I also heard someone was mugged at gunpoint and the robbers took his "cash, jewelry, watch,..." and ran away. maybe you should also be worried that this mugging is a "threat" to watch companies, jewelry makers and the banks!

here is a pizza shop robber: http://www.wcvb.com/article/police-pizza-shop-robber-is-former-employee/15948334
maybe the "pizza industry is under threat" too

how do you ban a robber (thief)? maybe you mean they ban robber (condoms)?

these people have been dealing with illegal things for years before even bitcoin was invented! and they will continue doing so with cash and other ways of transferring money. why are you threatened by it?

WHAT?!!

....none of which are new or even related to bitcoin!

if they do, then they also prove a real threat to all of us at a higher level because they use cash a LOT more than they may use bitcoin and cash is used by ALL of us a LOT more than bitcoin.

when they issue warnings about not going crazy with investing in cryptocurrencies, that is perfectly normal. I think almost all the countries in the world has already issued a warning like that. and that is quite necessary and it doesn't mean they are against bitcoin when they warn people!

when they regulate exchanges and close those that fail to do it or have been laundering money, this should not be confused with banning bitcoin. and closing exchanges in some cases is perfectly natural.
even banning ICOs is perfectly understandable since they are not legal way of raising money and there is no product, no company,... to deserve this money raised.

but when they ban bitcoin (which happens to be in 3 or 4 countries and China and Korea and Russia are not one of them despite what the news keeps saying) things are very different. it is not normal and it has nothing to do with that warning I talked about. it is the panic that the corrupted governments have regarding their loss of control to fuck up the economy and fill their own pockets.

I expect bitcoin price in India to grow a lot more just like before.
if you remember 90% of last year price of bitcoin in India has been at least 10% higher than other places in the world! for example when bitcoin was struggling behind the $8k-9k price it was already over $10k and rising over there.
they fucked their economy and now they expect people to stick around and not look for an exit! no matter how much they tighten things over in India, people will make their exit through bitcoin.

all the popular trading sites that I have seen so far have a "provably fair" system implemented which is also audited by those who understand it and if they pull anything it will become public so fast. so I doubt that there are many "rigged" gambling sites that can stay alive for long.

besides they don't need to rig it! there is a house edge which helps the house to always win and also the gamblers mentality which means the gamblers will lose in the long time and there are lots of them.

it is funny how many times the $10,000 bottom has been tested in the past month and each time some people come out and say it will drop so much more and then the price reverses back up above $10k again. it is starting to look like a pretty dumb pattern to me with a strong support at $10k with a huge volume of bitcoin changing hand (26000BTC only on bitstamp over <2 days).

makes you wonder who is buying these coins under the support line?

well the important thing to keep in mind is that to invest if you really believe in the future of the "thing" you are investing in. it can be bitcoin, altcoins, gold, silver, real estate,... as long as you do some research and analysis and come up with a proper educated speculation then it is a good choice to invest in it.

otherwise if people are just going to look at the numbers and the advertisement on the social media like reddit and telegram and invest based on them, they are walking into a trap to lose money.

nah, it certainly doesn't look like a restart of the spam attack to me.
the increase in the mempool count (which didn't last that long and wasn't that big either) happened right as the price started dropping and then recovering back up again. and whenever a big movement like this happens (specially at big supports/resistances) there is a lot of transactions on chain because of it.

whether price has gone up or down some people move their coins to exchanges to dump and some others buy the coins and withdraw them to their wallets to store. and that increases it.

I disagree. bitcoin is a currency, you can think of it as a tool too. and it is not a magic tool to make money for anyone who has ever gotten involved with it. so it can not decrease poverty, it can not improve economy of a country and can not do a lot of other things.

in fact bitcoin may have increase the poverty! there have been a lot of newbies who started investing in bitcoin in the past couple of months and many of them bought on highs and sold after a dip which led to losing a lot of money, then bitcoin went up they bought back too late and panic sold in the correction/dip and lost a lot more money.

this has nothing to do with banning or not banning bitcoin though!

ICOs getting banned should have happened a long time ago. they are ruining the cryptocurrencies for everyone with all of the free money they get for nothing, no product and no actual return apart from profit and free money for the owners.

banning ICO ads on Facebook is nothing worth talking about. they don't allow all kinds of advertisements on their platform and this is another addition to it.
hopefully in time we can see complete ban of all ICOs so that we can get rid of these scammers for good and eventually focus on real cryptocurrencies that focus on usability instead of focusing on ways of making more money.

since you are talking about all crypto not just bitcoin I have to say holding onto them is not always the best choice. because most of them will fall and continue falling and may never even recover. and it has nothing to do with the current situation of the market. most of the altcoins are purely for pump and dump and that happens when they reach the maximum potential: they start getting dumped. you should never hold any of these any longer than their pump lasts.

as for bitcoin, it is very different. it has real potential of rise. it is getting adopted in the real world unlike altcoins which are only for speculations. and what you saw with the dip below $10k is mostly shorting and manipulation which shouldn't last long.

worst idea ever!

not just because altcoins (specially coins like Ripple that OP is talking about) are super pumped and were in a bubble (again specially by the time the topic was started) and buying the bubble and hoping for profit is a terrible thing. and when it comes to long term altcoins have nothing to say.

but also because keeping coins on exchanges is a risky move because you can simply lose ALL of your money. even if the exchange is seemingly trusted. bittrex stole a lot of money recently and they were trusted prior to this robbery!

