Maybe Bitcoin doesn´t need high merchant acceptance or much actual trade to
be a success. It depends on what the main use case of Bitcoin is in your opinion.

I´d argue that Bitcoins main use case is to be a censorship-resistant store of value.
Without possible 2nd layer scaling solutions like the Lightning Network Bitcoin is
inferior to credit cards in terms of transaction times. However, Bitcoin has a known,
completely predictable supply and issuance rate unlike all fiat currencies of the world.
If Bitcoin is indeed a store of value it could be a great success irrespective of whether
it is actually used for payments. I concede that this may not have been the initial
vision of Satoshi Nakamoto, but maybe this is the true purpose of BTC.

Because they expect it to outperform other assets?
Because some will be aware of the huge impact that the next block reward halving will have on the BTC price (the months before the halving will be a crazy bull market if you ask me)
Because they are down with stock investments and try to turn around the year by gambling on BTC?
Because there are specialized hedge funds that invest exclusively in cryptocurrencies? Do you think they will invest all client funds in Ripple? Of course they are going to allocate money to BTC.
Because the stock market could run out of steam when the central banks of the world stop expanding the money supply?

Let me know if you need more reasons why institutional money would go back into Bitcoin.
I was just getting started.


I could be wrong, but as I said I will commit all my remaining fiat money if I get
the ability to buy BTC in the 2800-2900 $ / BTC range.

This prediction is extremely unlikely in my opinion. Many long-term holders, who took
profits during November/December are going to buy back way before that number. Besides,
institutional money will hop in way before that. 2.5k / BTC would be below the break-even
point for most miners...

Too many people are directly incentivized to prevent BTC from falling to 2.5k.

I go out on a limb here and will say that we will never see 2.5k again.
I will be buying BTC with all my remaining fiat money way before 2.5k myself.

You have to take into account that many long-term investors (= people, who HODL) don´t have
their coins on exchanges, but rather store them in hardware wallets, other cold wallet solutions
or even with a custodial service for institutional investors. Therefore their holdings aren´t really
influencing the day-to-day price development except by the fact that they aren´t really traded
and therefore artificially reduce the liquidity on the exchanges.

In general the amount of Bitcoins that is traded on the exchanges is a fraction of the total outstanding
BTC supply. Besides, the volume numbers on these exchanges are highly misleading for newbies,
because the same coins are being traded over and over again (bots, arbitrage, ...). In order to
illustrate that point you could take a look at a random Bitcoin exchange of your choice. E.g. Bitfinex had
a trading volume of 1,588,052.80 BTC at the BTC/USD trading pair in the last 30 days. However, the total
balance of the Bitfinex cold wallet hasn´t exceeded 145,000 BTC during that timeframe. This isn´t even
10 % of the traded amount. Additionally, some exchanges offer trading on margin, which distorts
the volume statistics even more.

I´d argue that you can´t really draw conclusions on the behavior of long-term investors / HODLers
by viewing the short-term price development.

It looks like Tether has actually redeemed 30M $ of USDT for the first time. The outstanding supply
of USDT has dropped from 2.25 billion USDT to 2.22 billion USDT.

If the outflows of several USDT wallets of the biggest altcoin exchanges are any indication,
we can expect additional redemptions of USDT in the next few days
(see my post in the Wall Observer Thread for the details: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg29314991#msg29314991).

I´ll add a few:

Pros:

• (re)enables certain use cases (e.g. micropayments, cheap subscription models, sub-satoshi payments)
• potential increase in privacy, because the huge amount of transactions using the LN that is to be expected will be harder
  to analyze than transactions on the BTC main blockchain
• no forced expiry of a channel, you basically can keep it open forever if all parties agree, which saves fees for funding transactions = great for long-term relationships of parties
• probabilistic payments
  

Cons:

• the possibility of undiscovered bugs (the BTC main blockchain has been battle-tested for nearly a decade and has stood
  the test of time in spite of huge incentives for people with nefarious intentions to find bugs/loopholes, Lightning
  Network is comparatively new)
• If Bitcoin´s main use case is being a censorship-resistant store of value... who needs a Lightning Network?
• some level of monitoring is necessary to prevent people from cheating - this is different on the main blockchain where
  transactions are completely irrevocable (this is compensated by the fact that LN allows no double spends)

Have you played around with some of the already available software?

I don´t think that software like zap is worse than most current Bitcoin wallets:
https://zap.jackmallers.com/


edit: given the fact how many threads in Development & Technical Discussion are related to
the LN, I really think that it deserves its own subforum

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16954366/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-mining-asic-chips-samsung

Big companies like Samsung are entering the cryptocurrency mining arena.
The future doesn´t look particularly bright for Bitmain if all the established chipmakers
will start to produce ASICs. And don´t even get me started on the future of BCH 

The fact that people are already using the Lightning Network on mainnet.

A quote from a recent Coindesk article:

If the Lightning Network proves to be viable it will enable certain
use cases that aren´t possible using Bitcoin at the moment. E.g. micropayments,
subscription models or even something like paying for a videostream by the
second. Many people think that it will make Bitcoin payments much more
interesting for merchants, because it lowers the transaction times and
the transaction fees.

On the other hand, you could argue that the actual adoption of Lightning
network is still far in the future and the development could take more time
than people think. Besides, there is the possibility that there are bugs or flaws
that will be discovered during the actual usage, because the LN obviously
isn´t as battle-tested as the BTC main blockchain thas has been
running successfully for nearly a decade.

Wait, are you telling me that I will never become an Aryan superman?



I looked up that Aaron Russo guy.


Seems legit.

But then I started reading about his movie about the American tax system and I have to admit that I´m definitely
sympathetic to some of his views:



Damn it, I´m starting to like Russo after I dismissed him initially as a
conspiracy theorist. Has anyone watched the movie (America: Freedom to Fascism)?

