It's impossible to say how many as it can be a few hundred or a few thousand. It's always better to have many people report the same site than just one person doing it, because that increases the priority to have the authorities or companies such as Google actually look into it.

Based on my own experience, it varies a lot. I have reported numerous scam applications in the Google Play Store, where some are being removed in a day, while others are left active for weeks. I think it yet again comes down to how many people report them. The more people report an application, the more likely it is that something is actually wrong with it, so Google has to act swiftly.

What I do nowadays is that I ask friends and family to report it as well, which increases the odds of a quick removal.

Then I must have been one lucky mofo because I managed to successfully change my email address without ID requirement.

Letting it all sink in, this might even be an attempt to get people to verify themselves so that they won't be booted off their platform whenever kyc verification becomes mandatory. It's only a matter of time before they go full kyc, so leveraging this event is quite an effective route to accomplish that.

A lot services nowadays sucker in their non-verified users to claim like $20 in shitcoins, but in order to claim they first have to verify their ID. Bitmex however doesn't want to spend a penny.

Still, how do you get the common joes to know about them? The general train of thought is that you can't use Bitcoin without internet. Dealing with physical cash is what people in these parts of the world know to transact offline because that's what they have been doing all the time. No additional learning curve required to chew through.

Agreed. I'm not a fan at all of fiat, but I like what paper money is and how it can be used to circumvent various degrees of government surveillance, and the fact that it can be exchanged locally in the most peer to peer possible way. This is also why we have seen various governments already put everything to work in order to get people to adopt digital money.

It was a major one this year. Before the price exploded from $4000 to $5000 we were perfectly completing an ascending triangle with a ~$1000 measured move, which is exactly what we got.

The only thing is that people weren't talking about it back then, where nowadays everyone and their dog knows about them, which weakens their actual effect, so I expect triangle breakouts to result in sideways price action more often until a longer time frame pattern breaks.

We had a time where short squeezes were hyped up, then head and shoulders patterns, bart patterns, triangle patterns, etc. What's next?

I have seen a lot people nowadays point at descending and symmetrical triangles and they keep adjusting as the price just keeps moving sideways, which invalidates the triangles they see.

Technically speaking, there is some sort of a descending triangle going on if you shift to the monthly time frame, so it could very well be that this whole month will consist of sideways price action. I'm actually happy to see it do so as long as we close daily candles above the 200MA. It should push the price up organically to explode or implode.

The $9350 level which was the horizontal bottom support level of the previous descending triangle, is now forming massive resistance. Not one single 4H close above it in the last couple of days.

The benefit of Bitcoin is that you don't need permission from your government to use it.

Do you seriously think that governments in African countries will legalize Bitcoin, a powerful tool empowering people to obtain financial freedom? I don't think so. They're rotten from inside and haven't done anything but avoid investing in education, because they wan't people to remain ignorant economically. Ignorance is a powerful weapon that silently does a lot of damage without people even realizing.

People have to do it all by themselves. Governments will not help them improve. We have enough empirical evidence backing that claim up in African countries.

It's not hard to secure at all, whatever that means. The most common form of Gold is jewelry. It's very easy to obtain and exchange for fiat currency when you want to sell it. It's also a convenient way to escape the financial system of your country without raising any suspicion of capital flight, because buying jewelry is a common practice pretty much in every country.

In the end, nothing goes above dollar bills in countries amidst financial chaos. Bitcoin is a great option if you want to secure a part of your wealth, but too much exposure isn't something I would recommend because you want stability, not volatility. The benefit of the dollar is that it is stable and you can spend it pretty easily because there is plenty of demand from local folks and businesses to accept it.

Bitcoin has never really been stress tested in such scenario, hence the reason for me to not follow the herd and say it will help a lot of people. I don't think it will at this stage.

The only thing "bomba" about the $3000 move we have seen some days ago was that it wiped out people's shorts and left many of them with $0 in their account.

No indicator could have possibly seen that coming. At most a regular bounce was due, but a bounce being due doesn't mean it should happen at x/y/z level. Bounces can be due for a long time before they actually happen, and when they do happen people generally aren't prepared for them. That's exactly why they tend to be so violent.

That's what mixers are for. It requires an extra step of course to get your coins to reach the gambling site, but you still get to use your Coinbase account comfortably.

It's so fucked up that banks can just demand an exchange to abide by certain very unfair and strict rules, but an exchange has no choice but to follow as they don't want to lose their precious bank accounts. IIRC, Coinbase applied for or was planning to apply for a banking license, but thus far there has been no news from their side regarding this license.

It would be super good news for everyone using Coinbase because it will allow them to stop demanding from people that they avoid certain sites/services.

Transactions of bcash will be cheap indefinitely because there is no demand for that much block space. If you strip out the fake transactions they spam their own network with, they can have super cheap fees for ever even with 0.5MB blocks.

The only ever moment the larger block size of bcash was utilized by real transactions, was just after the BSV split because people had to send their coins to a newly generated address to sweep the old private key containing BSV.

Everyone is allowed to build on top of Bitcoin. No one is stopping you from doing so. 

