LOL.   I tried telling people that bitcoin was going down and ripple would follow.  Granted I missed the last legs of the rally as money rotated in at the end, but I can now buy back in for more ripple than I had at that time.  I missed some gains but avoided losses, which I stated was my goal, to a bunch of laughter.

I was told Bitcoin would trade opposite Ripple.  BTC goes down means ripple goes UP!! LOL!

I was even told to buy altcoins as a way to short BTC!!  LOL!

I was told the Bitcoin correction was over and the bull market was still on!  LOL!

Zoom out on the chart he said!  It's going to 40k!  LOL!

It is so easy to just blame banks and pretend like everything is their fault.  Bankers are just acting in their own self-interest, just like all of us.  They play by the rules of the game.  Yes maybe they break the laws, and they get slap on the wrist fines.  Those are the real rules of the game.  The laws are not.

Why don't you blame the state for encouraging bad bank behavior, for bailing them out, and giving them special privileges?  Is it because it goes against your Marxist programming to worship government and blame everything on corporations?

Banking is one of the most regulated sectors of the economy.  Why is it so fraudulent then?  Is it because regulation is a fraud that destroys real capitalism by distorting free markets?

Why didn't people vote out all of congress after bailing out the banks?  They're the real culprits here. 

Or go even further, why don't you blame a population that enables the state?   You get a society exactly as good as your culture deserves.

You can shunt all responsibility onto a small group of people who are more successful than you, but that will never get you anywhere. 

If open systems, where you can see everything, were preferred by the market, then Linux would be dominating the computer OS market share.  It is not and it never will.  They are like 1% and Windows and MacOS are everywhere.  The market does not value the same things you value.   

There is nothing honest about bitcoin or decentralization per se.  That doesn't even have any meaning.  It's just emotional rhetoric.  What does it mean for an abstraction to be honest?  People can be honest.  Bitcoin cannot be honest because it doesn't talk.

Bitcoin itself is worthless.  I liken it to intellectual property, and I think it kind of spawned out of these kinds of distortions of reality.  You cannot own information and that's all bitcoin is.  It's nothing.  You are just owning information stored on other computers, worthless.  Yes you can currently legally own information in the modern world, but you don't really own it.  You just have the state enacting violence to protect your claim of ownership.  This is not the same as actual ownership.  You can do all kinds of wacky stuff under positive law systems.  It is just a state-enforced market distortion based on this fallacy, and it's causing enormous economic harm to all of us except the few patent holders and authors who struck it rich with these state run monopolies.  But who cares about definitions when the state determines reality for us?

Yes Ripple also is along the same lines.  The difference is Ripple is backed by its ability to lower costs of international transfers, so it's value is directly tied to fiat.  Bitcoin has no such claim and is really not even functional.  You can say fiat is backed by nothing, to which I would counter it is backed by the most valuable resource of all, your life, through the violence of the state and legal tender laws.  You can consider it a negative backing rather than a positive one.  Positive backing would be "take this paper and you will get gold for it later."  Negative backing is "take this paper or we will kill you."  Bitcoin has none of this and the people in the bitcoin cult don't appreciate any kind of nuanced discussion.  They are too blinded by rhetorical notions like honesty and decentralization and their delusions of vast wealth for producing nothing of any value whatsoever.

And there is one very important aspect of centralization that you are overlooking.  People have diverse abilities distributed along something of a bell curve.  You want the smarter people to be in charge of things, especially when your property is at stake.  I don't want your average Joe to have any influence over my life.  They can't even run their own lives.  I don't want them running mine.  This is why democracy is such a failure.  All the idiots become bureaucrats and go on power trips.  Everything good has come from entrepreneurs and markets, in centralized firms, not open decentralized systems.

