This is more of the same. When bitcoin price is rising we see all types of predictions trying to guess it's new ath. When bitcoin price is declining, we see all kinds of predictions trying to guess it's new bottom. It's easy to make predictions in the direction of the market, because it's already heading in a certain way, so maybe they will be right.

You are quite bold though, because you say a couple of months, and you go as far as $100, and that is just crazy. Set up a real date and a trusted escrow in this forum and I'm sure a lot of users would gladly take your bet.

This are really bad news, because it show the type of craziness that is going on in peoples minds because of all the hype generated by crypto. That's why I kind of understand the strict regulations that are happening in bitcoin. The China ban might have been to extreme, but Russia only allowing that professional investors buy bitcoin might be understandable in some point, and Facebook banning crypto adds is quite normal as well.

Of course that these things should be done by family members and friends, and not really government, but the truth is that most people that come into BTC don't understand it, and they need to be protected from doing crazy things. I like bitcoin and crypto and I think it's a great investment, but every time someone asks for my opinion or asks me to buy crypto for them etc, I always tell them to first look into bitcoin use cases and state of development. Then they can ask me questions if they didn't understood things and I will explain them what I know, and after that I still tell them that they must understand that they can still lose money because although BTC has potencial, we can't be sure it will work.

Only if they understand all these things I help them buying crypto. I can't prevent them from buying it anyway, but right now, all my friends that bought bitcoin still hold their coins regardless of the current price drop, and they simply don't care. These are the type of invetors we want, and I know none of my friends that bought BTC after this will commit suicide because of their investment, or panic sell because of FUD.

It's impossible to know those things, so I will just give you my perspective from a "trading point of view". If you look at the weekly charts for bitcoin, you will see that we had a huge run with no time to create real support lines, and this is why we are now falling fast as well. The real support line we have on the weekly charts, is around $5k, so I would be perfectly comfortable  (from a trading perspective) to see bitcoin going to those values. I would get worried if bitcoin dropped bellow that price, because that would show that people are losing faith in crypto.

Also, if you look at the volume, you would see that the bear volume is nothing compared to the bull volume, and that means this is not a bubble pop or whatever it is that people are calling it. This is still normal correction, and I'm still very confidant that bitcoin will recover from this.

From a fundamental point of view, you would see that nothing has changed for bitcoin, and we are actually in a better position than we were before, so things are still good for crypto and bitcoin.

Check this thread, so that you can easily understand what I'm trying to say that the bitcoin fundamentals are intact, and we are actually getting better.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2865338.0

If you already have bitcoin, and you decision is just between LTC and Ether, then I would definitely go for ether. First you need to understand that all alts are still very connected to bitcoin, but from all of those I think litecoin is the one that shows more relation to BTC. So in my opinion, if you want some type of diversity I would choose ethereum, since ETH is not really competing with BTC. Maybe they are competing for "pride", but not for market uses, so both of them can grow separately from each other, and I don't think LTC can really grow without BTC.

As it has already been mentioned here, I would also keep my eye on stellar lumens, because it also looks promising to me.

Bitcoin price doesn't really affect my gambling style as I normally define my bankroll using fiat. So if BTC price rises to much, I just remove those bitcoins from the gambling sites I use, and I make smaller bets, if they BTC price decreases, like it's happening now I normally increase my betting size accordingly. The fees however affected gambling a little, but things are getting back to normal now. I hope I can get a lot of bitcoins from gambling now, since the price is quite low, and this will maximize my winnings in the future.

And these are good news in my opinion. I do believe that most of the transactions are made by exchanges, so they really need to optimize the way they do this. Even without the LN there is no reason for the fees to be this high (even now, after they decreased a bit), so exchanges need to use segwit and batch transactions.

Maybe this is nothing special, but this is still a way for more people to get easy access to crypto, so I find those good news. Right now the majority of "investors" uses exchanges, that seem to be almost sabotaging crypto (by not batching tx and no using segwit), so if these new ways of buying crypto offer a good alternative to coinbase etc, then I find them good news.



The community might be used to fake news, and I do believe that those users are not responsible for the bloodbath we are currently seeing, but the new "investors" that don't really understand crypto are somewhat responsible for what is happening. I'm not obsessed with the price, like I said before I have bitcoin for long term, and I'm waiting for adoption and real use cases for them, and I have a cash bankroll just for trading. But it's still sad to see these coordinated FUD attacks. They can't last for long though, but if we can fight them, I think we should. So if you have some good news, please share them.

