Don't expect too much out of this at this stage.

Personally, even though there seems to be somewhat less bearish sentiment in the market right now compared to 1-2 months ago since the expectations of the market in general is that prices have reached its trough, I still don't think that there is enough momentum for a bullish outbreak any time soon.

Also, I expect prices to move sideways for the majority of the first half of the year, having some pumps like this and some dips as well. I don't think there will be any real recovery happening in Q1-Q2 based on previous bear markets.

I don't think that there should be a set amount.

Firstly, we don't know where the markets will go in the bull market. At the moment, all I can say with near certainty would be that there will be a recovery coming after this bear market concludes. Apart from that though, there is no reliable information available on how far the bull market will go in terms of BTC's peak value.

Personally, there is very little chance that this bull market will be anywhere as crazy as the 2017 one because the market has matured, and the market cap has increased to the point that there needs to be significantly more new investors in order to have percentage gains that we saw in the past bull market. Set your personal goals if you want, but for me, I'm just accumulating as much as I can at the moment before $4k because this is where I believe the market will show its bottom. I don't think this will be an opportunity for someone to be "set for life" from without having significant capital already, bitcoin just isn't a get rich quick scheme like that.

Are they going to compensate for the losses or are they just going to file a police report and that's it? I haven't been active recently and am kind of out of the loop about this situation.

This is a classic case of why you shouldn't trust exchanges to hold your funds securely. Not only is there a risk that their security infrastructure is complete crap, there may also be deposit/withdrawal issues that arise from KYC or otherwise that is completely out of your control. I'd personally much prefer having full control over the security of my bitcoins. Exchanges shouldn't be used as a wallet to hold funds, it sounds cliche but it's true. I personally also think that recovering funds is probably completely futile, it's worth a try but probably never going to find the hacker, and even if they do, funds probably have already been spent.



Who's going to use them even if they reopen? 

There are probably two aspects of the bear markets that need to be considered.

One is the fact that a lot of the people invested at a stage where the market was completely overheated, out of the fear of missing out. I think that is an important lesson, as a lot of the times the value of an asset will be overpriced and will come down eventually. Never invest out of the fear of missing out. And with that, you should also never invest with funds that you're going to need in the near future. There are people who are actually not doing too bad in this bear market, because even though they may be losing money now, they still have the financial capacity to hold onto their positions for the long run and break even and even make a profit when the next bull market hits. But if you invest, and you need those funds in the very near future, that gives you no flexibility or room to work with.

The other aspect is probably the FUD that exists in the bear market. BTC is undervalued at the moment yet no one seems to be buying on a large scale, largely because of FUD and market sentiment. IMHO, contrarian investing in these circumstances is works best.

Allowing just 7 days notice for all users to withdraw their funds is ridiculous.

That is very sketchy to me how they just out of the blue decided to shut down all their operations. It's almost like they are hoping that some person doesn't see this message, and the 7 days pass, so that they have a valid excuse to not process the withdrawal to that user. Even with liqui's shutdown had a much longer period that allowed withdrawals, and withdrawals can still be manually made after that date IIRC.

But this bear market has been rough to these small to medium exchanges. Seems like at this stage that a lot more will shut down either due to liquidity issues or other problems. The best practice at the moment is probably to get out all funds (if any) from exchanges while you still can, before anything happens like this.

I've been buying gradually and dollar cost averaging ever since bitcoin hit $4k, a few times a week to spread the risk.

So my average entry point for the coins that I bought during this is probably around the high $3k figures, and I personally think that is very close to the bottom. The fact of the matter is that you cannot time the entry points completely correct, which is the reason why dollar cost averaging will make sense in these bear market situations where markets aren't rational but rather panic dumping. Instead of placing all your funds in one buy order, you are averaging out the buys over a period of bearish times which will be extremely cheap in the long term.

Some people are obviously still waiting on prices to go lower. Personally I don't see it dropping below $3k for any extended amounts of time because of the newly found demand in institutional investors, and the progress in the network that has been made. All that has been negatively affected between the 2017 bull market and now is the price, and this is certainly a very good accumulation point in the grand scheme of things.

It all boils down to how long and how often you are storing your funds with an exchange.

An "exchanger" in the form of some third party that processes transactions are still not trustless, except your funds stay on their platform for less time, and is sent to you directly after the transaction. That's the only advantage, here. They are still able to hold your funds, block transactions, and it has happened. So don't blindly believe in these so called "exchangers" either. If you use a platform like Binance and withdraw all funds straight away after conducting your trade, you're essentially achieving the same effect.