No capitalism is not about decentralization.  Capitalism has a number of bad and useless definitions, useful only for its attackers who want to dominate markets themselves, but the primary essence of real capitalism is voluntary exchange with a lack of coercion.  Centralization happens everywhere, even in capitalist systems, and in the absence of state interventionism like bank bailouts, too much centralization can in fact lead to the downfall of firms which get too large and therefore too bureaucratic and inefficient.  That's what used to be called creative destruction and it was great.  Now the government just picks winners and losers.  This fear of giant monopolistic firms overrunning markets has never happened, except when the state made it happen, which is everywhere now.

On the contrary I think bitcoin is a device that transfers money from cultists to realists.  It is worth nothing and backed by nothing and will ultimately return to that value in the end.  I am more than happy to miss out on a rally here or there and jump in when I'm confident.  As Mark Twain said I'm less interested in return on capital than return of capital.

Also the further I zoom out the worse it looks.  It went up way too fast and has a lot of room to fall, especially for something that unlike ripple is fundamentally worthless.

Ah yes, the old somebody else said something similar at some point and they may have been wrong... or early, so that makes you wrong too logical fallacy.

This is the first time I have said anything about it.  The ripple chart looks very bullish to me, but the bitcoin chart looks extremely bearish to me in the short term.  If it does not decline substantially in the next few days then I will happily buy back in, but it looks like it's going to plummet, and I know if it does then people will start dumping their ripple too.  Maybe if ripple were already being traded on coinbase it would be a different story.  I hope it does go way down so I can get more ripple.

I understand the risks of USDT.  I think it is much lower than the risk of holding anything else at the moment.  Trading back to fiat would be ideal, but if I trade for fiat back at coinbase then it will get reported to the IRS, something I want to avoid.  I'll probably wait for the BTC crash, buy ripple around the bottom and ride it back up once more as BTC bounces back to ~$10k, then cash everything out for a while, into real cash.  I think BTC is entering a bear market.  I don't know how ripple will react in this situation.  If I do hold any crypto it will be ripple.  I have no interest in bitcoin, ethereum, or any of the others.  But I'm taking a wait and see approach for a while.

No, buying alts or selling bitcoin for fiat is not the same as shorting bitcoin at all.   Altcoins in particular are a terrible idea, as they almost always go down vs the dollar when bitcoin goes down.  Just look at the ripple chart when bitcoin went under $13k.  Ripple went down to $0.70.  I don't why people believe otherwise.  Just look at the charts.  Holding cash gets you no money as bitcoin goes down.  You just sit there with the same amount of cash at the end.  Shorting involves margin and risk, and you get a reward when the underlying asset depreciates.

No I actually just tripled my money going all in on ripple, but I am 100% in USDT right now.  Any other asinine assumptions you would like to make?  Please hold your coins.  You are much smarter than me.

I think BTC is about to implode, which means XRP is going down also.  Don't ask me why, that's just what people do.  I'm out for now.  I'll be back in XRP at bitcoin $5000 or so.  I wish there was a way to short BTCUSD.

Good luck to people still holding.  I think you're gonna need it.

So everyone is selling ripple now because everyone else is also selling their bitcoin?  What kind of sense does that make?  Who cares about bitcoin?  Bitcoin is irrelevant.

I guess it's good that speculators are so irrational.  Would be hard to make money otherwise.  When bitcoin was going up it was the opposite, everyone selling ripple because btc is going up, now everyone sells because btc is going down, just like a herd of sheep.

I had the foresight to sell my ripple for USDT and wait for retrace after bitcoin broke support, but I didn't pull the trigger because at first ripple was actually going up not down.  Too bad.  I gave speculators way too much credit.  Could have increased my ripple by a lot.  I still think new highs are just around the corner.  Ripple is the future.  Goodbye weak hands.  You will regret it.  That rally was not finished.  I still don't think it is.  Just a brief interruption due to irrelevant bitcoin crash.

Don't ask me.  Ask the banks.  The fact is banks picked Ripple.  I don't know anything about IOTA.  Don't really care either until it has a real use case.

If I had to guess why they picked Ripple it probably has something to do with the dreaded centralized nature of Ripple, and the fact that it holds copious reserves, the kind of things the bitcoin cult hates.

