Even if you have nothing to hide, anonymous services still
offer an advantage for you. You don´t have to worry that your
KYC documents or personal information end up in the wrong hands.
Just remember all the hacks of the last years of exchanges and online-shops.

As the end user you have often no idea how securely these companies
store your documents. Some of them don´t even have a physical office
and host sensitive information on servers that they don´t control.
To sum up, anonymous services are preferable even if your funds
are 100 % clean and you don´t have anything to hide.

The problem is that the majority of coins will go to zero in the long-term.
If you buy a basket of 10 random altcoins, 9 of them will probably
go to zero.

This makes your strategy a losing strategy. It is unlikely that you own enough coins
of the "winning coins" to offset the losses that you will incur by buying
all the failing altcoins.

I´d recommend sticking to BTC and maybe buying 1-2 promising altcoins
for a small part of your total cryptocurrency investment.

The problem is that it is hard to get people to actually switch to
solutions like atomic swaps or Decentralized Exchanges. Most people
are not particularly interested in anonymity and privacy. Just take at the
look at the number of people, who willingly provide all kinds of information to
Facebook.

This meme describes the carelessness that most people have with regards
to sensitive data today pretty well 




The real question is how can we incentivize people to actually
use Decentralized Exchanges instead of places like Coinbase or Shapeshift
that cooperate with authorities and enforce KYC.

I strongly suspect that this is a level that will be a very strong support, because
this is around the breakeven point for many miners. Of course it might go lower
temporarily as miners with big "war chests" try to bankrupt their competitors, but
in the long-term I´d be extremely surprised if the price would actually
go lower than this. The floor might even be higher in the future as the average
cost of mining a single BTC continues to rise.

And yet many people are actually celebrating every new ETF application and
every announcement of another Bitcoin derivative. If this development continues,
the same people that profit from the legacy financial system will also profit from the
new financial system that is built around Bitcoin.

On the one hand Coinbase has been the entrance for many newbies into
the cryptocurrency world. But on the other hand they are already involved
in various practices that hurt the free flow of Bitcoins (e.g. they close
accounts when you are making gambling-related transactions, require KYC
and have a history of suspicious behavior around the addition of new
altcoins like LTC or BCH).

I remember that fluffypony said that they wanted to change the hard fork interval
to once every year once Monero is more mature. But apparently they are still going with
one hard fork every 6 months.

However, the Monero hard forks are usually pretty quiet and don´t
come with the drama that is surrounding most BTC forks or the
recent BCH hard fork debacle  

I didn´t think of that explanation, thank you. Maybe investors are indeed valuing
this multi-party provably fair system more than I thought.


Your feature request seems unnecessarily complicated and I don´t really see
why devans would implement something like this. If you are worried about this,
you can just adjust your investment manually from time to time. Most
investors are clearly not worried about this as I have never seen anybody ask
for a feature like this.

I´d also disagree with the bolded statements. Investing at 5:1 leverage and then not
monitoring your investment at all may be risky, but if you choose a more conservative leverage
and check your investments every once in a while I don´t really see a problem.

Where I actually agree with you is the fact that having an onsite/offsite system at all
ends up forcing investors to use leverage in order to not get diluted. I know that the
system is designed for something different, but in reality people just use it to invest
with leverage without even having the offsite coins in most cases (this has been
the case at every single dice site that allows leveraged investments in my experience).

I also think that the BTC price will trade in the $6k to $8k range for the foreseeable future.
The upside is limited, because there are no real catalysts that could start another bull run.
Besides, many investors got burned due to buying BTC or altcoins at the top and
will therefore be reluctant to pile in new money.

But the downside is also limited, because a dump from the $6k level would push
the price awfully close to the breakeven point for many miners. The miners
are therefore heavily incentivized to prop up the price (either by buying coins
outright or by simply refraining from selling their mined coins).

I predict a prolonged sideways market and then the next bull run in the
months before the block reward halving.

Has anybody an idea why Bustadice currently has
a higher bankroll than Bustabit?

A rational investor would put their money in Bustabit, because of the higher
betting volume (roughly 215k BTC wagered at Bustabit vs
72k BTC wagered at Bustadice). Of course the historical
data might not be a good predictor for the future betting
volume, but still it is at least an indication for a higher
potential profit.

Maybe the point is to get out while you still
get 226 $ for every ETH that you sell. You have to take
into account the fact that many ICO teams are sitting on a lot
of raised ETH that they haven´t liquidated yet. I´m thinking
about ICOs like Tezos that raised more than hundred million $
worth of ETH.

Every price increase in ETH is followed by a quick reversal, because
ICO teams use this opportunity to get rid of further parts of
their ETH. I think ETH will go a lot lower than most people think.
If you want to hold a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is a much better choice,
because Bitcoin doesn´t have this sell pressure from ICO teams.

