Yep, I've created this thread because I often see newbies making comments like "Bitcoin will succeed because blockchain technology will succeed" or "cryptocurrency will go up because Bitcoin will go up", and sometimes they just use those terms interchangeably, they start talking about Bitcoin and then start saying "crypto" or "blockchain" as if they were the same thing.
I'm arguing that Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain are independent from each other, they can all have different future, and Bitcoin is even more different from both blockchain and cryptocurrencies, because it's not vaporware.
it is not always newbies though. I have seen multiple times that the news sites start talking about bitcoin in their title then continue it with purely speculating about altcoins. or for instance they are clearly talking about bitcoin in their article but they use the word "crypto" or "crypto market" for it as if it is general and what happens to bitcoin will happen to the rest of them! News sites are completely clueless. In fact, they're newbies themselves -- and that goes for both cryptocurrency media and the mainstream. I've found that both are totally pathetic, nearly across the board. I saw someone make a cogent point recently about a particular phenomenon with news stories. When you're knowledgeable about a subject e.g. Bitcoin, you notice when journalists are constantly screwing up explanations regarding BTC, blockchain technology, ICOs, etc. But then you turn the page and take everything else they say at face value. But really, most everything journalists say is bullshit -- they are newbies about virtually everything they report on, and yet they're always attempting to dumb down things they don't even understand. That's their job.  |
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Knowing Goldman Sachs, they filled their shorts and wanted to get the market moving with a little rumor leak.  it is not bitcoin AND the crypto market that is crashing, it is another serious case of altcoins getting dumped hard and that huge price drop which is equal to a lot of money exiting the altcoin market is putting a lot of sell pressure on bitcoin and that has been bringing its price down. There's no point blaming altcoins. Sure, people are dumping ETH and that spills over to BTC. But if people were so bullish on BTC, they would have absorbed the selling and pushed price back to previous levels. Instead, the price of BTC dumped more than a $1,000 in a day! No matter how you look at it, price dropped 15% today. Looks like there's not much buying pressure for BTC..... |
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Funny thing about this Doge coin is even if it was created as a joke, it feels much better now than those projects that "we are here to stay, eth killer, new btc etc".
There's something to be said for meme coins that focus on community (and which aren't built on the premise of vaporware). They mesh perfectly with social media. It seems like Dogecoin simply never dies, and can be hyped over and over. You can. This time is best to buy crypto, the market dump up to 20% in just one day. It your chance to buy.
You might be right. But "buying the dip" is tricky when it's not a bull market anymore. We could still drop a lot more. That's why a lot of people advocate for dollar-cost averaging, where you buy over a long period, a bit at a time. It's tough to buy right at the bottom.  |
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I can only wish them luck. With increased use of Bitcoin mixers, CoinJoin transactions and privacy focussed altcoins, the Japanese government is going to face a tough job. But they cannot stop trying. It might be easier to fight the non-monetary leg of crime.
In any case, we should always assume that intelligence agencies are trying. And you might be surprised how sophisticated their tools are -- blockchain analytics companies are extremely well-funded and are working closely with governments. Even with the use of Coinjoin, mixers, TOR and/or VPN, etc. there are many potential privacy vulnerabilities (not to mention honeypots) that governments exploit that can be used to identify you and link coins to you. The NSA has some scary capabilities. I'm less worried about the Japanese police, but who knows...  |
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I could be wrong, but he seems to be implying that the Chinese government could somehow be in cahoots with the exchanges because it's suspicious how they've been allowed back into China and are flourishing. I don't think they've been allowed back. They both moved operations outside of the country and they don't interact with CNY. They still obviously target the Chinese market, but they do so as an offshore exchange. Huobi just launched a US-facing exchange (HBUS) and an OTC trading platform in India, which I think shows they're trying to tap new markets rather than old ones. I sometimes think the Chinese government is just becoming cognizant of how little control they have in this situation. |
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After the largest Bitcoin exchanges were shut down in China, Localbitcoins volume skyrocketed and still remains much higher today than pre-2017.
The weird part is that Huobi and OKEx have never really been shut down in China. People there can still sign up and trade on these exchanges without using proxies. The only difference is that they just dropped CNY trading and have now gone all in on USDT (which allows Chinese citizens to easily bypass restritions). I'm surprised they weren't blocked -- I thought I heard otherwise months ago. I suppose they also moved operations outside of mainland China (to Hong Kong and Singapore). I guess dropping CNY pairs sort of shows the real concern -- capital flight. Cutting off large centralized exchanges from the CNY banking system and forcing traffic to smaller exchanges and P2P probably cut the volume down a lot. Why doesn't China just add these two exchanges to their great firewall black list? I strongly suspect that there is some faul play going on here, all to let these two exchanges (which have always been notorious) yet again become the dominant force in the crypto space.
