I don't see anything out of the ordinary. It's a normal Segwit transaction with one input and two outputs. A Segwit (bech32) output was spent to pay a legacy address, with the change sent to another Segwit address.

These days, I prefer Blockchair over Blockchain since the latter still hasn't properly implemented Segwit: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/cffc370961d10314cea6fd57ab72433a9cf0229bc515ccbdeeec7bac2e61a3f5

You should never, ever take a loan to make speculative investments. There's too much risk involved. There's no guarantee that price will recover or that you'll be able to repay the loans with proceeds from selling BTC.

The proper use for loans is to back business ventures (where it's reasonable to expect a return) or in cases of temporary income shortfalls where you have expected income that can repay the loans.

I'd say the sector is full of scams and also dumb, failed attempts at innovation. There's even been some worthy innovations too. The thing is, this condition isn't particular to the cryptocurrency market. The OTC penny stock market has always operated the same way: Fledgling startups with little or no working business selling equity for cash. Most of those businesses will fail, just like in the ICO scene. It's a high-risk market where you should expect your investment to plummet in value a good deal of the time. What a lot of people call "scams" around here are perfectly legitimate investments in the OTC market. I certainly don't want to see regulators being any more involved in cryptocurrency than they are in other markets.

Centrally issued tokens (securities) are also one thing, because there are existing securities laws that mandate investor protections. These laws usually don't apply to altcoins, so it would be pretty disturbing to see governments ordering exchanges to de-list them.

I don't see any indication that regulations are actually forthcoming. It just seems like more talk, like always. Maybe we should expect something by 2025 or so? They're saying more review is needed to "ascertain what, if any, effort is needed to properly regulate 'opportunities and risks' associated with crypto operations." It also sounds like consensus on comprehensive regulation will be hard to reach...


How would that work? Are you talking about some sort of government-sanctioned whitelist for coins, or an outright ban on altcoins? They both sound pretty awful, to be honest. I don't think the government enforcing monopolies on investor/consumer choices is anything to be happy about.

I'm guessing "Bitcoin dominance" will continue its downward trajectory overall, just because the growth in number of altcoins dampens any move upwards. But as long as there are new cryptocurrency investors, there will always be new maximalists because I think it's just a phase a lot of investors go through. It also probably waxes and wanes with the market. For instance, in terms of price and hype, early 2017 was all about altcoins but late 2017 was all about Bitcoin. I'm sure that dynamic has an effect on this.

I assume it was quid pro quo for Monex stepping in and repaying all the victims. There's no way they would have bought Coincheck if there wasn't an implicit expectation that regulators would treat them favorably. I'm sure they've beefed up security significantly but it looks like the damage is already done. This volume is pathetic:

Not even close. It's a derivative market based on contracts, so only the net difference between long and short contracts are being physically settled and thus bought/sold. It works the same in the traditional markets like gold. Only a small fraction of the physically settled gold market is actually ever "bought" and withdrawn from the gold vaults. Similarly, Bitmex is a venue for making speculative bets in both directions -- not buying and holding.

Halvings are irrelevant as long as fee revenues sustain the network. This requires scarcity of block space. Even if block rewards are falling, profitable mining should sustain via downwards difficulty adjustment. We just need fee revenues to rise enough that hash rate doesn't experience a death spiral where it becomes completely insecure from block reorganization attacks.

If Bitcoin were dependent on external subsidies to sustain loss-making mining operations, it would be a failure. Either the economic design works, or it doesn't.

Don't get your hopes up. The above situation has been true since July, when they shut down withdrawals for most cryptocurrencies. The consensus among people I've spoken to is that there's no incentive for Wex to return now. Trust in their brand has been irreparably harmed. Unlike Bitfinex, they never managed to pay off their debt tokens, so there's no reason to believe they can honor all deposits now. If they come online now, there will be a manic rush for the exits through whatever currencies can be withdrawn.

Are they partners at high profile law firms? Do they have many years of experience in securities law? These can help you determine who is reputable and who isn't. If you're investing in an ICO, you want a rock solid legal basis where your investment won't be blindsided by enforcement actions from the SEC.

However, you need to bear in mind that they're being paid considerable fees to help market an ICO. Greed is a powerful thing, and many attorneys will sell their soul if they're confident they won't personally be held liable or get disbarred for their actions. Creating a marketable team of advisors is paramount when ICOs are trying to raise money. Just keep in mind that the line between "good advisors" and "marketing strategy" can often be blurred.

I think both camps are growing, as should be expected from continued market growth. Maximalists have their own share of incessantly loud social media personalities as well, who are shilling their chosen coin just the same.

