I don't think that accepting FATF standards will necessarily "contradict" what the Indian government will do in their quest of trying to stop the crypto industry altogether, which they are attempting to do by cutting off any connection of the crypto industry to the traditional banking system through RBI restrictions.

My understranding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that these G20 regulations, if they are passed, are simply a set of minimums that countries have to abide by when it comes to KYC/AML etc.

So in that sense, it is certainly not a mutually exclusive event that a country may on paper accept G20 regulations, but in turn tighten their own regulations so much to the point that they cripple the entire bitcoin business sector within their country altogether. Essentially, that's the goal that the Indian government is aiming for, bar a sudden change of heart in the court hearing (which I doubt will be the case).

Extremely well written and said. Kudos to you.


This correction should really only spook out those who were trading on margin that were going long with tons of leverage, or weak hands who probably bought due to the fear of missing out at highs of around $13k. Long term investors should not be concerned whatsoever.

These periods of sustained dips, as you mentioned, are nothing out of the ordinary even in bull markets. Especially when you look at this type of market activity as consolidation (especially from a psychological standpoint, the notion that you mentioned as "people get comfortable with these prices") of gains that were made over past months, it's actually healthy.

Plus, looking at historical trends, it's very likely that prices will likely near its peak only after the halving which is still miles away. Relax, take this opportunity to bring your buy average down. I'm confident enough in bitcoin's fundamentals, especially after LN, that adoption will pick up over the long run.

What are you babbling about? Bitcoin in no way is in another bear market, and I think that is the consensus of the majority of traders at the moment.

If we're talking about root causes, people have attributed this downturn to Libra, Trump's comments, a bunch of things that I don't think are necessarily the reason why this correction happened at all. Sure, they may have influenced in terms of kickstarting the process, or worsening the losses, but really if you look at it from a macro perspective, this part of the cycle within the bull market would have come sooner or later.

This is a bear trap. In my opinion, it is still apparent that institutional investors are definitely interested, and that retail investment interest from the mainstream has not even started yet. The bull market still has a long way to go. While it may take quite a while to breach the resistance at $10k again and we may see further dips in the process, it's the complete opposite of doom and gloom to me. It's an excellent buying opportunity, for dollar cost averaging.

I don't think that it's 'anarchy' per se.

There are still rules within the bitcoin network that people abide by in order to facilitate transactions, as well as a hard coded emission mechanism with a hard cap on the amount of coins that can ever be mined and thus be in circulation.

These rules and regulations still exist, and essentially are where the intrinsic value of bitcoin is derived from.

In contrast to fiat currencies however, these decisions on the 'monetary policy' is not set and maintained by a central entity, but done so through consensus on a decentralized network, and enforced as such to eliminate the possibility of a rogue central entity. That's the major difference, I think.

What LBC is trying to do is that they are trying to uphold the integrity of their escrow system, and their promise that the traders of both sides will always be protected.

They do have reasonable evidence to at least suspect that you are an alt account of the account that has been previously banned, so from their perspective, they are simply trying to use the funds in your current account as 'motivation' for you to resolve any problems with the other account. Sort of like legal blackmail, if you will.


You don't need any evidence that you own the account. You're trying to prove the other way around.

As squatter said, place emphasis on the fact that your documents were stolen and that there is $5k or so at stake. Don't go into the mumbo-jumbo of bitcoin jargon or too much about Localbitcoins, just keep it simple and ask them to file a case.

So short term, are you saying that we will see levels sub-$7k?

I don't necessarily think that is a likely scenario, given that we are in an established bull market already and that we've seen support at $9k which caused the rebound today. But if it does ever get that low then it's certainly a zone for accumulation.

I really don't understand the panic that people have shown over the past week or so, though. Like we get it, prices did go down drastically from a high of around $14k all the way to sub-$10k, but what else do you realistically expect in a bull market where markets in the short run are extremely volatile? Also, it's not like this correction is unwarranted in any way, prices have simply been growing at unsustainable rates for the past 1-2 months.

You're right in the sense that setting up mining rigs and all that within your home is a very intensive process, that not a lot of people are able to have the professional know-how to carry out. You're also right in terms of the investments in hardware that you need to make.

But I don't think that these issues can be resolved simply by switiching to using a cloud mining service - if you do go down that route, you are simply adding way too many risks onto your investment, that you would not encounter if you mined yourself.

For one, you don't know if the company that you have put your money in has actually passed it onto spending it on actual mining equipment. You also don't know whether they are running a pyramid. Furthermore, most contracts that are sold in the marketplace are structured in a way which benefits the mining company, not you, in the long run due to all the maintenance fees and all that.

