Obviously, a market that produces more violent price swings and volatility is always interesting for the 'big dogs' that are used to trading legacy markets.

Even when people here are tired of the market moving sideways within a tight range, it's still perfectly tradable for the oldschool traders. People in crypto only feel comfortable trading the market when the price swings are at least 5-10% while oldschool traders are fine even with 1-2% movements. With a 2-3x leverage every 1-2% move is a fantastic opportunity without too much risk exposure.

The values are different, that's what matters.

At 12.5BTC the inflation in us dollars at today's rate is ~$5.6 billion a year.
At 6.25BTC the inflation in us dollars at today's rate is ~$2.8 billion a year.

For an asset so illiquid that's an immensely bullish outlook. Back when we had the halving from 25 to 12.5BTC the values were a joke. The larger the market grows, the more money you need to sustain the same price levels, so every reduction in block reward will have a massive impact long term speaking.

As for the next bull cycle not being as big as the previous one, that's entirely possible but not so much related to the block rewards or any other fundamental aspect. Hype always drives prices much higher than we all expect, and the panic and fear afterwards drives the price much lower than we expect.

Affordable fees? The fees have been quite affordable in the last couple of months. If you think fees of $0.05 are expensive, then you should rethink what it means to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin's on-chain fees will never be similar to what shitcoins such as Litecoin or Dogecoin offer, simply because their networks aren't being used much at all.

$0.05 in fees is crazy cheap if you add the fact that you use the safest and most liquid network available. That should be worth at least a couple of cent per transaction, right?

Fair enough, but even that isn't something that we can extract value from. How can we be sure that this exchange doesn't just make stuff up? They have an incentive as exchange to paint a brighter picture than what the reality is, and that alone doesn't sit well with me. If over-regulated banks make stuff up, what prevents a simple crypto exchange to do so? Nothing I would say.

I find the general mass sentiment to be more of an indicator of what the dumb money is thinking. Price up generally means that people are bullish and are likely to spend a part of their next paycheck on more Bitcoin. People had all the reason to be bullish some months ago, but I'm pretty sure that this sentiment reversed.

I don't think there are many retirees now thinking that it will be a great plan to allocate some funds to Bitcoin in the not so distant future. It will happen again when we have been going up for a few months straight. 

It's not an application in and of itself. It's a property that Bitcoin gained throughout the years because people have confidence that in the long run, their purchasing power won't be taken away from them due to fiat inflation. Short term speaking prices can be very volatile of course, but long term speaking there is a strong trend of growth.

People often refer to Gold as the true store of value because it doesn't have gone down a lot, but they forget to zoom out and look at the $1900 peak it reached in 2011. It tanked to $1050 after that. Currently Gold hovers around $1470 which is still far away from its all time high, mainly so when you take into consideration how shit the global economy has to turn in order for Gold to get there.

I don't think governments care much about the minority that uses Bitcoin and they can't trace. I'm pretty sure that even without Bitcoin this generally more adapted minority would be impossible to trace for governments. It's something they already accepted.

Regulations are a very effective measure to track the majority of the users. Exchanges have to comply with regulations and they will do everything to not break any laws. Coinbase is an example of how a very strict exchange can function as a massive honeypot for governments to figure out who owns what amount of Bitcoin, and what people do with their coins.

Due to Bitcoin's transparent nature, every step after the withdrawal to one's personal wallet can be followed. Coinbase already deploys such tactics to boot users off its platform in case they have used a gambling site, or a service their banking partners don't want users to do business with. Once you sign up to an exchange and verify yourself, gone is your "anonymity".

In one of his recent posts he claims that he owns more Bitcoin than a lot of the people here, yet he doesn't seem to think it's a good idea to cash out right now with how bearish his price forecast for Bitcoin is.

Doesn't really matter. The holders of either shitcoin have been rekt brutally.

The only ever valuable utility they served was that they made Bitcoin holders richer by allowing them to sell fork coins for Bitcoins.

It went up fast and went down fast. What I find more important is the level it peaked out at, which sheds light on what could happen if we are about to test the all time high level.

Open up your chart and select the monthly time frame. It will become clear that it peaked out at the higest monthly close we have ever had in Bitcoin. It's a semi all time high as I refer to it. I expect the rejection of the all time high level to be way worse than what we have seen a few months ago, mainly so with how it will drive every algorithm crazy as there is no further data to rely on.

When we do finally break the all time high, there is nothing that prevents the price from rushing far beyond any price that makes sense. It could be $50,000 or well beyond $100,000. Who knows.

I don't think it's related to the email service at all, but more so an error/delay on the side of the company where the communication to the email server isn't happening for whatever the reason might be. Perhaps an idea for OP to have LBC investigate where the problem occurred, but I'm not sure if he's interested in that considering that he got it working now.

What email service(s) have you been using when these delays occurred? I personally have never faced one single delay when it comes to receiving an email. At most there could be a delay when there are high mb files included, but that delay generally isn't more than a couple of minutes, and that doesn't apply to OP at all. In my case, I have been using hotmail and gmail.

Interestingly, even people who in the past called out yobit for being full shite and whatnot are currently participating in their signature campaign. In other words, people simply don't care as long as they can make a few satoshis. If people already don't care, why would yobit care? 

Yobit won't be affected by anything. In fact, the flood of exchanges that started enforcing kyc verification only make yobit stand out more as an alternative because they don't care about any of that. Yobit just runs whether people use or abuse it. I must admit that their fuck the regulators stance is something that I respect about them.

