It's really, really hard to think of ANY open-source project where the multiple less dominant implementations aren't going to follow the main implementation. In that regard, I dare to question how much effect it really has if there are multiple developers behind each implementation. Just because developers appear to be distributed it doesn't mean they add more decentralization to that project.

Ethereum is quite an example to pay attention to. It has the largest developer-base, yet the will and roadmap of Vitalik is what they follow. Vitalik can talk about how redundant he has become all day long, but that's obviously not the case with how he is still he main man pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The reality is that these "many" groups aren't that many at all, but just the same entities cycling through groups because their signals could be profitable one day, and completely unprofitable the other day. People leave the unprofitable groups to go with the profitable ones, but they are operated by the same people, so they aren't losing out at all.

I'm not really against signal groups because they aren't doing anything shady as long as they don't promise you guaranteed profits. It's up to the people themselves to make the decision to actually pay for their services or not. I just wish people made a rational decision based on the little understanding that they have of this market, and not just blindly hand them over money in the hope that it yields a monetary gain.

I find Bybit to be too new to generate the volumes they are pushing right now. I can be wrong of course and that they are actually as crowded as Bybit makes it appear to be, but the fact that there are plenty of social media influencers shilling it as if it is their last task on earth to fulfill, makes me a bit uncomfortable.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bybit
https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/deribit

Deribit, an exchange that has been around much longer generates less volume than Bybit, an exchange that popped up out of nothing. Perhaps I'm too overly cautious, but with exchanges nowadays wash trading like there is no tomorrow I rather stick to exchanges that have proven to be as liquid as they indicate. I hope others will do so too.

That huge difference is well justified because altcoins are pure garbage. The irrational nature of this market however doesn't look at how garbage they are, but where the next money making opportunity is, so from there I think that altcoins will be taking over the spotlights. Bitcoin's chart looks ugly af, while altcoin charts look increasingly more bullish.

That has been the trend, but the trend is your friend until the end, and the end might be near. In other words, I do expect that Bitcoin making lower lows will result in a capital shift to altcoins, because new money isn't going to enter to buy the dip. People love to buy what's going up and that seems to be the altcoins.

Are you referring to the trust aka the "limited ETF"? If so, then that's definitely not their main target. It's actually a pretty redundant product because a similar product (GBTC) has already been publicly trading for years.

This is the second time this year that Vaneck has withdrawn their ETF proposal, and I'm pretty sure they'll follow that path until the SEC finally approves their ETF proposal. They will submit their new proposal before the end of the year so that they are granted a much longer term, which helps them to iron out some of the SEC's concerns. It was pretty much their only option moving forward.

Meh. When Bitcoin is gaining market cap dominance people trash talk altcoins, but the moment altcoins are making a bounce up Bitcoin suddenly is losing credits?

It's just common sense that nothing goes up endlessly, and nothing goes down endlessly. A lot is going to depend on what Bitcoin will do this month, and then I'm referring to what direction it will break out. It's going to be a massive move, but one that might potentially upset a lot of people and fuel altcoins even further.

I'll keep an eye on what's going to happen, but the moment I notice that altcoins are gaining fuel by capital exiting Bitcoin (i.e. a downwards break of the triangular pattern), I'll long one or two alts on Bitmex.

It's not really surprising to be honest, and while we are focusing on JPMorgan as largest financial institution in the world, the others (e.g. Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs) also allow this to happen, just not on a scale as big as JPMorgan operates.

I'm pretty certain that if they didn't collectively manipulate the Gold market and flood the market with naked shorts, it would be like $5000 an ounce pretty easily. In that regard, we should be happy that there (for now at least) aren't many CME like platforms allowing you to short Bitcoin without actually owning it.

Also important to point out is that governments are well aware of this manipulation, which they obviously don't mind considering that their plan is to hoard as much Gold as possible in the forthcoming years. A relatively lower price for them is actually a good thing.

It seems that @Bitcoin is owned by someone unkown who's leasing out that account to the highest bidder. The highest bidder used to be Roger Ver, hence the BCash propaganda posts, but now it's controlled by a true Bitcoiner with a dislike towards everything Roger Ver was Tweeting about.

The downside to this is that we don't know what will happen when the person who's currently in control of the @Bitcoin account no longer has the funds to extend the lease. In that case I'm pretty certain that Roger will attempt to get it back to shill BCash crap again. It really sucks that the actual account owner only cares about profiteering and not about the community that Roger has been lying to for so long.

This is the current account lessee; https://twitter.com/theinstagibbs/status/1163837511287869441

It could very well be that they already did that, but the circumstances during the tests didn't trigger the bug. In that case it's very unfortunate. Another possibility is that they just assumed it was ok and then rushed to push it live, which if so, is a clear indication of incompetent developers and operators.

In the end, I think that when you're trading on a centralized platform, you after the risks of seeing an exchange get hacked and whatnot, also have to factor in these events. Good thing for the traders is that bugs of this severety don't usually happen. An exchange will always try to prevent compensating traders where possible, especially with how shareholders don't want their margins to suffer due to negligence.

If I had a sMerit left I would have given it to you. I couldn't have said it any better.

Don't forget that this directly applies to governments collecting taxes as well. People often treat Bitcoiners with a strong anti taxation opinion as tax evaders and thus criminals, but they have no clue about how much of their money is used to finance proxy wars and whatnot. Bitcoiners can now decide not to pay tax, or less tax than before because no one can freeze their balance if they avoid using centralized services.

