I have always said the same thing, people have been talking about how bitcoin is used for drug dealers doing their thing without getting caught or even people laundering money and all that but no one really recognizes the fact that bitcoin was created in 2008 and all of those things were going around before bitcoin became a thing.

People have been laundering money and dealing drugs way before bitcoin was created and they all used fiat money for that. There was a lot of talk about how "all 20 dollar us bills have some traces of cocaine on them" type of stuff. Bitcoin was not around during the 80's when cocaine was incredibly famous and used neither.

So, when something like this happens to Deutsche bank and cops confiscate all needed information to give out jail time for money laundering it just shows the world how innocent bitcoin itself is, it is the greedy people that are dangerous and they can use either bitcoin or fiat doesn't matter to them.

I used to but I do not have enough money to make it viable to use my ledger nano anymore. I used to store all my coins there and try to divide it equally and so forth, basically spent some time on getting a portfolio that looked respectable and like a proper crypto investor.

Obviously, I have tried to stay at those levels for a long time but I have failed so in the past 6 or 7 months and ever since june-July I have been using only my local exchange where I can put bitcoins in and take out fiat in return. Without a proper amount of coins needing storing there is no need to use hardware wallets, they are there for a bigger investor (even a medium one) but when you have couple hundred dollars in bitcoin there is really no need for it so I just put it aside somewhere and hoping to use it when the prices go up again.

I just hope one day people will see what XRP is for what it is and it will have what Tether had. Just like when people realized that tether is an empty promise of dollars without a real backing people will one day realize that XRP is the coin of ripple that they control and make money for themselves in order to fuel their company whereas no profits from the company ever gets to XRP holders.

XRP will one day go down so low that it would be shocked to Ripple company and it will ruin their quarterly profits as well and will make it hard for them to pay their workers and ruin their contracts. They have been living off crypto traders like a leech for years and never really got burned for it, they deserve the maximum punishment the market could give them and ruin all of their companies future plans.

In my predictions, I believe XRP may not survive for another decade when more people opt of decentralized freedom and rights. Only people who look for short term momentary benefits, buying and holding XRP. But it may get dumped at any time then people will understand the dangers of adopting corporate things.

I think they are needed for near future but not for too long.
Yeah, it is hard to accomplish adoption without stable coins but for how long ?

I think if we can manage to make some sort of bitcoin or generally crypto payment accepted a lot of places in the world thanks to stablecoins (the buyer can pay with any coin they like but the seller gets stablecoin instead which they can turn into cash) but that should not be too long because there will be a time when banks start using bitcoins in their systems and even store some in their banks which means just like your bank account is your "wallet" in fiat currency it will also become your wallet for your crypto and at that time we will not need stablecoins at all since we will be capable of paying with crypto anywhere we like.

I would never consider quitting investing during a bear market run. I mean it makes no sense to leave now that bitcoin worths a lot less, of course I am trying to keep as much bitcoin as possible but sometimes life happens and you have to cash out. For those type of days you need to have a rainy day account that could involve bitcoin as well. Aside from those extreme moments it is wiser to sell bitcoin when it reaches to a point where it would benefit you to sell.

For example, I will sell all my coins when bitcoin reaches to 11 thousand dollars, that would mean I would have enough money to upgrade my phone and I really need to get a new one considering my old one is a broken barely working phone. Until that moment I will keep on investing more and more into bitcoin like a savings account.

You know in every market, we are always busy as retail traders and investors, dancing to the tune of the whales and there is absolutely little anyone can do about it. They are the market makers, they move it based on how the market is, but in every situation of the market, they are always making the bucks whether we all like it or not, while we are just trying to anticipate the next possible move they might likely be making. Prices have not only fallen down because of institutional manipulation but at a result of greed in the market which we all know happened late last year and has now resulted to the market trying to tap out the weak hands.

A positive news need to be much stronger to impact the bitcoin markets. Anything like some government approves BTC payments or some big companies start accepting then we may see the trend change. We need to be passionate so that we may pass this hard time.

