Actually, they did do research. When Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud and threatened to fire every employee if they ended up dealing with Bitcoin, a European subsidiary of JPMorgan was one of the largest buyers of Bitcoin at that moment in time. These financial institutions know more about Bitcoin than most people here do, so don't underestimate them.

JPMorgan is known to manipulate markets not only through words by calling it shit or that something can't work, but by actually being active in that market. They're just trying to make people panic sell. Don't feed these whales. As always, don't look at what they say, but look at what they do; they're buying Bitcoin yet calling it a fraud. Makes sense right? 

I kinda get the idea behind that thinking, but has there been any evidence that lead you to being so sure that governments are running mixing services?

I'm not sure how they can pull something off like that, because that would mean they are financing the activities they are trying to combat, and that's an illegal act by itself. On top of that, if anyone is caught like that, the news of that will spread like wildfire and make trustless mixing become the new primary source to have coins mixed. In other words, they will shoot themselves in the foot.

I think it makes more sense to just continue their current plan of approach, which seems relatively effective given how they have forced a few mixers offline already. It's a game of patience in the end. They need all the time they have to build a case against each entity they're chasing after.

IBM tried the same, but similarly, failed hard. In this case I don't really think it was a matter of centralization that everyone disliked, but more so the effect of competing corporations and the market effect. There is much more to gain for these corporations to have the internet be open/distributed rather than trap surfers in a limited closed network.

Libra would be a better indication even though it hasn't launched yet. Altcoins that people consider centralized haven't *yet* censored people's transactions. They all go through without a problem. Libra is designed to exclude certain countries and people they don't want on their network.

I doubt they will. If we look at NY's Bitlicense, it can take crypto businesses years to actually obtain it, and that's just time time aspect of it. It also involves a lot of cost that very likely will scare off a lot of businesses because there doesn't seem to be enough user demand to justify that sort of an allocation of time and money.

Bitstamp was granted a Bitlicense this year after having applied for it in 2015! https://www.coindesk.com/bitstamp-granted-bitlicense-will-expand-crypto-services-in-us

Binance with all the garbage it has listed will face serious difficulties to be granted such a license, or they have to please the NYSDFS by excluding the more exotic stuff they have listed and only allow NY residents to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.

Roger has been suckered into it I believe. BCash started off as mainly a Bitmain product to have another large SHA256 network operational, all to recycle the older gen miners that were pretty much useless to mine Bitcoin with. It's a smart business move on Bitmain's side. Jihan must be happy with Roger taking all the credit and blame for everything.

It's too early to say, but even if that exchange isn't really successful, he can use it to prop up BCash. In that regard, I'm curious to see how the other more reputable exchange will react to the price activity on his exchange; will they ignore it or follow suit? Time will tell I guess.

It's near impossible for someone to admit past faults and mistakes when that person doesn't consider them to be that. He put blood sweat and tears into Bitcoin early on, and now he feels that he has been robbed by the big evil BlockStream (which nowadays is no longer as influential). He now carries a grudge against any entity he considers to be responsible for Bitcoin to not scale on-chain.

Roger is too damn deep invested in BCash to come back to Bitcoin. I would forgive him though if he did. I'm sure he isn't inherently ill minded, just feels he has been treated unfairly.

I don't think that's much of a problem if you for example use a hardware wallet where you physically have to confirm or reject value movements. In that regard, my question would be why OP didn't use a hardware wallet.

People quite often look at the initial purchasing cost and think they can avoid dealing with that by simply using a desktop/mobile client, but that's never a good idea as we can see from the many examples of how people lost their coins. The $100ish they try to save by not purchasing a hardware wallet leads to a loss of thousands of dollars worth of crypto. Pretty sad.

Actually, they do as governments have done everything they could to get people to adopt that thinking.

The part that I find more interesting, is that the people who actually do understand the system's (flawed) working, are still enabling them to do the same because they're either too afraid to say no to certain forms of taxaction (likely out of fair of prison time or high fines), or they don't want to look like a "criminal tax evader" within their circle of friends and family.

My question to you pretty much is; taking the above in consideration, what forms of taxes do you pay and not pay?

That's never a good idea, regardless of how 'proven' certain ways of transferring private keys through the air actually are.

Currently we have various mesh networks, where GoTenna even has partnered with BlockStream to utilize their satellites. I put much more confidence in these entities to provide the technology that will allow people to transact without the internet, because they are well funded and pretty far in development already. But then again, more competition is always a good thing.

Another way to transact offline is to use physical coins (e.g. Casascius, BTCC mint, Denarium, Satori). It works just as convenient as physical cash and nothing will ever move on-chain.

The volatility is also a factor to take into consideration. In that regard, just for the sake of providing them a better alternative for their daily spendings, stablecoins would be a better fit. If they on top of that have funds they won't be needing in the forthcoming months or even years, that's where Bitcoin comes into play as hedge and of course for the massive upside.

Bitcoin is so scarce and has so much upside, that people will eventually regret having spent it after seeing the price rally. Fiat motivates people to spend it because they know they will get the same amount back every month, and they know it loses purchasing power. I think that's a more effective approach for people who aren't yet into Bitcoin. They should hoard the Gold and dump the Copper.

Bitcoin and Gold both haven't done much lately. I think the main point is that we have to understand how investors think, and their gameplan is to front run everything they consider important enough to potentially influence the price. I'm strongly of believe that investors are quite disappointed because they expected much worse measures to be taken, also when it comes to the ECB.

