Gold bugs definitely feel threatened by crypto: https://www.ccn.com/world-gold-council-blinks-bitcoinGold may have a value of $7.8 trillion, but it isn’t happy about giving any of that up to bitcoin, the latter of which has a market cap of $97.2 billion. A day after Grayscale unleashed its “Drop Gold promotion, a TV commercial that garnered 100,000 views in less than 24 hours, the World Gold Council is clapping back. Gold’s reputation as a store of value has gone pretty much uncontested for thousands of years – until bitcoin, which has earned the reputation as digital gold in addition to its use case as a currency.
In a tweet, the Council stated:
“Cryptocurrencies are no replacement for gold.”
The World Gold Council didn’t stop there and published a blog outlining the features differentiating the precious metal from cryptocurrencies. They state:
“Although cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology look promising as a whole, they clearly do not represent a substitute for gold either in theory or in practice.”
Basically, they suggest gold is better for the following reasons:
less volatility
greater liquidity
a more “established regulatory framework.”
Touche. Yet they acknowledge bitcoin only has a 10-year history while gold has been around since 600 B.C. Bitcoin’s share of the store-of-value pie is only going to expand. Meanwhile, volatility remains a function of the extreme views surrounding the digital currency, both for its ascent and its demise.
gold The big question is whether some holders of gold will diversify into crypto "just in case". From a risk management point of view, diversification makes sense. |
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Here is a very sad article about how crypto isn't working out for Venezuela anymore: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-cant-fix-venezuela-i-should-knowMay 2, 2019
Today marks a week since I left my home in Venezuela.
So, here I am, watching the news since 6 a.m., haven’t separated from my phone all day. I’m worried about my loved ones, wondering if I could have done more before leaving, but knowing I had to leave anyway.
I left everything I knew behind, but I also fled an escalating crisis that jeopardized my income as a remote worker in the crypto space, where I’ve been now for years.
For the Venezuelans using cryptocurrency as a tool to survive the economic consequences of a brutal socialist dictatorship, receiving support from the international community has been vital to the reformation process. The trouble is that this attention has quickly deteriorated into a double-edged sword: a trend.
In the last few years, Venezuela has become a favorite pop culture reference in crypto, where bystanders – usually from a privileged background and perspective – spout their ill-wisdom about Venezuelan socialism, economy and migration.
This situation is particularly common in crypto. People armed with good intentions and misinformation about how Venezuela’s economy works – or better said, how it doesn’t work – spread their confusion and often diminish an extremely painful experience being shared by millions of Venezuelans.
So let me, as someone who used bitcoin to survive in Venezuela, clear up the misconceptions: Bitcoin can’t fix the situation in Venezuela.
There are no official statistics of how many crypto wallets there are in Venezuela. There’s no way to know how many each person owns. What it is very clear is that beyond a couple of businesses that accept this form of payment and a few trusted exchange platforms online, there are no services for crypto users available in the country.
No ATMs. No prepaid debit cards. Just assumptions.
The fallacy that bitcoin could “save” a country’s whole economy assumes the country meets all the requirements for mainstream adoption. Just to start, there would be needed widespread computer and financial literacy, reliable electricity infrastructure, stable internet service and an economy that not only allows the majority of citizens to count on a device to keep their digital wallets but also the safe migration from fiat money to digital money.
As we can see, the fact that Venezuela serves as a use case for bitcoin does not mean that it currently has the circumstances for broad cryptocurrency adoption.
The hyperinflation has stepped all over the Bolivar, as it also impacts US dollar-based prices that rise on a daily basis. So using bitcoin to get dollars, which is what many Venezuelans currently do, is still problematic and vulnerable to inflation issues.
There’s also the mining. Venezuela is famous for its off-the-charts rates of bitcoin transactions and mining activity. But the reality is that having access to cryptocurrency is limited to earning freelance income, trading and mining, which unless you are wealthy enough to own your own mining farm, isn’t a feasible option for most Venezuelans.
