Bitcoin is the oldest and most valuable cryptocurrency, but a crop of nimble competitors, including Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, could lure investors away.

Do you think bitcoin is going to reach june rates soon ?

When you ask someone for advise they always say buy low and sell high but this is very tough.

What is your strategy for buying low and selling high?

Do you agree with buy low and sell high is very tough?

I will wait for that time to arrive, because I believe the bitcoin price by the end of 2018 will soar.
I will keep the spirit to collect coins for my future.
although this month, bitcoin prices are worse than December of 2017, but I still believe it.
Can not be denied, the growth of Bitcoin value in 2017 is arguably fantastic. However, this criticism of cryptocurrency is analogous to a 'bubble' (because it continues to fly high but can 'erupt' anytime)

The year 2017 seems to be the period of proof for Bitcoin as the most calculated cryptocurrency. One climax occurs when the digital currency recorded a record high with the value (USD 19,796) on December 17 last.
Experts also predict that with these achievements, Bitcoin has the potential to record a much higher value next year.
"Bitcoin can reach (USD 60,000) by December 2018," said Mike Dumont, Senior Editor of Bitcoin.com

The first purchase using bitcoins was in 2009 when someone bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. Today, that would be worth $83,746,850. Many people have started to use Bitcoin and it is now the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. Many countries whose currencies have become hyperinflated have thought about switching their national currency to Bitcoin. For something to be classified as money, it needs to be a good unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. Since Bitcoin has become extremely popular, I wanted to explain to investors and Bitcoin users that Bitcoin isn't a legit currency. The main three reasons why Bitcoin isn't a legit currency is because it is a poor unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.
   One of the big three parts of a currency is that it is a good unit of account. For something to be a unit of account, people have to be able to compare its price to the prices of alternative retail goods. Since the value of a bitcoin changes so much, it would be hard and confusing for both the consumer and the seller to recalculate the prices every day. “Because the value of a bitcoin compared to other currencies changes greatly on a day-to-day basis, retailers that accept the currency have to recalculate prices very frequently, a practice that would be costly to the merchant and confusing to the consumer.” This quote from David Yermack’s article Is Bitcoin a Real Currency? An Economic Appraisal Bitcoin shows why Bitcoin isn't a good unit of account. That is one reason why Bitcoin can't be a form of currency and why Bitcoin isn't a legit currency.
   The second part of something that is classified as a currency is that it is a medium of exchange. A medium of exchange is an intermediary instrument used to facilitate the sale, purchase or trade of goods. Since bitcoin doesn't have any intrinsic value, so its worth is held up by its usefulness as a currency in the consumer economy. The Youtube video “Why Do Banks Fear Bitcoin” by VisionVictory explains that there is a set amount of Bitcoins and by the year 2140, there will be a total of 21 million bitcoins. Miners have already mined 11.9 million of them, and this means that there is only 9.1 million left. Once all of it is mined, there won’t be any more left to be mined. Dollar bills can be printed by the U.S. government if they were needed. Some more reasons why Bitcoins isn't a good medium of exchange are that Bitcoins transactions each take around 10 minutes each, which is very slow compared to using a credit or debit card, which takes a few seconds. Also, Bitcoin transactions can cost around $20, which is extremely expensive. Because of all of these reasons, Bitcoin can't be a good medium of exchange, which is very important if it were to be a legit currency.
   The third and final part of a currency is that it has to be a good store of value. A store of value means that the function of an asset that can be saved, retrieved and exchanged at a later time. In the long podcast on Youtube by Paul Vigna & Michael Casey: ‘The Age of Cryptocurrency’, they explain what a decentralized currency is. Bitcoin is an atrocious store of value and one of the reasons why is because of its constant hacking attacks and other security problems. This is mostly because Bitcoin is decentralized, which means that there is no central authority that can stop any Bitcoin transaction or any hacking attempts. One of the reasons why Bitcoin is so popular is because people can stay anonymous and make transactions without people knowing who they are. The downside of using a decentralized currency is that people can do illegal things anonymously and get away with it. And also, Bitcoin’s exchange rate has no correlation at all with any other big currencies like the Dollar, Euro, and Yen. This makes Bitcoin extremely risky to use because it is tethered to any other currencies so its’ value would change constantly. This shows how terrible of a store of value Bitcoin is and why it cannot be a legit currency.
   Tons of people are jumping on the “Bitcoin Bandwagon” without doing their own research on it, and they’re going to lose a lot of time and money because of this. They need to realize that Bitcoin is not a legit currency because it fails to be a unit of account, medium of exchange, and a store of value.

