How is it possible that this data is accurate?

Also, there is no mention of whether or not certain bitcoin derivatives are included in this figure, such as bitcoin futures or whatnot, because that's what institutions usually like to deal with as opposed to actual tangible bitcoins. Also, what classifies as institutions? Do certain non-incorporated, but yet high end investors count as institutions?

There is no means of verifying whether this data is legit, at the end of the day. But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if this figure continues to climb in the future because of the fact that a lot of financial firms have started to come into the market during this bear market, though that is not necessarily a good thing in itself.

There has been plenty of them in the past as well. It's not a new scam but the back story keeps changing.

Make sure that whenever you see claims of a giveaway, you verify this with some sort of official from the website that is apparently offering it. These giveaway scams have gotten so bad in the past on Twitter that CZ had to change his name to something along the lines of "not giving away coins".

Use your common sense here.

Why would an exchange ask you to deposit any sum of money if they were actually running a giveaway to promote themselves, especially with such high returns on your deposit? Most of them don't even have the appropriate licenses to do this, since this pretty much constitutes an investment.

I wouldn't really recommend using them for the sake of earning money.

The concerns about the wait time is right, but it's quite industry standard. The cashback sites that I personally have used in the past all have pending times of more than one or two months at the very least, because they need to ensure that your transaction isn't disputed or refunded before you receive your cashback.

If you're already doing some shopping and have experience with cashback sites that pay in fiat, and you want to get paid directly in bitcoin, then this may be worth a try. But the rewards are low while wait times are high, so it's definitely not dependable as some sort of scheme to make a stable income.

I agree with Slow Death here, we should see quite a bit of sideways movement before a breakout actually occurs, around the $5k level.

It'll be interesting to see whether the $5k support holds up. If it does then the recovery from this correction could take a lot less time given the fact that the market right now is still somewhat bullish.

On the other hand though, if $5k doesn't hold up as support then we could see prices regress further in the short term. Although, I do not expect it to go under the $3k zone in any instance despite what other people (*Vinny Lingham*) have said. That should be the bottom of this bear market, and the medium term trajectory currently should be upward as we've entered that phase of the cycle.

While I think medium to long term, your chart would demonstrate a likely scenario, in the short run corrections are still imminent and rallies that happens can't constitute an actual bull market. Yet.


I think that OP's advice is the most logical/rational thing to do here.

A correction was going to come as a matter of time, sooner or later, as rallies in the short term of this size simply can't be sustainable. If you are holding for the long term, this dip, if it does go below $5k could be an accumulation opportunity. Just make sure that your buys are relatively spread out

Have they actually teamed up with VISA or just one of those card issuers like Wavecrest in the past?

The product itself that they are offering in my opinion is fundamentally no different than what Wirex offered, or a bunch of other crypto debit card services. They are all based off the same idea, automating the crypto-fiat transaction, etc.

But if they were able to establish some sort of direct relationship with visa themselves, it could prove to be a lot more stable than what other services had in the past, which was constant issues with regulation and card issuers turning on them. That could prove successful given how a bunch of businesses had to completely restructure their model given the problems Wavecrest had in the past. But the fact that this is only offered to a restricted bunch of countries, and is not anonymous, will probably lower its potential.

I wouldn't say that "stringent" is the best word to use in this instance, but rather, restrictive.

The RBI is really not trying to regulate bitcoin at all, or to ensure that the risks of dealing with bitcoin businesses is lowered from the consumer's standpoint. Rather, they are trying to devise something in which they can push out all the bitcoin businesses from India, with what seems to be regulations on the surface.

That doesn't make much sense to me in my opinion because if they actually decided to regulate things properly they could be looking at extra tax revenue right now. It could have something to with trying to protect their domestic banking industry, but apart from that, imo it was a rash decision.

They would leave but there are still tons of large scale miners out there.

