Taking a look at prices at coinmarketcap isn't giving me hope we are at the end of the bear market yet.
But the charts and the overpriced assets (Shiba Inu, Dogecoin, etc.) are not the only indicators.

There's an event we are waiting for that should finally end and that's no other than the MtGox coins release. Certainly, Bitcoin's price is decisive for the whole market.

Maybe the release of 100,000 BTC will not be that damaging. Sure if everyone sells, we will find new levels, but right now, I think it is the only event investors wait to begin buying both Bitcoin and altcoins.
Nobody wants to buy fearing MtGox holders will dump their 9 year forced-hodled coins. Maybe they won't but it is fear of a dump that blocks many investors at this point.
The soonest the MtGox BTC are released, the better for everyone in this market. The FUD will end, and if prices drop then we get a discount.

During a bear market, almost every new project is going to fail immediately.
The funds required for the startup to begin will not be there, investors will not fill the presales, and scams will rule.
What could have a small chance to succeed, now has zero.
It takes backing from big exchanges and connections with investors for a project to succeed.

Having said that, I never stopped looking and will keep investing during the bear market appropriately.

But for anyone that considers leaving, know that this market will reward those that stayed. It is the time to educate yourselves.
I've seen even silly spammers changing their ways and realizing there is a lot more everyone can offer by changing their ways.
For now, it is the time we count losses, but also we strengthen and rise to the challenges we face.

Besides the new cryptocurrencies, from my perspective, I'd look more at cryptocurrencies that hold utility, keep developing and have a serious community.

This will be my final post about Elon Musk, and seriously we have all given too much attention to his shenanigans.
From the beginning, I was trying to understand his game and why he got into Bitcoin in the first place.
Musk has a very long file of tweets moving the price of Tesla since 2018. He (ab)uses his Twitter power to push prices.
His Bitcoin adventure though wasn't seen very positively by Tesla investors.

The YTD $TSLA chart is the reason for every tweet made by Musk. Tesla is down from ATH by a huge percentage and investors are not quite happy with that.
This is not just $1,5 billion but hundreds of billions.

He doesn't tweet to crash BTC, he doesn't care about Bitcoin, he only cares about his companies. He tried what was a trick to gain more popularity and entered the crypto world, but things didn't turn out as he expected, because many traditional investors dumped $TSLA for this reason.

The worst part is that Bitcoin is left now with Musk manipulating price, just for the shake of the price of $TSLA. I hope this resolves quickly and Musk loses his influence, but this will require giving a lot less attention to individuals trying to gain attention.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

This post is about those Bounty managers I have worked with. I don't have personal experience with some that are very popular and are considered top, but I think that these guys here are doing a great job, finding real and valuable projects, and can be considered to be very professional.
I have only had a good experience with all these bounty managers and I will be following and taking part in their campaigns.

• CryptopreneurBrainboss
• irfan_pak10
• Murat
• bubbalex
• Hhampuz

The order of this list is random and doesn't mean one of them is better than the rest. My experience was equally positive with all of them. Thank you guys for the work you put and I hope you receive some good rewards for your professional management.

I am part of campaigns from other managers too, some of them are professional but the payments I've seen were not worth the time spend. Creating a good reputation means you have to strive to find real projects and perform comprehensive due diligence. In any case, these are the top ones that I have had only pleasant experiences to share for the past 2 years I am using the forum for bounty campaigns.

Being very low in rank, I don't often participate in signature campaigns. In those campaigns that are really good, the competition in the low ranks is fierce as there are probably a million "member-rank" accounts in bitcointalk. For this reason, I have very limited knowledge about the top bounty managers that promote the signatures of famous projects in the cryptocurrency world.

Hopefully, with time, I will be part of the BTC paying signature campaigns.

Tesla invested 1.5 Billion USD into Bitcoin and plans to include Bitcoin as a payment method.
Definitely the reason for prices soaring right now.

Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt.

Bloomberg report:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-08/tesla-invests-1-5-billion-in-bitcoin-plans-to-accept-cryptocurrency

SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021004599/tsla-10k_20201231.htm

Looking at the index websites we see more than 50 altcoins having reached more than a billion dollar marketcap and a few more are ready to cross the 1 billion dollar mark price.

We observe how Ethereum is valued close to 200 billion dollars market cap. This is basically the market cap of Bitcoin a few months ago. Polkadot at 20 billion dollars, Chainlink at 10 billion dollars, Cardano 17bilion etc. What is the real market cap derived from utility of these coins/tokens? Is Cardano,Polkadot, Chainlink and even Ethereum deserving these prices and market caps, and do you seriously think they can rise even more?

