It's not as black and white as it may seem.

Some people just don't trust themselves with anything of value and for that reason let banks store their fiat and other valuable goods. If you don't trust yourself, then it's probably a better idea to let a bank store everything on your behalf where you enjoy insurance on your valuable goods too.

Then there are a lot of wealthy entities who use custodians to geographically spread out their wealth to reduce the risk of becoming a single point attack factor. Wealthy Bitcoiners for example do that too. Xapo is the largest Bitcoin custodian with at one point $10 billion in holdings. Bakkt has launched a similar service. There is more demand for these custodians than people think.

There is nothing for them to change their mind on.

Takeaway is the platform they are signed up to, and this platform is settling the incoming payments through its partnered payment processors. Burger King itself doesn't know what payment option you are using to pay for your food, neither does it care about that. They want to increase their revenue and for that reason utilize the Takeaway platform.

End result is free marketing for Burger King Germany and free marketing for Bitcoin. Yuuuuu!!

I don't think we have seen any government thus far do that aside from the known 'be careful with crypto because it's a high risk asset class' type of warning.

These type of events are great for the local peer to peer market because what else will incentivize people to follow that route? If people are being treated nicely by centralized exchanges and governments don't really make a point out of it, then what incentive is there for them to go peer to peer? In these cases governments are helping the crypto ecosystem in general to become more distributed. Not bad.

I doubt Coinbase would purposely ignore your transfer. It's more likely that Coinbase's banking partner either hasn't received the transaction itself, or that it is received, but not yet fully cleared. The slow communication between you and Coinbase might be the result of them simply not having any information about this case to share yet.

I would give it a few more days to see if everything comes through well. Wait until wednesday or thursday to see if anything has changed, if not, contact them again.

For now. Their SAFU fund after years of profit surely must have been well stacked, but the 7000BTC they took out of that fund can't be ignored. Currently we don't know how much Bitcoin is left in this fund, and I honestly doubt they will have sufficient funds to compensate for another similar hack, so don't get overly confident in that exchange just because of what they did in the past.

Losing US traders soon will have a tremendous impact on their finances, which can't and shouldn't be ignored. They had an easy ride as non-compliant exchange, but that easy ride is about to end.

https://blog.blockchain.com/2019/07/15/airdrops-adoption-whats-ahead/

That's a pretty damn great success. ShapeShift is less known than Blockchain, but will do well with this promotion nonetheless. KYC or not, people don't seem to care. 

I think that your ideal picture of the world using blockchain is a bit too rosy. Bitcoin is immutable, Ethereum to some lower degree is, but the type of blockchains you're referring to (if they ever going to be used on a large scale) will be private chains, ones where you do not get to participate in the consensus model they use.

The benefit (for the entities participating in a specific consensus model) is that data can be altered/removed when needed. Immutability is actually an aspect that isn't useful in most industries where decentralization isn't needed. Mistakes are made all the time, which you can't correct with an immutable blockchain.

Fair voting for example isn't going to be more fair with private blockchains of 'independent' organizations. They are highly susceptible to manipulation. For that you would need Bitcoin, a truly independent and immutable blockchain.

In Asia these type of 'cafes' tend to do quite well. I have seen various documentaries and vlogs where people literally spend every single hour that they are open inside. It's almost like a second home to them. I however don't know if there is much demand for a similar concept within the US.

The thing however is that the profit margins are quite low if what you have pointed out will be the main source of income. It's going to get very expensive legally to set up an ATM if it's yours. Your best shot is to contact manufacturers of Bitcoin ATM's with the required licenses if they are willing to locate one in your building, that way you don't have to carry that cost on your shoulder.

I don't think the further development of Lightning will matter much with how the price hasn't ever pumped or dumped because of Bitcoin's fundamentals.

Even with a 'complete' version of Lightning you still need people to use it, and then even when people use it there might not be much of a reaction to the price. It's going to take multitudes of years for the speculative nature of Bitcoin to damp down and let fundamentals and utility actually play a role of importance.

I am actually more looking forward to the implementation of Schnorr because that directly offers an on-chain benefit to everyone using it. Merchants can easily consolidate their inputs at a fraction of the cost instead of paying up for every single input right now. This is a very big deal and it also contributes to more privacy.

It depends on what your definition of shitcoins is, but unfortunately they will not miraculously vanish from the crypto sphere. The thing with altcoins not showing any signs of life (relatively speaking) is that it forms a solid setup for a contrarian move.

The most intense bull runs happen when people don't expect it. Currently people are prepared for it with loaded bags (just like they did with Bitcoin last year), which only means that there is selling pressure that will curb any attempt of an altcoin season to initiate. Once people unload these bags, things will start to get interesting.

Smart money has a lot of patience and it might lead to another 6-12 months of boring market activity. Dumb money on the other hand doesn't have any patience and I'm of believe that they are on the verge of dumping.

You're giving Craig far too much credit here. Most of the "support" that BSV enjoys consists of bots, and then there on a much smaller scale are some imbeciles of human beings too weak minded to figure out that he is a scam. BSV army is very similar to XRP where the wealthy backers finance this fake sense of reality.

