https://www.arctictoday.com/russias-first-floating-nuclear-power-plant-leaves-murmansk-for-the-eastern-arctic/

That's some hardcore shit. A floating nuclear power plant is currently heading towards a very remote area in Russia to provide heat and electricity to 100,000 people. No amount of 'free' home heating through mining will be able to withstand this brute force of reliable but potentially very catastrophic form of generating energy.

Russian's as tough as they like to present themselves will probably negate the risks and only focus on the short term benefits.

A lot of that liquidity that might have been still there if the price didn't significantly shoot up. It's perfectly normal that it goes down with how merchants accepting Lightning payments suddenly have 3x'd their revenue and for that reason have to cash out to reap the fruits of the bull run.

Then we have the liquidity that was added during the 'hype' where Lightning was in the news almost every single day. Now Lightning isn't making new headlines anymore that liquidity has been withdrawn.

844BTC is currently locked into the network, which is plenty enough liquidity for people to transact with at current stage. I would even tend to say that it is too much considering how early it still is, but you can't possibly have too much liquidity so it's all good.

This doesn't take into consideration how much more secure Bitcoin's transactional network is compared to Ethereum. Ethereum needs several days of POW to match the same level of security of just one day of Bitcoin POW. Saying that Ethereum processes more transactions with just a third of its electricty consumed (as in it being unnecessary to consume more electricity) is shortsighted.

If we look at how much on-chain transaction activity there was in the last 24 hours, dollar wise, then the stats speak for themselves;

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/ $5 billion
https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ $244 million

It's tough to answer right now. There are so many variables that might come into play that we don't think about right now, but will affect our long term game plan.

If Bitcoin ends up reaching prices near the $1 million level, it has probably shown enough strength and demand that I can't see it go back down much lower. I expect similar market behavior as what we see Gold go through. Just for diversification purposes, I will probably cash out 15% to fiat, and convert 25% to Gold. This leaves me with 60% Bitcoin which is perfectly fine with me. 

I will never sell my entire stash. That's pretty pointless at a stage where it has become a serious enough asset being worth $1 million.

Shady pumping? I usually see people only complain when the price gets dumped down. 

Mind to explain what makes you think the pumping is shady? All I have seen so far is regular fomo activity combined with short squeezes. I can see how people get the impression that there is something shady going on with big green candles popping up out of nowhere, but it definitely isn't shady or manipulation.

As for my view on the price, I will remain neutral until we either make higher local highs or lower local lows. It feels good to just sit back and wait for the pop, regardless of the direction it ends up popping to.

If you follow your coins after each deposit, you'll notice that the exchange starts to move these coins from address to address. It almost looks like they're mixing the inputs. Each one of these transactions requires a fee, and the steep withdrawal fees that people pay are meant to cover these fees. In other words, you're paying the exchange for something it shouldn't charge you for.

People should stop using this exchange. Usding them equals rewarding them for their misbehavior.

0.034BTC in two seperate transactions. That sucks. 

One could blame people for not doing enough research themselves when it comes to phishing sites and whatnot, but it really seems that the one who got this domain in his possession did it to make people trust the site because it isn't a phishing site. The signature campaign they had running did some free marketing for this scammer and now he can just sit back and wait for people to bite.

I wonder how long it will take for this foolish scammer to stop using the same address over and over again.

This is an important bit of information. People here seem to dislike the idea of centralized services, but the thing is that people can decide for themselves to use them or not. Not one of the services we have in crypto forces you to use them, yet people keep trashing their business models because it's against what crypto stands for.

Not everyone here has figured out that most people don't really care about being their own bank. They are here either to speculate or earn money and use an exchange to cash out.

In order to have newbies appreciate what Bitcoin stands for, we need another Cyprus type of crisis where everyone with a bank account in a specific country is subjected to a haircut. We haven't seen any of this happen since 2013.

That's very likely it. Even if they haven't been caught converting to fiat directly, the entities who end up receiving these tainted coins might try to convert their coins without realizing what they have been used for, and that's how law enforcement is a step closer to the actual criminals. Bitcoin is just a horrible tool to use for practices like these.

I actually believe that law enforcement is very happy with Bitcoin being so transparent. It allows them to solve cases that with a high degree of certainty wouldn't be solved if the criminals used cash. But then again, this isn't going to work for ever with how people slowly but surely figure out that there is no such a thing as anonymity when it comes to Bitcoin.

I don't think Trump is responsible for everything people blame him for. Fact of the matter is that the US was going downhill in some aspects before he was even elected as president. People point at Trump because the situation is seemingly getting worse within his term as president, while I am sure that if we had a different president the outcome would still be the same.

Regarding freedom of press, what has changed that you think is Trump's fault? If there is less freedom of press today, then it's more so related to the social justice warrior attitude that seems to be spreading like a virus globally.

If you as rational person have a portfolio consisting of Bitcoin for the upside and Gold for the stability and durabilty, I think you're doing a pretty decent job in taking distance from a system that's continuously decreasing your purchasing power. Governments have been stacking massive amounts of Gold throughout the last years.