On top of that, the effective block space utilized hovers around 1.25MB and is slowly trending up. With enough Segwit adoption we should be able to climb towards ~2MB which is quite significant.

It's not as rosy as it appears to be, because if you hold a certain amount of crypto for a full year, it's added up to your overall wealth that will be taxed annually, which means that you still pay tax over the coins that you bought. I know that from experience because I'm more or less subject to these tax laws myself as a european citizen.

The problem with seemingly loose tax laws in one field is that governments make up for it by taxing you extra (directly or indirectly) in another field. They invented this legal form of theft and they know how to give people the impression that they are getting an advantage while there in reality is no advantage at all.

People expect a lot but know very little. Bitcoin is very transparent by nature, and there is always a trail to follow. That by default means it's not anonymous at all.

It would help if you also explain why people don't need internet to use Bitcoin.

In order to not need internet to use Bitcoin, it requires you to purchase additional hardware such as a Gotenna mesh device for example. I however doubt that most common joes getting started with Bitcoin know about these, or the satellites that Blockstream has running.

Nowadays there are no non-kyc instant exchangers anymore with enough volume to let you swap a decent number of your tainted coins for some other tainted coins. On top of that, instant exchangers may put your transaction on hold to request additional personal information from you. When that happens, you're toasted.

I rather trust a mixer who's only task is to mix coins than to trust instant exchangers that at any time can change their terms silently to subject you to some crappy new kyc terms because they have to comply with regulations. Easy choice for me. Mixers are generally MUCH cheaper too.

From an unbiased perspective, there really isn't much of a difference in settling transactions other than Bitcoin's fees costing you a few pennies, while bcash's fees cost you 1/10th of a penny, perhaps a bit less. The crappy business ethics of BitPay however makes you pay an additional fee for using Bitcoin, which is completely retarded. No other service but BitPay does that.

If you want instant transactions and only pay 1/100th of a penny in fees, go Lightning and play around for a bit to see how fast and convenient it is.

I'm affected as well, but luckily, I use a different email address for each and every service that I use, so the only thing I had to do is change my email address.

Just in case, I changed my password as well for peace of mind, and recommend others to do the same.

I'm honestly not even surprised or shocked about this event as my bar for crypto related services is already super low due to their incompetence and scandals. I'm really glad they don't demand people to kyc verify themselves, which if they end up doing that in the future, is a reason for me to stop using Bitmex. I'm sure they'll leak your kyc details as well. 

It could theoretically work if the company issuing them allows you to surf on their name and whatnot to conduct payments, similar to how domain privacy works, but in this case I don't see that happen with how the company will be held responsible for any misuse or breach of Visa's or MasterCard's terms by the people who use these prepaid cards.

More realistically speaking, with all the kyc and aml bs, it's probably safe to assume that Visa and MasterCard will oblige the company to actually subject their users to these verification procedures. There is no way to escape from kyc and aml nowadays when it comes to any financial service playing by the rules. We're trapped.

I would actually be happy to pay more in fees if such card came to exist. It's a pretty badass product.

The reality is still that they don't allow people using their mobile client to send funds to bc1 addresses, so I rather see them support bech32 within their mobile client that (unfortunately) a lot people use, but I don't think they'll ever go that far. I'll be truly shocked if it happens, but considering that their "plan" was to do it before the end of 2018 and they still haven't done it today, it will not ever happen.

I have been using blockchair.com for quite a while now and it works perfectly fine and offers many more useful features. Definitely an explorer I recommend people to use.

Exchanges have to consolidate every single input at one point, and when you look at what happens with your deposit, it's usually sent back and forth, which all cost them unnecessarily more in fees than when they would have Segwit fully adopted.

If you spend millions in fees every single year as large exchange, which they all really do, then a 30-50% reduction in fees means more net profits without doing much. I think that alone should give an exchange enough incentive to adopt Segwit.

On top of that, being able to offer lower withdrawal fees (especially in times where the fees are shooting up) than competing exchanges is a damn solid way of attracting the mass, because they do care about low withdrawal fees.

It's funny how you refer to whales as if they're working together as group to manipulate the price to their advantage. It's not like that at all. In fact, whales aren't much different from you and me in terms of market outlook and whatnot. They just have more money to invest, that's it. Percentage wise, they lose out just as much as you do if the market turns against them.

Do you think whales all cashed out at a profit last year when we went from $20,000 to $3000? They got rekt just as hard as most people did, and some even harder as they provided buy support around certain levels the many sellers easily sold through.

An example of whales getting rekt are the dozens of +$10 million institutional crypto funds that had to shut down with over 90% losses. Amongst them there were even +$100 million funds that lost +90% of what they put in. If they just sticked to Bitcoin their losses woudn't be as severe.

It may seem like so from a distance, but most of the areas with relatively easy to extract resources such as Gold and oil are in the hands of foreign governments and private investors.

African countries have been underselling themselves for decades now. For every dollar they get for their Gold and oil rich areas, hundreds are being extracted to end up in the pockets of governments and investors outside the continent of Africa. No wonder most African countries are so poor. In the crypto world we refer to this as getting yourself rekt.

Venezuela for example has the largest oil reserve in the world, but is going through a horrible recession with mind-boggling hyper inflation.