On your site you mention these benefits:


Why is "automated capacity rent" repeated twice, and what do the others even mean?

This is basically essentially them saying that, yo, this isn't your money anymore once you deposit it with us. You no longer have the capacity to make your own decisions, and if you were to bank with us, you'd be giving up the control.

Think about how absurd it would be if a bank blocked transactions to the stock exchange, just because they seem to think that it's too risky. Think about how much outrage that would cause - how everyone would be complaining about the bank doing this for their own good. This is exactly what Wells Fargo is doing. It's no different just because it's on bitcoin.

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I wouldn't say that financial institutions are "increasingly pro-crypto", either.

They may be interested in developing their own cryptocurrencies, or even conduct their own trading activities; sure. But when it comes to supporting actual decentralized cryptocurrencies, which are what we're interested in, they're nowhere near that step.

Yes, Goldman Sachs is planning on launching their own trading desk, yes, Facebook wants to dip their feet into the FinTech world. But does that really matter when you realize it's got no aspects of decentralization anywhere, nor have they ever explicitly supported bitcoin as a movement? They're only interested in the profits, that is all.

These are the obvious steps to take, on paper. However, when it comes to execution, given the lucrative profit margins for businesses that hire child workers it's simply unfeasible to expect that everyone will comply with regulations, which I'm fairly sure has already been implemented.

Plus, do you really think that just by "urging the government to give better wages" to children, that they're actually going to receive better wages? Govermnents can impose all sorts of minimum wage regulations, enterprise agreements, whatever; but do you really think that employers are going to care, or that a black market for child labour won't simply form?

It's a huge issue that requires structural reforms that I don't see can happen in a short period of time, and certainly not as easily as you may think.

Jesus christ. I've always been interested in the Zimbabwe situation from an economic standpoint, and this is just awful to hear.

Do the Zim government really expect their population to believe in the stability of their currency, after the 3 currency reforms that they tried to do to save the Zim dollar all went to crap? They just recently introduced the so called "bond notes" which was a sign that they weren't going to dabble with creating their own currency anymore, and confidence was just building up. And now, this is just a big hit to it once again. Banning foreign currencies doesn't help at all.

It's no surprise that the Zimbabwean population are trying to diversify their assets into something accessible, yet a long term store of value, like BTC; especially when other forex is banned from being directly traded.

After all, the tales of hyperinflation isn't as distance to them as it is to the majority of the western nations. They are very well aware of the economic consequences of holding a depreciating Zimbabwean dollar for the long run.

I think that the comparison of a lot of fiat currencies to in game GP is a good one - while they may be store of values in the short run, or at least appear to be so; in the long term their value is heavily based on trust in the game to continue to function.

And given the fact that the game creators can essentially create as many of these "partyhats" (think, fiat currency) as they want to, it's really a representation of how fragile its value can be. Same logic applies to fiat - when the central bank introduces monetary stimulus to debase the currency supply, what suffers is the value of existing currency.

What has traditionally been recognized as stores of values are precisely the opposite of these types of centralized assets, but rather, assets whose supply can't be controlled by anyone (think gold, silver, stones, even clam shells). And BTC I think is simply a more robust and efficient way of representing that idea.

I wonder how they were able to arrive at this figure, because it does seem like a heck of a lot for one quarter. Are they encompassing all the BTC lost due to fraudulent investments as well (like HYIPs), or are they only accounting for actual hacks and breaches?

But hey, at least only their hot wallets seems to be affected.

But why $32 million in their hot wallet? That's 3200+ BTC, which has absolutely no business in staying in an online wallet - and any exchange owner with common sense should know this. They SHOULD be liable for these damages, at least partially, since it is a clear neglection of common security protocol.


What do you mean? It's obvious how the owner can profit from reporting fake losses. Theoretically he can take the funds and run, while the rest of the world thinks that it's gone to a hacker.

Absolutely nobody here is saying that Libra is good, or even that it is viable in the long run. Just look at all the regulatory backlash that the Libra project has already received from central banks, despite the fact that their products haven't even been launched yet!

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I think that this dip below $10k further confirms that this has got nothing to do with Libra.

Whilst it is true that prices have slipped after the Federal Reserve's comments, if you look at market developments after that, it continued to be bearish - not because of any news, per se, but rather because of the fact that market sentiment has swung significantly to the negative end, and a possibly long squeeze.

Stop attributing every single detail in BTC's price movement to Libra. Sometimes they just aren't related in any way.

Doesn't look like it to me at all.

I don't think that the bull market has even entered the major stages of bullishness, fear of missing out, and euphoria yet. Prices have rose a crap ton over the last 3-4 months, yes, but nowhere to the scale of 2017, or what I'd expect to be the peak of the market.