Governments aren't stupid. They know that their phony money isn't going to last so they stack up Gold while everyone is still accepting fiat money in exchange for their Gold. It's a hedge against their own sucky monetary policy. If that isn't enough evidence for you to start hedging fiat, I don't know what will be.

Even if you hedge just 25% of your net worth as risk averse fiat saver, that's still better than nothing. 

It's actually quite important in the sense that it will be a new yearly high, and that also means continuation of the bullish run that we're in. Currently people can only hope to have that continuation but there is a fair probability that we'll be heading down to test some wider time frame moving averages, which isn't really the end of the world.

Max is pretty much the Peter Schiff of Bitcoin. He keeps rehashing the same arguments hoping that he will be right eventually. There generally isn't much risk in what he's talking about.

I don't think Bakkt deserves that kind of praise. It hasn't done anything yet to consider it a fundamentally important development for Bitcoin.

I personally don't like the fact that we're continuously going back to the $9xxx levels, which if you do it a few times too many, we'll confidently break it to the downside. People then will blame Bakkt for having failed because the price didn't go up, while in reality the price movements we're seeing aren't related to Bakkt at all.

On top of that, Bakkt has likely bought enough coins to serve their clients, so there isn't really a need for them to add more to their position unless they run out, which I don't expect.

If they get pissed off with Bitcoin for not scaling they don't understand Bitcoin. Scaling Bitcoin is not something you can force through someone's throat like what happens with BCash where they can fork at any desired date and get it through without problems. Bitcoin isn't designed to favor their business model.

I think the main reason they do not want to implement Segwit is that it deems their BCash near worthless with how Bitcoin's fees would be so low, that BCash's only advantage (which is provide low fee transactions) isn't longer a selling feature. I believe that these fools have been stupid enough to convert their Bitcoin to BCash when it forked off.

We sold our BCash probably to these entities at +0.2BTC rates so they're sitting on very expensive coins right now. We've seen Bitmain's balance sheet to know that they have gone balls deep in BCash.

BTCPay is fantastic, but I don't think it's a good thing to donate BitPay free exposure like this, because they definitely don't deserve this. The way they discourage using Bitcoin as payment option by charging an extra fee is just retarded.

Coinbase is a much better alternative for those looking for a centralized BitPay alternative, and they accept more coins as well; https://commerce.coinbase.com/

It's definitely a loss for Coinbase but a massive opportunity for the other smaller exchanges to gain some more popularity.

According to Bitcoinity Bit-x aka Coinsbank has a lot of volume in GBP, but I don't really trust their volume reports. If I look at their volume bars, they one by one are nearly identical, which is very suspicious. It reeks of automated wash trading with little care to make it look organic.

Most people probably know them because they used to run one of the biggest signature campaigns here where the top posters earned like 0.5BTC per week.

It's the most likely one for sure. It doesn't happen all that often where someone sets up a project that becomes succesful and nothing of the founder's shares are sold. Back then Bitcoin was a mere experiment that got a little bit of attention and a monetary value. No matter how convinced of Bitcoin's success people were back then, most of the holders did cash out a portion of their holdings.

Another (slightly less probable) theory is that Satoshi was/is so convinced of Bitcoin's long term success, that he won't be touching any of his coins until it becomes a unit of account. This will make him the wealthiest person on earth.

I don't think that fits in the category of tarnishing Bitcoin's reputation. If governments refer to Bitcoin as being the main cause, then it's just them using that as a smoke screen to hide their own dislike towards Bitcoin. Governments have never really come forward and say we don't like this or that technology, they always try to come up with an excuse to ban it.

A few local cases of electricity theft to mine Bitcoin or any other crypto isn't enough to cause harm. If governments would fuss over that then they would have played the 'Bitcoin is an environmental disaster' card already and banned the practice of mining and Bitcoin right away.

People may not be realistic in the sense that they expect Bitcoin to absorb every single gimmicky characteristic of an altcoin that they deem "useful", but I don't see why it won't be able to have a feature integrated if it really adds something to Bitcoin that we don't already have and makes it even better.

The problem with most people is that they always look at what they don't have, then pretend to need features while they don't ever intend to use them. We already have a working product that people actually use. It may not be perfect, which is why there is development going on to improve it even further, but it gets the job done.

What do people actually use crypto in general for? It's to send coins back and forth between themselves and an exchange, to transact with others to settle deals, make online purchases, etc. Bitcoin does that already and with Lightning it will get the job done even better and cheaper.

It's so funny seeing people speculate about Bitcoin reaching $1 million prices while they get a boner after seeing a 50% increase in a matter of weeks and sell a large portion of their stack.

If you're so tempted to sell your coins after a pretty insignificant increase, then why dream about such high levels? If you're serious about holding until such prices, first make sure you can keep your coins offline for a whole year without moving them. If you fail there you will not be able to hold even until $100,000 unless it happens before the end of the year, but that's highly unlikely.