The mainstream media is doing an extremely good job dedicating a lot of its time to the wrong criminals.  

Why is it frustrating? I have given up on caring about these news articles a long time ago. People just need to grow a thicker skin and accept that criminals of all sorts use the best forms of money to their advantage. In most cases that's physical cash, but in some cases Bitcoin or other cryptos too. Not a big deal. Money is money at the end of the day.

Neither fiat or Bitcoin should be blamed for what people do with it. These are mere tools that people have at their disposal. It shows that Bitcoin is useful to all layers of an economy.

Definitely well in the millions, but that's today. If you add world reserve currency status at one point in the future, this domain could very well be a few hundred million dollars at today's purchasing power ratio. It's a powerful weapon for both a good and ill minded entity. In Roger's case it (unfortunately) is being used by an ill minded entity.

What I am more interested in is to find out whether he actually owns the domain in full or not. Before the @Bitcoin Twitter shifted narrative people assumed it was Roger's toy, but turns out it wasn't at all. I wouldn't be too surprised if the same applies to bitcoin dot com.

Too bad for Roger that the whitepaper refers to bitcoin.org which everyone in the space is well aware of.  

I think he was referring to those who are using Changelly "anonymously".

Considering that as per your observation >90% of the trades on Changelly are done "anonymously", these people might have an interest in knowing what to do to not be forced to undergo a KYC check. The very fact that such a majority is not KYC verified just shows how important it is to people to retain their privacy as much as possible.

But then again, it's still a centralized service at the end of the day, with its own set of rules so people shouldn't be too shocked to see this happen.

They don't have to hold Bitcoin (at least, not for a long period of time). It requires little effort to code something that automatically transfers the coins to an exchange and have them there converted to fiat. It would cut out the 1% fee that BitPay charges too, so there is a minor incentive right there.

I think BTCPay needs a bit more marketing in order to be more widely known. Most merchants just go with what they know of, and that unfortunately is BitPay. 

Yes! It's quite funny and weird at the same time, but even people who have gone through the pumps and dumps for years still find themselves trapped one way or another.

The thing is that people adjust themselves to whatever the situation is in the more recent months and discard what happened before that. I have already seen people say that just because the bulls have supported the $10,000 level it's the new bottom. They no longer think about how $6000 last year was more fiercely supported and for a much longer period of time. It still broke.

Just look at how many threads will pop up when $9000 breaks asking why the price has gone down. It's always the same story.

Now you bring that up, it reminds me of clowns on social media claiming to have "invented" methods to beat the house by playing dice. There are always clueless suckers who see that as their last opportunity to make money by paying for these methods, especially when they see windows paint style edited screenshots of insane profit margins. 

People just need to admit one thing to themselves, which is that they suck at trading and stop doing it. It would save them a lot of money that they could use to buy Bitcoin and simply hold, the only near *risk free* form of investing here. Even if the price tanks, you still have every single satoshi. If you lose trading or gambling, you actually lose satoshis.

I haven't really had the impression that Bitcoin is becoming unattractive to criminals. Some dumbos indeed have busted themselves by cashing out through KYC exchanges, but a lot of what we see in terms of usage is Bitcoin that continuously gets circulated without the coins being converted to fiat.

The great thing about Bitcoin is that there is always someone who is willing to accept it, which can't be said about altcoins. I'm pretty certain that EVERY cryptocoiner will accept Bitcoin, while with altcoins you'll see that it's quite difficult to get rid of, even when it comes to privacy coins on dark markets. People use the most adopted coin, even when it's lacking in the privacy field.

Physical cash is great for offline payments but sucks balls when you try to transact online. It's pretty much useless there.

It's a fantastic thing that dark markets can't be stopped, because that's exactly the whole purpose of it. The freedom that it offers also attracts the scummiest entities to utilize it to their advantage, but there just isn't a way to stop this. People are afraid of dark markets because the emphasis has always been on murderers, terrorism, etc.

I'm personally not against people buying/selling weed and whatnot through dark markets, and let this be what most people use them for. I know someone who regularly buys shrooms for personal use. Nothing wrong with that.

Tether volumes are so crappy fake that it isn't even worth taking into consideration. It's close to impossible to cash out to actual fiat unless you go to Bitfinex and beg them to process your withdrawal request (which they aren't too keen on because they don't have much USD to begin with). People are incentivized to trade back and forth because there isn't much else it can be used for.

Paying attention to what exchanges as Coinbase and Bitstamp for example generate in USD is much more of a reflection of what's going on. The trend has been that the actual USD volumes have consistently gone down a lot, while the Tether volumes remained consistently high because of what I said above.

That's what people hope for. Bitcoin however is a risk-on asset that investors generally buy into for its up side, but are prepared to let go of it when the tide turns against them.

When people lose their jobs their priority won't be to buy either Gold or Bitcoin, they'll sell assets they don't necessarily need to comfort themselves with a stacked bank account that will get them through the forthcoming months without having to worry about bills they can't pay. It happened in the past as well, so it's not that it hasn't been put to the test yet.

I'm happy to be proven wrong and see Bitcoin go up, because that's great for me too, but I wouldn't really put too much confidence in it.