Isn´t the real reason why Doge is still around that Doge has a healthy community?
After all if a coin has some community support there is at least a certain percentage of people,
who will buy a few coins occasionally and others might devote a little development time
or build a project on top of the coin.

The problem with the coins that are just founded to enrich the founders is that the
developers often lose interest when the price drops (as they often own a huge percentage
of the total supply) and people start to lose interest in the coin. Just take a look at promising altcoins
from 2015 or 2016. Some of them were completely abandoned by the developers as a result
of a continuous price decline, which kind of makes sense if they were only in it
for the money anyway.

Even if the price only goes sideways at the moment, a lot of money is flowing into
Bitcoin. The miners have to sell at least a certain percentage of their block rewards
in order to pay for hardware, electricity, taxes and other expenses. Therefore they
create a constant downward pressure on the price.

This implies that even if the price goes sideways a lot of new money has to flow
into Bitcoin just to absorb the sells made by the miners.

If we assume that the miners sell 60 % of their block rewards, we are looking at
1080 BTC that are going to be sold every single day. This is the equivalent of
nearly 7M $ at the current price.

If you use an agent/broker to register an SBO account, you are right.

But you can just sign up for a direct account at SBOBet without going through
an agent/broker if you don´t reside in one of the restricted territories.

You seriously recommend investing in American penny stocks and smaller cryptocurrencies?
Both are terrible investments unless you have some kind of insider information, which most
people don´t have.

You will get eaten alive in a market like the trading of penny stocks. Insiders manipulate these markets all day
and as an uninformed investor you will just burn money and lose your investment.

Small cryptocurrencies are also a bad investment. I know that most already lost 90 % from their peak value, but
most of them will continue to lose value. Do we really need 2000 different cryptocurrencies? The majority
of these projects will go to zero, because there is no real need for them and people will stop buying them when
they realize that the price is going nowhere but down. I disagree that the only way for them is up, because the big
majority of coins will go to zero. Only a few altcoins will survive along with BTC.
Of course there may be the odd pump and dump here and there and you could get lucky, but in 99 % of
cases your altcoin investment is going to go to zero.

Additionally, the dollars that back the GUSD will be deposited in
a US bank. This is obviously a more reliable jurisdiction than wherever
Tether has working banking relationships (the last rumours were that they
were having bank accounts in Costa Rica).


Aren´t these stablecoins the perfect vehicle for capital flight? They are as viable
as any cryptocurrency for getting money out of a country without the volatility inherent
to cryptocurrencies.

I stopped reading right here  
I´d take the project more seriously if they would have built it from scratch
or on a better platform. Ethereum has huge scaling issues and various other problems (e.g.
Casper keeps getting postponed, no coherent monetary policy...) and
is therefore a horrible platform for a stablecoin.

If the ETH blockchain gets congested due to an event like another CryptoKitties launch,
the stablecoin transactions would grind to a halt as well.


I guess the Winklevii know the right people. They are probably members of the same country club
as a few high-ranking NYDFS officials and suddenly their stablecoin´s approval was a mere formality  

The problem is that SBO is licensed by the Isle of Man Gambling Supervision Commission and their
license doesn´t allow for cryptocurrency deposits (I hope that this might change in the future).
Otherwise they would have started to accept BTC deposits and withdrawals a long time ago,
because it obviously makes sense from an operator perspective as you pointed out.

This is also the reason why many other bookmakers don´t accept Bitcoin deposits as of now.
However, it is possible to deposit at many bookmakers by using Neteller as an intermediary
(=deposit your BTC into your Neteller account and from there to the gambling website).

This workaround should also work for SBO as they generally accept Neteller deposits.

You should take the possibility into account that many altcoins will never recover.
Do we really need 2000 different altcoins? I´d speculate that only a few of the current projects
will still be around in a few years.

Besides, a heavy price decline often has bad consequences for the community of the
respective altcoin as well. Many people sell off their holdings when they are down
80-90 % or more in order to recoup at least some of their money. The developers
of the coin are also often more motivated when the price is rising and the community is growing.
It is hard to devote your life to a project when the price just keeps on dropping.
There were many altcoins in 2015 that have been completely abandoned as the result
of a price decrease.

Patience may be rewarded if you invest in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, but if you
are invested in one of the thousands of altcoins, it is likely that your investment
will decline gradually.

I agree with your post for the most part, but the actual bankroll
size doesn´t really matter for the average player. Does it really
make a difference for you if a site has a bankroll of 500 BTC or
of 5000 BTC? Most players bet a few satoshis or maybe a few mBTC.

I´d argue that the bankroll size is only relevant for the occasional
whale, who actually places big bets.

Of course a certain bankroll size is also a good sign that people trust
the site, but if you are playing at provably fair gaming sites trust isn´t
much of an issue in the first place.

Yes, because using a public ledger is so great for covering your tracks 
All major dark markets moved away from accepting BTC payments years ago.
I wonder how many people are rotting in a jail cell somewhere, because they believed
the claims by the media that Bitcoin is completely anonymous.