Oh I see IOTA is about the "internet of things."  Give me a break.  Nobody gives a shit about the internet of things.  I will purposely avoid every appliance that needlessly comes with WiFi for the rest of my life.  My phone needs WiFi.  My laptop needs WiFi.  My toaster does not need and I do not want it to have WiFi.

Ripple has an actual purpose and use.  As I understand it's being used by actual real companies for real international money transfers to reduce costs.  BTC and ETH are crap IMO, backed by nothing but hysteria and faith in some poorly defined notion of decentralization, under the assumption that decentralization itself is always a good thing or is the main goal or something.  It's turned into kind of a cult.  I'm honestly not interested in bitcoin anymore.  I don't have faith in its future. The mania will probably go on for some time, but I"m okay missing out on that.  I'd rather buy gold than bitcoin at this point.  It's a much better value proposition for sure.

I want to play with bitcoin.  I have no interest in playing for fiat.

Yes bad beats happen and if he bluffed all in and I called and the hand played the same way then I would just brush it off.  But he CALLED all in, which no one would do unless they either just wanted to fuck with me and didn't care at all about he money or knew somehow the hand was going to win.  So it's not that I caught a bad beat. I understand that happens.  It's the way the hand played out and the way the guy was playing before it.

Another instance.  I was playing 30/60 limit Omaha8ob and there were 3 of us.  This one guy literally called every single bet all the time for about 25 hands straight. This is the perfect kind of guy you want to play with but he just kept catching runners over and over with any cards and splitting the pot or outright winning it with the luckiest shit you could imagine.  This went on and on.

So I decided to ignore it, keep at it and just try to brush it off and keep my eyes open, but something else happened just now.  I was in another low stakes NLHE tournament and this one guy just keeps winning with random cards that no one would ever play, and he keeps this huge stack of chips somehow, playing like a retard.  I play AK and catch a K on the flop.  He calls my bet to put him all in and catches 2 runners to make a straight.  He had j2 no piece of the flop and no draws at all on the flop, yet he calls all in and catches 2 runners to make a straight as if he knew it was coming.

50k tournament chips.  He put his whole tournament stack in the pot with 25, not bluffing, calling.  And he was only in it for 2400.  No pot odds, just his limp and the blinds were in there. No one in their right mind would ever do that unless they were cheating.  And if you play like that there's no way you'll make it into the money in the first place.

I knew there was something shady going on playing the high stakes PLO8 tables.  Ive been playing poker for 15 years and never seen that kind of "luck" in my life for the other players. 

Now I just busted out of a NLHE tournament.  This guy kept bluffing me over and over like he knew I couldn't call.  So we're on the last 3 tables and he limps UTG for 2400.  I'm near the button and I go all in with about 50k.  This same guy has about the same amount of chips and he calls basically all in after everyone else folds.  I flip over AK and he flips over 25 and flops a straight.  I'm done with this bullshit.  I would advise everyone else to stay away from this site.  First the rake "mistake" and now this. It's a shame there aren't any legit bitcoin poker sites.

Yes it's true that fud threads can always be created but it shouldn't be in this thread.  Anyone with half a brain that sees some bullshit thread about xc will probably come here to see our side of the story.  If they come here and see the same bullshit it's is very bad for our r image. Let the other coins spread their fud in their own threads. To me it just shows how worried they are of being overtaken. But this place is ours and it should be treated as such.

I don't care about blocknet.  I want to know why does it even exist.  Any feature you can add to blocknet can be added directly to XC.  

Generating revenue through fees is a pipedream.  How are we supposed to believe in small fees when XC is consistently losing massive value?  We need a stable currency first.  And I don't see how blocknet helps us get there at all.  Maybe it's useful.  If it just involves borrowing other coins' features I don't see the use.  Any coin can add any feature it wants.  It would be much more preferable to have one coin with all the features of the other coins.