I think that every service that tries to use bitcoin for real life needs deserves my attention, because this is very important for adoption. I do have some questions though:

- Food normally isn't very expensive. So when I use this service I will be buying food with BTC that I could be doing with fiat (since this is what you will be doing). So I will be adding the BTC fees + 5% to 15% on top of the price I could get by just ordering online and paying with fiat right?

Is this worthy? I would understand a need for this food delivery service if I only had bitcoin and no fiat, but to just show cryto support, it seems a little expensive to me, or am I missing something out here?

- Do you plan on offering this service to more expensive goods?
Although I could still buy online myself I could see someone trying to use this service to remain anonymous, since they would pay in BTC to you, and you would be the one making the order and paying in fiat (assuming I understood the model of your service correctly)

I think it would make more sense if you linked those sites in a thread used for sports gambling. Like I said before, if you can't find a good thread for discussion, feel free to create your own thread, and manage it the way you want.


Right now I don't know of any threads with real poker analysis in this forum. Maybe it's because poker is still not very popular in "crytpo gambling". So if you want, you can start your own thread and post it here. Maybe other users will join us in the discussion there.


Thanks for sharing this. I will put this link in my thread. It's a little different from what I'm trying to do here (since I just want to find topics with good discussion from certain areas of interest that I have), but this is definitely a very good service that will probably help users that come to this thread and don't find what they are looking for, and could probably find it there.


I will definitely put the first link on this thread, as I think this is very important for cryptocurrencies development. I do have some questions though, but I will make them on your thread. Thanks for sharing.

---

I will be deleting the other posts. Not saying they are good or bad posts, and I even gave merit to one of them, but I will not add the link to that post/thread because it was not what I was searching for.

I think you are doing the right thing about tether. I think that is the most rational decision for people that don't trust them. I personally think there are some shady things going on, and I doubt they are doing a 1:1 ratio between tether and dollar. On best case scenario, they would be partial holding the funds investing by users. It's what banks do, so although it should work and it wont probably collapse, I still think it's a bad option to hold tether, so selling them for crypto is the best choice, and that's why I think it's stupid to see prices dropping because of this issue.

I think you are correct on all your points, but they are all FUD related and should end eventually since they have no fundamental basis to support them and keep the price down. I understand that tether is the worst one, and it could grow bigger if it is proven as a scam. I still think it's overrated, because most of the money that came into crypto was from real USD and not from USDT.

I don't think Facebook had any impact on the price, because it's actually a good thing, but it's hard to say. India government say they will fight illegal transactions with BTC, the news sell they will ban crypto, and we have another crash. People are crazy, and they make irrational decisions, so I don't really know how they reacted to Facebook news.

If you want to buy bitcoin for the long run, and since it's current price is currently around $8k, then I would say there is no need to wait for the "perfect bottom". You should just start buying now, and keep scaling your entries. Let's say you have $10k to spend. You buy $5k at current price, then you keep buying $1k stakes as the price goes down or something like that. If it starts increasing, then you can scale the way up on the resistance levels.

You will not get the best price, but you will get a good average price. If you want to day trade, you can't do that, but if you want to hold, then it's a good strategy.

Since you mentioned USD and not USDT, then I think you need to exchange them to bitcoin or ethereum first, and only after that you can exchange them to USD. As for what exchange to use in order to convert BTC to USD, I would recommend Bitstamp, Gdax, Gemini, and Kraken. I don't use them all, I'm just mentioning the biggest exchanges with USD, so you should make some research about them.

I don't really trust tether, and I never use it. Like I said I'm all cash on my trading bankroll right now, because we are on a down trend, and I mainly try to play oversold bounces, but I trade with real USD and not tether.

Since I don't trust tether, I don't understand how people sell BTC for tether. If they want a way out of tether, they should sell it for BTC instead.

As for margin trading I never do it because I think it's just suicide in crypto, since it's volatile enough in my opinion. But doesn't it just work almost like a "loan" from the exchanges? Exchanges just offer leverage, but in order to do that they need to have the funds and the price wont rise more than the actually tether in circulation (don't know I this statement was clear enough, but I don't know how to put it in a different way).

