fees have nothing to do with "traffic" or "high USD value" of bitcoin. it has not changed ever since fees were introduced to bitcoin. fees are there to prevent spam attacks, practically to prevent them from being able to go on forever since it makes them more and more expensive to attack bitcoin.

obviously the amount of fee you pay first depends on the size of your transaction. if your tx size is 180 bytes you will pay a lot less fee than if your tx size is 100000 bytes (~100 kilo bytes).
also you can think of fee as a competition for a place in the block. there is always going to be a limited block size whether it is 1 MB or 100MB. when it is empty you can pay the minimal amount or even 0 and get that space. but when that space is full you will have to compete with others and pay a higher fee to be able to get that space.

the reason why fees sometimes go up during bull runs is that there are more transactions being made on chain so the blocks are full since there is more transactions. you can call this "traffic" but it is a traffic that is higher than capacity. which is why there is more competition and the fees go up. this can increase both on rises and falls as people make more transactions in both cases.
however in 2017 alongside that competition we had a serious case of spam attack which made everything 10 times worse.

I have done it and it works but there are some problems with arbitrage trading that makes it sometimes impossible and sometimes extremely hard to make profit from it so my conclusion was to stick to normal traditional trading instead of wasting time on arbitrage.

I have done it manually and with my bot. the problems I am talking about is the fact that others are doing it also so there is a risk involved specially if you are doing it with an altcoin that can get dumped or pumped at any time and you lose a lot of money that way. another problem is that most of the times the reason for the price difference (which you use for arbitrage) is that there is a problem with that coin or with that exchange that has the different price so you can get stuck and lose money. and finally another important problem is that the profit most of the times does not justify the risks. meaning you take a huge risk but earn a tiny profit.

last time I checked Bitfinex didn't have any fiat markets, there were all USDT (attention to the last letter 'T') which is an altcoin called Tether. it is worth $1 but it is not dollar. and withdrawing it is like withdrawing any other altcoin, you just give it an address and you receive it after confirmation.
I don't use Bitfinex to be able to tell you what the minimum is but it should be pretty low since it is not fiat and the fees should also be minimal because it is a cryptocurrency not a fiat.

it can work and it is a valid strategy but the final profit depends on what you are trading. for example if you are trading some useless shitcoin and bag holding 30% of it then your final result will be a big loss as that shitcoin gets dumped eventually because it is inevitable in pump and dump altcoins.

but if you are doing it with something good like bitcoin then it can be a good strategy.
for example you buy $1000 worth of BTC then after it went up you sell but you don't sell all of it. instead if your total value is $1050 you sell $1025 of it and keep $25 profit in BTC and $25 profit in fiat.

you can never trust the media when it comes to bitcoin!
for all we know Tom Lee has never even made any of these comments and they are making it up. at least that is always my first assumption when I read any news on the internet regarding bitcoin.
it is like that Apple guy (Steve Wozniak?) one day we read he has dumped all his coins and says bitcoin is shit the other day we read he is praising bitcoin and has a lot of bitcoin....

well bitcoin or altcoins are not banned in India. this is just bank shenanigans that the Indians have to endure every day. and this is not the first time they are encountering this type of problems, unlike what these topics tell you it didn't start this month. it has been going on for over a year now but in different forms and every time with a new drama.
but since bitcoin price is now at the bottom and some people want it to go lower, you keep hearing the "negative" news over and over again in an exaggerated manner.

I see what you mean but your comparison is wrong because altcoins are pumped!
the difference is that in dotcom bubble and the similar ones people actually rushed to buy them so the price went up because of that. in altcoin bubbles people did buy them but that was not the reason for this kind of rise. the reason was because of the pumps.
in dotcom bubble pumps are illegal and since the market is regulated you can not do it without consequences but altcoin market is not and it is easy to manipulate it without consequence and also since it is a tiny market you can become a whale with a lot less money.


