Price movement-->>link to x/y/z event that took place just before or around the same time. This auction is a perfect smokescreen. People always do that.

The price went up quite a bit in the last couple of weeks without a decent correction from the top, so here we have that healthy correction. I would be worried if we go up without those corrections every now and then, and technically speaking, the weekly trend remains as bullish even if we have a brief dip below the $9000 level. People need to chill and be happy with those dips.

For Russia (or any other state for that matter) that's not necessarily a bad thing. It allows them to selectively enforce their laws, which they seem to have been doing for a couple of years now. It's a tough environment for businesses to operate in since they don't know where the 'boundaries' are as to what is allowed and what not, but hey, that's the environment they chose to operate in anyway, so they likely accept the risks tied to that.

I only think states will rush to deploy a clear regulatory framework when they know there is something to lose, and to be honest, I don't think there is much to lose right now. People act like crypto is that new revolutionary thing that will change the world, but thus far it hasn't changed much apart from people's hunger for more profit. Crypto is one big casino.

It's not entirely true when it comes to Gold. As the price of Gold keeps making higher highs, fake Gold that looks more real than ever before hits the market tricking people into buying and storing it in their vaults for decades. Without the proper hardware to identify the purity of the Gold you think you have bought, you're exposed to a huge risk right there.

Also, there were fake branded Gold bars that made it into the vaults of large banks (article). In this case it only concerns a fake brand stamp, while the Gold is real, but it's a scandal nonetheless since you can't point back to its original source. Banks with all their expertise happily accepted them in their vaults.

All above doesn't happen with Bitcoin, and you can easily and for free verify everything you receive.

I wouldn't consider a mixer being the 'fastest' as a useful metric since you purposely want to add some form of a (multi hour) delay between depositing and withdrawing the coins.

In terms of large amounts (in my case >0.5BTC), I wouldn't feel comfortably using anything but ChipMixer. I'm confident that most established mixers will do their work relatively well with amounts below 0.10BTC, but above that things will start to get complicated liquidity wise, and I rather avoid such situations by using a proven high liquidity mixer.

That's true. Bitcoin has had quite an easy ride thus far with how the stock market went on a parabolic ride similar to Bitcoin's parabolic ride (obviously not percentage wise).

I am really curious to see how Bitcoin's 'safe haven' narrative holds whenever we see the US stock market takes a massive multi year dump. I'm afraid that it will also drive Bitcoin down because it's treated as a very risky and speculative investment asset, which in general, is sold off the first whenever markets start to turn bearish.

I am not going to hold a bag of coins in that situation and will unload a chunk to buy back lower when most of the hot air has escaped. It's better to think rationally whenever that happens because it sucks sitting out 80ish % corrections. No matter how much I like Bitcoin, it just sucks because you could have bought many more coins back lower.

If people are that easily convinced of something that isn't true, then please be happy that they aren't going to invest in Bitcoin. They don't contribute anything to Bitcoin anyway, and these people usually are so low on funds that they will buy a shitty few penny altcoin and rekt themselves hard there.

In the end, the more of those high level entities talk bad about Bitcoin, the more they see it as a threat to their own project. If something wasn't a threat, they would ignore it and focus on what they do consider a threat because it takes away market share and capital from their own project.

Another aspect that's very contradicting to his story is that he is exceptionally bullish on Bitcoin and holds quite a significant stack of coins. Why would he do that if Bitcoin was controlled by China? 

It's enough to push the price down far enough to force a bearish close on the daily or weekly time frame if market sold. If this "manipulation" leads to a reversal of the trend, the bull trend we're currently in wouldn't last much longer anyway. If the price gets bought back up and recovers over the course of a couple of days, perhaps a week, then that's exceptionally bullish.

I'm curious though, what's your definition of a 'big whale' in terms of capital in BTC or USD? Some one having 12,000BTC is what I consider a damn big ass whale.

