As long as people only use Bitcoin as store of value and an investment tool, banks and governments don't see it as competition, therefore they will tolerate it to some degree and I think we should be happy with that.

I strongly believe that if people would use Bitcoin as a currency, and it also scaled to onboard hundreds of millions of people, governments would have gone full nuts against it.

Fiat as stable token and crypto will harmoniously complement each other. Bitcoin doesn't scale and probably never will to the aforementioned degree. We need something else as day to day currency.

It definitely helps, but we're at a stage where more Bitcoin is being mined than lost, while that at the very beginning might have been different when things were still very experimental.

Medium term speaking, when the bear market kicks in, it doesn't matter how many coins have been lost, because due to the lack of liquidity in the spot market the price will be sold down effortlessly.

People buy what they see pump, and sell what they see go down, regardless of how strong the fundamentals are. Irrational markets have brutally rekt even the best investors in the world, even Warren Buffett with a few of his investments.

It's because the mass doesn't know how to seperate poor and biased journalism from ubiased quality journalism. Most news outlets target the mass and adjust their content so it's easy to understand and look trustworthy.

People above what we would refer to as the average joe category are doing their own research, where they are much closer to the source (and thus the truth) than all these copy and paste news outlets will ever be.

Good thing is that most people who are here for the right reasons quickly figure out how bad the journalism is in the crypto space. The rest will likely get rekt and exit for ever, so the space will clean itself if you give it enough time.

Improvements?

Ethereum all time high $1400 versus $270 current price.

XRP all time high $3.7 versus $0.43 current price.

Bcash all time high $4000 versus $410 current price.

Litecoin did better, but that only because of the block halving that's going to take place in less than two months. I'm sure that without the block halving it would be hovering around the $50 mark still.

Bitcoin is where all the money is going into and with the block halving being so far away still, I doubt we'll see altcoins make a move out of their current position, and then I'm not even talking about their poor BTC ratio.

People often think that when altcoins have gone down a lot that they will have to recover sooner than later, but altcoins are known to go down well beyond what you consider fair or oversold.

I don't think the right course of action is to see centralized exchanges set up decentralized exchanges, because it counters their main business and for that reason will end up being similar to BinanceDEX.

People have been hyping up Binance DEX for a long time now (very likely because they own BNB and think it will go up), but for people watching from a distance not being biased it's clear that it isn't a decentralized exchange at all.

If decentralized exchanges will be a thing of the future, the last thing we need is to have centralized exchanges get into it. The sole reason decentralized exchanges are needed is because to no longer deal with them.

I doubt any Russian bill (positive or negative) will have an effect on crypto at all. If the market cared about Russia it would have reacted before they started going back and forth to end up not doing anything at all.

It really seems to me that Russia doesn't want to force through regulations in the quickest way, but prefers to exploit the grey areas to selectively attack anybody who's running a crypto related business or project.

This is about Tom Lee, the co founder of Fundstrat. The Lee you are referring to is Charlie Lee. Tom Lee has been making predictions for nearly two years now, so from there it's not surprising he's still doing it.

Tom Lee doesn't seem to care about being right or wrong, because if he did, he would stop after being wrong for almost an entire year. He must have an elephant skin by now with how the whole crypto community roasted him.

I doubt that. The position in Bitcoin of people is either too insignificant, or most of them won't be able to resist the temptation of cashing out profits when they are up like 25-50%. Only those with the hodl mentality will make killer gains.

The block halving is an event that has proven to steer up the price before and after, and that's what people are trying to buy into. There aren't many events that are bullish and guaranteed to happen like the block halving.

This Libra coin fueling Bitcoin nonsense has just one purpose, which is to make Libra look more relevant and potentially tempt people to buy into their stock, which has seen a 5% increase in the last 5 days, so it might work for them.

First it was JPMs coin that was super bullish for Bitcoin, and now it's Libra coin. What's next? I knew news sites such as CNBC and Bloomberg were poor with their crypto reports, but they managed to sink even deeper....

How do you see this work out? It's not that every person who switches to your ideal decentralized world is on the same thinking level as you are. Nothing changes the fact that we're still working with people.

Working with people means that there are different agendas to follow, and we to some degree have seen that happen in crypto already. Aside from being your own bank I don't think we will actually benefit much from decentralization.

The thing with decentralization is that it (for now at least) can't compete with centralized entities providing a service people consider useful to them. I haven't seen any development after Bitcoin yet that boosts my confidence in decentralization.

I'm actually pretty happy with where we are right now. My goal was to break through the $6000 mark before the end of the year, and that's exactly what we have done. I consider every price above $6000 a bonus.

I rather see the market consolidate for the rest of the year so I can accumulate in a calmer market, but that's just me being selfish here. Our fiat currencies have taken a hit and continue to buy us less satoshis week after week.

I would increase the blocksize and while we're at it, try to push Schnorr through as well (if it was ready to be implemented). Segwit's block weight hasn't yielded much of an advantage so a base block increase is needed.