Bitcoin exceeded $ 10,000 in 2017. What's going to happen to Bitcoin in the coming year?

My start with crypto/btc was that I invested a bit end of November last year. I had a few friends that told me about their small successes and how easy it was to just 'start'. It was indeed quite easy. I started to read and research into btc and every other relevant coin. Whitepapers, teams and such. Then I started to shift focus to the block chain, starting to get a grasp on what could be the future possibilities. I started to get real exited and invested some of my savings in a few projects with (to me) real potential. None of those projects appeared to be alive because of speculation only, mainly because they have a vision and actual plans.

So then I noticed that there are quite a few documentaries. I started to watch them all. A few from 2015, 2016 and 2017. I was disappointed to say the least. Everything was about bitcoin and the value/worth of bitcoin. It was about highs and lows, crashes and deceit. Only a few times the actual potential of the block chain was mentioned. Mostly it was about money.

Right now I am starting to feel like this is just a way to make money. Nothing more nothing less. You buy into btc or other coins and in no way are you really supporting the project, besides maybe adding to the order books at the exchanges with some minor effect until whales decided to take over. I sometimes have some sort of dishonest feeling, like the money I make through buying (and seldom) selling is somehow dirty as it comes from people that simply do less research, bail out or simply already had their take.

I started with high feelings of morality, being part of some new future where block chain would be the next internet. Right now it feels like a rat race where you have to grab as much money as possible before others take it before you or from you.

Not that I am ungrateful. I like many projects because of the team behind it that actually want to change the world. But if I look around me, it is mostly those that are in it to make money, a lot of money....and this money has to come from somewhere right (those that lose money)...

What is your take on this? Is this all a phase, part of how this game works?

Yes, stay away BTC and all centralized coins. Trading XRP.

Bitcoin dipped to 7500$ and i think now it is danger zone could go to 3000$-4000$ again.
Good chance for newcomers, sorry for those who bought bitcoin at 18,000$ an 11,000$

What do you think? How low bitcoin can go?

Just hodl it

:)Countries are divided into 3 groups: those who ban bitcoin, those who will regulate it strongly and those who will give complete freedom to development. The second and the third groups us well be satisfied with. This majority. It's enough to survive.Therefore, it is not necessary to look for negative outside of us. ;

kinda strange when investing in a volitile  market. you can spend 10,000 $ into the market in january and come out less. than what a person invested in april with 10,000 $.

Dont panic at first. stay still .. wait for the right moment. try other stuff , then be back on the increasing market value of the your assets.. Market place is not so stable on some point, just have enough knowledge in your game. find a fast moving game plan so your coins, will not be stagnated.

Do you think the market will stay green or turn red?

It not an easy call

I say green

crypto is green again, do you thing is good time buy now .

The society is divided into haves and haves not, poor people are getting more poorer and rich people are getting more richer, Value of money is decreasing and inflation is increasing, Many people around the globe suffer death mostly Africa and asia because hunger and unable to fulfill basic human needs.
What actions should governments need to take and how individuals can contribute?

I have seen the future of Bitcoin, and it is bleak.

The Promise of Bitcoin

If you were to peak into my bedroom at night (please don’t), there’s a good chance you would see my wife sleeping soundly while I stare at the ceiling, running thought experiments about where Bitcoin is going. Like many other people, I have come to the conclusion that distributed currencies like Bitcoin are going to eventually be recognized as the most important technological innovation of the decade, if not the century. It seems clear to me that the rise of distributed currencies presents the biggest (and riskiest) investment opportunity I am likely to see in my lifetime; perhaps in a thousand lifetimes. It is critically important to understand where Bitcoin is going, and I am determined to do so.

My hundreds of hours of thought experiments have been productive. I published a whitepaper about the future of Bitcoin, and because of that paper I’ll have the great privilege of sitting on the “Bitcoin in the Future” panel at the 2013 Bitcoin Conference in San Jose. Through these years of deliberation I have satisfied myself that the answer to the “Trillion Dollar Question” of whether any form of distributed currency can ever achieve a stable price, is “yes”. (There are three ways this will happen, as I have written elsewhere).

