I find it hard to believe that an authoritarian (draconian?) government such as Russia's could ever be on friendly terms with a cryptocurrency they don't have full control over. I personally think that most countries will launch a national cryptocurrency at some point in the future, such as a digital version of the dollar, or digital euro for example. That way they can still control the emission and blockchain without missing out on its tech.

Bull runs can't be predicted with any long term certainty, anybody claiming to have insider information or proven signals is likely lying unless they somehow have access to significant FUD or FOMO information before other people. and if that was the case, why would they share it, rather than buying up BTC or shorting the hell out of it? Use your brain people.

The right time to buy ETH is any value under $1000. Not that long ago ETH was over the 1k mark, and now it's down to almost $250, I would say thats a bargain in comparison. All ETH needs to do is regain its all time high in order to generate you a nice return on your investment. In fact if you went and invested now, and ETH goes into a solid bull run then you can easily stand to make 3-4x your investment, I don't think there's many other speculative investment options available that have the chance to do that, so grab it while you can.

Most ICOs are beginning to realize just how hostile the market conditions are towards ICOs right now.ICOs that would have completely smashed their hard caps last year are now struggling to even make a modest soft cap.I think the majority reason behind this is the increase in the number of scam and faiing ICOs, as well as the reduction in support from the institutional investors and corporations. It will take some time for this to recovery and the bounty system to regain its strength and purpose.

This is a common scenario in the world of cryptocurrencies. When BTC is strong, altcoins tend to weaken. Though when the market is extremely strong, both altcoins and BTC will grow in value. Right now, we're in a market that is really favoring BTC dominance. Therefore if you're holding altcoins you should be wary, always making sure to set stop losses for any of your trades and holdings, as only the strongest are thriving right now.

A lot of ICOs just pay random idiots on websites like fiverrr.com and freelancer to write their whitepaper, these people don't understand the depths and intricacies of the project, leading them to search for this information online. Unfortuntately there isn't much information available online, meaning the less creative writers will start to plagiarize the little material they have.

Here's a lesson guys, write your own damn whitepaper, or actually take the time to fully brief the guys on the project.

Do you really think bounty hunters care about what the ICO price was? They know that if they don't sell out quick, some other bounty hunter will come along and sell their tokens for less. This mentality leads to hundreds of bounty hunters dumping their tokens lower than the previous guy. If there isn't enough market demand to soak those tokens up, this lead to the market crashing.

The best way to fix this is to lock bounty payments for 6 months to a year, or release them gradually so there's a consistent flow to exchanges.

I think the biggest misconception right now is that cryptocurrency facilitates tax evasion, fraud and money laundering. The truth is, traditional cash currencies are far more anonymous and easily moved around than cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of tax evasion and money laundering uses traditional currency, NOT cryptocurrency. I feel like the luddite officials keep pinning this on cryptocurrency in an attempt to discredit it, annoying!

Came in this thread expecting to hear horror stories of how much money people have lost. I am surprised that most people have only lost less than $500, which in the grand scheme of things really isn't that much. Remember to know when to stop, sometimes you have to accept a loss rather than risk putting yourself further into the red. It's definitely a hard skill to learn, but it will save you big time on the long run.

Looks like the common consensus is that Bitcoin is going to drop to around $6850-6750 before recovering to push past the $7000 mark. Personally, I think that we will stabilize around the $7,000 mark unless for some reason or another we enter another extensive bull run like last year.

However, I don't believe that cryptocurrency follows predictable markets, so I doubt that will be happening. There's a good chance that we will see $10,000 by the end of the year however, but I don't expect we will ever see the bad side of $5,000 again.

Doesn't really matter, so long as people do their due diligence, the odds of being scammed by an ICO is actually extremely low. I have lost track of the number of times I've investigated a potential ICO investment option, only to be turned-off by something or other. Typically, I find out news later down the line that the ICO was actually a scam.

Luckily I haven't been stung by any of these yet. But for real guys, do your damn research before investing. If everything isn't exactly PERFECT do not invest as you WILL lose your money.

This is exactly why ICOBench is completely shit. What is the point of going to a third party review service if all the reviews are paid shill ones? That's why I prefer sites that rate them directly, giving specific reasons for each point given, rather than just allocating an arbitrary score based on no details whatsoever. This is just one of the reasons why ICObench is being smacked by other rating sites like ICOdrops etc, I literally don't even check ICObench anymore as it's become so bad.

These are estimated figure, I highly doubt that number is true, let's be realistic. According to a recent article I read, there are 100,000 bitcoin miners in operation throughout the world. Let's say that each Bitcoin miner uses an average of 1kWh of energy, that means that 100,000x this is equal to 10GWh per day. However, the total energy consumption is currently 15TWh per day, meaning that Bitcoin consumes just 0.1% of the total expenditure.

These posts even alluding to cryptocurrency possibly being dead are extremely annoying. Do you realize that these types of threads contribute to the FUD that actually causes the price crashes that you then post about whining about how much money you lost? If you trade currencies, let's say USD to AUD, do you then start bashing AUD and cause its price to dip? Probably not, because they would be stupid, so why do you do it here? Cryptocurrency is nowhere near dead OBVIOUSLY, would you say Amazon stocks are dead when they double in value in a year? Obviously not, get your perspectives straight before you open your mouth.

The major problem is the incessant spam accounts that are joining. A lot of the low income countries are starting to catch on, and it's becoming a community business in countries like Indonesia, Phillipines and Thailand where there are coordinated efforts to manipulate bounties for personal gain. I personally think that only members and above should be able to participate, as it's quite clear that 90% of new Jr. members are just spamming up the forum.

They are profitable if you do your job and do it correctly. You should be participating in as many bounties as you can, but ensure that you only spend your time working with projects that are extremely strong, because right now it's difficult to raise money due to a lot of FUD in the air surrounding the recent SEC delays and ETF rulings. If you're a shitposter who doesn't produce useful advertising, then you don't deserve any bounty rewards either, so make sure you're actually contributing, rather than just spouting useless trash that doesn't help spread the word.

One word. Simplicity. The Ethereum ERC20 standard is the most well-developed tokenization standard and as such it has the most support, most resource and the most developers. A lot of these ICOs claim they will start on the Ethereum ERC20 network and then switch to their own native blockchain after some time, however few of these swaps have actually taken place.

I've seen a bunch of complete idiots who literally don't do any research into a project before investing. Typically the ICOs that are most successful are the ones that have a real understanding of how to market and acquire investment. Unfortunately some of these projects are also scam ICOs that end up generating a lot of investment and eventually leading to an exit scam.

Just remember the age old proverb, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If they are promising more than 50% returns in a year, be extremely skeptical.

Ethereum has just been getting tanked on lately, really dropping much faster than many thought it would as prince of the cryptos.

Personally I think that it's only a matter of time before it spikes up, and spikes big time. I really think that Ethereum is among the most advanced of any cryptocurrency and is definitely the one blazing the trails in many regards. Right now is definitely a chance to buy, remember that just over 6 months ago ETH was over $1000! All it needs to do is retake that level and you'll see an almost 400% gain!

Altcoins certainly don't look like the strongest picks right now, they are gradually losing steam against Bitcoin as people move their money into the more stable markets.

However if you really want to get into altcoin investing, try to stick with coins in the top 50-100 by market capitalization, you can definitely find some gems in there that have potential to multiply 2-5x in value over the coming months.

Some of the ones I would recommend is IOTA, NEM and Monero, these are all wildly undervalued and can easily multiply relatively quickly if they are adopted for their tech.