If you really want to, bestchange.com has a nice list that you can search through for these automated exchangers. I personally use changer.com and never had issues, but the thing with these sites are that their fees are incredibly high for the convenience you get.

As Omegastarscream said, p2p trading is probably the way to go these days. LBC and Paxful both are quite respected and even though their KYC is getting stricter as well, they provide quite good support and allow you to withdraw your funds in almost all instances. But decentralized exchanges in the future will be the way to go, as even p2p isn't trustless.

Some interesting findings from the article:


It's still only speculation, but it does raise interesting points. The fact that there seems to be no linked cold storage wallet that has ever been active is shady, and increases the chances of them running a fractional reserve since essentially they'd be running a ponzi of taking customer deposits and repaying older withdrawals.

But still, it could just be that the cold wallet has been obscured from public eyes and that QuadrigaCX does have one. But, the chances of them operating on fractional reserve is higher.

When your bitcoin is with a third party, it is the same as if you deposited a sum of money with a bank - they are able to lend it out and do whatever. Except in the bitcoin world there are way less regulations, and exchanges can often become insolvent as a result.

Unless bitcoin prices go up drastically over the time that your contract is active, I don't think that you should be expecting any net gains from cloud mining. And even if you do make a profit, you are better off just holding bitcoin itself.

I've invested in the past. What happens usually is that the ROI in the first few months are high, but gradually drops down to a level which is below even the amount of maintenance fee that you have to pay, which means that your "lifetime" contract will likely expire very likely within the first year.

The way that they structure their contracts mean that they are overpriced, and designed to bring more profits to the company themselves, not the investors. Even with the 2 and 5 year contracts that they have currently, I doubt that they will be profitable at all.

Exactly, I'm wondering that too.

Luno had already been tagged as a stolen account back in 25th, while chat logs seem to indicate that OP got scammed on the 28th. So based on the available information, OP should have been able to see the negative trust that have been posted on the profile of the hacked account.


As others have said, ranks (or even reputation, for that matter) can't be trusted if you can't be sure or verify that the account is still in the hands of the original owner. You're not going to be able to get your money back, unfortunately, unless the scammer comes back and pays you which is extremely unlikely.

Is there any way for you to see when/who used the keys?

There are always going to be short positions being taken out when people think prices are going to go down, which can lead to further price decreases. That's just how it works. It's not just bitcoin but it happens in stocks, derivatives, anything that can be traded on an exchange essentially.

It's obvious that this drives prices down in the short run. However, I don't believe that it is necessarily harmful in any way in either the short or long runs.

What matters in the long run is the fundamentals of bitcoin, whether the network is functional or has improved, whether people still see utility in bitcoin as a store of value and currency, and whether adoption has increased or not. Thus, short term price swings that are caused by people trading on leverage or shorting the market shouldn't really do much in the long term, as it doesn't influence the fundamentals whatsoever.

I'd say that your two options are pretty much exchanges and sportsbooks/dice sites.

Coinbase, Virwox, xCoins (though this one can be considered to be shady) all have affiliate programs that have merits in their own right. Major exchanges as you said like Binance and Kucoin also has this aspect.

There are also sportsbooks out there that offer a percentage of gaming volume back on any of your referral's bets. The same applies to dice sites. Essentially, they will give you a percentage of the house edge back as a reward for referring these people, you just have to find the best deal, make sure that the site you're dealing with is indeed legit, and make sure that doing something like this is legal in your state/country.

Personally, I only notice affiliate programs when they are being listed on a site I'm already using. Since affiliate programs are constantly updated, it's hard to keep a definitive list.

It does seem like that the new update supports most of the countries out there, which is nice.

My only concern would be that a lot of people with Binance have unverified accounts, which cannot use this feature. But collecting customer ID and info is pretty industry standard for processing credit card payments anyways that it's not really that big of a negative.

Also, 3.5% fees could be a bit costly. If you are using your credit card you may need to also pay the cash advance fee/rates, instead of the normal ones.

But overall, pretty awesome update. Simplex has been around for a while as well so it should prove to be a hit with the market.

I don't think that there are any fundamentals to back this one up.

Sure, some Chinese bitcoin investors may be inclined to sell before the CNY in order to celebrate the festival, but apart from that, I don't see any sizeable drop in demand that would suggest that bitcoin prices before the CNY should drop drastically. Nor are there any fundamentals that are able to justify predicting the rise in price after the CNY.