Another reason why Bitcoin isn't doing much is because it's stuck in what appears to be a bearish formation, which we will see it break out of in 10ish days. It could very well be that investors are waiting for that breakout to become active again. Perhaps that moves comes sooner with Bakkt going live next monday. We'll have to wait and see.

I never thought of this before until today, but the funny thing about him using that domain is the free advertising he does for Bitcoin while his sole intention is to market BCash. The same pretty much applies to the BSV camp where they are also bleeding a lot of exposure to Bitcoin, especially with how they refer to BSV as Bitcoin and not as Bitcoin SV.

People by now already know that Bitcoin doesn't cost $300 per coin anymore, or $130 in BSV's case. Too bad for Roger, the bitcoincash dot com domain is currently in possession of the BSV camp, but then again, similarly, they're doing free advertising for Roger's BCash.

It's shady for sure, but not the worst thing in the world either. I'm pretty sure that Roger has more up his sleeve, which I expect to take off a couple of some months before the block halving. BCash has been suspiciously calm in terms of price action with how fundamental the block halving event actually is. His exchange will come in handy to prop up prices.

I must admit that Roger is a fighter. This dude is relentless when he wants to achieve something. Great characteristic if he used his resources the right way.

It depends on what side of the trade you are of course, but I do agree that most people would consider that a nightmare.

In the end, how tragic can it really be? Before we saw the price pump from $4000 to $5000 most people didn't give Bitcoin a single chance to come anywhere near the $10,000 level before the end of the year. I have seen people throw around with sub $1000 bottom scenarios. $6000-$7000 will definitely shake out a lot of week hands, but at the same time still be a fantastic area to settle a new bottom.

I see a bearish break as one last MAJOR buying opportunity for those who missed the boat. Heck, I would use that as a buying opportunity too. It's too good to say no to.

That situation was a bit different though. The price was bouncing between $200-$300 for almost a whole year, with more $300 touches than $200 based on Bitstamp's chart. Currently we're not hammering the same horizontal resistance level, but lower ones as the resistance descends further and further.

Another difference is that we back in 2015 were in the process of bottoming out with how exhausted the sellers were, while currently we might be in the process of topping out with how bearish the triangular formation is. On top of that, at current levels there are a lot of profits that haven't been taken yet, so I'm currently favoring a bearish outcome.

Eiter way, current volumes for Bitcoin are extremely low. Judging by the wicks up and down it seems that market movers have a great time toying around. I'm not going to take a trade unless we break in either up/down direction.

theymos's perspective on this matter; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5177423.msg52219756#msg52219756

I think that people severely overestimate Roger's wealth. It has been more than clear that he spent most of his Bitcoin and very likely fiat buying Bcash. If you also take into consideration the money that the spends on marketing, dozens of employees he pays (employees of a business that generates little to no profit), it becomes clear that he can't just recklessly spend money left and right anymore.

As for Blockstream funding it, I seriously doubt it with how Adam Back (CEO of Blockstream) was just as surprised and suspicious as anyone else.

I can vouch for Bitrefill too. It's my go-to shop to buy gift cards and whatnot through Lightning for instant settlement.

It's actually faster than when my third party Lightning client forwards to me whether the transaction has gone through or not. I award people with Reddit awards quite regularly, and the award has been awarded even before I got a message from my client that the payment has gone through. 

What I like even more about Bitrefill, is that they accept Bitcoin directly, and not through a shitty third party payment gateway. Kudos to them for that.

Libra doesn't have any competitors because it doesn't exist yet. And when it finally comes to life, it's going to be an interesting event to follow because they will definitely exclude certain countries from their network. It's a business at the end of the day, and they have to abide by the regulations per the country they plan to operate in.

Tether is somewhat comparable in the sense that it holds a basket of assets which their tokens are *supposedly* backed by. Tether however can't prevent you from transacting in any shape or form because it's built on decentralized protocols (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum). Facebook will be able to censor transactions and put a hold on your balances.

It pretty much comes down to how much money there is to gain by chasing after businesses. It requires so much time and manpower to dig through the tens of thousands of smaller fishes, that it is a horrible allocation of their resources. The easiest targets will always be the largest businesses because of how severe the consequences are of negligence in the privacy field.

Another thing that contributes to negligence is that the larger the businesses are, the more important their profit margins become, which they expect to see increase year after year to please shareholders. Complying with these regulations is quite a bitter pill to swallow financially, hence the reason they try to delay it for as long as possible.

If every business was following the rules, the governments wouldn't be able to profit from it. They're perfectly fine with how things are. The same applies to banks fucking up. It means hundreds of millions in extra income they wouldn't have if the banks weren't breaking any laws. Business is business at the end of the day.

Every platform's trading engine is different so it makes sense that they don't have the same problems.

Bitmex, a very large exchange has been dealing with "overload errors" for quite a long time now, with no intention to solve it. That's way worse in my book.

Binance "losing" 7000BTC were CZ has requested a roll back of the Bitcoin blockchain, now that's amateurish. If that wasn't enough, hackers managed to game their withdrawal system multiple times. For an exchange that controls over 400,000BTC that's scary.

Coinbase this year has paid out $30,000 to someone as bug bounty, which is quite a big deal since they usually hand out amounts in the $100-$1000 range. It was severe enough for Coinbase to not disclose what that bug actually was.