I agree with this though. it has been a theory that I have had for a while now. as people dump altcoins they do it on popular altcoin exchanges like Binance, Poloniex,... these places don't have fiat markets (don't confuse tether with fiat) so in order to go back to fiat they have to sell their shitcoins for bitcoin then transfer it to another exchange like Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken,... to dump for fiat so bitcoin price comes down as they dump their altcoins and the bubbles burst.

there is no "dilemma" here!
bitcoin is going to be used as before by the Indians but now they will be doing their trades elsewhere instead of doing it on Zebpay. and altcoins are still the same shitcoins with no future so we are clear on that front also.
and when all of this drama is settled bitcoin is still the same decentralized currency that nobody can't do anything about to stop it.

it is not "no one" it is just you. and the reason is simply because you listened to the FUD instead of listening to your own logic and using your own brain. when some idiot told you to "buy" you jump to buy bitcoin and when another idiot told you to sell because bitcoin is dead you panicked and jumped again to sell bitcoin and in this process that you repeated multiple times you lost a lot of money each time.

then you made the mistake of listening to another kind of idiots on the internet who were telling you to buy shitcoins. after a while you found yourself with bags filled with a lot of altcoins each of which losing value up to 90% and you found yourself in a lot of loss.

that is why you are so negative right now. so my suggestion is to start looking back and see what you did wrong. stop listening to idiots on the internet and start using your own head and stop bag holding altcoins.

it seems like these days people keep sharing their wishes and call them "analysis" and pretend their wish is a prediction of the future. if for example they wish for the price to come down so they can buy to make profit then they say price will fall and then try to come up with any reason they can think of to back it up. the same is true with the ridiculous rises but at least "rise" is more realistic than these doomsday topics because rise will eventually happen.

first of all when price has already fallen sharply and a lot then there is not much room left for such sharp drops. we may see more drops like any other time but they will be smaller. you can't go from an ATH to 99% down for something like bitcoin which has a lot of usages and a lot of investors. 70% has been more than enough drop for it and now it is even underpriced!

secondly making profit from either long or short term investment has nothing to do with what price bitcoin is at right now. you have to know how to make profit. even if you do short term trading  and not know what you are doing you can lose money. and long term is an investment that you buy something that you know is going up in long run. so the bear market in short term should not even concern you!

bitcoin has never exactly left the track to now want to come back on it.
the thing you are forgetting is that this "track" is not just an always-rising-price track. it is a live market with both ups and downs or in case of bitcoin more like a rollercoaster where price shoots up and comes down hard but eventually ends up higher than the initial price and then after a little while of accumulation it starts rising back up again and see the same rollercoaster again.

"entry" doesn't happen just once. whales are constantly going in and out to make profit in short term also and when bitcoin swings big time they make the most profit. examples:
Forbes 2017-12-28[1]  and Bloomberg 2017-12-27 price is on the downtrend and in 2 days following these artilces the price goes down to $12000 before rising back up to $17200 (43% profit in a week).

bitcoin is on downtrend from $16700 to $13000 from 2017-12-7 to 11 and Washington Post[3] Bloomberg[4] The Telegraph[5] publish the obituary before price rises up to $20k (53% in 10 days)

another major downtrend during September from $4900 to $2900. during which time CNBC[6] CNBC (Jamie Dimon FUD)[7] Forbes[8],... spread FUD, just before price starts rising back up again and reaches $6000 (106% in 2 weeks)

.... and a lot more. these 3 specific sites (Forbes, Bloomberg and CNBC) at least have always been on point with publishing in the dips before the shoot up in most cases.

but I agree that with the fact that when bitcoin is overheating they also publish a lot of crap for attention and click baits.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2017/12/28/the-great-bitcoin-scam/#70a7afb15c1e
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-27/bitcoin-is-an-implausible-currency
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/12/11/why-bitcoins-success-could-be-its-downfall/?utm_term=.9ab38bcc5e2b
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-11/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-brookfield-ceo-flatt-says
[5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/12/08/new-gold-bitcoin-like-beanie-baby-bubble/
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/bitcoin-is-in-a-bubble-and-heres-how-its-going-to-crash-ron-insana.html
[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-raises-flag-on-trading-revenue-sees-20-percent-fall-for-the-third-quarter.html
[8] https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/09/09/why-china-crushed-bitcoin

that is wrong.