Would blacklisting them make much of a difference? Chinese people seem pretty savvy at getting around the firewall. |
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Developments on this front need to be monitored as some trading may shift from exchanges to peer-to-peer mode, which may also involve increased usage of cash. Possibilities of migration of crypto exchange houses to dark pools/cash and to offshore locations…require close watch.
The absence of information on counterparties in such peer-to-peer anonymous/pseudonymous systems could subject users to unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering laws (AML) as well as laws for combating the financing of terrorism (CFT). In a nutshell, the "religious" government of India, will try to block the p2p market as well, the way they have banned "Bank to business" transactions in crypto space. Hard days are coming for Indians it seems! They can try, but as we've seen in China, it's pretty hopeless. After the largest Bitcoin exchanges were shut down in China, Localbitcoins volume skyrocketed and still remains much higher today than pre-2017. Shutting down exchanges or banking onramps to exchanges only drives people towards P2P -- ironically, this is what Bitcoin was intended for. |
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If you switch the figures on coin.dance of the trading volume on Localbitcoins from Venezuelan Bolivars to BTC, you will see the whole picture.
The fact is that trading volume is not increasing at least on localbitcoins, in terms of BTC terms.
I honestly don't know whether this is because of the fact that Venezuelans simply can't afford to buy more BTC due to depreciation of their fiat currency, general disinterest, or their government wanting to push their centralised crypto.
Squatter raises a valid point, that most venezuelans most likely only want USD. It doesn't give BTC any less credit, imo, as it is the currency allowing them to do so.
I'm not even sure the minimum wage is equivalent to $1/month anymore. Between the erosion of the bolivar and massive capital flight to safety, there just isn't much money left for speculative assets like BTC. Also, if you have BTC in Caracas, do you really want to sell it for bolivars?! Venezuelans need stability more than anything. I figure they're not looking an asset that can make them money. They just want to put their money into something (like USD) that won't lose half its value (or worse) overnight. |
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You should add Bitcoin Core. It’s the most robust full node implementation with the largest and most trusted development team. I would also add Electrum — it’s the most user-friendly lightweight node, and can be easily be used for offline signing.
I would stay away from Exodus, Jaxx, or any other multi-coin wallets.
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500,000,000 Bolivar is how much US dollars? it's only about $2000. So this title is very misleading, lol
The story is clickbait. It's trying to feed into that narrative that economic crisis is good for BTC adoption. The reality is that Venezuelans want USD. And I would expect new [bolivar-denominated] volume records. After all, the government devalued the bolivar by 95% just a week or two ago. That means it took 95% less trading to reach the previous volume record. |
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People are always curious when large amounts of BTC are moving around, but not maybe because of security issue, but because those coins are sent to the exchange with the intention of being sold. From a security point of view maybe it looks like this person is not too smart, but maybe he/she just move that coins from exchange/desktop wallet to hardware wallet. Although it would be much smarter regarding privacy and not to attract attention to send this BTC in few transactions then in one. I think it's always prudent not to "put all your eggs in one basket." The parallel would be putting all your BTC into one address. Fundamentally, that means you're completely reliant on one security procedure, built on one set of security assumptions. What if that procedure turns out to be flawed?  I especially wouldn't put all my coins onto a hardware wallet. I feel like the attack surface hasn't been studied well enough. |
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The article makes some good points against Belfort. I just find it incredible that a guy who's known for being a financial criminal gets to have an opinion on what is or isn't a scam, and people are supposed to believe him even though he made a career out of being a liar.
I think a lot of people don't realize what he did or where the name came from. His nickname is just a household name because they made a blockbuster movie about his story. I never saw it myself, but cuts from the film always made him look more like a business-savvy shark than a scammer. No the movie pretty clearly shows what a scammer and liar he is, which is the funny part. Anyone that's seen the movie would run away from anything Jordan Belfort has to say. That’s the point. I think far more people have heard of the “Wolf of Wall Street” or “Jordan Belfort” and therefore would lend him credence on CNBC than have actually seen the movie. I haven’t seen the movie, and didn’t really know or care about the plot. But I’ve been hearing his name for years. That has a psychological effect that the news media tries to exploit. |
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The article makes some good points against Belfort. I just find it incredible that a guy who's known for being a financial criminal gets to have an opinion on what is or isn't a scam, and people are supposed to believe him even though he made a career out of being a liar.