When investing in the top altcoins do you think the market cap is not important in your judgement to find if they are perhaps overvalued?

Please keep it civil in your replies, I am not attacking any of your favorite bags, just pointing out something that you should remember. Most altcoins will lose 99% of the price they have today as it happened again and again. There are very few alts having fundamentals to support the current valuation.

Is the NFT market going to shine someday?

I see potential but I only recently joined. What I would be interested is in the basics as I am missing even these. I know what the ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens are and that many are now using them for games, domain names, and collectibles. Lately, we have Sorare for example making some collectibles of footballers. I don't know if this will be important, I would prefer the NFTs to have some use inside a game as well. I have seen some games and have a few collectibles today, and opened an account at OpenSea which seems to be a nice marketplace. However, I think I am missing a lot of what I should be doing, where to be looking and what exactly I should be doing. Probably a good guide is required, if I become experienced in this I will create one if there is none available in the forum.

I heard about NFT markets being strong and going to become the next DeFi, but I have heard that since the summer and now many months have passed, yet no hype and no interest in this. Was it the rise of Bitcoin price that stopped the crypto community from a growing interest in NFTs? Will there be a moment when we will see some rising interest like it was in the past with Cryptokitties?

I have my eyes on the NFT market but I don't know if it will become a big one similar to DeFi. I know that many of the top gaming companies already have some plans to enter blockchain gaming and it could be interesting to have markets of nonfungible tokens used for game items in top game releases. It could become fuel for the market in total.

What do you guys think about NFTs and their potential?

I have taken part in many of them and since 2018 there have been some that paid a few tokens that I am still holding and many had failed, didn't pay or never reached an exchange.
With the ending of the ICOs in 2018 almost all startups


I think that airdrops are required to increase the base of holders and supporters for a startup cryptocurrency project.
It helps the new projects in many ways and it is the best marketing for them. Airdrops help a project like this:

• Social media numbers and followers
• Better distribution in many wallets
• Better fanbase
• Advertisement and brand name recognition

For the last two years, there have been only a couple of airdrops distributed to participants' wallets and there have been a few even asking for KYC something that I'm not willing to do but it is up to how someone values his private data. Energi was a project that paid good airdrop and required KYC.

Airdrops will get better as long as the altcoin market is rising and new projects appear. Although with DeFi what happened left me uninterested as many scam projects instantly appeared in a couple of days.

Startups should have a better selection of how airdrops are distributed, excluding certain behaviors, and having a secondary selection of people that have the potential to help the project and provide additional value.
The UNI airdrop was distributed to anyone that used this platform. It is how airdrops should be performed to exclude thousands that would only care to dump at any price and did the minimum to help.
A quiz, participation in AMA, and getting knowledge of the project is more important. Airdrops should be active and have something more than just follow on social media.

I expect in the new year thousands of new startups to appear in the cryptocurrency space and perhaps a revival of the ICO is possible. We can now better identify the scams and expose or ignore them and follow the startups that are developers trying to create something that could help the world.

Airdrops will be more important soon again.

Paypal has recently announced the offer of Bitcoin in their platform but in a very restrictive way.
Recently a friend informed me that he bought Bitcoin in PayPal and I was glad about it, but what was the impression of a beginner about Bitcoin? He told me he sold it after making a profit and didn't need it.

I tried to explain what he should be doing. I told him to buy a hardware wallet and transfer the Bitcoin there and tried to explain about private keys, public addresses, and passphrase, how Bitcoin is giving him financial freedom and why it is important to own the private key.

He was confused with that and told me that Bitcoin bought inside Paypal, only exists in Paypal and he can buy or sell and make some profit from trading. The only thing he could do except buying or selling is to use the Bitcoin bought in the Paypals merchant network which he could do with dollars and didn't need to switch to Bitcoin.
His first impression was that Bitcoin wasn't even needed at all. And he is right. It doesn't have a use case if it is trapped inside an app and you can't move it.

The essence of Bitcoin is removed this way as Bitcoin doesn't belong to the user but to Paypal. Paypal can even give you a token instead of Bitcoin and tell you that it is Bitcoin.

This is not Bitcoin that Paypal is offering but perhaps it is something similar to Grayscale Bitcoin Trust stock. It should be classified as such, a share of Bitcoin with restrictions.