The crypto misconception
Foreign initiatives to help Venezuelans have instead revealed widespread ignorance about the actual problems that Venezuelans face.
Working personally as a contact for the crypto charity GiveCrypto, owned by Coinbase, during 2018, I found a common problem in this initiative that others have followed: the gigantic misinterpretation of how to help from outside.
In the case of GiveCrypto, the goal was unreachable from the start: to feed 300 people with $100 in bitcoin. That’s 33 cents per person. To anyone with an understanding of the economic situation of the country, hyperinflation wouldn’t be this underestimated. Sadly, it’s quite commonplace.
And this isn’t an isolated case of donations given without much of strategy based on reality.
Crypto donations are very popular nowadays, like in the case of AirTM, which has just announced that will be teaming up with MakerDao on its goal to raise $1 million to distribute between its users in Venezuela, with a goal of giving away $10 to each aid recipient. (Such a small amount doesn’t serve as savings or investment, as it easily vanishes for a week’s worth of expenses.)
Despite all the international efforts to distribute crypto in Venezuela, so far there aren’t any solutions able to make a sustainable and adequate difference beyond what a similar dollar donation could have achieved. The important thing for these foreign brands appears to be just cramming a blockchain-shaped peg into any hole. Looks like the lack of reliable electricity and internet has scuppered the adoption of bitcoin in Venezuela. |
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It seems good news to some people though, i leanrt that the ban of miners will have positive effect on the market which i dont know how it will
We all cannot deny the fact that we really need the involvement of china in cryptocurrency because of their population and good economy that they have, people that feel it will add more benefits to the market are simply looking at it from the point of crypto Supply, they feel that once they ban miners, supply of token circulating in the market will be reducing and causing demand to be high, which will make those coins quite expensive, but it might not really work that way China is not that rich as many come to think of it It may be an economic superpower taken as a whole but its population is still mostly poor. It can be said that Chinese economic muscle comes exactly from the poverty of the Chinese population in general as poor people can be paid little (read, they are cheap workforce). The bottom line is that sheer number of total population is not a guarantee of big demand (the same is equally applicable to India) China might not be that rich - but the Chinese are much more motivated to hide their wealth from their government than those in the west. Because the Chinese govt is totalitarian and they sometimes use the existence of wealth to accuse you of corruption if you have annoyed some important person. Bitcoin is perfect for people like that - and of course that is the main reason the Chinese govt is trying to stamp it out. |
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I have come to the conclusion that investing into major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Binance coin are the best because with these cryptocurrencies there are new investors who come on board every now and then but with ICOs they are mostly full of pumps and dumps.
I don't think you currently know how investors feel that they are currently disappointed because they often see ico failing and they are often hit by scams, now many investors prefer to participate in IEO rather than ICO. Investors still need to be wise too when it comes to ICOs, they should not completely still rely on them because anything could still happen, because it is IEO will not stop the project from failing or end up being dump till it becomes useless, and anyone holding them for long will become a bag holder. There are some IEO on some exchanges that are just equivalent to ICO too, because another way scammer works is to enter exchange is and distribute useless and dumped token to the investors and then pack up. IEO also have the tendency of doing so if we still don’t take precautions too, but chances of getting scam is still 50% lower to ICO. Remember that whether it is an IEO or an ICO, these things are really about insiders (the developers) cashing out by selling to outsiders. The same thing applies to Initial Public Offerings (IPO's) of stocks. See the listing of Lyft shares. They bombed, so all those initial investors are hurting badly. The only people happy are the insider venture capitalists who cashed out. If you think a coin offering has potential, don't go in at the start. Wait till it has finished it's inevitable initial pump and dump and then buy in cheaping on an exchange. |
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I think we've reached the peak of the stock market bubble though.
Jerome Powell (chairman of the Fed) caused the markets to tank yesterday. They'd deluded themselves that he was going to cut interest rates - he held them and said that he thought there was still potential for inflation to build (which means there could be a rate RISE later this year). And he's still doing Quantitative Tightening.