If you look at this chart, I think that the more likely scenario is that we're currently in the first bear trap.



Markets will consolidate at a lower price before testing the $10k once again. I remain bullish for the long run despite people's concerns about Libra, because ultimately that has nothing to do with bitcoin's fundamentals.

Plenty of other instances of the same issue:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2711760.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1822756.0 (more than one person has reported the same issue within the same thread)
And https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2725615.0

Your only chance of recourse is to either go through their support system, or potentially try to message one of their mods on the chat box; neither of which I'm confident in due to how unresponsive they are in both of these channels.

I've seen people say that if you translate your ticket to Russian and send it through, they'll reply faster. While it's unconfirmed, it's worth a shot since things can't really get worse than that.

They definitely have the funds and I wouldn't doubt that, with a bit of tweaking, they can come to automatically accept deposits from contracts as well. It's a matter of willingness, really.

What are you talking about? I myself is still able to trade on LBC despite the fact that I haven't even completed Tier 0 verification yet. Is it something that is specifically on your end where you've exceeded their unspoken threshold?

As far as I know though, you're still able to trade anonymously at least until September, where their tiered verification system will actually come into play.

But the decision to go with extended KYC isn't something that has surprised anyone, in my opinion. It was clear to begin with that they were going to have to start doing this sooner rather than later, with EU (where they are located) regulations tightening as well as G20 talks of global regulations for BTC. Paxful and others will most likely follow suit as a matter of time.

I couldn't believe how Peter Schiff even got into this article to reinforce his position as a long term goldbug/shill


The narrative/stance is still the same - that bitcoin isn't a true "currency", despite the facts that squatter pointed out when it comes to the sheer amount of transactions being processed on the network on a daily basis; that bitcoin poses "regulatory risks" potentially; and that decentralization isn't anything good.

Which is understandable given their vested interest in the central system, which I appreciate. Hey, at least they are shifting their stance to more positive in terms of bitcoin's status as a store of value, as opposed to just denying that fact altogether.

But what I find more interesting is their obsession with Libra. They seem to be more concerned with Libra than BTC at this stage, which sort of contradicts the entire 'decentralization' story that they've put out. But it's also obvious why they seem to feel threatened since essentially if FB gets enough people to adopt their coin, they can run their own economy, have their own currency, control their own interest rates - things that BTC can't do.



But what Powell is saying is that BTC isn't used for payments, period. Which is clearly false.

I don't necessarily think that the commission exchanges take is the most concerning thing.

The majority of traders are completely fine with the exchanges taking a small percentage off trades, as demonstrated by the popularity of exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, etc.. If people are predominantly concerned about fees alone, they wouldn't use Binance with a 0.1%, but rather use exchanges which offer much lower percentage rates (there are even sites with negative maker fees).

Perhaps it matters more to whales, where percentage fees are a much bigger issue than plat fees. But for average traders, they should be more concerned about transaction fees to and from the exchange.

Besides, lowering the fees alone on an exchange is barely a "disruption" to the industry. It's just modifying existing parametres.

What I think will really disrupt the entire field is if decentralized exchanges are able to exist, whilst operating across multiple currencies, as opposed to the current model where it's limited to digital assets on one particular platform. Something like the BTS decentralized exchange, except it's not trading derivatives, but rather the underlying asset itself.

Where did you get that info?

This was the official press release regarding cash trades that I saw a month back or so on their twitter, and I haven't seen any new updates post tiered verification system is implemented:



It's very unlikely then that the removal of cash trades had something to do with the tiered system - they were going to introduce that regardless, it seems. Rather, it's more to do with the overall connotations that "cash" brings, as opposed to online methods that are traceable to regulatory authorities.

We have to expect tightening regulations at this point, without any easings. Though for most people's purposes I think tier 2 is still quite overkill, you're probably better off verifying @ tier 1 first and maxing out your tier's trade limit before you move onto tier 2 for privacy's sake.

Don't be surprised if in the future when the RBI or another regulatory authority actually formally bans BTC, that premiums shoot up through the roof even further.

These premiums can be seen through all types of currencies traded against BTC, if the country which the currency is in has some form of capital restriction preventing capital flight, or liquidity issues. The Chinese Yuan, for example, has experienced periods where the premiums on BTC over the global average has been significant due to demand from people to use BTC as a tool to move funds out of the country. If you look on exchanges located in Africa where currency destability is widespread, you'll also see these above market rates.

It's similar in this regard what you'd see with the INR/BTC rates if a formal ban is pursued. Since there is no regulated exchanges anymore, people are going to flock to the P2P market if they do want to buy BTC, which would have a limited supply.