I would say a 3MB base block size would be sufficient to onboard more users. I'm not going higher than that because we shouldn't forget that this isn't a toy like Bcash and the rest of the scam forks are. 3MB + LN will do it.

Currently Bitcoin isn't growing that rapidly anymore when it comes to processing more transactions on a daily basis and that's because of the 1MB base limit. Segwit adoption isn't going anywhere with toxic entities blocking adoption.

It will depend on how people swallow the increasing level of KYC and AML policies, because if people continue to not give a damn it's going to be hard for decentralized exchanges to actually gain ground.

We're already at a point where people blindly hand over their personal information and scans of their government issued ID and passport to ICOs just so that they can participate in the crowd sale stage, which is mind boggling.

I really hope that it will change eventually, but thus far we haven't seen much of an indication that people demand a change unfortunately. It has always been greed over security for most people.

Fair point. Gold's market is in the top 5 of most liquid markets in the world, while Bitcoin's market wouldn't even make it to the top 50, or maybe not even top 100 at current stage.

Gold's market is also much more centralized where only a few players offer access to the order books, while Bitcoin's market consists of dozens of big exchanges and hundreds of smaller ones, each operating their own order book.

I'm sure that nobody will complain about the massive difference in size as long as the price keeps doing what it has been doing for nearly a decade. With time the liquidity difference will no longer be as massive as it is today.

Maybe on a very volatile day or when a coin is bouncing up and down within a firm range. I can't think of any trader who is able to consistently profit even 1% per day. It may sound like peanuts, but you'll know it isn't when you try it yourself.

Even the best traders end their daily trading sessions with a loss from time to time. It's impossible to book consistent results in a market being this irrational. Luck is never a reliable factor. It runs out eventually with severe losses as result.

Don't believe people on social media flexing with their imaginary profits. Most of them tend to sell signals as well. If their trades were so profitable as they make it seem, they wouldn't bother to sell you signals.

If you think he meant it you're probably just as far gone as he is. McAfee has already denied having made predictions in the past, where he even claimed that it were imposters having made these predictions.

I honestly believe that the best way to deal with this market is to at least hodl until we're close to the $20k mark, or until the block halving takes place (whichever comes first).

People securing profits hoping to buy back 25-30% lower have been doing bad because the correction they have been waiting for didn't happen. It's always in hindsight that people regret not having held longer. Don't make that mistake again.

In the last couple of years there has been a massive influx of crypto related influencers on social media monetizing their content to bank on the booming crypto market, and quite a few of them are doing pretty well.

I haven't seen other industries where social media influencers on a larger scale do well. Usually only a few become very large and the rest lags behind to eventually give up because it's no longer worth their time.

Crypto has truly opened the door to people from every part of the world and every financial class. At this stage even those who outside crypto don't stand a chance to make a good living still manage to grow here creating content.

I don't even think that will affect Bitcoin's price. It's easy to link whatever problem in the world to an increase in Bitcoin's price, but it's impossible to actually prove that the problem you think helped Bitcoin increase actually is responsible for that.

I remember reading about how back in 2013 Bitcoin's pump to over $200 was caused by the problems in Cyprus, while that most likely wasn't the case at all. Most average people there probably didn't even know what Bitcoin was.

The thing with crypto related news outlets is that they always try to make it seem like people in whatever shaky country are using Bitcoin or crypto, but most of them obviously aren't. They have other problems on their mind.

It's so unfortunate that even more entities will be able to short without actually owning the asset. Good thing is that Bitcoin is so scarce that at this stage it doesn't matter yet, but eventually it will.

Gold has been suffering from these cash settled products for years now. The ratios between spot and paper gold trading are so far apart that it has become a toy for speculators.

It would be a healthy development if these cash settled products would have an actual coin backed product on the other side, but I'm not seeing it happen with how far Bakkt and ETFs are.

Be careful what you wish for because this might also be the next major push for the scammers behind BSV. nChain and CoinGeek are just as toxic and influential because that's where most of the capital comes from.

Craig is a master at making every type of publicity work out well for him, and news outlets happily contribute to that by releasing plenty of articles that generate tons of clicks.

One way or another, people love to read about Craig, regardless of how much they dislike him. He grew from nothing to something by being who he is, an evil minded con artists whoring for publicity.

Libra isn't a Bitcoin rival because it's mimicking fiat but in stablecoin form. It's more a rival to PayPal & Co, which they know and for that reason pais $10 million to be a validator of the Libra network.

I think this could potentially be something that will also rival XRP. I don't see why banks and other institutions wouldn't pick Libra over what XRP does. It has way more exposure and potential in my opinion, so we'll see how it goes.

Ethereum just like Bitcoin doesn't have anything to worry about. Binance chain is the biggest threat to Ethereum and all other smart contract platforms, but they first need to overcome their US exit.