I think a lot of people don't realize what he did or where the name came from. His nickname is just a household name because they made a blockbuster movie about his story. I never saw it myself, but cuts from the film always made him look more like a business-savvy shark than a scammer. But that's why he gets invited on CNBC and other networks -- not because he has a clue what he's talking about, but because people are sheep and are enamored with Hollywood and other social authorities. |
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You have to consider what value Bitcoin is providing, and what services it might be replacing. For example: How much electricity does the banking industry consume? What about the gold mining, minting and storage industries? Here's an article that discusses those comparisons. One of the things Bitcoin's energy consumption is paying for is immutability. So far, there is no mechanism besides proof-of-work that can provide the same level of security. |
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However, attributing the reason exclusively to the ICOs will be rather unfair because if there is any section of the market that takes the most hit in 2018, its the ICOs market where there were bans against raising fund, advertisement platforms basing their reason for suspending crypto related ads for the fraud there such as Facebook, Twitter, Google etc. I've been hearing a lot about ICOs liquidating and fueling the bear market. A trading analyst I follow on Twitter updated his sampling of ICOs a few weeks ago and said that most are still holding. That was a few days before the market bottomed. I'd agree that it's not primarily ICOs selling that's been causing the downturn in 2018. I think it's just a natural distribution cycle after all the gains made in 2017. I saw the same stuff play out in 2013 and 2014. |
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A fun wee figure but meaningless. Much of that 'value' will be coins moving between wallets owned by the same person or to and from exchanges. There are very few actual transactions taking place. It's primarily movement. On top of that, the idea of "transaction value" really doesn't mean much if the analysis doesn't account for change addresses. Most transactions involve change. Let's say I use "Input A (0.5 BTC)" to pay "Address A" 0.01 BTC and "Change address B" 0.49 BTC. When you look that transaction up on Blocktrail, the "value" is 0.5 BTC, even though only 0.01 BTC changed hands. It's meaningless. |
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Iran’s National Cyberspace Center reveals the draft of the state-backed cryptocurrency project is ready, local news outlet reports.
That's one way to bypass international sanctions, though as the Venezuelan Petro has shown, simply creating a cryptocurrency is not enough to convince people of its value. It needs to have built-in scarcity and to be widely adopted by the masses to succeed. How does it enable bypassing sanctions? If a token is backed by the Iranian state, it will be treated just like the Iranian rial with regard to sanctions enforcement. Some people argue that using a decentralized currency (like Bitcoin) would make sanctions enforcement harder. That might be true, as the banking system is avoided entirely. But I'm not sure how the mechanics of sanction enforcement works, and to what extent it's really true. |
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The moment you cash-out your bitcoin to a bank or an exchange or to any other means that requires a real world identity, pseudonymity is lost. Satoshi's rally for privacy goes down the drain. Your identity is uncovered. They can already trace your bitcoin wallet address and all other wallet addresses you transacted with.
Did satoshi really rally for privacy though? I genuinely don't know. I always thought that the focus was on decentralization. Satoshi definitely had privacy in mind when he designed Bitcoin. The primary focus was on removing third party trust, but the whitepaper specified the reasoning for anonymous public keys and for the practice of never reusing addresses -- privacy: 10. Privacy
The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the
parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly
precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in
another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending
an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is
similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of
individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.
As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them
from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input
transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk
is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to
the same owner.
I'd say the way out is mixers because you can cut or at least shorten your trail with them, but the moment you transact with another person (or most of the time anyway), you cede some level of privacy.
That's why it's important to break the chain of transactions, whether through a mixer or non-KYC services with proxy/VPN. Even still, there are sophisticated methods to deanonymize transaction trees. I'm hoping that new privacy methods like Dandelion and CT will be available sooner than later. |
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The original design was for transactions to remain pseudonymous from end to end, and the public records remained as such until you cash-out. It is here that we lost the pro-privacy gift of the blockchain. Early versions did include a pay-to-IP function, which was sort of a privacy pitfall on top of being a security pitfall. The moment you cash-out your bitcoin to a bank or an exchange or to any other means that requires a real world identity, pseudonymity is lost. Satoshi's rally for privacy goes down the drain. Your identity is uncovered. They can already trace your bitcoin wallet address and all other wallet addresses you transacted with.
The effort of pseudonymity is lost. But is there really a way out? Can we really remain pseudonymous to continue the blockchain's rally for privacy?
There are a few methods that should improve privacy in the future. I believe Dandelion is already compatible with Bitcoin, and can obfuscate the originating point of transactions. Progress is being made on Confidential Transactions, which make transaction amounts private. Schnorr signatures are also exciting from a privacy perspective because they incentivize Coinjoin-type transactions. It's true that web browsers (cookies) and payment processors like Bitpay (who collect lots of data about you) remain big problems for privacy, though. |
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Attributing a single cause to bitcoins price change is not a good analysis. Exchange Traded Funds alone was not to be a factor in determining bitcoins price but it was hyped by investors? Now is Bitmain IPO, and is gonna be given another hype to break traders heart.
People have been linking the ETF decisions to price because there is an expectation (perhaps a false one) that approval would create huge institutional demand for BTC -- or for derivatives tied to BTC. I think the hype and disappointment around the rumors has a short-term effect on price, but won't fundamentally change things. The Bitmain IPO is a separate matter entirely. It has no connection to the BTC price. In fact, the success or failure of Bitmain is becoming less relevant to Bitcoin all the time. Their miners are becoming less and less competitive, and they are planning to transition much of their business away from ASIC manufacturing and towards AI development. |
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