It'll be interesting to see how many countries actually comply with this. Sanctions are easier said than done, especially when there is national interest in some countries to keep things running as they are right now to ensure that businesses are more attracted to them.

I personally think though that this type of regulation is inevitable, and would come regardless of the bull market given the growth in adoption and market size. In essence, this is a draconian restriction put on people to make their bitcoin transacting process much more difficult than it should be.


I also would not be surprised at the least if they decided to append this list further. Namely, forcing people to provide source of funds, why they are transacting, etc. on regulated platforms. I think all this will do is drive people away from regulated platforms, and onto P2P ones.

Given Bitfinex's association with other shady ventures, and its previous hacks, I was never a fan.

However, one of the things that I actually thought was good about them was their customer support, for the brief amount of time that I did use them. But seems like things have changed quite a bit, especially in your case.

This is a common strategy for exchanges nowadays, to cite the so called "KYC concerns" as a way of essentially holding onto your coins for longer than what you would have originally planned. Things like this happen on subpar exchanges like HitBTC extremely often. And exchanges who use these tactics are often suspected of insolvency, given that their objective is to delay withdrawals.

I'm not sure that this is Bitfinex's reason for delaying here, but it clearly does not render them in a trustworthy light whatsoever. Should be a warning to all.

It used to be easier, but I think that most banks across the world now have much stricter controls when it comes to buying coins with credit cards. Most of them will charge you the cash advance rate straight away with no interest free days, and that is assuming that buying crypto is within their ToS which for a lot of them is not.

Not only that, there is a serious lack of exchanges that will take your credit card funds because how easily you can chargeback on your transactions, meaning that the little that will accept it will have significantly higher spreads.

I think it's intrinsically risky to speculate on BTC on credit, especially on credit cards, because of the high interest rates and fees, and a lack of liquid markets that allow you to transact from CC to BTC. If you are willing to take on this risk, you might as well trade on margin.

I think that it is a good reflection of current market activity, and what the prevailing market sentiment is. I guess you could look at it from that perspective and try predict when the market becomes overheated.

But it does have its limitations. Firstly, I don't think that this is an accurate indicator to predict the future is. Since market activity generally lags behind price, this is really a retrospective indicator, since trading activities significantly increase only after a big market move.

Also given the fact that fees have dropped due to the fact that Segwit, and potentially the implementation of LN on a grander scale in the future, you can't really compare markets between different "eras".

No. I personally do not see a correlation here whatsoever, given the fact that the coin that Facebook will launch will have absolutely nothing to do with decentralization, but it's rather more related to their own profits.

There should be a clear distinction drawn between what is corporate use of blockchain for their own profit driven incentives, and actual decentralized cryptocurrencies.

Once you draw that distinction, you'll find that the demand for each of them is completely different, and thus, the value of one is most likely completely untied from the other. BTC is bullish mainly because of the stage of the market cycle we're in right now, not to any external events.

Contrary to popular belief, most countries in the world are neutral to BTC or deem BTC as legal.

Of course, you need to fulfill your taxation obligations as a result. This solely depends on your jurisdiction, and you'll have clear info listed out for you in your country's tax agency. But the thing that is generally accepted standard essentially is that BTC income will still be filed as income, and you're likely to be expected to pay CGT.


They can only really track any transaction with precision if it's been through a regulated exchange that actively reports back to them. That said though, I think that in the future they'll come up with more methods of tracing, though there will always be limitations due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of addresses.

I still somewhat disagree with this statement.

With people utilizing hosted wallets, and payment protocols such as Bitpay, there will be some degree of centralization when it comes to the distribution of bitcoins naturally, since the nature of these services demand that people trust them with their coins at a central location. Even though this is to the detriment of the user, this is what is practically happening.

Furthermore, while there may be a certain degree of correlation between real world utility and equality of distribution, I don't think that there is a strong link. Especially when you consider the fact that BTC's utility doesn't necessarily stem from small transactions, but rather, from serving a store of value and a means to transfer wealth out of countries with strict capital controls, etc., all of which can involve larger sums of BTC, that can be stored on central platforms once again.

But I agree in the fact that BTC is currently still being mainly used speculation still, and that there's still ways to go before this is not the case. I just think it's over-simplistic to directly correlate a high gini coefficient to lack of real world usage, imo.