As long as unemployment in the US is low, he won't cut rates, and the markets are struggling with the rises he put through last year. Lots of corporations have debt they need to roll over this year - they borrowed at 0.25% and will probably have to pay 2.5% when they roll it over. That's Ouch territory. Come the autumn we shall see many shares tanking.
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People are not thinking anymore of the times that bitcoin price was still cheap.
What they have in mind now is the last bull run, that $20,000 is till fresh in their minds so price now is very cheap and it disappoints investors.
And there are a lot of people sitting on painful losses and haven't got the stomach to put more money in. They're probably also being teased by their friends and family for buying into the FOMO and purchasing at the top. It will take another couple of years for wounds like that to heal and memories to fade. |
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It looks like Ethiopia is looking to launch it's own cryptocurrency too: https://www.investinblockchain.com/cardano-founder-collaborates-with-ethiopian-government-create-cryptocurrency/According to Hoskinson, Atala is a groundbreaking blockchain framework built from the ground up to serve real-world use cases such as property registration, supply chain management, voting systems, and cryptocurrency adoption.
Per the Forbes report:
“Atala is an enterprise framework similar to Hyperledger Fabric. However, the point is to be a solutions provider for governments in need of a municipal currency or a supply chain management system.”
The first implementation of the Atala framework will be used to develop a cryptocurrency for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to provide a secure and dependable means of payment It totally makes sense for them to just start with the capital city - that way if it's a flop (say people prefer to hold bitcoin rather than the Ethiopian crypto) it can easily abandoned. |
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Well the following piece of news made me feel really hopeful: The US government is allowing people to get tax refunds paid to them in bitcoin. See the following article: https://www.coindesk.com/us-income-tax-payers-can-now-get-refunds-in-bitcoinMay 1 2019 Income tax payers in the U.S. now have the option to receive their federal and state refunds in bitcoin.
Blockchain payments processor Bitpay announced the news on Tuesday, saying that the firm has partnered with U.S.-based taxation services provider Refundo for the service.
Refundo customers can choose to receive all or a portion of a tax refund in bitcoin using its CoinRT product. Taxpayers will have to set up an account to get a unique routing and account number to input on their tax return, according to the announcement.
They will also have to provide necessary background information for know-your-customer (KYC) rules, as well as a bitcoin wallet address. Once the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or state has deposited the refund, BitPay will process the payment and send bitcoin to taxpayers’ wallets. Once you can pay taxes with bitcoin, get tax refunds with bitcoin, adoption becomes so much easier. The next step is being able to pay the rent or mortgage with bitcoin. |
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Can't agree, when we talk around bitcoin, as time shows, holding it and doing nothing is less risky and far profitable than daily/weekly/monthly trading.
Btw it's not so easy to just hold coins, there are risks and you can't escape from them. News has huge impact on bitcoin's price, for example china bans mining. This news sounds terrifying, no one knows what will it cause, maybe that's the end and better to sell asap? Or maybe market will recover? And if won't recover? There are risks and we all want to get rid of them, that's why we are impatients in holding for long term.
You can always sell an amount to cover your initial investment. That way all you are gambling with is free money and fluctuations due to news and market events don't matter so much. It really depends on your personal tolerance for risk. Bitcoin is not for the fainthearted because it's extremely volatile. |
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Look for coins that do well in areas where Visa/Mastercard struggle. One such area is mainstream online gambling. One of the largest mainstream gambling sites in the world, betonline has enabled deposits by cryptocurrency. https://www.betonline.ag/bankingThey have enabled deposits via bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, dash and bitcoincash. |
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Witnesses are now testifying against him: https://www.ccn.com/satoshi-nakamoto-expert-witness-testifies-craig-wrightAn expert witness has filed an affidavit in the Kleiman v. Wright case, which alleges that Craig Wright stole billions of dollars worth of bitcoins from Dave Kleiman either before or after he passed away. The Kleiman estate is seeking damages in the neighborhood of $10 billion. Wright is defending the case with tenacity and recently submitted a provably fake e-mail as evidence.
