People have assigned it value, and for it to be used as a currency, it has to have value, and so people speculated on what truly is the acceptable price for 1 bitcoin is. I won't call it fundamentally flawed; we, the same people who gave bitcoin its value, are the ones who deviated away from the fundamentals of bitcoin and have allowed the same middlemen and governments to encroach this tiny space of ours on which we think we're safe from their control and observant eyes. Had we not given bitcoin some value, we wouldn't even be here, and only those who truly believed in the system way before bitcoin reached some significant value would stay.

Building your own market watch from scratch and using an exchange's API could do the trick, although there are some rumors that exchanges somewhat mask big buy/sell orders on the platform so as not to cause a sudden sway in the order books and prevent a crash/pump to happen. I could be wrong though, but platforms have changed drastically that it's not easy to trust the order book alone, and I have seen a lot of instances wherein the order book seemed to be okay without anything unusual then a sudden crash happens.


Yep, OTC is still the way to go for whales that want to get a customized deal and to also not drown/excite the market too much. However with the real-time price action on exchanges, there's a lot of money to be made in an instant so other whales like to stick it on their trusted exchange and do as everyone else does.

For personal gains of course. Right now, people aren't interested anymore in being free from the constraints of banks and the governments but are now interested on at least redistributing a small percentage of wealth by means of buying into crypto. I am still against banks and the governments, especially the thought of them tying down your assets into their policies and regulations as if they own it. While banks and governments are flocking into cryptocurrencies little by little, I still think that it will be hard for them to establish the same control as they have on today's current financial system. They can go on and ban bitcoin on their countries, but as long as bitcoin has value, people can and will use it any way and anywhere they like.

The US is at it again bullying services under them to do what they wanted. If they think they can bully any other nation and use services that these countries rely on to make a point, then they're clearly wrong. Somewhere along the way, people will find alternatives, and as of now cryptocurrencies are the only viable avenue available. The EU and the US are trying so hard to impair Iran's economic capability and status, and it's clearly not painting a good image for a lot of people.

Hah! Bitcoin deflated like a 'soap bubble' but the minister admits that it attracted significant interest despite the losses incurred in the cryptocurrency space. Two contradicting views in one statement is oftentimes relaying that the speaker doesn't know what he's talking about or doesn't really put things he say in all seriousness. Anyway though, bitcoin is climbing inch by inch everyday, and there seems to be no imminent threat for the price in the mean time. Also, several institutional organizations and investors are still eyeing bitcoin for their own schemes, and if that alone isn't enough for a statement that bitcoin is still primed to get good gains, idk what else is.

No matter how hard we pin down the banks on this one, still they will insist that bitcoin is the evil and they are the angels sent from above to alleviate criminality and protect the people's financial interest and such. They are trying to instill in people's minds that bitcoin is an instrument created solely for money laundering and will not do any good without looking at their own faults. How many times have big banks been raided and been charged for being a platform for money laundering and such?  

I'd like to incline on someone guessing his password but that is highly unlikely, or someone may have sifted through the database and found something relating to Satoshi's account. Also, the post doesn't seem to pertain to anything at all, and is done to somewhat disturb the market for a brief period of time. I think this could be the same hacker as 2014 although there isn't sufficient evidence at all.

For context on the 2014 "hack":

I believe that this is somewhat partly true, considering that the anticipated batches of newer ASICs back in 2016-2017 from BITMAIN has caused a considerable amount of hashing power to be vested on the whole bitcoin network, and it is said that BITMAIN is doing this in order to 'stress-test' the machines before it even reach the consumers, though I think that this is a cheeky way to get more from the machines by mining it first before shipping it later. As for the "90%" of all crypto, I guess you are underestimating other players involved in this whole scheme. There's Japan, Europe and the US that are the most active traders right now apart from China. and having a whole lot of hashing power doesn't mean that they have ultimate control of the entire crypto-space but it is somewhat a significant control nonetheless.

Not in the case of the Philippines, I'd say. It is only very recent that some malls and supermarkets started accepting scan-to-pay technology, and a few years back, it's just credit and debit cards reigning the payment scene for these stores. Also, given that the 'palengke' setup is anything but advanced and technological, I'd say it's entirely different since this isn't anything compared to the marketplaces of progressive countries and China, Singapore, and other countries that uses WeChat and Alipay. I'm somewhat stoked on this idea being spread out on other cities as well, though knowing the demographics of the urbanized and marginalized community in the Metros, I'm also concerned that this might induce the rise of theft and robbery within these marketplaces.

The support @ $3600 was never breached, and several days ago the bulls are testing $4000 only to have breached it yesterday and made a comfortable footing at the said range. This might be the start of a recovery but I'm not too optimistic yet since we've seen the same pattern happened last week: a slight increase and it went downhill from there. The climb back to $4000 seemed to be flawless and haven't met any resistance as of late, which makes me somewhat doubtful of what the coming weeks has to offer for bitcoin.