I personally think that it could be possible given that a lot of bitcoin traders do believe in this, and it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But at the end of the day, even if a bull run does emerge out of the CNY, I don't think it will be long lived. The markets are still extremely bearish sentimented and I don't think a recovery is coming in the first half of the year.

I can't believe that they actually bothered writing up an entire article just about this.

Honestly, it's common sense. Gold and silver have a lot of the monetary properties that makes it a good hedge against fiat currencies, much like what bitcoin offers. Bitcoin just offers a lot more in terms of transaction capability, global transactions, divisibility and portability in general. That's why you see that people who see precious metals as long term investments often have investments in bitcoin as well.

But their findings of people's number one investment choice in 2019 being gold is pretty surprising. In this bitcoin bear market, I think the best decision is to buy bitcoin as it nears the bottom. Even though gold and silver may have a good year, I still think that bitcoin will continue to take away from their investor base as bitcoin as a store of value becomes more and more popular in the long run.

They won't be complete mirrors of each other, but I think that the general sentiment that was within the market in 2015 was quite similar to what we are experiencing right now. The price movements that we observe are also quite similar.

We can't say for sure that we've bottomed, but I think that we are definitely in a similar circumstance compared to 4 years ago. Prices have dropped 80+% from the peak, which is in line with the bottom which occurred in 2015. We are also a year removed from the end of the bull market of 2017.

If we look at the halving as a benchmark for the start of each market cycle (which has basically happened throughout bitcoin's history), then the patterns do come clear. A recovery might come next year, but I don't think it will happen this year because prices are still consolidating. 2015 and 2019 obviously won't be 100% in line, and market anomalies can and will happen. But right now, prices seem low enough while the fundamentals have improved to say that bitcoin is undervalued.

But what exactly does this mean?

I guess they have clarified their position on bitcoin, i.e. it's not illegal to use or hold, but classifying as a commodity doesn't really help much in terms of determining what is legal to do with bitcoin, what regulation surrounds the use of bitcoin within Indonesia, etc. It's all very vague.

In fact, classifying something as a commodity would be no different to classifying it as a currency, if all the regulations are the same between the two. Perhaps there will be tax implications, but that is unknown from this report.


Just because bitcoin isn't legal tender doesn't mean it can't be used to purchase goods and services. Who's to stop people from bartering fish for cows, for example, even though neither of these are legal tender and can be considered to be commodities? IMO, the same applies to bitcoin in this context.

I read it differently. It says in the article that


Which means that you'd only get taxed if you do make a profit on your bitcoin in comparison to when you bought it initially.

If you do make a loss then it won't count as taxable, from what I can gather from the article above. In certain countries you might even be able to claim that as a deduction, but not sure about Romania.

That isn't actually too bad compared to a lot of countries worldwide where CGT is a lot higher. Though, I'm not sure if Romania will have special rules in regards to the use of bitcoin as a currency to buy goods (i.e. if you use bitcoins you bought a while back to buy something online when bitcoin has risen, will that also be taxable?) or not.

Again, I don't think that the bitcoin ETF is actually as relevant as what people make it out to be.

Sure, an approval would mean a short term pump in prices, but apart from that fact, what else does it actually bring tangibly to help the bitcoin ecosystem? In my opinion, pretty much nothing. And there are also concerns of furthering market manipulation if bitcoin ETFs were to be approved, though that can't be stopped if it does happen.

The point is that to the average bitcoin user that transacts on the network, the ETFs mean absolutely nothing. It's going to be mostly used by institutional investors.

But yeah, I personally think that there is virtually no chance at this stage that a bitcoin ETF is going to get approved. Not any time soon, anyways.

As you say, they make a completely invalid point, because bitcoin already has value that is brought by supply and demand. Them suggesting bitcoin would only have value in crises is blatant BS, as essentially they are ignoring bitcoin's current price/value completely.

The thing is that bitcoin, given its independent status and decentralized nature will probably perform quite well in "dystopian economies". As people lose faith in fiat, like in countries like Venezuela where people's trust in the Bolivar has been completely shattered, bitcoin's demand should theoretically increase as people look for alternative means of transacting, that also comes with the long term store of value aspect.

But that doesn't mean bitcoin can't be useful as a hedge, a currency, and as a store of value in periods of "normal economic activity". People use bitcoin to transact globally every single day. Bitcoin is also used as an investment hedge against the fiat economy, for example, just to name a few uses.