I think these are two sides of the same coin. Remember Satoshi's message from the genesis block -- a reminder of the bank bailouts and the threat they are to the integrity of money. Sound money is both an investment and a medium of exchange.


There will always be demand for robust, censorship-resistant, permanently stored public payments and data. For transferring lower value, I think that the Lightning Network (payment channels) will serve our needs well. Even if it turns out to be a hub-and-spoke model, it'll still be trustless. Since confirmations aren't required for LN transactions, fees will be much lower. Satoshi had payment channels in the original software, and now that we have addressed transaction malleability, we can start using them.

It's easy to think you can beat the market, but timing and correctly trading price corrections is easier said than done. Often times, you'll just be selling the consolidation before new highs. The same goes for crashes: many people sell when it's most painful, right near the bottom. It's important to resist the urge to sell during these "capitulations." Because there's a good chance you'll lose coins in the process.

Long term, it's becoming clear that Bitcoin is here to stay. It's becoming economically relevant. Seeing the 2013 and 2017 cycles play out have me convinced that we won't see prices below $5,000 or possibly even $7,500 again. We're getting to the point where most of the world is getting priced out of owning a single Bitcoin!

I'm not sure that anything is competing with Bitcoin. The best developers in the space are working on it, its network size is unmatched (this can't be measured by transaction activity due to hodlers), and it has a big first mover advantage.

As such, the most promising cryptocurrencies are not directly competing with Bitcoin, but rather explore different use cases altogether. The main areas I'm focusing on are anonymity/privacy coins and decentralized exchange (DEX) coins.

For privacy coins, I like Monero, Zcash, Verge, Zcoin.... but more than anything, I am looking forward to MimbleWimble, which will apparently be launched as its own blockchain next year. For DEX coins, I'm interested in Blocknet, Komodo and Bridgecoin.

It makes no sense to associate fees with fiat value. There's no decentralized way to link fees to fiat; it would require centralized coordination every step of the way. Bitcoin is meant to function via incentives through its native currency. Fiat should be irrelevant.

Fees are denominated in BTC, and Bitcoin's deflationary supply means that transaction fees will rise (as denominated in BTC) over time to replace the block subsidy. I'm actually annoyed that Blockchain.info shows $ value by default rather than BTC value. If you expect the price of BTC to rise, then you better get used to the cost of fees rising too. Block space is a valuable and scarce resource, so it's priced accordingly.

Odd, I figured that Blockchain.info would make the inputs spendable again by now. Three weeks? Their wallet is even worse than I thought.

The easiest thing to do is export the private key(s) or wallet seed and import them into another wallet like Coinomi or Ledger Wallet. You can then spend them again with a higher fee. If it's an HD wallet (created in the last ~2 years), you can go to Settings \ Security \ Wallet Recovery Phrase to get your BIP39 seed, which you can import into another wallet.

Otherwise, you can go to Settings \ Addresses \ Imported Bitcoin addresses. On the right hand side, there is a drop-down menu that will allow you to copy the private key for the address(es) in question. This should be in WIF format by default, which you can import into Electrum, Coinomi, or many other wallets.

I can understand why beginners think this is true, because they only think of Bitcoin wallet hacks as "computer intrusions." The problem is that your mind is not capable of being truly random when you are generating the brain wallet.

Brain wallets usually end up being very low entropy because of the way the human mind works. In turn, you are always at a much higher risk of a dictionary attack or similar kind of brute forcing to decrypt your private key.


That's interesting. It never occurred to me that the massive bitcointalk leaks, for instance, might be valuable as brain wallet decrypters. I wonder how many people generate a brain wallet based on compromised passwords/passphrases, only to have them immediately wiped when they fund them.....

I'm not sure about exchanges based in Australia -- Coinjar is the only one I've heard of and I don't know anything about it. But I have an Aussie friend and he does all his Bitcoin trading on Bitstamp. He wires AUD to Bitstamp and they convert it to USD to trade. They're one of the most reputable exchanges on the market, so if it comes down to them and BTCMarkets, I'm choosing Bitstamp every time.

For whatever reason, Aussies aren't allowed to trade on GDAX, which is probably the safest place on the market to dump USD while waiting out price corrections in BTCUSD. However, Aussies can buy on Coinbase. They cannot sell nor can they use the exchange interface (GDAX).