Tl;dr - bitcoin is never going back to zero. With the number of rise and falls bitcoin has had in its entire existence, it's not surprising anymore to see such steep falls and insane climbs. No matter how many financial experts state that bitcoin is dead after a steep fall, the market always decides otherwise, and we see it climb after a short while. With the number of infrastructures established and organizations involved, it's almost impossible for bitcoin to fall to zero no matter how hard the crashes be.

There should be a certain amount of bitcoin involved or transferred to another address before the owner of the said address is prosecuted, otherwise the said Iranians could go and spend a couple Satoshis and turn anyone's address into a recipient of the dirty coins listed on the OFAC. It's quite vague on the Fed's part to really address this issue since sooner or later, a huge chunk of the network would be affected and almost everyone can be prosecuted.

Idk what came to their mind but this is not going to work in the long run.

I don't really understand why the USA is trying so hard to act as the global police on these sort of things when in fact, they just wanted control and that's pretty much it. Also, the plan to blacklist addresses is just out of this world; it will never work since mixers and other methods to obfuscate taints and trails are already existing. I doubt that they will even pursue this as hard as they can since it will be a dire effort no matter how hard they follow the taint. Somehow, they will have to ban a huge number of addresses should the guys owning the said coins wanted to play some sort of game or to just hide their tracks completely.

I don't think it will be easy for bitcoin to lose its advantage over any other cryptocurrency. For you to overtake bitcoin in terms of dominance, you need not only improve on technicalities and specifications but also convince people that your coin is far superior and better than bitcoin in all aspects. It's a hard task, considering that this involves a great deal of conditioning the minds of the masses, and we all know that not everyone can easily be swayed by random blabbering by devs and their peers. It is possible to defeat bitcoin in terms of dominance, though in what manner is probably a question that none of us can answer in the mean time.

Fact of the matter is that only a few people would dare touch bitcoin when it is tanking really hard. A few days ago, I tried buying a couple coins (priced @ $3600) thinking that it's okay to play with a few thousand bucks at hand. Seeing how the price turned fast right now, I'm somewhat happy that I turned a profit of $600 in just 2 days, and if I haven't considered buying when everyone is spreading FUD, I wouldn't have made any money at all. Panic sellers would always be there, together with fudsters and the faint of heart, but only a few will ever take advantage of a lousy market condition and turn it in a profit.

Generating a private key while offline is in itself already a good idea, as long as the machine that you're using isn't infected in any way. Also, randomizing your own set of pass phrase, or in your example, random letters and encrypting it in SHA-256 is also okay, provided that no keylogger or any similar malware is present in the machine. Once it's encrypted, I don't think it will be easy to de-crypt it by any means, and knowing that your random letters are unintelligible and might look as if it's the incorrect phrase, I guess you'll be good in the end.

Or a derived form of anarcho-capitalism since we don't want governments to interfere? But yeah, crypto-capitalism sounds fitting knowing the ecosystem that we're moving in. With the disparity between the number of minnows and whales, I'd say it balances the scale since the whales act first, minnows follow next; without the initiative of the whales, I don't think we will find ourselves sitting at a hefty $19000 price range just last year knowing how we small-time traders wait for signals before trading and setting our next moves. Not that I'm applauding the said market activity, it's just that most of us are scared of risking our assets first since we only have too little and too important money to lose whereas the whales can risk hundreds of thousands, or even millions, and they can still swim in the waters.

I guess that'll always be the case on any societal hierarchy or setup: there will be the capitalists who can do anything at will and the average Joe who will just follow as what the capitalists do.

Seamless transfer of funds in between exchanges without having to exchange into real fiat and/or moving your assets without disturbing its value is what I see stablecoins offer. They offer a temporary 'hedge' on a trader's assets when the trader wishes to not trade atm and doesn't want to lose any value his/her assets hold. In a way there's a good reason for introducing stablecoins but then its legality and stability has been questioned numerous times simply because they are claiming that they are 'backed' by true currencies or any other assets they claim. I haven't used one nor planning on using one but I guess the demand is there so they are creating multiple stablecoins, but I'm somewhat interested on what steps would an exchange take should there be any complications that happened with their stablecoins along the way

Like OpenBazaar? It already exists, but it hasn't gotten any significant attention from the merchants that's why there literally is no volume whatsoever for their platform. Also, trust is still an important factor that people look at when buying things online, that's why they want to ensure that someone can be held liable if their purchases turned out to be bad or not matching their expectations, otherwise they will look for other places to spend their money.

If exchanges is what you're after, there aren't any promising decentralized exchanges for cryptocurrency elsewhere, or I am not looking enough to find one that fits the bill.

'The new Marulas Public Market in Valenzuela City is the first-of-its-kind ‘DigiPalengke’ initiative in Northern Metro Manila where an entire marketplace is equipped to accept mobile cashless payments.'

https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1015376

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This is quite interesting since even a public market where most of the time common folk buy their everyday needs is accepting digital payments. While this is not entirely related to cryptocurrency, it's as if the people are slowly seeing the convenience and security cashless payments offer to their everyday lives. For years, scan-to-pay stores are just confined within the walls of malls and luxurious places but it seems that we're slowly bringing it to the masses and eventually, it will be the norm to pay only with our smartphones and pre-loaded accounts--and in the future, possibly even cryptocurrencies.