I agree with your post in general. However, this part seems a bit harsh.
The quality of most media outlets is not what it used to be, because they are
not as well funded as in the past when advertising money was amazing.

Nowadays the majority of the advertising money goes to Google (including Youtube) and Facebook
and the online editions of the newspapers are only getting the scraps.
Therefore they are able to hire less staff than before and due to the increased competition
they also have to make use of headlines that are becoming more and more
like clickbait.

Besides, the surge of clickbait is probably also a result of the decreased attention
span of the people, who grew up with smartphones and tablets. Most of them
are more likely to click a superficial article with a headline like
"Millionaires hate this ONE trick..." than a long, well-researched article
with a less sensational headline.

I have been monitoring the action on the Tether Rich List and there
have been some big movements of USDT in the last days.

Tether Rich List as of now:
https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

Tether Rich List from 3 days ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180128114237/https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

Notable changes:
-1DUb2YYbQA1jjaNYzVXLZ7ZioEhLXtbUru (Bittrex) had outflows of more than 71M USDT
-1FoWyxwPXuj4C6abqwhjDWdz6D4PZgYRjA (Binance) had outflows of more than 92M USDT
-1Po1oWkD2LmodfkBYiAktwh76vkF93LKnh (the smaller address of Poloniex) had outflows of nearly
50M USDT and contains less than 2M USDT now

No known Tether address of an exchange has received inflows of similar amounts of USDT, which
makes it likely that they are going back to Tether or Bitfinex.

Maybe this is not even related to the recent Tether news/FUD, but due to an
outflow of money from altcoins. Could this be the beginning of the end of the altcoin bubble?
I´d argue that many people finally realize that investing in Ripple, Stellar or similar shitcoins
won´t double their money in a week.

Another possibility is that these are funds that were raised by ICOs that use USDT
to launder their money or as a way to exchange their proceeds to BTC. After all
Bitfinex is one of the exchanges were you could arguably easier get rid of ICO proceeds
compared to more legit exchanges like Gemini.

Have you ever considered setting up Bitcoin ATMs in Germany?

According to Coinatmradar there are currently zero Bitcoin ATMs
in Germany. Even obscure countries like Guam or Aruba have at least
one ATM.

I remember that years ago all BTC ATM operators in Germany had
to close their operations, because the operation of an ATM required
a BaFin license. If Bitwala is going to be awarded a BaFin license anyway
in the next months you wouldn´t face this problem.

To me it looks like a huge untapped market full of potential and aside
from the obvious advantages for Bitwala as a company this would
also be great for Bitcoin adoption in Germany.

Unbelievable.

Most exchanges keep only 1-2 % of customer funds in hot wallets. Keeping NEM tokens that
are worth 500M $ in a hot wallet is a blatant example of negligence by the Coincheck
management. Especially, after all the Bitcoin exchange hacks in the past.

On the other hand it is probably necessary to keep a certain amount of coins in
hot wallets, because otherwise fast/instant withdrawals aren´t really viable.
It basically always boils down to a trade-off between maximum security
and maximum convenience.

 

This post is a classic in the Bitcoin community, I don´t really see this as a problem.

You could have picked a different example in order to corroborate your
frustration about the new merit system.

E.g. if you take a look at the Top-merited replies, all-time you will see
that the top-merited reply is a blatant example of a merit swap.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=toprepliesat

The post in question:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1482690.msg28907895#msg28907895


I still have mixed feelings about the merit system, but it is definitely bad
if one of the public rankings is headed by a post like this.

How did you arrive at this conclusion?



Altcoins are heavily correlated to the BTC price.
If you think about it this is entirely predictable, because
most of them don´t even have fiat trading pairs. Therefore
their value in $ decreases if the Bitcoin price decreases, because
they are priced exclusively in BTC.

They might not be allowed to do so if it was a secret subpoena.

Wikipedia:

A Bitfinex employee actually made use of a warrant canary in December.
If you are interested in the details you could read this post I made in the Wall Observer
Thread earlier today:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg29264569#msg29264569

Bitfinex´ed on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/958420215301394432

Bitcoin surged 43 % in the 48 hours after the delivery of the subpoena.

Back then everybody attributed the price action to the launch of the Bitcoin
futures if I remember it correctly.

I´m still sure that we won´t see a real decrease in the Bitcoin price.
I think we will stay above 10k.

Have you read the updated version of the Bloomberg article or the posts by gentlemand?
The subpoena was delivered on the 6th of December.

The majority of Tether issuance has happened after that date.
Therefore the CTFC has stepped in when the outstanding amount
of USDT was roughly ~800M $.

Isn´t it possible that your friend simply didn´t had the money to buy
BTC even when the Bitcoin price was low? I guess a few people that believed
in Bitcoin simply missed out due to not being liquid enough to invest.

I´m not sure from which country you are, but even in a wealthy country
like the US the average person is not exactly having a lot of money
that is available for investment.

63% Of Americans Don't Have Enough Savings To Cover A $500 Emergency

Maybe you should reconsider and gift him a few mBTC  

I can corroborate this theory.

https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/12/15/warrant-canary-bitfinex-employee-disappears-rumors-swirl

Bitfinex employee Chris Ellis removed the warrant canary from his
Twitter account back in December.

If anybody is not familiar with the definition of a warrant canary, here is
the definition from Wikipedia:

Besides, until then Chris Ellis was making multiple
tweets per day and suddenly his Twitter activity completely stopped:
https://twitter.com/mrchrisellis

Irrespective of this I have to agree with Torque, the proceedings that follow a subpoena can
take a long, long time and stalling tactics are definitely viable...

I don´t think this will have a big impact on the market at all.
I hope someone of you got a few buy orders filled.