speculate the price of it, everything changed and the libertarian and anarchist value from people using bitcoin were lost. It's quite saddening but that's the grim reality we're facing, and as you said, the posts on this forum say it all.

Then what do you propose for a system that will completely replace the banks? I don't like the banks either but I'm forced to use them since I have to finance my business/house etc., but for the common people they work well and gets the job done, and we do know that the people of this current generation don't want to overcomplicate things as long as they are working, so the change wouldn't be accepted immediately. I'm pretty sure, bitcoin was created for the civilization before speculation and capitalists arrived in the economy, and in the end you should blame the capitalists and not bitcoin itself for ruining a tool that could help liberate people from their financial woes from the banks and the governments.

Accounting, logistics and recordkeeping would be the industries in which the blockchain would prove useful and viable. Seeing how it competes with the current fintech in terms of security and reliability, many companies would surely employ the said tech in their own firms. The decentralized, p2p ledger is the only blockchain we know to have top-notch security and integrity on its stored data. I couldn't speak much for private blockchains as we haven't seen a great working model of it yet and most of it would surely be private and hidden (lol).

It's scaling nonetheless!   But then again, who do they expect to keep those humongous data on their PCs? Also, the miners always have the option to not fill their blocks with transactions, but then again this would turn out to be a loss on their part since more tx included in a block = more fee = more coins, and assume that they indeed push this development for ABC, do they already assume that the number of full nodes will decrease drastically and only miners will have to run them? That's not good IMO. Satoshi must be laughing his/her ass off upon reading this road map.

I don't see any solid link between the two, and the run in 2013 was something that was perpetrated by a bot, and traders just went on and played the fire until it peaked December of the same year. Also, i don't think there were that much people concerned on the shutdown of the Fed government that were involved in bitcoin in 2013 too, so it's hard to draw a line correlating the 2013 ATH and the fed gov't shutdown.


Knowing that during this time, bitcoin is a widely-used currency on Silk Road makes a much more appealing correlation to the 2013 ATH. Governmental uncertainty would play a vital role in today's market, but back in 2013? I don't think so.

CEO of BitMEX IIRC.

If you've been on crypto for far too long, you'll realize that not all noise are necessary. Heck, noise-signal ratio given off by these so-called crypto market analysts is so high that we rarely see a prediction coming right off the bat. If you yourself don't think that Hayes won't give you anything good for your position, why continue listening to him? Researching on your own is way better than listening to some other people after all.

Ahh yes, I remember so many threads and funny tweets from 2014 and 2015, specially here on bitcointalk where everyone thought that $180 is absolutely going  downhill to double digits in a few weeks (I can't remember who that permabear was but he was active at the Wall observer thread). But yeah, bitcoin speculation spawns the most obnoxious, hilarious and illogical predictions to date, and I think that this is one part of crypto that you can't remove. We've also seen the rise of the believers of a cyclical market, correlating market cycles from the past and banking hard on the thought that it could well just be a repeat of the previous cycle--in this case it's Bobby Lee.

I guess you should hang out to the Wall observer thread to get a good laugh every now and then.

If you're having doubts, then don't do it all at once. Studying is not a few hours commitment; if you want to really digest what's happening in the market, I think few hours isn't enough to get all the knowledge you needed before investing. $50k is a lot of money in my books, and I could easily create a business that will run for years had I chosen to not invest it on crypto. There are always risks on every form of investment available to Man, and you need to decide whole-heartedly if that risks are worth to take for the potential reward.

Seeing bitcoin as 'too big to fail' is also wrong, and you really need to evaluate your plan since you might get it wrong and you might kick yourself once bad things happen. I'm not a crypto hater nor a non-believer, I'm just stating that anything can happen for bitcoin and crypto investments in general.

This is no extravagant prediction IMO as this was bound to happen. Price goes down sharply = miners would sell off their machines and wait for another good run. Everyone seemed to overshoot their expectations on bitcoin, and due to that failure to recognize that bitcoin already lost steam once it reavhed $19k, everyone still thought that it'll push, and ended up investing more.

2018 is like a shit show for all investment-related subjects, and bitcoin isn't alone on the ordeal. Even stocks and other properties have taken a beating, resulting to losses for investors.

Or they imply cannot come up with effective solutions to try and regulate crypto? If other giant countries can do it, why can't they? Their priorities are far more focused on something that doesn't benefit the citizens much, just look at the giant statue that they erected. This is simply neglecting their citizens from the benefits of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies IMO, and not some case of regulations that are hard to impose.

One of the major problems I see for bitcoin is the number of places you can actually spend your coins at, thus creating a ripple effect that somewhat forces people to not use their coins as they don't feel the need to, given that using bitcoin as a speculative asset is far more viable than using it to buy on shops. If only there are lots of places to use bitcoin at, we might see some interesting change on use-case, but sadly that's not the case. Services and institutions are busy creating platforms to facilitate trades but merchants are left on using fiat due to bitcoin being so volatile.