The government cannot do this. there is no backdoor in Bitcoin or no way for them to control the network unless they had 51% of the hashrate, which is incredibly unlikely due to the cost of production of ASICs and the limited resources available. The government would have to crack down on their citizens and restrict their freedoms in order to control the network by making mining illegal (think new world order type stuff), and we would have much bigger problems if this were to happen. And if they were to do this the only thing they could do is to not accept certain transactions into a block. They wouldn't be able to do much more than that.

This scenario is so infeasible it's not worth worrying about.

Fair point, but as we all know market cap is not an accurate measurement for cryptocurrencies. The more accurate way (IMO) of determining the Bitcoin price upper limit is the block reward.

For example, 10 years from now the block reward will be  1.56. if the price were to be $1 million per coin, that means there would be $9.3 million dollars of inflation per hour. This works out to $224.6 Million per day, or to a comically high $82 Billion per year. $82 Billion would need to be entering Bitcoin every year in order to maintain a price of $1 million per coin. This isn't very viable, so the upper limit of the price is probably a little bit lower than this. This, of course, is assuming Bitcoin would hit $1 million after 3 more block halvings, in 2028. This also assumes that miners would sell 100% of their coins too which is unlikely, as they would likely only sell a small percentage of their earnings, depending on the cost of mining of course.

Who knows, this price could be possible, but I just don't know if there would be $82 Billion/year worth of demand for at least 4 years to maintain the price.

Where have you heard that there are many people selling into USDT? I haven't heard of this, I've actually heard quite the opposite. Many investors don't want to touch anything to do with USDT. It is far too sketchy, and there is no concrete proof that the "evidence" tether provided for the USD backing USDT is actually money for USDT. Also, the fact that no audit has successfully been done is especially damning.

I don't think that there are a lot of people holding USDT currently. I'm sure there are some, but if you hold USDT I strongly advise using a different stable coin or better, just hold Bitcoin.

I don't think there are governments manipulating the price. Bitcoin is far too speculative for them to be trying to manipulate it just to load up on reserves. However, I do believe there is some manipulation in the markets by huge corporate entities.

The news about Goldman Sachs abandoning a Bitcoin trading desk was apparently "fake news" according to their CFO (if I recall correctly), I seriously think this was an attempt from someone associated with Goldman Sachs to artificially deflate the price. This was just a strange situation in general.

Always load up on these dips, do some cost averaging!

I have not heard of this?? Is this true? I doubt this is true, the market would have reacted way more violently if Satoshi coins moved. Where did the news for this come from?

If his coins really moved than this is a huge deal, but I just checked the first few blocks and it looks like they are still there. Is there definitive proof that coins that were moved came from a satoshi address? I thought the $1 billion worth of coins that moved came from a silk road address?

I don't think this is our last chance to get Bitcoins under $7k. This is the 5th or 6th time we have bounced off of the low $6k range over the course of 2018. There is strong support at $6k, but the price keeps trying to break that support. I do think that if the Vaneck ETF is denied the support will be broken by panic sellers and we would be headed into a crypto winter for the rest of 2018 and possibly 2019. I think a more realistic price for the end of 2018 is $7000 - $8000. Of course if the ETF is approved, with the hyp in the market it may be enough to keep us at around $10k by the end of 2018. We will see what happens on sept 30...

The altcoin market can't last forever. Especially because it's a zero-sum game. Bitcoin is great as an alternative to gold, that is it's killer app. It is unable to be influenced by state actors and it has a finite amount of coins. This is good for storing value during macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties. Altcoins really don't have a use besides making money, as you say. Whenever you make money in altcoins, you are making the money that someone else has lost. That is zero-sum. Eventually, people won't be able to make money with the altcoins anymore and they will just sell them off until they are 0. Who knows, maybe that is whats happening right now.

Lightning is live now, the network is continuing to grow, there is positivity bubbling up for Bitcoin. The altcoins are likely going to die, ETH is showing signs of this right now. Since Bitcoin has relatively low liquidity, the potential for a bull run similar to 2017 is still there. I think that the decision the SEC will make on sept 30 for the Vaneck ETF will be a driver for what the end of 2018/2019 holds for Bitcoin. A lot of speculators are waiting for an ETF (been talking about it since 2014) and the Vaneck/Solidx ETF seems to be the most promising proposal so far. The SEC commissioner is also pro Bitcoin ETF. If it gets approved that could cause enough hype to end the bear market and start the reversal. However, if it gets denied, I'm pretty certain we will see large panic sells that will drive the price down and into a crypto winter.

So what happened with DOGE? I am so out of the loop on this one, they are potentially developing a doge/eth bridge? Is that it? I see no reason for DOGE to be increasing in value like it has been this last week, especially because the founder of DOGE publicly admits that it's a joke coin and he pokes fun at the entire crypto industry. He himself says DOGE is worthless, so why do people continue to buy it?

I don't know, Vitalik seems to thing the days of massive gains in crypto are over. He stated the reason for this being that everyone already is aware of crypto and a pump like the one in 2017 is unlikely to repeat. If this is truly the case then we are many years off for ETH to hit 2000 USD, actually, it may never hit that price. Maybe if they can finally get the Casper upgrade implemented and when Sharding comes to fruition, then we will see those prices, but there are a lot of technical issues with those upgrades so they may never happen. Vitalik seems to have lost faith in the crypto industry these last two years, that's my perception.