It's similar to the situation in China in regards to exchanges. I would not panic too much over it.

I don't think that the market will shrink at all just due to the fact that Binance has shut its door on US customers - crypto investors will find other ways, regardless of the exchange that they use, especially the whales who have a lot of vested interest already to continue trading and investing.

I highly doubt that people are going to be stepping out of the crypto market just because of Binance's closure to the US alone.

Though, I agree with the fact that we may see a reallocation of capital from less liquid coins, to more commonly traded coins within the crypto market, internally. These structural changes could certainly change the composition of the relative dominance of each coin, with highly liquid coins potentially now receiving more demand due to US investors.

It's most likely due to the fact that a lot of African currencies are illiquid and/or have capital controls, which means that the market prices for BTC and other liquid, international cryptocurrencies will be significantly higher in comparison with the free markets elsewhere in the world. This has happened before elsewhere, e.g. with INR, KRW, and CNY.

There is no one that moderates BTC price, nor can any single entity do so given its decentralization. It's essentially something that is built in, so that no central bank can manipulate BTC's supply or whatnot, even if that does lead to short term volatility. So no, there is no legal regulation for any exchange in the world to uphold a rate that is close to the going market rates, because it's simply not up to them to control.

My suggestion to you is if you can, convert your funds to USD or other forex first, then buy cryptos on the open market. Though, the premise for that is that you need to have a means to convert your local currency to USD without significant markups/spreads.

It seems like yesterday when the mainstream media seemed to be ultra-bearish and calling for bitcoin's demise every single day. It just goes to show how sensationalist they are, and how much they are influenced by mainstream investor sentiment. It is a quality indicator of market sentiment, though, I'll tell you that. As to the actual analysis, not so much.

Right now, I would not jump to conclusions and say that BTC will even move above the all time high by this year. Let's not forget the fact that this bull market is still in its infancy and will likely see a lot of resistance at least for the latter part of the year, as investors are still somewhat uncertain as opposed to fully euphoric as what happened in 2017.

I think that given the improved fundamentals, such as LN and the recent inflood of institutional investors, and their BTC-based trading activities, these predictions of a 6 figure bitcoin are not entirely possible - but I feel like that they are based off arbitrary numbers as opposed to any tangible evidence. And if they were to happen, I think they will occur much closer towards 2020 when halving will have a psychological factor on investors, as opposed to now.

It's obvious that Revain realizes they've run out of arguments to put forth.

They know fully well what they are doing in terms of breaking forum rules, etc., and it seems like at this point they're just trying to decrease the amount of negative publicity that this issue is causing by diverging attention to other irrelevant issues, as I stated before.

The damage has been done on their forum reputation, and most likely, they're just hoping that newbies fall into their trap nonetheless.


The evidence should be apparent to anyone with a brain. It's a shame that these bumpers are unfairly elevating certain shady projects in their position, but all we can do is report their posts and how mods handle them.

HK is sort of operating as an alternative for mainland crypto companies to relocate at the moment, and obviously the government there recognizes that there is a huge opportunity for them to really try set the tone and regulate the market in order to gain more revenue.

However, with the political instability in recent months, there could be pressure from the PRC for Hong Kong to further tighten regulation to the point that they become restrictive.

This is all speculative at this stage, and obviously nothing is confirmed - I'm just saying that I would not be surprised if Hong Kong in the future turns its back on crypto somehow due to political pressure to prevent capital flight.

Also, I echo the sentiment of those who mentioned Philippines - I think that they have one of the most robust crypto payment networks in coin.ph and others, and from my experience, crypto adoption is certainly huge there.

My question is, so what? I don't see a point in trying to measure gini coefficient whatsoever.

Bitcoin is not a nation, nor is the gini coefficient in this instance a fair representation of net worth of individuals who use bitcoin. Just because you may hold a small amount of bitcoin in a particular address doesn't necessarily mean that your total net worth has to be less than those who hold more BTC than you. All this says about you is that your propensity of investing in BTC may be higher, that's all.

If you do this same thing with something like gold, I think you'll find similar results.

Besides, you're not taking into account factors such as centralized exchanges having majority of the coins in cold storage addresses, which contributes to this stark contrast. This is simply not accurate.