The good old "crypto journalism". If there are no real news, they simply make
up a random story  


I can´t believe that they paid 400M $ for Poloniex after the bull run
of 2017. The previous Poloniex owners really cashed out at the right time.
Maybe they were already seeing the signs of the altcoin crash on the wall.

These days Poloniex gets used less and less. E.g. today Poloniex is occupying
the 27th place on the exchange list by trade volume at Coinmarketcap.
Even obscure exchanges like Allcoin, OEX or DOBI trade are reporting
a higher volume than Poloniex (if you can actually believe all self-reported volume
numbers of exchanges is another story of course).

I couldn´t find any information on the rake at J88 Poker on BTCgrinders.
After all 60 % rakeback may sound great in theory, but wouldn´t be
so great if they charge 8 % uncapped rake or something similar on their
poker tables.

Additionally, I´d be interested in how secure the games are. Even pokersites
that are more popular are sometimes infested by bots and the sites don´t care too
much. I´d imagine that this would be an even bigger problem at an
unknown Asian poker operator. Have your players had good experiences
with J88 or are bots and collusion a problem over there?
I have played at various poker sites during the last years, but I haven´t
yet tried out these Asian poker rooms like J88.

Thank you for your help.

I´m not sure if a significant decline in fees
is even possible. After all most Bitcoin ATMs are simply
forwarding the orders to a Bitcoin exchange and therefore
have to be more expensive than the exchanges by definition.

Besides, there are often costs for licenses and for the location,
which adds a few percentage points to the rate, too. In rare circumstances where
the operator owns the place where the ATM is located anyway it might be possible,
but otherwise I don´t think the Bitcoin ATM fees will decline much if
they decline at all.

And yet this is precisely what the big majority of people
are doing everyday. If you take a look at the average savings rate
in countries like the US, you will be shocked at the results.

People are bombarded with ads constantly and in
consequence develop the feeling that they really need that car or that vacation.
Some are even so stupid to buy depreciating assets like a car or a
new TV by going into debt.

Reducing your exposure to ads is the first step if you really
want to live a more balanced lifestyle without having to worry about
your finances constantly.

I doubt that it would even be a problem at this
point if Satoshi were to sell his coins. In my opinion
a smart investor would scoop up the BTC just like it
happened with all these government auctions.

Of course it might lower the price temporarily, but in the
long-term it doesn´t really matter at all.

Having said that, I still think that Satoshi is gone for good
and we will never see a movement of these early coins.

Which crime   ?

Check out this article from The Economist from last year:
As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do

Japan has a rapidly aging population and a very low percentage
of immigrants. Its almost as if this combination is a recipe for a
society without much crime.

Back to the original topic I think that if they really want to introduce something
like this, they should include more cryptocurrencies than just BTC and ETH.
Otherwise it would be trivial for criminals to simply use one of the cryptocurrencies
that they are not tracking.

If the author is basing his prediction on the German market, his prediction
is completely ridiculous. If you want to install a Bitcoin ATM in Germany, you need a permission
from a regulatory body called "BaFin". Getting this permission is such a hassle
for any aspiring Bitcoin start-up that there are exactly zero Bitcoin ATMs
in the whole country. I don´t see this changing anytime soon. Therefore I
highly doubt that Bitcoin ATMs in Germany will grow as much as much
the author claims.

I don´t know for sure, but maybe they want to create the impression that they are actually
doing something productive at the SEC. After all they have to justify why they need
a budget of hundreds of millions of $ and therefore it is necessary that they produce some
approvals and rejections from time to time.


I don´t know why people keep repeating this statement. One of the recent
ETFs that got denied had a minimum investment of 200k $. You can´t really
claim that it is easier to invest in a product like this when most people can just
sign up at an exchange of their choice and buy BTC for 100 $. The high minimum
investment of a potential BTC ETF acts as a huge barrier for the average person.

I´d stay away from BitMEX. They are definitely a shady operation (they run
their own in-house trading arm that is trading on the same platform as the users)
and using 100x leverage is crazy as well.

On an unrelated note, I read an article today that has a price
prediction for ETH that I can fully agree on - 0 $  

The collapse of ETH is inevitable

I concede that it is not an important feature, but I´d still think that many players
share my opinion regarding this. I´d be surprised if every Stake user would be interested
in Litecoin bets even if they have a high bet amount or a high win amount.

I don´t want to shill for a competitor here, but YOLOdice already has a feature like this.
Go to https://yolodice.com/#watch and click at the cogwheel symbol at the bottom right of
your screen in order to see how a feature like this can look.