I'm starting to doubt on chain scaling solutions for ETH will ever come to fruition. Sharding has been talked about for a very long time now and still, we have nothing on it. There are a lot of problems with sharding that I can't seem to figure out a solution for, like the potential for a 51% attack on multiple shards. Plasma sounds great, but still, nothing on that one either. Now the dev community in ETH is getting split up over the potential upcoming hard fork (At least that's what I have heard). Also, wheres casper?

ETH is dumping hard and has been a terrible investment... I don't know if these problems with scaling can ever be addressed.

The Ethereum price is pretty abysmal right now. I am shocked to see it drop below $200 like it did earlier. When Ethereum's recovery starts it surely will start with a bang and a huge pump. It's just lately when Bitcoin goes up, other alts like Ethereum go down. So if Bitcoin goes back up, Ethereum possibly may end up staying at the same dollar price but it would lose it's value in Bitcoin, like it has been.

I think Eth and Bitcoin are no longer tied together in terms of pricing, I think Eth has gone it's own path. A lot of the crypto market seems to be decoupled from Bitcoin a little bit as of late.

Another prediction thread? There are hundreds of these already, OP no one knows what the future of Bitcoin holds. I mean this is a speculation board, I get it, but these threads are getting very tiresome.

Yes Bitcoin is a good investment, yes the price in 2019 will definitely be higher than it is today, yes you should buy some now and Hodl it. We will be at least at $15k by the end of 2019 and I am almost certain of this. The halving hyp in early 2020 will be a big driver in the next bubble. An ETF will be around by then, and institutions will certainly fomo in before the halving.

Just buy as much as possible and hodl! You can't go wrong with that strategy 

It sucks to lose money, I understand, but take this as a lesson learned. You should not invest in ICOs, they are blatant scams. ICOs are get rich quick schemes for the "founders". They are not designed to make you money, they are designed to make them money. A lot of these ICOs that have good concepts are very fundamentally technically flawed in their design. A lot of ICO investors aren't very familiar with how Blockchains actually work, so they get duped by these promises that the ICO's make. The ICO's can almost never deliver on their promises. I mean look at EOS, it sounded like the best thing in the world before the mainnet went live, and look at the dumpster fire it is now. ICO's are only meant to make the founders money.

Tether isn't just a stable cryptocurrency. Tether is tied to the US dollar so it is meant to be stable (rumor has it tether is backed 1:1 with USD). Tether really isn't much of a cryptocurrency IMO, it is just a way for crypto traders to easily exchange their coins for a fiat substitute. There is no point in "investing" in tether, as that's basically you investing in the dollar. Except tether is wayyyy riskier, there is a lot of shady stuff going on with tether and Bitfinex. Trust me, just stay away from tether and move on.

Depends on how you view Bitcoin. If you view it as a store of value, then yes HODL is a good approach for Bitcoin. Hodling takes coins of the market which creates more scarcity, so that = higher price. Although you are correct, it does increase the chances of manipulation as there wouldn't be too much liquidity in the orderbooks. However, that has been the case for Bitcoin this whole time, and that is why it's so volatile. Not everyone will take their coins of the orderbooks and hodl, a lot of people try to day trade. As the market increases in size, then volatility will decrease and BTC will be much harder to manipulate. There will always be traders in the Bitcoin market that don't hodl, and there will always be more that join them.

If you view Bitcoin as a currency, then HODL is not a good approach IMO. Money needs to change hands frequently for a currency, as this is how the economy works. HODLing is basically hoarding, and if no one wants to spend their Bitcoin, then it will not work as a currency. Once the price stabilizes I think people will only hodl to store value (like they do with gold) and at that point with LN and a stable price, usage as a currency will be no problem.

I'm not sure about this, I think altcoins dying would help with Bitcoins market cap. Investors will sell their altcoins and allocate their holdings into Bitcoin as a safe haven. A lot of people in the crypto space wouldn't just leave the entire market if their altcoin dies, they would just take their money and put it into the only coin that matters. If BCH where to disappear, a significant % of the money in BCH would come back to Bitcoin and only a small percent would likely leave the market entirely. This is the reason why I believe altcoins dying would help BTC's price and market cap.

But could they manipulate it if it was verifiably decentralized and was open source? Of course, it would be way easier for a government to create a closed source permissioned blockchain, as that would give them way more control over their people... Generally, that is what governments want, more control. The 51% attack is a problem that would need to be solved, any blockchain used for voting probably would be very centralized, as there would be no incentive to maintain the ledger.

I really am unsure how this would work or how something like this could be successfully implemented. Is there any more information on what Japan did for this? Who maintained the blockchain? What was the incentive? What algo was it? So many questions.

There would have definitely been a much larger drop. I don't really think that those coins moving had anything to do with this price drop. Maybe it had to do with the Bitwise ETF? Did the SEC reject that already?



Are you talking about the legendary whale bear? Lol I remember that day. A huge 30,000 BTC sell wall popped up on Bitstamp at $300. That was fun to watch. I bet whoever sold those coins are really kicking themselves now!

It's not just ETH, Bitcoin is down 5% now, but BCH and crap EOS is down 11%. Ethereum has been the worst investment this year, I have no idea why its crashing. I know there is some FUD surrounding the upcoming fork? It's probably crashing due to that debate. I'm not sure, The only thing I am sure about is that I should not have boughten ETH. It's funny beacuse I was only using ETH to earn more BTC but I ended up losing nearly half of the BTC I invested in ETH. Lesson learned, only hold Bitcoin.