Practically, regulation is more like an approach of trying to make things a lot more matured and interesting as we get to see the market being less likely manipulated. Yes, regulation always come with its own disadvantages too, but in a lot of ways, it actually helps hugely when it gets to the area of trying as much as possible to get the best of the market and play with it, without at least having to worry about some whale pump or dump.

Also, considering the fact that a lot of big investors on regulation, will find it easy to want to invest in the market, simply makes more money to get ushered into the space as the case may be.

I will say the main reason people tend to do this is because they tend to get the wrong initial idea about gambling.

There is a lot your mindset has to play when you are approaching gambling for the first time. Yeah, the curiosity is there, you want to try something for the first time, but what is actually the motivating factor to want to try it ? That is what matters.

A lot of people are motivated based on their urge to want to make more money from gambling, while some actually try to compel themselves to do it for fun. With the complete mindset of wanting to make more money without understanding the risks, that is where the problem starts when it comes to addiction.

I don't really understand how stellar works without everyone having a bank that is someone connected to getting paid. I understand the logic, it is a way of sending money from one place to another but how is it really done ?

I for example live in country A and send money to someone who lives in country B, I can send stellar which is easy to understand but how can he turn it into fiat without a branch there? Stellar all depends on branches in all over the world, without them they value nothing.

Plus, while stating stellar is not fifth, don't forget the fact that it has endured the same type of all as all other coins as well. Not like it was going up while eos was going down, stellar just didn't went down as much as eos, that's the difference. Not like neither of them have a real value to me but the difference is incredibly tiny right now.

It was already known that tether is a criminal organization and bitfinex was the base of operations for it. This is not interesting because department of justice is basically looking into something that looks criminal to begin with so it is not shocking to anyone.

There will be a lot of FUD news that we will see these days because price is low and there are people who want it lower so there will be bad news going on in order to keep it low without spending too much money on it. However, they should realize that bitcoin and crypto people already done with tether and no one trusts it anymore. They have an offshore account that confirms how much money they have and if they were so honest they would have moved their money into a more trustworthy bank already but they didn't. They keep working with some offshore shady bank instead.

I don't think there is anything that needs to be discussed about this issue. Why did we needed lightning network back in the day? Because the amount of transactions was too high and there was a need to drop the pace and the fee for sending money from one place to another, in order to save some space in blockchain and help people out. Right now, the volume is so low that there is absolutely no need for LN at all. The price is dropping as fast as a secreteriat breed and all transactions are quite fast already.

Hence, people already forgot about the works done on lightning network since the need for it is not there yet. If (hopefully) one day the price goes up again and the volume sky rockets and the transactions get stuck and the fee's gets high, we can start talking about it again.

Isn’t the first time HitBTC is going to be having an issue, but this one mentioned by the OP obviously seems to be a short technical problem which I believe it will be fixed eventually anyway. But at the same time, that does not change the fact that HitBTC is an exchange that sucks, and if you really do not have much value for the money you have, that is when you want to be using this exchange.

I know some of you may not have had trouble with it, but an exchange with no support, does not seem like something worth taking the risk, considering the fact that people have had crazy times with this exchange over the years when it comes to withdrawals and deposits.

The reason why it went down so much is the way rich people can wait this out. Right now the price dropped a lot but those people sold bitcoin at 30 thousand bitcoin levels all at once. It means the market responded really harshly and the prices for everything went down. It is not a surprise that all coins drop when bitcoin drops because most of the time prices are tied to bitcoin instead of dollar and that results with all coins value dropping when bitcoin drops.

Since, rich people can wait out the storm they sell a lot of bitcoin all at once and use that money to gather back some bitcoin slowly, by slowly I mean couple thousand bitcoin a day. That way they will have more bitcoins at these prices compared to what initially they had. Instead of having 30 thousand bitcoin they can sell it and get 40-50 thousand bitcoin in return. Patience is their winning method.

If you use blockchain it is. Blockchain is already worked on insurance right now, there are companies who are trying to insure stuff on blockchain to make it more forever there type deal and for that to happen you need the underlying contract to be agreed by both parties and exist in blockchain. Now, if you take that blockchain technology into insuring crypto you can make it happen however insuring crypto assets would require a lot more details then the regular "life" or "house" insurance type of deals because it is harder to calculate the underlying risks.