False. The only way to end this nonsense is to stop caring about it. Craig loves this drama. Bad news is good news for him. You taking him so serious is a problem on its own too. It means that his tactics are working. 

I'm not sure if you own Gold coins or Gold bars, but they are quite small and do allow you to store a lot of value in them. In that regard, it's not a problem at all for someone to store $10,000 worth of Gold at home. For most people in Argentina that's quite easy and convenient, especially with how they don't trust banks anymore.

You can walk into a jewerly store and have it converted to fiat, while with Bitcoin you don't have that level of acceptance there. Gold jewelry is commonly accepted as a valuable good that can be exchanged to fiat at any time, which makes it even easier for people to liquidate pure Gold coins/bars. It's really not that difficult or risky as you make it appear to be.

Shifting their funds to wallets that are safe is obviously a good thing, but the three exchanges you stated do that so frequently, that I am not so comfortable with it. If you look at Bitstamp's or Coinbase's cold wallets, their funds aren't moving at all unless they have to fill up their hot wallets. There is no reason as an exchange to keep moving a large chunk of your cold funds back and forth so frequently.

It's funny how people suddenly link every single high value transaction that happened in the last couple of days to Bakkt's custodial service. They wish that many coins would be handed over to them to take care of. This is crazy FREE exposure for Bakkt that otherwise would have cost them tens of thousands of dollars in marketing. 

It's smart marketing. People in crypto don't seem to respect their privacy enough to skip these promotions. If we look at Blockchain's promotion, it has turned out to be a great success for them, and so will it be a great success for ShapeShift.

The people who hand over their personal information to ShapeShift then have a fully verified account, which means that they can use that platform without any hassle moving onwards. This is exactly what ShapeShift is after. Admittedly, ShapeShift is quite a useful service so people will love using it to convert crypto back and forth.

Proven in what way? I don't see anything that the blockchain can improve that for example a database can't.

We're living in a world where for example banks not being efficient can exploit that to charge you ridiculous fees if you want a faster transfer of value. If banks really cared about instant transactions and at the same time wasn't harming to their profits, they could have made sure it was possible even before Bitcoin and thus the blockchain were a thing.

Aside from banks there are countless of other sectors that do not want you to benefit from any form of efficiency. That's how money is made. The efficiency benefits that could be achieved will be privatized while they socialize the cost of their previous not efficient system to you to boost their profit. That's what we will see happen more.

Why is it concerning that altcoins aren't performing well? I think it's perfectly normal for shitcoins not being worth anything to not perform well. I do however have to point out that in dollar terms altcoins are doing fairly well. It's just their Bitcoin ratio that has dropped hard. That's what you get when you exchange your precious Bitcoins for trash.

What I find more concerning is that the same people who initially said that the dominance metric is useless, are now cheering for the dominance to be going higher and higher.

Crypto is irrational. No matter how worthless altcoins are, we'll be getting some sort of an altcoin pop at some point which will significantly decrease Bitcoin's dominance again. If enough people give up on altcoins in the coming months, the market will catch them by surprise and a massive bull run initiates due to people fomo'ing back in. It ain't done yet. The only questionable aspect is the timing.

It's pretty meaningless when on the higher level you have multi billion dollar corporations bribing politicians so that this can happen. These politicians do not care because they live far away from where the fire is rapidly destroying more and more nature. All they have always cared about is to be corrupt. The whole country suffers from the leadership of these criminals.

When you see the politicians close their eyes for what's happening, you know they are in it. It's disgusting to see this happen. Retarded world we live in.

Bitcoin donations directly can't be stopped. Donations through ShitPay can because you are begging them to process your transaction, but they spit right in your face and say no.

People are making things way to difficult for themselves. The IRS doesn't care about the fees you pay to the exchange, so don't calculate them because it only leads to extra confusion. It's just you using $1000 worth of BTC to purchase $1000 worth of Lisk. Whenever you sell (be it at a profit or loss) you still have to use the $1000 as a base, even if you lost a few bucks in fees to the exchange.

It would be extremely helpful if governments would provide guides on how to properly declare gains or losses with how most people in crypto haven't had any prior experience with investments and taxation.

Another CLEAR sign that Blockstream (aka the banking cartel according to some noobs) doesn't control the development and the roadmap of Bitcoin at all. Blockstream's contributions have been slowing down consistently over the course of the last 12 months. Too bad the stupid people falling for the big block propaganda are too stupid to realize that.

What got me turned off was them openly praising Tether, and that while Tether has done everything to signal that they thrive on funny business. Why did they do that? Right, to have Tether be a Liquid client, a private side chain that has been an awful performer. Absolute waste of resources. Centralized crap it is.

Registrations as metric is just as flawed as volumes and whatnot. I can sign up to an exchange with thousands of accounts and not complete the KYC procedure, which means that the accounts are worthless. If I can do that, an exchange can too. Exchanges that display the number of registrations do not exclude non verified accounts for obvious reasons.

Interest can be measured in stablecoins with how they are the only fiat metric we can actually trace. If we look at USDC for example, they have reached an all time high this month in the number of stablecoins they have circulating. This means that capital is still entering crypto.