No. I highly doubt any correlation between a centralized project that FB has to offer, and something that is decentralized from day one in BTC.

Especially when you consider the fact that bitcoin dominance has actually been increasing over the past few months, instead of the normal trend of decreasing as we see a bull market emerge, further suggesting that people are moving towards investing into decentralization.

I simply hate it when people try to attribute BTC's price movements to completely uncorrelated institutional events, ranging from the stock market, to JPMorgan's own coin, and now FB's project. The biggest factor is still the cycles within the BTC network itself, as well as the fundamentals that shape demand, including the health and development of the network (LN), and institutional interest.

It works theoretically but it's simply not practical.

It's like those pages with a list of known scams. While it may be useful, when a site is reported as a scam most likely the admin will have already exited and stopped promoting, meaning that the list of scams can often be redundant when it comes to actually protecting consumers. The currency and relevance of such a list is debatable imo.

Likewise, with your proposed service, I think not only will it be difficult to try to even try to get a portion of the addresses associated with known schemes, new ones are popping up every day that you'd have to document. It's simply unfeasible to update that often. Much better to teach people how to spot them instead.

These aren't surprising at all given the fact that they are all historically countries that are sanctioned by the US or other countries, and the states of the US that they have included in there are also historically restricted from accessing crypto related services.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how they are handling this situation though.

A lot of exchanges/services would take advantage of the situation and make it extremely difficult for these users to withdraw their funds, especially past the notice date. But they seem to be quite supportive. It's still up in the air how they practically handle this, though.

If you sent as F&F payment there is still some chance that you are able to chargeback, but you'd have to claim that your account was hacked at the time of the transaction IIRC, which I don't recommend doing since it probably breaches some form of ToS.

There were plenty of warning signs available that you should have recognized to deter you from trusting this guy and going first, imo. Why would you deal with someone with no reputation, sending with F&F? Use escrow, or send as G&S instead. Also, the fact that he's selling at such steep discounts suggests that he probably did not obtain these credits completely legitimately in the first place, which even escrow won't mitigate the risk of, and can land you in some trouble in certain circumstances.


It seems like that the user Jean_J is highly likely to be an alt of the same accounts. He's the only one that is vouching for the seller (moonu296) on the thread.

Technical analysis itself doesn't move the markets.

It attempts to predict what the underlying movements will be in the future, but it doesn't actually influence how demand and supply is shaped, unless enough people believe in the TA itself at which point it becomes somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy.

However, this is definitely not the case with this run up.

What we saw was that earlier this year, bitcoin consolidated at its bottom of $3k. Right now, people are recognizing that this is the start of a new bull market and thus, their sentiments are becoming a lot more bullish as a result. One of the new fundamentals factors introduced into the market is also institutional investors, who not only will provide more liquidity into the market, but also inspire more investor confidence which could also be one of the underlying causes of these rallies.

At the end of the day though, this is cyclical, normal behavior and you can see this with any market - it's not caused by any type of analysis, period.

Instead of this, wouldn't a better use of their resources and time better directed to investigating certain multibillion and transnational companies for their tax evasion behavior? But of course, they'd like to target everyday Joes instead, with extremely tough tax codes that are hard to understand for specific circumstances.

It comes across like that they're trying to use some sort of scare tactic here, because they know that the enforce-ability of tracing all transactions over the blockchain, especially for anonymous blockchains, is quite hard. They can only track people effectively really through regulated channels.

Of course, you should lodge your capital gains, and I do believe that given the maturation of the tax code in regards to crypto, this increase in investigations in regards to CGT of crypto income will continue to grow. I'm not saying that people should evade tax. But instead of trying to regulate large corporations more effectively, they may be putting resources in the wrong direction.

How about instead of avoiding the accusation altogether, let's address the problem here which is the fact that you guys either a) have your own shills on bitcointalk or b) have hired a thread bumping service in order to obtain a dishonest advantage which is against forum rules?

Literally, your bounties thread is kept alive by accounts that all have similar generic post histories, commenting repetitive replies over and over again. I don't see how you can deny that and say this is not a result of using a service to bump up your thread. There is virtually no organic engagement coming to your thread.

Nutilda and OP both have solid cases against you. There is no reason for them to "defame" you, they are simply speaking the truth.

Address the issues that are important please.