The premiums must be really hard. The easier method is insuring crypto platforms. Such as coinbase, blockchain.com, bitmain and all those crypto related stuff could be insured instead of crypto itself. Much easier method and still insuring in crypto world.

The sad part is you have seen people who were upset about bitcoin price dropping from $6.5k to $5.6k and so forth, even at the first stages of this 10 day streak we were like oh too bad that it happened and ever single day after that we have seen bitcoin dropping even further and further down and looking back 10 days ago when we were sad about bitcoin we should have taken our money out instead of thinking it would go up from there.

What we believed was a drop in the price that would be corrected seems so much better right now compared to what we have right now. We could have had a better financial stress free life looking at how we got out in right time but instead we are looking back at those days thinking "I tought that was bad but I was wrong, this is so much worse".

It is not just an "ego" fight at all. Ego definitely plays a big role and for someone like Craig it is definitely an ego thing which I can understand because he really thinks he is the person with Satoshi connection and he knows what he wants and so forth however in reality he probably has no clue what would Satoshi wanted. He is a prick and he wants to win, that side could be all ego.

Moreover for places like bitcoin.com and bitcoin cash original guys with bitmain and so forth it looks like it is more about money. They would have to give the reigns to Craig and would have to lose a lot of money, yeah they are losing money right now at these current rates but at least they did not lost the coin itself, that would have been a bigger loss for them. So right now they are losing a little compared to what they could have lost.

Lol. I would not doubt that. The market brought in greedy hands into the market last year, and now trying to scare out those greedy hands this year, which is what they will do until they are sure the last of them are out. People should understand that what the market players want them to think is there is no hope, and the truth of it all is that they are accumulating the dips as we speak, and possibly just tapping the price down the more until there is no more sellers.

If you allow yourself to get played instead of trying to accumulate when the market is down and be patient for the long term, then, you will end up getting a lot more screwed eventually when the market recovers.

I have been trying the 50-25-15-5-5 method, for those of you don't know it is as simple as it looks and sounds. You put 50% of your money into one thing and that becomes your main source of income and put 25% into another thing which is there to prevent you from having a bad trouble with the 50% one.

You put 15% into something that looks promising but not quite there yet (think of early dotcom amazon type stuff, it was known that amazon was a good company but it wasn't known HOW GOOD it could be) and you get 2 very dangerous looking pink sheet type of stuff at 5% each and they are most likely busts but in the off chance that they become huge you get a lot of money in return. I tried this with 50% bitcoin, 25% ethereum, 15% dash, 5% nano, 5% doge but as you might imagine all of them dropped in price.

Maybe I should start with 50% stocks, 25% crypto, 15% gold, 5% forex, 5% something.

Yes, it really gives you the perspective on what we can really achieve with crypto all around. Right now the crypto is quite filled with either exchanges, miners or casinos. Those are really the top 3 things crypto is known for but take a look at how much they have changed the world.

I know miners were not something big but even companies like AMD and NVIDIA is now focusing on making crypto related products to increase their revenue so even miners are making a change. Exchanges are getting VC funds and starting operations all around the world because of it. Casinos and gambling has been around since day 1 of crypto.

We have managed to turned casino work into provably fair so  that players can gamble whenever they want wherever they want with just one click and know that the place they are gambling are not out to scam them because you can check it by provably fair.

I do believe in some projects that we currently have in crypto world but I do not invest in them. Just because you trust some team to accomplish what they set out to do doesn't mean it will either go up in price or you would risk your money into them.

I trust that nano will be the best coin out there for money transfer, they are currently leading currency for the highest amount of traffic with zero transaction fee and instant transaction. That is a technology that crypto world sorely needs because bitcoin literally got destroyed during the peak times when the transaction fee went as high as 30 dollars, it means Nano is really fixing a problem in the crypto world.

Doesn't mean I will invest any further ( I did in the past), the price is really low right now and I do not see it going up any time soon, even with a bull run it will never be its original price for a long long time.