I don't necessarily think that this regulation will necessarily lead to a more decentralized bitcoin mining environment, given the fact that you can't just look at centralization from how much hashpower a country has but how much influence individual corporations have as well, regardless of their country of origin.

But that said, I wouldn't say that this is something that is that negative either. People have been after all expecting this to happen sooner or later, and it was pretty much confirmed during 2017. This is just an extension of that, nothing more.

This really has nothing to do with bitcoin at all.

In a drug bust, you'd expect the funds to be seized. It's exactly what happened here. The crime wasn't that someone was holding bitcoin, but rather they are doing illicit things, and bitcoin just happened to be the payment venue that they decided to go with. I don't think that this has anything to do with the anonymity of bitcoin, even.

It would be interesting to see however whether or not they hold onto the coins, or auction it off to convert it to fiat. It's the first time that I've heard something like this out of Canada's jurisdiction, though it has certainly happened multiple times before in the US.

I'd actually agree with him on this one. He's not saying that it will happen, rather that it could happen, potentially.

To me though, the bottom of the bear market has already been set, and panic dumping on the scale that we saw in the 2018 bear market probably will not return. Right now, all that I'm expecting is occasional short term dips that come after a period of rallies, and nothing major. Market sentiment has already shifted to the bullish end of the spectrum as well.

Could there be an event in which the previous bottom is tested once more before BTC actually breaking out? Absolutely. But is that likely? No.

No. Not all regulation is good, first of all. You could have regulation that essentially makes it extremely difficult for people to use bitcoin or use it to transact, which obviously hinders the growth of the network in certain countries.

Secondly, regulation doesn't mean that banks or governments become middlemen. The regulations are placed on third parties who use bitcoin as a means of exchange, not on the network itself. Since it is decentralized there is really no way of actually doing this, even if governments tried.

Positive regulation in a specific context that encourages businesses to adopt bitcoin, or to give out licenses to businesses could be beneficial, and as a result, lead to the value of BTC increasing in the short term as the markets generally over-respond. However, short term rise in value isn't the ultimate objective whatsoever.

That is certainly true. And not just emails, the same thing applies to all cloud storage hosts.

A lot of people say that as long as you encrypt it with a password, it doesn't matter where you store it. But in my opinion if someone is able to gain access to your email, it is likely that they were able to crack your password in the first place which makes encrypted file easy to crack as well, since so many people reuse their passwords for everything.

Even though it may seem convenient at the time and the risks are quite far away - trust me, you don't want to be placed in a situation where you are potentially out of pocket thousands of dollars if not more simply because you failed to follow simple procedures. Store it offline.

I do think that it's safe to say the floor is at $3k as demonstrated by this chart, and anywhere below that wouldn't be sustainable at this point because there has been so many new investors and corporations that have been made aware of bitcoin in the 2017 bull run that would drive demand for cheap coins.

Bitcoin has always been fundamentally sound but we are seeing a real shift in sentiment I think which is the underlying cause of the rallies, people aren't as uncertain about the market as they were last year, and psychology had a lot to do with it.

We could see an incoming correction due to the fact that prices have risen so consistently over the past weeks, potentially down below $5k as I don't think there is sufficient support there yet. It's only natural that this happens, as price corrections are a matter of time in such instances. But in the medium to long term I think this should be the start of a bull market, and the halving next year will only further the bullishness.

I nearly did the same thing on another bitcointalk phishing site, back when PM spamming phishing links was still relatively new. Good thing that you did change your password.

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I wouldn't say that a move necessarily would need to be made for theymos to acquire all other top level domains for bitcointalk, because most people will know that .org is the correct domain, and it's simply unfeasible to be doing it due to the costs. But there could come a situation where people are phished for their login details on these sites, even if right now they may not be a phishing site and may genuinely just be another bitcoin forum with close to no traffic, who knows what could happen in the future.

But this is a reason why bookmarking certain frequented sites is needed. You don't want to be caught in a simple phishing scam because of a momentary mistake.