I have been predicting for years that the world’s first trillionaire by USD valuation will be an early investor in distributed currency — quite possibly Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he/she/it/they may be. I own a few bitcoins, and I intend to keep them until I find a more attractive investment (that is, I want to invest in whatever replaces bitcoin or builds on top of it).

To many people, this sounds like an implausibly rosy future, and for early adopters that is true — it feels like winning the lottery every day. However, for most other people, the ascendancy of distributed currency systems will feel like a disaster. If you are involved in Bitcoin now, you should prepare to be almost universally hated someday.

In this article, we will examine a few simple thought experiments to show how the rise of distributed currencies such as bitcoin could create massive social upheaval due to governments’ rapidly degrading capability to fulfill their core functions of taxation and regulation of commerce. We’ll see how the end result could be extremely painful for common citizens due to previously unimaginable wealth disparities, hyperinflation of previously stable government-backed fiat currencies, and a greatly empowered criminal class.

The Bleak Future of Fiat Currencies

Anarchists and hardcore libertarians love Bitcoin, but most people outside those circles are not in favor of completely doing away with their government. If you aren’t part of a fringe political movement, chances are there is something the government does that you like, whether it’s handing out entitlement money, killing enemies, putting people in prison, building dams and roads, funding research, or any number of other things. The government can do these things because the government can collect taxes, which in turn they can do because the flows of money are highly regulated and tracked at every level. Whether you are collecting a paycheck, buying furniture, cashing out investments, or simply dying and leaving an inheritance, the government knows about it and takes a cut.

For our first thought experiment, let’s imagine a world where distributed currencies like bitcoin have become wildly successful due to technological advances which make them easy to use and completely stable. In this world government-issued money is as good as dead. It may take a few years for everyone to realize it, but there will come a point when the ever-increasing outflows of money from fiat money into untaxable, unseizable decentralized currency will reach a tipping point, and we’ll have a financial panic like the world has never seen. Frightened lawmakers and banks will try to stop people from cashing out, but that will just increase the panic. Those who don’t get out before the door closes will be in dire straits indeed. This is the ultimate bank run — the run on the world’s central banks, and who could possibly step in and restore order?

When people think of hyperinflation, they usually envision a Zimbabwean printing press running around the clock in the dark corner of a mud hut, putting ever more zeroes on cheap paper. Has it ever occurred to you that hyperinflation can happen while the printing presses are off? The value of the money in your pocket is not ultimately guaranteed by your government, but by simple supply and demand. The government controls the supply, and we control the demand. If demand falls precipitously, we have hyperinflation without ever needing to print another dollar or euro. If people start fleeing government currencies en masse, hyperinflation is the inevitable result.

The good news is that you don’t need to worry about current government debt in this scenario. If government currencies lose their value rapidly, debts which previously seemed overwhelming suddenly become much more manageable. Perhaps your debt-laden government will someday completely pay off it’s national debt by simply selling a few gold bars and a couple national parks.

The Bleak Future of Retirement

For our next thought experiment, let’s consider what will happen to Grandma. For her whole life, she has carefully saved her money, and now she is living in reasonable comfort. She gets money and health care from the government, and she has her own savings to fall back on. Grandma has done everything right, including taking her savings out of the stock market; most of her savings are now invested in the safest asset known to man: U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Rather suddenly, things start to go wrong. At the same time all her expenses start skyrocketing, the government has a liquidity crisis; they are having trouble collecting taxes and can no longer pay for her health care. Her savings are still “safe” in the sense that she will get U.S. Dollars out of them, but that is little comfort when those dollars which should have lasted years can barely pay her weekly grocery bill.

Grandma’s retirement has been sabotaged by the rise of a new kind of money that she can’t even begin to understand. All she knows is that she did everything right, and now she has nothing.

The Bleak Future Wealth Disparities

All the world’s wealth has essentially been stolen, but by whom? By you, dear reader.

We’ll be very lucky if we aren’t all rounded up and summarily executed. Thankfully, you’ll be able to use some of that money to purchase protection, but I’m not at all convinced that it will be enough. A wrathful government backed by an enraged population is a fearful enemy. Satoshi foresaw this long ago, and I doubt he/she/it/they will ever voluntarily come into the light.

If there are enough of us, and we are very careful and charming, we may be physically safe. However, the massive displacement of wealth will still have some awful consequences. People argue all the time about the societal benefits and drawbacks of wealth disparities, and the rise of distributed currencies will create disparities that previously did not seem possible. It seems clear that there will be a lot of jobs created by the new wealthy, but whether the average person is better off or not, one thing is sure to rise: resentment. What right do we have to take all the wealth of the world and put it in our pockets? Sure, a nifty new idea should pay off for early visionaries, but nobody ever expected a new idea to suck all the wealth out of the world like a financial black hole!

