Is it really surprising that the Petro nowhere to be found? I mean, even information about the Petro is nowhere to be found on the internet. Precise figures of how much the sale raised is still impossible to be found out.

Maduro's mismanagement of the economy isn't a thing that has lasted just a few days, it's been around for ages.

He's hyped this idea up so much, yet there are no adopters, and for a good reason. There is no reason for anyone, including merchants to adopt this, because they know that it's nothing more than the reincarnation of the Bolivar. It's backed by essentially nothing. It's controlled by the government. The Petro really nowhere near the thing that the government is trying to make it seem like it is.

Are you talking about bitbox.me?

What actually happened when you tried to use them? How were you scammed, and how much were you scammed? Did you contact support already? Have they responded to you?

You really need to provide more details for anyone to help you out here. Some screenshots of your situation would be nice.

Apparently they are legitimate. I'm not ruling out the possibility of an issue on their side still, though. But you could have definitely been using a phishing site all along as well, as Omega said. Check the URL you have been accessing.

Seems like there's a few for different ETFs ranging from the 7th to the end of the next month as others have already mentioned.

However, we have no idea whether these so called "deadlines" are going to be final yet. Postponement is a real possibility. But rejection is probably the most likely outcome, given that the last few were all rejected as well. There is simply no reason for it to change now.

There is really nothing to watch here. ETFs have gradually eased out of trader's minds as something extremely important because they're starting to realize that it does not benefit the average bitcoin user one bit, but instead, could even have some negative consequences in terms of market manipulation. The only thing that could come out of this decision is that if it was approved, we could see a small rally, but that would be it. If it was rejected, pretty much nothing will happen, not even an adjustment downward based on previous responses to these rejections.

Unfortunately, this had to be done due to the regulatory pressures.

The blog post actually felt quite sincere given that usually exchanges just glance over the issue of privacy altogether. Shapeshift has definitely been one of my favorite exchanges to use over the past few years, with all the KYC requirements on other exchanges. It's sad to see it come to an end, and their business will definitely be hit hard due to this - but it was a matter of time only.


I will probably continue to use it until this becomes mandatory, at which point I'll try find another site to use. If I can't I'll probably reluctantly hand over the docs, but as a last resort. It's really quite unfortunate given that it had the perfect mix of anonymity, trust, and convenience. An alternative will be hard to find for sure.

All of these are extremely bullish predictions that are probably never going to materialize.

Just to be clear here, I'm not a bitcoin bear by any means, but once you see that $20k by the end of the year is the lowest prediction on the list, you get a feel of how absurd some speculator opinions are, especially in mainstream media.

The fact is that most of these, especially Tom Lee and John McAfee, are just saying these to get media attention for clickbait titles. There is nothing more than that. They've repeated the same things hundreds of times, and are permanently bullish even when their previous speculation does not pan out.

Anyways, an ATH is next to impossible at the moment by the end of the year, due to the bearish sentiment within the market. We could see a bull market re-emerge by 2020, but that would not take BTC anywhere close to $1 million.

I don't think that blockchain is overhyped.

There is a ton of potential that could be explored through the use of blockchain that probably hasn't even been thought of yet. Nor are there nearly as many adopters of existing blockchain technology uses such as bitcoin itself to say that it's anywhere near being mainstream. Thus, the potential for blockchain technology is pretty much endless, ranging from being an immutable ledger replacing conventional databases to being a currency.

I do have to say though that there are a lot of projects whose aim is to raise as much money as possible for the founder through the guise of an ICO that are overhyped, to the point that they are quite shady. Never invest in those.

The style which the photos were taken of the 'team members" was enough to tell that they were probably gotten off a stock image site.

Anyways, the site was extremely poorly designed and there is only one damn page on the entire website. Logically thinking, do you really think that a legitimate project would ever be so unprofessional in terms of their site design? Obviously, it's a big no.