One thing for sure: The e-mail was fake
In response to this e-mail’s filing and Wright’s subsequent motion that it be stricken from evidence, an expert witness has filed an affidavit on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Dr. Matthew J. Edman, a cybersecurity researcher who previously helped the FBI acquire Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s Bitcoin stash, testifies that the e-mail was certifiably fake.
"Counsel for Plaintiff also provided me with the file DEF_00030487.mht, which appears to be a copy of an email sent from the Defendant to himself and that I understand was produced by the Defendant in discovery. The content of the email is identical to the content of ECF No. [144-1], including the PGP signature. The email was sent on April 16, 2014 at 10:22 PM UTC6 according to the date in the email’s header. If this time is adjusted to UTC+10, it shows that the Defendant sent this email to himself on April 17, 2014, at approximately 8:22 AM, i.e., about two minutes before ECF No. [144-1] was created and six minutes before it was last modified." |
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That graph on the dollar is shocking. But do you know what the really amazing thing is? The rest of the world's currencies are doing even worse than the dollar.
At least the dollar started to strengthen in 2016, as a result of interest rates normalising. Everyone else's currency weakened further as a result of zero interest rates and QE. The ECB's base rates are 0.0% and the rate they charge banks for depositing excess reserves at the ECB is -0.4%. And yet banks still deposit excess reserves with the ECB despite losing money. The mind boggles as to what they're thinking.
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The bull market is much anticipated by most investors yet very few investors prepare towards it. One of the fundamental ways to prepare towards bull market is to;
1. Make sure you buy at low price during the bear market. Investors that buy at low price during the bear market will make profit during the sales during bull market at high prices. No profit for an investor who failed to buy at low price.
2. Reduce greediness level. Out of too much greediness, many investors fail to recognize when a coin bulls.
3. Exercise patience when the bear market takes long. There is no single permanent market condition in crypto hence once there is a bear market, there will certainly be a bull market. Patience is required to stay calm and wait till the bull market comes.
One mistake people made in the 2017 bull run was thinking the price would go even higher. It had moved from $1000 to $20,000 in a single year, it was bound to come down because nothing goes up in a straight line. The wise thing would have been to take profits on the way up (because no-one can predict the top). But some people just held thinking it would keep going, and thus missed out. |
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Can you provide the link that will be directed me to the elon's tweet? Im so glad to see that if elon is more interested with ether rather than tron. Tron is such garbage caused by it has created a partnership with scam company like tether.
Here's the tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1123033196642201600You can browse there lots of CT replies lmao. Buterin even replied and invited him to eth devcon on that tweet. With these Silicon Valley types, if they're tweeting about a cryptocurrency, it means they've already invested and they're talking their book to their fan base (of several million in the case of Elon Musk). I wonder if this means a bit of a bull run for Ether. |
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April 26, 2019
E*Trade Financial Corp. is getting ready to let customers trade cryptocurrencies on its platform, according to a person familiar with the matter.
If this actually happens it will be a massive step forward for cryptocurrency. Think of the obstacles in place for those who currently want to invest in crypto: they have to undergo excessive verification that the standard stock/share exchanges don't request. And they have to give their details to exchanges who have a poor record of security and may be hacked at any moment with personal data stolen and sold to identity thieves on the dark net. No wonder most people are leary about the whole business. However if an existing exchange like E*trade accepts crypto - with millions of existing members, no crazy veritication/data harvesting requirements, and who will allow crypto trading for their existing members without additional hassle. This is the holy grail of adoption. |
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I think this new found hype will help out getting new money in too which is what we needed for so long. 24th of April became the 8th biggest transaction day in bitcoin and that is enough to show you that we are in fact in another bull hype, even if the bull doesn't come this is enough proof to say that in fact we are in a bull hype and everyone is expecting bitcoin to skyrocket soon since everything required for it is already established.
