It'll be interesting to see what effect Bitmex either going full sensible or buggering off will have. It's possible that it'll be the same as when all the piece of shit Chinese zero fee exchanges died, Bitcoin finally took off after years of suppression.

I've no doubt Bitmex commanded the price for long stretches as people played with spot markets to screw with others on it.

Just as important is to emphasise how flaky many of these card services have been in the past. Most are at the mercy of other service providers who may pull the cards without any notice.

You have to treat these as the hottest of hot wallets. Load and spend. Do not linger, don't leave anything on them and don't run anything important in your life through them.

I remember when the first Bitpay card shut down, along with all the other ones provided by the same company. There was literally no notice. There were people tweeting Bitpay who had thousands of dollars on the card and they were halfway across the world and that was their only spending option.

After several thousand years gold is still largely speculation, or perhaps that has grown as its usage as any sort of money has waned with more useful things coming along.

But deflation/hoarding will be just as big a factor in stopping it progressing into a currency, perhaps the prime one in time.

I would really like to see an anonymous ATM operator turn up and give us a breakdown of their costs and profits. Since there are so many someone must be making money, or then again it could be the classic crypto shit throwing at the wall and finding nothing sticks which is the fate of most of these things.

I don't understand who chooses to use them so I don't understand who chooses to run them.

They have uncovered the pleasures of combining the fruits of unfettered capitalism along with reserving the right to torture, oppress and slaughter whoever the hell they feel like. I'll bet most governments look on at that combination with a great deal of envy.

Why would they give up either of those abilities? Throw in a population that mainly doesn't seem to mind and it kinda looks like the future, sadly. The candy ass West has given them the tech to steal and the money to get rolling while at the same time started to commit slow cultural suicide which they must find highly amusing to watch. They'll steamroller us lot soon enough.

It's also the form of their stock investment too. You're going to get pre allocations, insider info, block buys. Compared to what normal people can access it's effectively its own market.

Yes. That one's an important one. Unlike the old Wavecrest cards, where they clearly didn't give a shit and proved it too, most of these have extremely limited availability outside the usual places.

Probably the most important bit of info. It'll save many a hope being dashed.

I'll wait a few more years before believing 'we will never see four figures again' but it is still a very meaningful stat.

It's the lows and consistency that tells the real story, not some ridiculous high that sustains for a few seconds. Anyone can make a spike if the market is absent enough. Creating a lasting base takes vastly more depth and that's the really informative metric.

You'd probably be better off doing that. I can well imagine people will downgrade the security and competence of their wallet to accommodate shitcoins and stick the BTC in there as well for convenience.

The best Bitcoin wallets have been around for much longer and have many more eyes on them than much of the multi stuff out there.

Erm, the purpose is clearly stated in the message embedded in Bitcoin's very first block.



I have never, ever seen any indication of fun or lack of purpose anywhere. It oozed purpose from the first moment it appeared.

That's the telling thing about it. If it went away right now no one other than the spammers hammering it would care in the slightest. It has made zero impact beyond them whatsoever. It is nothing other than a corpse with a few strings being pulled to give the illusion of life.

I can't see them changing their approach so it's going to continue absorbing money and achieving zilch. I would've pulled the plug a long, long time ago.

Handy list but Revolut isn't a crypto card. You can't deposit or withdraw real crypto, all you can do is buy price exposure through their app. The purpose of these cards is to exchange and spend. That does not.

But many of the people who buy it will be the exact same people who are dicking with stocks.

There's a really weird blind spot many commentators and others have about this. They seem to think Bitcoin lives in its own little vacuum where the rest of the world is mysteriously shut out.

It's those pesky humans who decide its course and movements and they're rather samey wherever you go. Until they get hungry and bubble it's going to behave much like many other things.

You asked a longstanding Bitcoiner for compensation because you didn't educate yourself earlier? That's an unusual approach.

Satoshi had enough foresight to create Bitcoin. No doubt he expected the various phases it would go through before it reached its full potential. Hoarding and speculation is one of the early ones.

Since many a country won't let you buy anything in good old cash over a certain sum anyone expecting a fully untraceable coin to be left to flourish in peace is a crazyhead. It's the way of the world. It's crap but it is what it is. If I was balls deep in privacy I would have planned accordingly from the moment I entered.

I assume some wallets are hoping to be bought out. There'll come a time where their market lead can't be beaten. Others may extort shitcoin communities like Coinomi are doing here. Others may simply choose to con their users like Mycelium and their token sale what paid for their holiday to Spain and was never heard from again.

It's definitely a curious area.

Taxes of course, as for 'unregulated trading' it's the platform's problem for allowing it. I'm unaware of any law about a civilian taking their business to places they may not approve of. Maybe there is one. Dunno.

That makes me dislike Coinomi rather intensely. They'll have many users who don't bother to check or update all that often and that leaves them in the lurch.

I get that it costs them money in labour but ransom demands are not cool.

How these things are funded is something people should take more time to ponder. It wouldn't take much for a developer to throw in the towel and be bought out by an asshole. Most people just mindlessly update forever and don't conceive of there being another actual human somewhere in charge of it who's as fallible as they are.

The only thing they can really do is telling exchanges to drop them and they will, apart from the no shits given outliers. It'll be the least surprising development in cryptoland's history.

It'll be interesting to see how this moulds their markets.

https://twitter.com/SquareIR/status/1314190152663617536#

Square have just put 1.8% of their cash into BTC too. One of the less surprising ones of course but still, 50 million dollars thrown at it isn't to be sniffed at.