No KYC/AML for their ICO, nor are there any account system in place where you can actually track your share of tokens. Just two addresses for investments, just shows how quickly they got the whole thing up to lure people in.

Seems like they've already raised 5% of their early bird investments. Hopefully that's not a lot of people getting scammed...

This might actually be a good thing.

The exchanges will be increasingly regulated which means that the probabilities of a hack due to the lack of security measures on an exchange, or an exit scam on the exchange's part will become smaller and smaller from previously.

I'd expect this to be the norm in other countries in coming years as well. Every single country will most likely be tightening up their regulations in the future, whether it's for good or for bad. This one here isn't necessarily a bad thing at all.

Potentially. Historically China has been pretty restrictive of anything that could bring capital flight, including any foreign currencies. But I do think that that's probably not the only reason that they've announced this newest crackdown, as they've also shown pretty negative sentiment over bitcoin in particular historically.


This is probably much bigger magnitude of a crackdown than we've seen in 2014. I guess markets have matured to the point where don't care much about the policies of China because they already expect them to be negative anyways, and as you mentioned, bitcoin has became a lot more decentralized geographically than China dominating the market or just one country dominating, which is another factor.

As others have mentioned, it's again, a very hard to enforce ban. Major traders in China have international connections anyways. A lot are already overseas. Others still in China will simply use a variety of methods to get over the blocked sites, just as they would access FB or Youtube which are also blocked from China. Also, P2P trading activity will still be thriving regardless of the ban.

First of all, I'd say that ETF rejections really has nothing to do with mainstream adoption whatsoever.

While an approval would definitely be nice, it's not going to all of a sudden mean that actual bitcoin usage will increase. In fact, the only category of users that will see an increase will probably be financial institutions such as investment banks. ETFs are aimed at these types of people, who deal with investments. Average bitcoiners will never even directly deal with an ETF, which is why I think it's been overhyped and quite irrelevant.

What needs to happen for mainstream adoption is really some sort of incentive to use it. I believe that would be bitcoin as a international currency on the internet, while being a store of value. To achieve this, there needs to be surges in merchant adoption which we're already seeing, however, this will take more time before it could become anything "mainstream". But bitcoin could already be considered to be quite "mainstream" in terms of helping people get their money out of fiat in some countries with strict capital control, even though it could be considered to not be so elsewhere.

It's not selling pressure at all. The buyers when they are buying any goods essentially are letting go of their coins in exchange for something else. The merchants exchanging it to USD contributes nothing to the selling pressure on the larger scale.

But this has been a question that I've been thinking about as well, whether payment gateways are really helpful in allowing merchants in particular in adopting bitcoin.

It definitely does simplify the steps for the merchant to set up and accept bitcoin payments, which is definitely a positive, as they can deal without the chargebacks with traditional paypal and credit card payments. However, they're not truly accepting bitcoin, but rather, just using bitcoin as a gateway for USD.

From a purely adoption point of view, it does boost adoption numbers. However, what really needs to happen in the long run is merchants accepting bitcoin at face value, without converting it to USD instantly, as that would be what brings price stability.

It's fishy as hell, this one.

Why is he paying you 10% just to buy coins for him? Why isn't he buying himself and getting the full 100%? Clearly, something is up here. He's completely anonymous, and the whole thing seems to be using you as middle man for some sort of fraudulent operation, most likely money laundering.

While there is a possibility that you could get away legally by saying that you didn't know about the whole thing and you were misled, you could still get into a ton of trouble since I'm assuming the LBC account is under your name. You're using your bank account to receive the funds as well, that's another huge factor as the funds could be dirty. You should stop as soon as possible, and cut connections with this person.

This is a pretty interesting proposal.

Obviously they are saying that they are using this to monitor money laundering activities, but we all know that sometimes, these tools can be used for mass surveillance purposes, whatever their ultimate aims are, and if misused, can really pose a threat to privacy.