I've noticed there is a strong tendency for newbies to buy into altcoins because "Bitcoin is too expensive." That was my own starting point many years ago. I later became a maximalist for a couple years, only to begin rejecting it because its dogma is so obviously at odds with the market. Maximalists are constantly cursing the irrationality of altcoin growth and it makes them look almost as foolish as Bitcoin skeptics citing tulip mania. I think this eventually happens to a lot of maximalists -- they simply get tired of fighting the market.

If gold were only a decade old, it would be very volatile too. I don't think that's a strong counterargument to what Szabo is saying.

It's all hypothetical, but in the case of global mainstream adoption the volatility should greatly decrease eventually. Decades from now, most of the speculative potential would be gone and so would the fear and skepticism that Bitcoin = tulip mania. In that context, cryptocurrency could provide central banks with better risk-minimizing features than what gold already offers.

No, not at all. You're making multiple horrible assumptions that have no basis in reality.

You're assuming that Bitcoin's total transactions are a static number which LN is cannibalizing. That's completely nonsensical. There are multiple arguments made above as to why it makes no sense. You continue to ignore them in favor of repeating dumb claims. You're essentially saying that all future throughput will be channeled through LN. You haven't done any game theory analysis as to why that would be. Based on the fact that "cheap fees" haven't driven Bitcoin's users to altcoins -- not to mention the additional security tradeoffs of LN like having to keep private keys online -- it's very clear that LN transactions are not a replacement for Bitcoin transactions. You're just assuming they are because you've made no attempt to analyze the incentives or security model.

Great, I'm so excited to see what kind of games Roger will play with the markets. I sense some Bitcoin Cash pump-and-dumps in our future!


BitMEX has already overtaken the spot markets with its insane volumes. How do they expect to rival them? I thought maybe the edge here was a licensed offering. I see nothing about licenses. Instead I see this, which doesn't look promising at all:

How does that contradict anything I said? Obviously people will use LN to make multiple transactions per on-chain commitment transaction. That's the whole point. But anyone who wants to use LN needs to make a commitment transaction, and likely multiple to have decent liquidity, plus periodic funding/re-balancing transactions. The more people that use LN, the more on-chain transactions are required. LN can still provide exponential scale, but you can't ignore that it's still built on top of on-chain throughput.


That's a weak assumption. First of all, using LN requires multiple security tradeoffs. People won't stop using Bitcoin just because LN is cheaper. If that were true, altcoins with cheaper fees would have far more usage than they do. Look at Segwit adoption: Users don't even sacrifice any security to get Segwit's cheaper fees and yet adoption still remains below 50%. Secondly, you ignored the argument that LN enables transactions that were previously cost-prohibitive. That means transactions that previously never would have used Bitcoin (micropayments) will now add to on-chain throughput via commitment and settlement transactions. That's a net gain for miners.

Not only that, but it should increase overall on-chain throughput. LN will theoretically enable lots of transactions that were previously cost-prohibitive. The associated opening and settlement transactions are therefore a net gain for miners.

More importantly, the security of every LN transaction ultimately depends on Bitcoin's mining security. The blockchain arbitrates cases of attempted fraud and theft on the LN network. You can't have LN without Bitcoin miners.

Lightning requires commitment and settlement transactions -- these occur on-chain. If Lightning sees exponential adoption, it will greatly increase on-chain throughput. There's no way around that. That's why many people concede that even if we offload most throughput onto LN, we'll still need to increase the block size limit in the future.

What stops governments from accumulating cryptocurrency reserves the same way? I've always assumed that if Bitcoin became a traditional asset alongside gold that this would eventually happen. If BTC were widely accepted and demanded like gold, it would have similar properties from a hedging standpoint: It's decentralized and thus not reliant on any state economy.


It's partly a question of how scared people are of their government. If the US made an Executive Order banning Bitcoin and began confiscating it like they did with gold in the 1930s, I'm sure a lot of people -- and institutions -- would comply. People keep lots of coins on deposit with exchanges, and in the future there will be ETF trusts and things like that. That represents a lot of coins that would be willingly handed over to the government.

Most buying options require KYC these days. Since your KYC documents can be used to steal your identity and exchanges are prone to hacks, you need to carefully choose a reputable exchange. I would avoid doing KYC at more than one exchange.

If you have access to Coinbase Pro or Gemini, I would recommend them. Next in line would be Bitstamp.


Some of those threads go back to 2016. This ecosystem moves really fast. I actually think this question ought to be re-hashed every few months.

I sympathize with your point, but it's impossible to separate Bitcoin's network value from greed. Its scarcity of supply means that as demand rises, so does price. Inevitably, that means speculators entering the market to capitalize on those gains.

It's not just about gaining fiat money either, but about purchasing power. At some point, Bitcoin will hopefully become a popular unit of account with its own self-sufficient economy. At that point, holders won't need to sell for fiat money to realize gains. They'll be able to spend their bitcoins for anything they need.