Sure, there are entities with many more coins, but those coins aren't theirs but represent the asset they have under management on behalf of their clients. That's different in my opinion.

$8600 seems fair given the fact that on the weekly the price tends to bounce off the 21EMA, which conveniently speaking, is around that level.

I however think that altcoins are on the brink of exploding, which might help Bitcoin to regain some bullish momentum too in the very short term. Ethereum dips are bought up like crazy, even much more aggressively so than Bitcoin's dips. I'll keep monitoring the price of Ethereum and wait for a long entery point. Given its fundamental strength, it might pay off handsomely.

A low tier alternative. In China there are various applications with widely deployed networks where people can transact instantly and for free. Yes, it's centralized but as long as it works it works, and for most people they don't need decentralization for every single transaction. Bitcoin is there for them when they do need decentralization.

I would love to see Bitcoin gain adoption rapidly over there, but that's not something I see happen any time soon, especially with how volatile and precious Bitcoin actually is. In both cases it doesn't help the spending narrative. People just want to sit on their coins because they are confident in the price to appreciate throughout the years.

Not sure what country you are from, but the reason they don't 'last long' could be related to the legal framework in your country.

In general, there has been quite a decent increase in the number of ATM's installed worldwide, which signals that there is demand, otherwise there wouldn't be much incentive to spin up those ATM's. I wouldn't use them myself, but there are a bunch of people who do and do not care much about the fees that are tied to using an ATM.

In the end, I do agree that those ATM's will become 'useless', but only because of how legacy bank ATM's will offer crypto buying/selling straight from their widely deployed ATM network. Can't compete with that.

The far majority of those are dApp transactions. Not native Ether transactions. Makes a big difference.

One address's spam transactions accounts for over 50% of those 40,000 transactions.

Price fetching data and weather fetching data.

I don't know exactly what the ratio is between operations that are marked as transactions and actual transactions, but I can say that not all of them are actual transactions.

It's such a desperate attempt to talk down on Bitcoin. I do however agree that there should be more on-chain throughput, but that's a matter of time only with Segwit gaining more adoption and Schnorr hopefully this year.

Also, services are batching transactions to save on fees, which means that the actual number of transactions does go down, but the actual value transacted on-chain not.

I'm not so sure of that. I can obtain Gold right away by walking into a bullion dealer/jewelry/pawn shop. Up to a certain amount I don't have to show any documents, which is cool. It depends per country where that legal threshold is, but you could even just walk into different shops to circumvent hitting that threshold.

Creating an account on an exchange such as Coinbase takes time. I have to verify myself first (i.e. sending them all my personal information/documents), then after that approval I have to transfer money to my account and then buy. This process could take days. Also, an exchange could block your account at any moment to ask for source of funds, which then only further delays the buying process.

Yes, you could choose to meet up with someone locally and conduct peer to peer transactions, but as newbie that's most likely not what you are interested in doing, especially not when you take the risks of such transactions into consideration.

Nobody cares about a centralized shitcoin project such as IOTA. Bitcoin will most probably go back up to ~$10,300 in the coming 24-48 hours because the CME gaps tend to fill as long as the price is heading in the direction of the trend, and that's definitely the case. This however doesn't mean that we can't fall below $10,000 again after that, but it's just something to keep in mind.

People usually talk about buying dips, but that makes sense during a bull market, because those dips produce quite high returns. In bear markets dips turn out to be highs and you regret buying most them most of the times. Wherever the low of the current dip turns out to be, buying it will be rewarding. You don't have to catch the perfect bottom, just make sure you buy it.

It's important to zoom out a bit, because we're very much in a bull run if we go from $6400 to $10,500 in such a short period of time. Just like how during bear markets we don't go down in one straight line (there are plenty of 20-30% pumps happening), we also don't go up in one straight line when the bulls are in control of the macro term.