I've heard that some Aussie traders buy BTC on Coinbase, sell it on Coinjar and wire AUD back to their bank account.

Yes, it would be trivially easy for someone with enhanced verification to take their account back. The case would probably take weeks to process, but the account would be frozen in the meantime. They could claim their account and email were hacked, provide ID and recent proof of address that match the account, and their IP log will appear like the original account holder. It would probably be an open/shut case.

Also, most people willing to sell a verified Paypal account are probably selling hacked accounts. I assume the same applies here. If it were me, I'd be worried that the buyer would transfer darknet market coins or otherwise illicit/blacklisted coins into the account, or otherwise get me potentially involved with shady stuff.

I understand why there's a market for this, but I would be too paranoid to be either buyer or seller in this situation.

It's more than that. For US users: Name, address, birth date, last four digits of Social Security number, scan of ID and selfies. It's not all the information required to steal your identity, but it's most of it. In particular, I am very uncomfortable giving out the last 4 of my SSN. The first 5 digits of someone's SSN can be predicted using other personal information (like state of birth). As such, giving out the last 4 of your SSN is dangerously close to giving out the entire number. And once your SSN is stolen, game over. You'll never get a new one.

Fraud and ID theft are rampant, and these exchanges are targets for hacking. They're not banks, either. They're shitcoin exchanges. Do you really trust them with your data? And who is this Jumio company that Bittrex contracts with to do enhanced verification? Why should I trust them?

Keep in mind that no exchange is "safe" for holding cryptocurrency. Even reputable exchanges get hacked. That said, the safest exchanges for US residents are Coinbase/GDAX and Gemini. Bitflyer has also just launched in the US; they are the biggest Japanese exchange and appear to be obtaining licenses in every US state they operate in.

Altcoin exchanges are risky. Poloniex and Bittrex are the biggest exchanges, but they are now notorious for support backlogs, account/withdrawal disabling, etc. Binance and HitBTC seem to be the most popular alternatives for now, but you should be aware that as users flood these platforms, performance tends to significantly degrade.

It's definitely clear from the CME and Nasdaq getting involved that Bitcoin is going mainstream from an investment perspective. That's definitely a positive development, but I'm concerned about the impact that regulated futures markets will have on spot BTC prices. As I understand it, these markets will be run during standard market hours (Monday-Friday) with circuit breakers and other volatility-reduction mechanisms. And I think we all recognize the amount of capital that Wall Street can introduce to the market -- that goes for both the long and short side.

Are there any ongoing discussions/threads about the impact that these new markets will have? The spot market used to follow China. Now it seems to follow Bitfinex/Bitflyer. I wonder if it will follow CME/Nasdaq in the future.

I think this is the case, but you never know until a service (node operator) tells you so. During one of the recent spam attacks (when high priority fees were reaching 1000 satoshis/byte), I submitted a stuck transaction to an acceleration service on the forum. It was an RBF transaction that had already been submitted with a higher fee, since the network fee rate kept increasing.

I was told that the transaction was a double spend, so it couldn't be accelerated. I'm curious which pool the service was submitting to, but I can't find the original post now.


It's possible that either transaction could be confirmed, depending which pools mine subsequent blocks. I've seen two transactions spending the same inputs, where the lower fee transaction got confirmed (and the higher fee transaction got discarded by the network). Pools have transaction priority mechanisms that we'll never be privy to, and users on the network can always submit the lower fee RBF transaction to an accelerator service. In that case, fees aren't everything.

There's hundreds of people complaining about similar issues. It seemed like one of the common threads was that Basic Verification stopped working for people who are not US citizens. It's interesting that you had your withdrawal limit increased to that of a Basic account, given the name mismatch error.


I don't understand. Why don't you just trade the USDT markets on Bittrex? I have the Bittrex:ETHUSDT chart open, and it's ticking away normally. Why do you need to involve Changelly or Shapeshift? USDT is always unavailable on Shapeshift, anyway. I've never seen it available once over the months that I've used their service. Not sure about Changelly.

Anyway, 1 USDT = $1.01 at the moment, so no reason to panic. I would be much more concerned about the status of your Bittrex account. The third party enhanced verification service is dodgy. Lots of people with locked accounts right now, unable to verify.