OP is 100% correct and most people (possibly OP himself) don't understand it.


Silver is $18/ounce which is $18/3.125e-5 US ton or $576000/1 US ton
bitcoin is now worth $0.34/ounce or per 3.125e-5 Bitcoin unit. or $11000/1 whole BTC

bitcoin is killing it with this cheap prices and you don't even see it! it should already be $100/ounce and we have a long way to go until we reach there.

fork (depending on the context) can mean 2 different things:

1. simply an upgrade.
for example when P2SH (multi signature features) were added to bitcoin, it was a soft "fork" for bitcoin that happened years ago. so was Segregated Witness upgrade which happened last year. there are also hard forks, there was at least 1 hard "fork" for bitcoin near the early years fixing a bug.
these "forks of bitcoin" will improve bitcoin itself. and they need the whole network to accept them in order for them to happen. and if the majority doesn't accept it, the "fork" needs to change or be dropped.

why do these happen? to improve bitcoin, fix a possible bug,...

2. copying code.
in programming when you copy the code and make changes to it and create a new thing it is called a "fork" you can see the term on github which is a basically code sharing platform and you "fork" a project when you want to copy it and create your own thing.
these "forks of bitcoin" are those forks that create a new coin which is also called an altcoin. examples are Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin gold, and about 700 others.

why do these happen? to create a new coin and explorer new possibilities and in most cases to use the name of "bitcoin" and gain some money from creating the new coin. like free advertisement.

LN is not some product that you "roll out" at some arbitrary date. Lightning Network is a network which already exists out there on bitcoin main-net which you can choose to use if you wanted right now.
there are many nodes/wallets made for it just like there are many nodes/wallets made for bitcoin. you choose one out of these and join this network and start using it.
https://github.com/lightningnetwork
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair
https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop

but since these are new and have not been used as much, they may have bugs. so be careful if you decided to use them with real money/bitcoin.

successful in what sense? are you planning on selling tickets or something like that to cover the "prizes"? or are you going to pay them out of your own pocket? if it is the later then yes it will be very successful but if you plan on selling tickets or raising funds or something like that, I don't think you can get that many people interested in it enough to pay you! even with escrow since most of these games and tournaments are free. and you can always join online and play for free too.

it is an interesting idea though. you can use an escrow with multiple signatures and since everything will be on the blockchain the prizes will be transparent.

I believe what you have heard is something about "trading bots". in which case I give it a 90% possibility that what you heard was from someone advertising a bot in order to make money in case you bought that program. and that has been happening a lot lately because there are currently trading bots that pay people who "refer others" and unfortunately this has turned into a fake advertising competition with lots of false information.

part of it is true though. for example a program (aka trading bot) can take some data from exchange APIs and do a quick analysis on it. which is just a bunch of calculations which the programmer programmed it to do. and that can be a lot faster than you looking at your screen and opening up a calculator to do the same calculations. but don't mistake them for programs that can make you money just because they can do such "calculations" fast.

I haven't really paid much attention to physical coins and there are different types of them each doing something different. for example there was one guy who produced physical coins like a capsule with a shining red thing in the middle, you had to create a private key yourself, then encrypt it and send him the encrypted private key so he could etch it at the bottom of the capsule and then seal it for shipping.

Casascius  is another type of it: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Casascius_physical_bitcoins
you can also find out more about physical coins which are basically collectibles in their respective board on bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=217.0

yeah, surprising except the fact that market capitalization of a company does not mean the same thing as the market capitalization of a cryptocurrency, bitcoin in this case.
in fact Market Cap is a falsely imported factor in cryptocurrency world which is also being falsely used to compare them with companies and with each other.

it was already affected by it!

the way news like this (either positive or negative doesn't make a difference) affect bitcoin price is that the effects start way before the actual date. for example if people expect the price to drop due to Lunar New Year, they start selling weeks before it starts, meaning the recent drop from $14k could have been partly because of this.
last year was the same, price dropped from Jan 4 to Jan 13 and stayed low until end of the month.
also same in 2016 and 2015 as far as I can see on the charts.
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitfinex/btcusd

pump and dump groups are bad under any circumstances. you may think you can beat them by joining in and being "careful" but you will be wasting your time. unless you can predict the pump without the pump group telling you (like by finding out the signs of it), there is no way you can beat a pumper who is obviously scamming the members out of their money. even if they win once or twice they lose in total.