During bull markets the price likes to bounce off the 21EMA on the weekly, which currently hovers around ~$8600 the last time I checked. In that regard, it's quite simple for me to conclude that it will offer an amazing buying opportunity. I however think traders will front run that level at this point because money is eager to enter so I will get in around ~$9000 if it gets there.

Every place you buy Gold from, regardless of the country, uses the main USD ounce value at that day, so you won't gain any benefit price wise unless they offer some sort of a 1-2% below spot price deal, but those usually only apply to damaged coins/bars. 1-2% below spot isn't what I consider 'really' cheap.

If Gold is REALLY cheap, it usually means that it's too good to be true.

I cringe every time I see people (especially newbies) go to sites such as Amazon or Ebay to purchase Gold. In reality they are far more likely to purchase a very good looking fake bar. I browse through the sold listings of Ebay quite frequently, and I double cringe every time I see a fake bar is sold, and some times by very trusted sellers. At least you can get your money back if you fill in a claim.

I'm also confident that Bakkt's OI will increase further, but that on its own isn't really much of a big deal for me personally. I think the fact that we have multiple end-to-end regulated platforms with each their own market and OI pools makes Bitcoin's market as a whole more liquid, which is the most important aspect with how illiquid this market was and to a large degree still is.

People assume that the volumes Bakkt are pushing are low because it's so much higher on Bitmex, Bybit, Deribit etc but none of those are regulated and all their volumes are representing leveraged volumes, so who knows how low the actual volume really is compared to the reported daily volumes.

In the same way, volumes reported by Coinbase are much lower than shite Tether exchanges reporting +$500 million in USDT daily volume. Cheaters will always manage to stay far ahead and therefore shouldn't be used as benchmark exchanges.

It depends on what BTC/ALT pair you are looking at.

I just looked up BTC/LTC and I am surprised with how 'much' liquidity there actually is available; https://bisq.network/markets/?currency=ltc_btc

I'm pretty sure that you can get the job done there as small fish (which most people are) without loosing too much due to slippage. I honestly wouldn't mind losing a small percentage to slippage when I can buy or sell Litecoin (or other top tier altcoins) without KYC in a trustless manner. People who care about actual trading and the smallest profits will obviously ignore dexes.

It's still China that makes the decisions, and they seem to have lowered the bar for 'detection' of infections, which means that now even people with the most innocent symptoms are labelled potential threats, which caused the highest number of infection numbers thus far in a single day (according to multiple sources it varies from 15,000-20,000 new infections).

I wonder how those new measures will affect the shipment of goods from China to other countries. It's time for OP to come up with an update since he has been online today already. Even if the status of Bitmain's shipment hasn't updated it's still worthwhile to point that out here.

I hope that Bitmain keeps their clients up to date with an email instead of just letting them stare at the status of their shipment. Mining is a competitive space so every delay means more profit of people going down the drain.

I was also in the 'sign a message' camp, but even if it's done eventually, it's still no concrete evidence that we're dealing with the 'real' satoshi.

Private keys can exchange hands, either on a voluntary or non-voluntary basis. As long as nobody signs from any of those ancient 50BTC reward addresses it's safe to say that the real winner is the market (i.e. the holders of Bitcoin), which I add a whole lot more weight to than finding out who or what satoshi is. In other words, people shouldn't want x/y/z entity to ever sign a message.

This however also means that losers such as CSW have free game to claim that they are the inventor of Bitcoin. Rather this than the price crashing hard.

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? First you claim that crypto isn't country based but some kind of a universal currency, but then state that we (who is "we"?) need to give permission to a country while you at the same time claim that legal documents aren't needed.

The usual way is that businesses accept crypto, then later find out what the legal consequences are as the legal system in most countries isn't up to date with the developments in the crypto space. In most countries there shouldn't be any serious consequences, but there are always countries such as Russia where things seem to operate in a different fashion in terms of legislation.

China can be added to the list as well, but at least they seem to be more direct with their approach, which can't be said about Russia. They have always followed through with sanctions and whatnot, which unfortunately didn't pan out well for crypto.