I don't recommend any third party web wallets. You should control the software that signs/broadcasts transactions. I also dislike mobile wallets, especially closed-source wallets. Most use centralized validation and have very poor privacy, particularly multi-coin wallets.

As mentioned, there are Jaxx and Exodus, but I've seen reports of vulnerabilities in both. I immediately uninstalled the Jaxx wallet when I realized that you literally cannot encrypt the wallet with a passphrase. You get a 4-digit pin number. No thanks!

You should look into a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano. They are integrating more altcoins everyday, including low cap altcoins. This is the most user-friendly and secure option for dealing with multiple currencies and internet-connected devices.

You're sure that you deposited to an ETH address, right? Post the tx hash ID from your transaction history, so we can confirm. For example, it should look like this: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x05f71e1b2cb4f03e547739db15d080fd30c989eda04d37ce6264c5686e0722c9

Coinomi apparently confuses some people into exchanging currencies before sending. I came across a thread where someone thought they were sending BTC, but they ended up sending USDT to a BTC address. This was problematic because the broker didn't support USDT.

After we confirm that the transaction actually happened on the ETH blockchain, the next step would be to confirm that the receiving address was actually your ETH deposit address at Kraken. A screenshot will do, but be careful to crop/black out any other account information before posting one. 


It's possible that their node is not operating correctly and/or that this is just a delay. But it sounds like something went awry. I would really advise against using Coinomi. It's closed-source, and its Shapeshift/Changelly onboarding seems to confuse people. In a pinch, I much prefer https://www.myetherwallet.com. To circle back to your other thread, they checksum addresses....

This flaw has always been frustrating to me. Your money is gone, and you don't control the private keys that will let you access it. If you are sweeping private keys, typing is fine. No harm done if you screw up. If you are sending/receiving ETH, a typo can screw up everything.

With Ethereum, it's particularly important to copy/paste or use QR codes. Ethereum addresses don't have checksums (not natively anyway). There is EIP55, but it's a band-aid. if the counterparty hasn't implemented the checksum algos, it does nothing for you.

I wish they'd address it in one of their hard forks. I don't understand why they haven't. Maybe there is some complexity/technical problem that I don't understand.

No, he logged on yesterday. He comes online all the time. To be fair, it was bad etiquette to announce that there were five openings, and then neglect to fill them:


It's now been 3.5 weeks since that post, and he didn't accept anybody into the campaign. Meanwhile, many people have added the signature/avatar/personal message based on the aforementioned vacancies. These people are providing ostensibly free advertising.

I'm fine with campaign managers taking a few days to approve new applicants. But 3.5 weeks? That seems unacceptable. It almost seems deserving of a red asterisk on your chart, if only to warn people against joining for nothing.

It sounds like you had those coins there for a while, if you're referring to the Cash and Gold forks. Prior to the Bitcoin Cash fork, when were the coins last moved?

Is it possible that you were using the Blockchain.info legacy wallet at that time? In early or mid 2016 they rolled out HD wallets, but there was a period of time afterwards (several months) where you could still use the legacy wallet. If your coins were in legacy wallet change addresses, you will need to export them one-by-one. In that case, go to Settings > Addresses > Imported Bitcoin Addresses. To the right of each address is "More options" > Private key.

I did Basic Verification on a new account a few months back. They weren't able to verify my details through public records. But instead of rejecting the verification, they allowed me to simply verify my mobile phone number via SMS. Did they offer you this option, or is that gone too?


I heard recently of multiple cases where people with "enhanced" verification still had their accounts disabled and reduced to "new" account status. Bittrex is definitely making lots of changes (KYC, disabling accounts, new minimum/stale order policies and supposed policies against "pump groups") and they've been doing so ever since BTC-e got shut down.

I can't tell if they are being directly pressured by regulators or law enforcement agencies, or if they are just scared and doing everything they can to more closely comply with existing regulations.

We are in the parabolic stage of this uptrend. One might even say that we are in "blow off top" territory, but even so, we can still go significantly higher before this ends with a very significant bearish correction.

As such, I expect the speed of the rally to continue increasing. At this stage in a trend, I'd also expect volatility in both directions to be increasing, meaning that we can expect the bear traps to be increasingly fast and brutal. The lows at $5400 and the subsequent bounce are characteristic of what I mean.

I guess what I'm saying is, the difference between $9000 and $10,000 is now very small. Bitcoin can do that in a day now.