I do believe they removed it because of high fees. The thing is, if they are true about using crypto, why not offer an alternative? I would understand their move if they accepted another coin with low fees, instead of bitcoin. If they didn't, then the fees can't be the only reason. I'm just saying that.
You run a company and you want to offer crypto as a payment method. You give up BTC because the fees are high. Won't you offer a better alternative then, after you removed bitcoin? If you don't then you are saying that you don't believe in crypto (unless like I said they just trust bitcoin, and they are waiting for BTC to be usable again).

Sorry, I made no comment on this one, because I don't know Stripe. I will check it out. Anyway, if they make the same move as steem, then my answer will probably be the same. If they are serious about using crypto as a payment method, and they have problems with BTC because of high fees, then they need to accept another coin that has low fees and keep crypto support.


I hate the current fees, even now, that they are lower I still hate them. But I understand that BTC is in development so I will not just massive sell.
What I said was that when the fees were high, people were still crazy about BTC, and the price was increasing, so it didn't really matter to them, so the drop in price can't be fee related.

And again, I'm not defending fees. I don't like them, but it makes no sense to massive sell BTC because of that. People would simply hold BTC and wait for the LN. Why massive sell? It's irrational to do it because of fees.

And again, if the fees were the problem, they would sell BTC and buy an alternative. There are plenty of coins with low fees out there. Why aren't those pumping as the alternative to BTC? Simply, because the problem is not fee related. They are afraid that crypto might collapse, and become illegal, and be banned by governments etc. (so again, it's FUD related and not fee related.)

Well I'm looking for good threads with good discussions about those topics. If you like poker and sports betting, I would like to see threads where users discuss poker strategy and betting strategy. For example, they show a few hands and explain how they played that hand and why they made those decisions. They can just discuss general poker strategy as well (like blind steel, continuation bets, position play, how to react to flop raises, donk bets, etc.)

For sports betting I would like good threads where users discuss their game analysis, and betting strategies (bankroll management, etc). Not like those tipping betting threads, where users just post their tips or make vague explanations on why they are taking that bet.

If you already know any threads like that, just post them here. If not, you can create one and hopefully more users will join and we will get a good discussing going about those topics.

Of course people don't gamble just to have fun and pass some time. Or maybe they actually do it, but it all depends on what makes them tick. With that I mean, that maybe some people like to feel the excitement of risking something, and that's why they gamble. Since risking money is their way of having fun and passing time. Also, that doesn't mean that they don't both things. Playing normal online games, and playing some casino games, or poker, or doing some sports betting. I know I do all those, so one thing does not stop someone from doing the other.

I'm not having losses. Like I said I don't let emotions affect my trade. I know the market is crashing right now, so I separate things. I have bitcoin for long term (don't plan to trade or sell them, I intend to use them in the future), that are obviously outside exchanges, and I have a small amount of cash in exchanges. Since I know the market is on a down trend I keep those funds in all cash mode. This way I can buy dips like we had today, and then sell again for profit, so I actually increase my bankroll even if the market crashes.

This thread has nothing to do with trading. And although I already had some profit today (bought around $8500 and sold around $9k, so I got a 6% profit today), that doesn't mean I don't get sad with what is happening.

From a trading point of view, this is great, but I prefer bitcoin usability over trading opportunities, and that's why I get sad when I see these irrational behaviors.


Nope, that is mentioned in the news, and the fees argument is not valid for the market crash.
Fees are much lower now 36980 Unconfirmed Transactions just check https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
We had almost 200k Unconfirmed Transactions and the price was actually rising at that time. So people didn't really care about that, so that is not the reason for the crash.

It's funny you mentioned steam. Did they offered an alternative? No... so they weren't' really serious about using crypto, and they removed it for some other reason. Unless they only believe in bitcoin, and they are waiting for the LN.

Also, thee fees would be much lower if coinbase and other exchanges just adopted segwit instead of doing inside trading with bcash, and batched their transactions. Do they do it? No... because they kind of enjoy lagging the network apparently.

EDIT: And yes, fees need to be lower, I will not argue with that, but that is not the reason for the crash, and the LN development news would actually fight that, if that was so important for the bitcoin price. BTC is in development, we all know that, so I don't think people would massive sell because of that. They got tired of waiting and decided to massive sell? I don't think so...
Also, they are getting alternatives?? How can you say that, if the hole crypto market is dumping. What alternatives are they buying into? xD

I like to trade, so I do check the price regularly, and although I don't get emotional during my trades, I do get a little sad when I'm not trading and I have time to think about how the crypto markets react to fake news.