I wouldn't say that so loosely. An exchange requiring kyc verification doesn't make them trustworthy by default. I can start an exchange today and subject everyone to kyc verification before they can utilize any feature on my platform. If I can do that, every other person starting an exchange can do that too. No government/regulatory approval is needed to 'verify' people's identity.

In fact, there is a lot of value to extract from verified user profiles, which scammers have been chasing after for years now, inside and outside the crypto realm.

It would suck initially, but considering that there are thousands upon thousands of individual miners distributed globally, it's extremely hard for one single government ban to affect Bitcoin seriously long term speaking. In fact, it will make people more aware of the importance of decentralization. It's one thing to visualize theoretical attacks on Bitcoin, but it's a whole new thing to see governments actually employ an attack.

That's also why running a full node shouldn't cost too much. How do you prevent it from costing too much? By not letting the blockchain grow unnecessarily fast, hence the reason the scaling roadmap of Bitcoin is very conservative. It's more about using the existing block space more efficiently, which is what upgrades such as Schnorr allow you to do.

The price has always been front running the hashrate, which if given enough time, will come back closer to the actual cost of mining depending on the difficulty at that time. The bigger the difference between the cost of mining and the price, the more incentive miners have to sell and close that gap. It's literally a race to be the fastest seller within the mining space.

Hashrate is lagging behind the price development up to six months depending on how willing Bitmain & Co are to send out the purchased hardware. That's why the hashrate can keep going up while the price has been going down for a good while. In case there is no price recovery, that hashrate will be withdrawn again, which is what we witnessed in 2018. I'm pretty sure that people still remember the fud about a looming death spiral.

Fair point.

I prefer to focus on https://messari.io/screener for volume. It's obviously not a guatantee that these volumes are 100% real, but at least they are far more realistic considering the exchanges (Binance, Bitfinex, Bitflyer, Bitstamp, Bittrex, Coinbase Pro, Gemini, itBit, Kraken, and Poloniex) they fetch the data from. The difference between the volumes here and the volumes shown on CMC is massive.

I have been following the volumes at messari and they have consistently dropped in the last months. Not so long ago the daily volume on messari for Bitcoin fell below $100 million, which is an absolute joke. CMC kept reporting double digit billion $ volumes. They don't even care about fake volumes anymore despite their 'promise' for drastic changes.

I don't think anyone has problems understanding the difference between the various machines mining specific algorithms. This is also why it's not smart from a business perspective to only focus on Bitcoin because you want to sell your machines to as many people as possible.

Based on the stocks of both companies they don't seem to be much affected. In fact, AMD is currently near a 10 year high. Lower gpu demand doesn't seem to have affected them at all. Nvidia on the other hand has seen a massive decline in Q4 of 2018, but that can't be solely due to poor gpu sales, and currently they are on the way back up.

Smaller more centralized projects can fork at any time to fight against asics, but that's not possible with coins such as Ethereum and to a lower degree Litecoin, which both increasingly see more asic presence on the network. The Ethereum developers and community probably no longer care with pos coming up.

The health of the company is solely based on Bitcoin. If Bitcoin isn't going up, there is no real demand for additional mining gear. If there is no demand for additional mining gear, the company stock is worthless. Bitcoin is the center of this whole space. If it's going down, it takes the whole space with it. Even creating hardware to mine other algorithms won't do much in that case.

It's hard to say anything about that beforehand, mainly so with how unpredictable China is with everything it does. In all honesty, I don't believe a word of any report claiming that China is open to Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrency. It's the exact opposite of what they want to achieve within their borders, which is total control and domination of people's finances.

People seem really hyped up about China lately, but they don't seem to know that it only concerns a looser stance on blockchain projects, which generally are centralized. Bitcoin & Co aren't going to enjoy an easy ride and they technically never have in China. Crypto had a free run some years ago because the regulatory framework within China had to catch up, and it did with very negative consequences.

It's a fact that most people in any market lose money. In terms of percentages, it's said to be over 90% which just shows how the majority fills the pockets of a minority of profitable traders. Knowing that, people are way better off letting a bot do the trading for them as every single trade is a calculated one based on the technical analysis it did in fractions of a second.

I rather be a 'dull' person but have a bot make rational and calculated trading decisions than to be a cool/active person who ends up losing due emotions and the lack of proper technical analysis skills.

Every asset is a 'trending' asset, not just Bitcoin. What makes Bitcoin kinda different is the repetitive nature of the cycles it goes through. No cycle is exactly the same as Bitcoin grows larger after each cycle, but the cycles do rhyme quite nicely in terms of general behavior.

The current up trend has formed just before the $1000 pump to the $5000 level in April and we have respected it thus far, which I expect will continue. If it doesn't respect the trend and breaks below it, then Bitcoin does something it hasn't done in the recent years, which I would consider extremely bearish.

The ~$7300 level we bounced from wasn't just a random support zone, but the ascending support of the up trend that should hold for many more months until we part with it during the next parabolic leg up.

OP made a typo. Both exchanges charge people 0.0005BTC in withdrawal fees.

It may seem high, but both exchanges did not increase their withdrawal fees in 2017/2018 when the base network fee for Bitcoin hovered between 0.001-0.002BTC. It means that they lost on every single withdrawal that their users requested, which is what people don't think about.

Coinbase works with dynamic withdrawal fees based on the level of network congestion; currently they charge you like 0.00002BTC, but in 2017/2018 there were short periods where they charged even over 0.002BTC.

Every fee model has its pros and cons depending on how congested the network is. Currently Coinbase's dynamic fee model is the best for people, but when the fees spike up, Binance's fee model will stand out as being the cheapest.