If you want to not be tracked like this in the future, use a bitcoin mixer to increase your privacy (not trying to advertise anyone here), or we could even see some surges in usage for privacy centered coins. But to be honest, this whole scheme to me is pretty much useless. You're very unlikely to track down anyone using addresses and transactions alone, it's like trying to track down the flow of cash.

Not really. As long as your contest is legit and not rigged and your business is completely legal, then it should be fine.

Do be careful with giveaways which involve chance and a deposit from the participant, because in a strict legal sense, that could potentially constitute as unlicensed gambling activity. But I'm fairly sure that most giveaways do not involve this.

Just write out your rules extremely clearly and make sure that you deter the cheaters by having those rules, and as long as the giveaway is actually "free", there really isn't any problems I can foresee happening.

Where have you seen that correlation?

If there are a lot of short sellers, then it most likely means that prices go down in the short term. The reason these people take out these short positions is that they feel like BTC would go down drastically meaning that they can buy them back later at more favorable price. Even though this might not be completely bearish circumstances, I don't see how this could be bullish, unless a short squeeze occurs.

Anyhow, I think what you mean by shorting in this sense is that prices are going down due to shorters, while the people taking the long positions are doing so when the markets are falling. If that makes sense.

You're getting the idea of this central bank wrong.

It's not going to be all of a sudden asserting control over bitcoin's network. It's not like that. The most that it is able to do is to regulate the services which deal with bitcoin.

But even that isn't the main aim of this central bank mentioned in this article. The main thing that the RBI and Indian government may trying to be accomplish or at least look into is the creation of their own cryptocurrency. Obviously that will be centralized, but it won't affect existing decentralized cryptos one bit.

Exactly. That's one of the points that I forgot to mention in my reply as well, which was the fact that silver and gold are going to be still used for jewellery purposes, which since bitcoin isn't something that is physical, cannot fulfill. I guess that could come under the "industrial uses" that I mentioned with precious metals.

Having said that, bitcoin is simply just a purer and better form of money in my opinion.

Even silver and gold are subject to more centralization, and manipulation when it comes to value than bitcoin. Nor can precious metals be transacted online, which is something really important as the internet continues to develop.

It's an interesting thought for sure.

I've personally always thought that some sort of global financial crisis could be helpful in terms of getting people to adopt bitcoin. Especially one that has inflationary consequences, with rapidly increasing prices and CPI overall.

For example, just look at individual cases like Venezuela and Turkey, where bitcoin is definitely helping individuals to store their wealth away from their fiat currency, and thus leading to more adopters. This could happen under a global scale as well. Whether or not this actually evolves into a global payment network is another, but increased adoption of bitcoin as a store of value internationally is definitely possible under these circumstances.

If you're talking about this price rally in particular, which saw prices go from the low of $6k to $7.3k right as we speak, I honestly don't think that there is anything tangible in terms of news coverage or milestone events that made this happen.

It was merely a reaction from the market when prices went down to the $6000 to sub-$6000 level, which previously held as support. What happened exactly is hard to tell. Perhaps it's a whale accumulating because he thinks that prices are cheap, perhaps it's just a group of buyers buying in anticipation that the same rebound cycle will happen just as before.

Wouldn't say that it's odd. Markets do move without reason all the time, whether up or down. It's important to realize that. Not all price hikes are justified by a reason, markets simply move unexpectedly.

Your question really isn't "what is the future of bitcoin". Your question is much better phrased as "what do you think the movements of the bitcoin markets is going to be in the near future".

Anyhow, I think that at some point in 2019, markets will rebound from the lows that was saw this year. I believe prices could likely drop further before that recovery finally happens, potentially even to $4-5k due to panic sellers and just general bearish sentiments.

But in the second half of 2019, expect the market to be somewhat rejuvenated as that tends to be the length of bear markets in the past. There is also reason to be bullish then due to the 2020 halving, which is likely going to feed into the market's psyche. Overall, while I'm not very optimistic about the recovery happening in the first two quarters of next year, I do think that the last two quarters are going to be much more bullish than what we saw in 2018.