Anyway, the author isn´t exactly informed about the subject and obviously heavily
biased as well.

These 3 Ukrainian politicians would respectfully disagree:
https://www.coindesk.com/45-million-ukrainian-lawmakers-reveal-big-bitcoin-holdings/


This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Who knows how many other politicians
own huge amounts of BTC (probably gained by granting favors to various lobbies?)
and just didn´t declare their holdings.

They have no real interest in regulating anything related to BTC, because the average
citizen of the Ukraine isn´t owning any cryptocurrency anyway. But the elites
are obviously taking full advantage of the features of Bitcoin.

I agree that it would be great for Bitcoin if the LN would
enable the use cases that you mention again. But are newbies
actually using shitcoins for these purposes? I rather have the impression
that people bought them mainly for speculative purposes. The transaction
activity on literally all altcoin networks is extremely low.



Bitcoin is actually an improvement to Gold, because of its digital nature. E.g. you
can transport a huge amount of wealth in BTC far easier than transporting the same
amount of wealth in Gold. Not to mention the fact that BTC facilitates transfers and commerce,
because it is easier to send to someone else.

How high is the commission % for Orbit Exchange accounts that are provided
by BetInAsia?

You can´t compare a random altcoin with ETH. ETH is the gateway for
investing into ICOs. Most ICOs raise a majority of their funds in ETH.
Therefore all successful ICO teams end up owning a lot of ETH that they
want to liquidate. And obviously they want to do this while they are still
getting a nice amount of BTC or fiat for their soon to be worthless ETH.

An altcoin like Monero or Litecoin doesn´t have this downward pressure by ICO teams
that are looking to cash out, because they are not used to raise funds for ICOs.
Ethereum will drift a lot lower than most altcoins and will eventually
be trading for a few $. 190 $ is still ridiculously high for ETH.

Bitcoin will obviously go to the moon. Just imagine what will
happen when increasingly AIs make investment decisions.
Faced with the decision between inflationary fiat currencies
and a hard currency like BTC, they will obviously allocate funds to Bitcoin.


Why do you think that an eradication of poverty leads to a reduction in the crime rate?
I´d argue that this may be true for some types of felonies, but things like white collar
crime shouldn´t be influenced by this at all. Besides, a big welfare state
opens up completely new opportunities for crime (e.g. people that claim welfare
payments while earning additional funds by dealing drugs or similar stuff).

This could be caused by something different than miner dedication.
Maybe the miners are just aware that if Bitcoin (= the most popular
and well-known cryptocurrency) fails spectacularly, the entire
cryptocurrency market will be doomed.

Just imagine the fallout if the hashrate would plummet and the BTC
network would succumb to a malicious attack. Probably all
cryptocurrencies would immediately drop 90 % and the miners
would be stuck with a ton of hardware and lost investments.

They are kind of forced to dedicate hash power to BTC when necessary,
because of the reasons mentioned above. Bitcoin´s gametheoretical
incentives ensure its survival once again  

The problem is how can we incentivize people to switch to using solutions
like the LN in the first place. Of course the LN is cheaper than credit card
payments by a magnitude, but the average user isn´t really aware of the
costs that are associated with credit card payments, because they are
hidden in the end price by the merchant. I´m not even taking into
account other advantages of legacy payment methods like
fraud protection or cashback and reward schemes here.

I´d argue that the better use cases for Bitcoin are still
being a store of value and being a means of making
censorship-resistant payments. The use as a payment mechanism
is just the icing on the cake, but not the main driver for the long-term
success of Bitcoin.

I think BTC is holding these levels, because the current price
is only marginally above the average cost of mining a single
Bitcoin.

I don´t think Vitalik´s statements have anything to do with
the ETH decline. It is just a combination of a lack of interest
in ICOs (only 3 ICOs raised more than 25M $ in the 3rd quarter
of 2018 so far) and previous ICOs that are looking to liquidate their
ETH, which is providing continuous downward pressure on the
ETH price.

Better to get rid of ETH at 190 $ than at 40 $ (a price level,
which is not too far away).

How exactly can you see how many tokens are on the exchanges? Most exchanges
use hundreds of wallets, which makes it nearly impossible to determine how
many funds are actually at the exchange. If you try to determine the amount
by looking at the order book, you should be aware of the fact that many shady
exchanges use spoofing to give the impression of support "walls".

I also have no idea why you think that it is possible to see what the big holders
are up to. How would you track their movements? I don´t think that this
is doable and cryptocurrency trading markets are just as opaque as
stock market trading.

I actually think that the decline in the bankroll is simply caused by the fact
that one user won ~60 BTC a few weeks ago. Therefore I´d argue that
investors just lost to the player and weren´t willing to replenish
their investments.

Given the fact that the site has lost popularity it would take a very long
time to make back that many BTC by investing.

Check the "Total profit" graph on dicesites.com for SafeDICE, it confirms
my theory.

https://dicesites.com/safedice