True facts:
Development
- Even though the lightning network is still in "beta", the number of LN nodes in the main net is increasing, and they have open channels running on them, with real transaction being made. (Check the number of nodes and channels in the Lightning Network in real time)
- Even if we disregard the LN (since it's still in beta), the fees are lower again, and the network is doing better (hopefully segwit will get more adoption, and exchanges like coinbase will batch their transactions, and BTC will be usable again, until LN is complete).
- Coinbase is finally making the implementation of segwit a development priority (Here)

Adoption
- Square Cash App now accepts BTC, so merchants that use it as a payment system will be able to accept BTC as payment.
- Robinhood will add BTC as well; Sberbank (on of the largest state banks in Russia) is planning on opening an exchange. So it will be easier to buy BTC
- Samsung is now making Cryptocurrency mining chips
- 50 Luxury Flats sold for Bitcoin In Dubai (Here)

Social
- A good article that gives us a glimpse on how our society could be after decentralization (Here) Thank you dado7 for sharing.

Regulation
- SEC and CFTC Hearing was positive (Here) and (Here)
- Arizona State passes a bill to allow it's citizens to pay their taxes with BTC (Here)
- Georgia follows Arizona lead (Here)
- Germany has said that they won’t tax Bitcoin users for consuming the cryptocurrency as a means of Payment (Here)

Posts with news from different areas
Check this post dado7, showing us some positive news from Venezuela from (Here)
Check this post u9y42 (Here). Bitcoin getting more private and having smart contracts? Yes please! And he also posts a cool link to check how LN nodes are evolving in the main net (very cool link). Finally, we seem to have a decentralized exchanges that will soon accept fiat. Amazing news! Thanks for sharing.

FUD:
- Tether scam (could be true, but look at tether marketcap, and look at BTC marketcap). How can anyone say that BTC price is up because tether printed tokens out of thin air to pump BTC price? It would not have a big impact...
- China cracking mining... (just rumors, and probably fake). If mining was at risk do you think Samsung would get involved in mining?
- South Korea ban... (fake news, as I hope you all know already. They will only regulate it, probably using something similar to NY’s BitLicense link here)
- India making BTC illegal... (more fake news, they just said they want to crack down illegal activities that use bitcoin and not BTC itself)
- Facebook banning adds (actually a positive thing in my opinion, because it might help decrease the number of uninformed investors that enter the market, that click on those adds looking for profit, and then get scammed. We want investors with strong knowledge about Bitcoin and crypto, because those will not follow FUD or FOMO)


Bitcoin is evolving, we have real and positive news, and we have some bad fake news, or news that simply aren't relevant.
What do the markets do? They crash...

Help me fight the FUD, and post links with some positive news that you think are important for bitcoin, and help me fight FUD, by exposing fake news.

From what I know, and I understand it's little right now, the transaction will only be written on the blockchain as soon as a payment channel is closed. So would miners still get a fee when a channel is closed right? Also, I understand that you pay a fee to open a channel and then fund it. Is that fee going to the miners as well, or to the ones running the LN node?

Finally, if the fees get to low (because they are only paid when a channel closes, or something like that), and there is no block reward, because there are no more bitcoins to mine, what would be the incentive to support the network? Would miners keep verifying transactions and at the same time would try to run LN nodes with big limits so that a lot of payments would pass their node? (assuming they get small fees when a payment passes their nodes, which I believe they do).

I don't think those are really good news, and will probably end up like the AriseBank that was ordered to close down. I'm not sure crypto banks will have a futures in the crypto world. I do think we need more safe approaches so that bitcoin can be adopted and used worldwide. The news about scams, and thefts are to big. If we want adoption to occur, bitcoin can't be safe to use only by users who understand how to "use the internet properly". If these so called crypto banks will provide a safe option for some users, I'm ok with that, but I would still prefer that bitcoin would remain decentralized, since that is one of it's main purposes.

I still think that they are kind of violating your privacy, but I also understand their concerns. A proof of that is those nearly $600 million illegal funds that were being traded on exchanges. Of course that is not a huge number compared to actual volume in exchanges, but minimizing all illicit funds are important to me. The markets are still red, maybe it's because of the tether problems now, or maybe they are still waiting for mass adoption now, so I guess we will have to get use to these new prices for now.