The Bleak Future of Law Enforcement

This is where things get really bleak. Currently distributed currencies facilitate money laundering, black market commerce (the Silk Road), and insider trading (TorBroker). These applications in their current form are just a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg. Not only will they get MUCH bigger, but we will see applications which are much less savory. Historically, the “Dark Net” accessible by Tor and private networks has been nothing more than a hidey-hole for illegal files and a hangout for paranoid schizophrenics, but it is quickly becoming the platform of choice for large-scale illegal commerce.

For this thought experiment, we will imagine that your child has been kidnapped and put up for sale on “TorSlaver”. Their business plan is to kidnap children and sell them to the highest bidder, whether parent or pedophile. The winning bidder is sent the location of the child, probably bound and gagged and dumped somewhere. As long as they don’t get caught doing the kidnapping, the kidnappers can do this again and again with complete impunity. Once someone proves it can be done, copycats will come out of the woodwork, and it won’t matter if the first mover gets caught.

As a parent of three small children, I cannot describe to you how awful this makes me feel. I have always been a very reluctant bitcoin investor, for this very reason. I don’t invest in bitcoin because I think it will bring about a happy utopian world. Quite the opposite. I invest in bitcoin because the rise of distributed currency is inevitable, and owning some bitcoins seems to be the best way to prepare for the chaos ahead. And just maybe, if I position myself correctly, I can make things a little less awful.

The Government Strikes Back

Does anyone really expect the government to sit back quietly and watch while their currency is debased, terrorism is funded, and children are kidnapped? The only question is when and how they will strike back against these forces. While the government does have a lot of options, ultimately those options only slow things down. At some point, we collectively with our governments face a difficult choice between trying to survive this deadly storm or attempting to destroy all decentralized computer networks (including the internet). The former seems unthinkable, the latter, impossible.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this chaos gives rise to a strong, centralized, one-world government which gets its revenues by tightly reigning in freedom of commerce in order to collect taxes. For instance, I will not be surprised to see a requirement someday that every person buying or selling have an implant which tightly binds their identity to the sale. Perhaps the implant will even be located on the back of the right hand or the forehead! This may seem repugnant to you now, but wait until you have lived in the storm for a while before you call it impossible. The natural reaction to the deadly chaos of decentralized currency is for the populace to embrace increasingly centralized controls on commerce. The battle lines are only just starting to be drawn, and your guess is as good as mine for how it will play out.

What Should We Do?

We need people thinking about this. I’ll admit that many of the things I wrote about may not happen at all, or may happen very differently than I imagine. However, there are lots of people touting the fantastic benefits that bitcoin and its children can give us, and I don’t see anybody talking about how bad things could potentially get.

We need solutions. When the government finally starts taking decentralized currency seriously, it will probably be doing so in a state of panic. We need to be advising governments now about how they can survive the storm and protect their populace. We need to think of ways the government can pay for its most critical operations, and what legislation makes sense to mitigate these new risks while preserving as much freedom as we can.

The Lifeboat Foundation is attempting to provide this thinking, advice, and solutions. They are already getting ready for a new advisory board, culled from computer scientists, economists, and bitcoin experts. If you make a fortune from your investments in decentralized currency, I urge you to consider how you can help all the people harmed by these rapid changes. Many bitcoin enthusiasts seem to think they will get to retire on a private island with a harem and a stable of Italian sports cars. This is wrong. Bitcoin investors need to someday become bitcoin philanthropists, and our giving needs to be targeted at helping all the people we have harmed. The Lifeboat Foundation is one option, but I’m sure there will be others.

I first published this article on the blog of the Lifeboat Foundation: http://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/04/bitcoins-dystopian-future
Reddit version is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/bitcoins_dystopian_future/

tl;dr: Wildly successful distributed currencies could hurt a lot of people.

Bitcoin was supposed to be used as a currency, not only a form of investment. However, it's been more successful as a form of investment, a "speculative asset".

Do you guys think that this can change in the long term ?

In recent years, blockchain technologies have given rise to a new industry. Numerous fintech startups create innovative solutions to radically change the world which we live in today.