that is even more wrong.

why? it is simple, a lot of people have not even heard of bitcoin. they may have seen the name, saw some article online, on TV,... but they never even paid attention to it. it was something they passed by. and there are a lot more people who know about it, read the articles,... but they didn't invest in it because they were afraid of its future. for instance instead of reading what bitcoin is they read what Warren Buffet said about bitcoin so they decided not to get involved with bitcoin.

this will change in the future. the same people will start learning more about bitcoin and know how bullshit 99% of the articles about bitcoin that they read were. and the rest who haven't heard about bitcoin will know about it and that way the adoption increases.

even if we assume that no new person is going to adopt bitcoin (which is simply not true) the same investors are still investing more money in it so in a way price will rise even there were no new adoption!

there are no other coins. there are shitcoins and then there is bitcoin. the value of these shitcoins are never going to be even remotely close to bitcoin's because they are shitcoins!!! and you can never remove speculation, it will always exist as it exists in any other object out there from currencies (fiat) to goods.

if you are hinting at confirmation speed then you should know that bitcoin's transaction confirmation speed is already ridiculously faster than VISA's confirmation speed!
for example as a merchant when you receive bitcoin it will only take about 10 minutes on average to get 1 confirmation and be sure of the payment. but with VISA it will take a couple of days (up to 3) to have it confirmed and receive actual money.

some day that can happen as bitcoin grows in adoption. but not yet, we are very far from that day. you may hang around in bitcoin related communities and see bitcoin only and a lot of trades so that may seem to you like a lot but if you get out and look at the market from outside with a fresh eye you can see that despite all the growth that bitcoin had in the past few years the market is not yet that big. we need to grow a lot more for it to be able to become as big as stocks market,...

it depends on which market you are talking about. bitcoin can not collapse because it has real world applications as a currency and as long as it keeps that it will stay strong and grow more.
but altcoins for instance are purely based on speculation and speculation can not keep something alive when there is no real world usage for any of them. eventually they will all collapse and disappear. there are about 1600 altcoins now and there has been about 4000 altcoins that have collapsed and died in the past few years.

don't confuse the situation with SYS with a pump. it was a bug in Binance platform.

speaking of real pumps, they are good ways of earning a lot of money in a short time.
should you take part in them? when you trade altcoins you are participating in pump and dumps because that is inevitable since all of them are pump and dumps.
but it depends on how you participate in them. if it is by following some pump group that tells you what to buy then it is a big mistake because they are all scams that aim to take your money from you. but if it is on your own by detecting the pumps and then jumping on the rocket and getting off on your own based on your experience then it is the right way of doing it.
I have been doing this for some time now and I have been making good profit.


do you have any proof that this was a hack and not a bug? I haven't really been following this news!

when fiat and banks are involved even if it is just a half involvement such as deposits, then the place where is accepting these deposits needs to follow the AML/KYC laws otherwise the bank is not going to work for them. not to mention that without asking for documents they can easily get scammed. for example there are a lot of stolen cards that can be used on such exchange to purchase crytpocurrencies and the loss will be focused on the exchange when the bank reverses the stolen money, so the exchanges won't even want to accept without documents.

I disagree. it is not about the number. it may as well be 2% or 1.5% or even possibly be 1.1% and doesn't make a difference. when people want to choose where to go they compare these services (in this case a dice site for gambling) and it is a competition. when one site offers 1% and the other 0.5% and the other 5% people will choose the one with lowest house edge not the highest.

there are good incentives on this site in my opinion such as the lottery (both free tickets and ability to buy), rewards you get which you can use in many ways, profit from your investment which is 100% guaranteed not like investment in gambling sites that depends on players losing/wining, free rolls, .... but these are good for a different kind of user, in the end if you want to attract gamblers you need lower house edge.