And yet Bitcoin's transactions haven't come close to reaching Ethereum's transactions - which means that the "hype" isn't benefiting bitcoin at all. If the Lightning Network fails under strain, then it follows that the smart money will give up on bitcoin and migrate to an alt. We are really in the last chance saloon - it's now or never for bitcoin to prove it can cope with a large number of user and scale. |
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Totally agree, there are still FUD news which drive market at some percent. For example news about Tether, last new is about 300m Tether printed, which could be reason for last dump. But we seen roughly 8 times FUD news around Tether and Tether is still working just good as 1st day. I trade on Bitfinex and never have problems with them, also I am not in Tether there, I am in USD when I am out of trade.
There is not as much FUD as there used to be. Do you remember the time where "China has banned bitcoin" used to be in the news practically every week, causing dumps till they really banned retail bitcoin, whereupon the bitcoin price rose? That said, I do think that Tether has problems in that it isn't realy backed with dollars. The good news is that crypto isn't dependent on Bitfinex and Tether the way it was back in 2017. |
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Your point is interesting.
All those operators should take care when switching to alts to transfer value reason is in the BONUS section of my post.
Fees are not a bug, but the price to have an uncensorable transactions. Other alt offer cheaper fees, but at a cost of very limited security.
Your bonus section refers to Bitcoin's forks, which I agree are not very good - but they're not bitcoin's primary competition. Unique alts like Ethereum, Dash and others are the main competition. There was a video circulating like mad on reddit of someone from Venezuela purchasing food with crypto: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/bi9hdg/what_crypto_looks_like_to_people_who_needs_it_the/2760 upvotes because people were excited about ADOPTION. But when you view the video the Venezuelan was using Ethereum. Adoption is not happening with bitcoin, it's happening with Ether. That's why the Ether transaction count is so high. Run your analysis again, but this time comparing each point with Ether to see which coin is outperforming. BTW, I don't own any Ether, but am thinking of buying now the price is reasonable. |
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Transactions number: NEUTRALLast month status: NEUTRAL Time Horizon: Short Term https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?daysAverageString=7×pan=2yearsRationale: transaction number can be interpreted as the “bitcoin heart beat”. If transactions are scarce means one of Bitcoin primary functions (“mean of value transfer”) is not properly working. Of course the advent of layer 2 solutions is going to make this measure less and less relevant in the future. But as far as L2 capacity is not comparable to the whole bitcoin capitalisation, transaction number cannot be discarded. The reason transactions are not picking up (when you take out the orgs that are using the network to test/spam) is because in the Dec 2017 - Feb 2018 period, when fees spiked, bitcoin lost some users permanently. Some of the remittance operators switched to Stellar Lumens/Bitshares/Dash as they were more reliable. It was either do that or wind up their business because none of their users could afford $1000 fees. Lots of the altcoin mining pools switched to paying by Litecoin or Ethereum. Lots or ordinary users switched to moving stuff from exchange to exchange via an alt (litecoin, Ether, BCH or doge). Once these people switch to another method of moving money, they never switch back. Instead they stick with the new method for as long as it continues to works. When fees spiked again at the start of April 2019, we had a new batch of people switching to alts to move money. Basically everytime the fees spike a new group of people are alienated and their transactions move onto a different chain for good. Eventually this will happen once too often and an alt will become the primary way of moving things. Lots of people already use ethereum, litecoin, doge and BCH in that way. |
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If they were going to do it, they wouldn't announce it in advance. That would just spike the price. Also: there arn't enough circulating bitcoins to meet any country's reserves, and certainly not enough to replace the dollar. They may hold a small reserve of bitcoins so they can move money to their client states without attracting attention from the Americans, but they won't hold much. It's easier for them to hold gold, not least because there is a lot of gold available to hold as a reserve. |
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