SWIFT 2.0 on Blockchain

Ripple Labs, Inc. – a company developing cryptocurrency of the same name (Ripple) – is a good example of how the blockchain can be used to transform the landscape of modern financial transactions. Ripple solves the existing problem in the world of finance.

Today, we can send letters instantly by using emails instead of traditional postal service. We can send any information to anywhere in the world in one click. But we can’t say the same about money. We can’t make a transfer of money from a sender to receiver as fast as a transfer of information. The existing solutions that the current world can offer are very slow and expensive.

If you want to send, say, $10,000 from New York to London, it will be faster to take cash, go to the JFK airport and fly through the Atlantic on the plane. Because traditional interbank transfer will take from 2 to 5 working days.

Ripple makes cross-border payments faster and cheaper. It takes only 4 seconds to make a transaction through Ripple blockchain network, and it costs at roughly $0.0004 even for the amount of hundreds million dollars.

Crypto Derivatives

Step by step, cryptocurrency is being recognized by the traditional financial world as a new kind of digital asset with many benefits. Wall Street approached crypto by establishing derivatives contracts. In December 2017, the two largest U.S. Futures Exchanges – Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) – launched futures trading on Bitcoin. This opened up crypto-market for big money of institutional clients and hedge funds.

Since the launch of futures, there has been a heated debate about the expected Bitcoin ETFs on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). If this is launched, you will be able to buy shares of such ETFs as stocks which price will be correlated with the price of Bitcoin.

Next level of crypto derivatives is option contracts, both options on Bitcoin futures and options on Bitcoin itself. Whilst CBOE and CME are still discussing the possible launch of options on Bitcoin futures, the Bitcoin options already being traded on several crypto-exchanges such as LedgerX and Deribit.

After the Bubble

The tech sector of U.S. stock market is determined by the NASDAQ indexes that include stocks of numerous tech companies, and many of them were born during the famous Dotcom bubble in 1995-2002.

At its climax in March 2000, NASDAQ Composite index peaked at a high of over 5,000 points and then lost about 80% of its value dropping to a low of around 1,000 points in October 2002.
A new all-time high has been reached only after 15 years in 2015, surpassing the level made during the Dotcom bubble.

The charts of NASDAQ index in 1999-2000 and Bitcoin price in 2017-2018 are incredibly similar, with the only difference that velocity of Bitcoin price increase is several times faster than the velocity of NASDAQ growth.

Many companies created during the Dotcom bubble were really ahead of their time. For example, Amazon, which was founded in 1997 as an online bookstore, is now among world’s top-5 tech companies. Amazon has finally become an integral part of lives of the most U.S. residents but this has happened only with the passage of time and the introduction of the Internet into everyday life.

The same happens with Crypto now. Today, the blockchain technology is really ahead of its time. It is possible that after several years many blockchain projects will be implemented in the real world, and Crypto will emerge from a new Renaissance. Until then, the Bitcoin price can possibly suffer decline and continuous depression, just as NASDAQ did.

The recent sharp drop in the crypto market caused the decrease in volatility and the decline in public interest. The initial excitement is gone now and the market has calmed down. This is a sign that the new market is moving into the maturity phase.

Big money like quiet markets. So, news has begun to come that hedge funds with the money of Soros, Rockefeller, and even Rothschilds family are moving into the world of crypto.

These financial sharks seem confident in the bright future of crypto-markets. And the most interesting time is yet to come.

Read full article here: https://bokka.com/cryptocurrency-news/the-future-of-cryptocurrency/

Do you think that Bitcoin has become too slow to compete with the relatively quick alt coins out there? Is it realty competitive to have a slow community rather than a centralised decision making in development?

In other words, does the community effect of decentralisation enough to counterbalance the difficult decision making processes?

While I don't have many posts. I got involved in Bitcoin in 2013 and joined this forum in 2014. While I do not consider myself wealthy from Bitcoin yet. I do have an idea of how I would like to direct some of this new found wealth. I think most of the people who got involved early got involved for the right reasons. IE: To change the world and move humanity out of the control of the bankers. I am concerned that the new people coming may only be in to make money. I hope I am wrong, I really want this technology to be a force of good in the world and deliver economic freedom to the masses and the unbanked. My hope is everyone who was early, has some idea in mind that will help others. Maybe help your family, or a charity that you think isn't wasting money, or building a community swimming pool etc. If you have a lot of money think big and how you can change the world for the better. This is our chance!