It's interesting that in the article they stated that, because a lot of investors seemed to panic when the bear market hit and they thought that institutions were going to step out after the huge drop.

But as history has told us many times, the smart money enters the market in precisely zones where prices seem to be down and general market sentiment is down, because they can see that bitcoin has not changed fundamentally, all that has shifted was the uncertainty in the market at the time.

How much this stat actually means though is debatable. Just because institutions invest increasingly doesn't necessarily translate to positive things for the market, especially when you factor in things such as potential manipulation in the market in the future. Though, this overall demand from institutional investors could potentially fuel a bigger bull market in the future, even if I'm not completely sold on the idea that they will improve the fundamentals.

If the reason why you are sending the coins is to gift someone then yes, it counts as that. But if it's as a payment for something then no, just because the recipient might be related to you doesn't mean that all of a sudden it is classified as a gift as opposed to a normal transaction.

I honestly don't think that it will matter that much since you are the sender though. The recipient is usually the one that will incur tax implications.

Also, you need to be careful of asking for advice on the legal subforum without giving any specifics, because tax laws differ from country to country and the answers people can give you can only be extremely broad if you don't even provide the basic information. Note that most tax laws aren't platform specific, which means that even if your transaction is made without a third party, on-chain, the same rules will generally apply.

Didn't Coinbase Pro add fees?

As far as i know they're not completely feeless. The minimum taker fee (i.e., you execute a market order either way on the orderbook) is 0.05% even if you have $1B+ volume, while for most people the maker fee/taker fee split is .15%/.25%, similar to what other major fiat exchanges offer.

You're not taking into account the withdrawal fees as well, especially with the type of audience that your article is geared to they are very likely going to be trading lower volumes which means that withdrawal fees constitute a significant percentage of their trading. Also, even though spreads aren't necessarily fees, they still make up potentially more than even the exchange fees in terms of amount lost through a trade. Not to mention the somewhat questionable reputation of Coinbase. These are all factors that need to be taken into consideration.

It's another warning for people that want to set up a p2p trading business that handles large volumes of money. Stick to what the regulations say, and reporting duties need to be upheld. Otherwise, there is always a chance that you will get into trouble.

That said though, it does seem like that law enforcement in certain jurisdictions are a lot more harsher when it comes to bitcoin and its "effects on money laundering", compared to other means of money laundering that may actually have more volume going through them, to the point where even though there may not be any proof of money laundering going on that people are still getting arrested.

But like I said, stick to the laws applicable or there is always a risk at the consequences. It's not the first time that this has happened, in fact there has been multiple instances with Localbitcoins traders alone. High volume transactions are especially prone.

Great find. Can't believe though that it took over a year for someone to finally notice.  

Always verify with multiple sources what you are downloading onto your computer. And if a user is offering such software for free and posting public links it's probably nothing good. Think about it, the scammer's posting it in public to make a profit, and can only do so because of people downloading will be paying the price. So common sense alone tells us that either the software contains viruses, or will do something malicious with your exchange account.

Remember that legitimate trading bots are sold at a price, not offered for free. And always take what users without reputation is offering with a huge grain of salt, especially newbies that are offering some sort of get rich quick method. There is no such thing.

It's obvious what they are referring to here, and that is because Binance still allows semi-anonymous accounts to be opened.

I wouldn't doubt that if Binance keeps this up, no matter how much they try to dodge the regulatory bodies and even moving around globally to different countries, eventually they will have to still be forced into asking for KYC for all members the same way a lot of previously big name exchanges have, or cease their service to certain countries at the very least.

I personally wouldn't see this as a risk, but obviously, the regulatory bodies in certain countries do, and they will do something about it eventually as we see time and time again. Even P2P platforms like LBC is falling to this pressure. Binance knows what they are doing and what they are not. They want to target people who are privacy-centric and don't want to submit ID, but it'll only get harder to continue that aim into the future.