I'm glad that you point out the growth of acceptance of LN, because most people only pay attention to the growth in the price. Price increases and development don't go well together.

Most of the development takes place in times with little to no positive price movements, which is why I'm happy that the bear market makes people aware of what really matters and keeps the gamblers away for a while.

I'm sure that when we're a year or two away from now and still haven't upgraded to LN, people will skip your site or service, especially with how the main chain fees by that time will be even higher.

For micro payments I use LN. I don't see much point in using an altcoin that I can't spend anywhere just to save a few pennies. By using Bitcoin you pay for security and wide level acceptance at the same time.

Everyone in crypto will accept my Bitcoin payments. Way less will accept a top 10 altcoin, and orders of magnitude less people will accept payment in an altcoin with a sub $1 billion market cap.

When exchanges roll out support for LN things will become even worse for altcoins. I'm not saying they will become worthless, but certainly less in demand because they can't compete based on low fees anymore.

I'm sure that the farms that sold their hardware at dirt cheap rates seriously regret having done so. One miner's loss is another miner's gain. This just shows how poorly managed some of the operations have been.

If you fill up your buffers so that you can fill gaps in less profitable months, you can at least keep mining, but nope, greed makes people reckless and they paid the price for it. This is a brutal industry, for spot investors and miners.

The only downside is that Bitmain will get more orders in an use their profits against the coin that allows them to make all this money. Competition in this field hasn't really seen much of an boost. It's still Bitmain being the leader.

I start to feel sorry for Peter. If you can't admit that Bitcoin throughout the years has proven your predictions wrong, something is wrong with you. He reminds me of some of the more blindfolded Bitcoin maximalists.

Important point is that gold doesn't appeal to people as much as it did before. You're not really booking any progress in terms of hedging fiat's inflation either. It just sits there struggling with that important $1300 level.

I rather have a "false" rally than an asset that hardly moves.

You seem rather optimistic about something we shouldn't be so optimistic about. Nuclear waste isn't going to miraculously vanish. It's a concern for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years after.

I doubt it, but even if so, Bitcoin mining isn't happening in one centralized spot that you can provide energy for from one single nuclear plant. You need a lot of these nuclear plants around the world the way mining is distributed.

Things aren't as easy as they may seem when it comes to energy consumption. You can't possibly pool the entire network together with one energy source. It makes you an easy target for governments too.

You're not far off. Both are looking for bad publicity because for them that's the only way to be interesting enough for people to follow, and bad publicity is still good publicity for these con artists.

It would help if people on social media and news outlets just stopped covering them, because the sooner they stop being relevant, the less incentive there is for them to continue being con artists and jerks at the same time.

McAfee hasn't ever been a favorite character of mine, but I always had some degree of respect for him, but after promoting scam ICOs I lost the last bit of respect and hope he pays for it one day.

It's pointless to wait for a correction. It will happen when no one expects it to happen. People were waiting for a bull run, but it didn't happen. The bull run happened when people somewhat gave up on it and expected a slow year.

We haven't seen much of the crazy fomo yet, so it could very well be that the correction will kick in once we're peaking in field. The more positive the sentiment is, the harder we crash.

The only thing is that we don't know from what level we will start correcting, and what the bottom is. It might very well be that a relatively minor correction 10-20% is all we can expect with the demand popping on all sides.

I would say that it's a better plan to start paper trading before you start risking your hard earned money. If paper trading doesn't work out for you, then you most likely have to see that as a sign to stay far away from trading.

I know that there is a difference psychologically between paper trading and real trading in terms of risk taking, but the general aspect of it is still the same. I have done it myself too, and it confirmed what I thought, I suck at day trading.

Right now I'm just doing some buying low selling high, which could either take a day to profit, or months in some cases. My goal is to profit in the most sustainable possible way, and not to profit in the fastest possible way.

Bitfinex has been an exchange to avoid for a couple of years now, so you're indeed better off to use Binance. Good thing is that the other stablecoins there start to pick up in popularity, which means more volume and liquidity.

I would say that the alternative stablecoin pairs against Bitcoin offer enough liquidity for most people by now. I doubt that there are that many people here needing millions in liquidity on both sides of the order book.

I actually find it more impressive that I can receive money with Bitcoin without opening an account somewhere that requires ID verification and whatnot. All you need is to install an app or generate a paper wallet online.

Sure, you need to watch out for fake wallets and fake sites, but with a little research you can easily avoid them. This is power to the people and there is literally no one that can take your money from you if funds are kept secure.

I actually gave a few family members of mine some Bitcoin earlier this year and they were amazed at how easy it was to avoid dealing with centralized rip-off services such as PayPal.

This puts a smile on my face thinking about it again.

I like Peter Schiff's stance on the economy in general and the money printing schemes of central banks, but his anti Bitcoin attitude is based largely on being a salty gold bug because Bitcoin threatens his wealth that largely consists of gold.

It's not healthy to rehash the same non arguments, which he has been doing even when Bitcoin's price hovered around the $100 mark. Just look at his Twitter account, it's being flooded with Bitcoiners pointing him at exactly that.

I'm not anti gold, and I don't see why both Bitcoin and gold can't coexist, but him not allocating a portion of his holdings to Bitcoin is the biggest mistake of his life. Trash talking Bitcoin since it was $100 and being wrong all the time must hurt....

You have been reading too many bitcoin dot com articles. Bitcoin despite all the problems people think it struggles with, has absorbed most of the user adoption in crypto, and this is just one aspect of it.

Another aspect to focus on is the number of active addresses that keeps going up consistently, while most other coins haven't seen much of an increase in that field at all.

Another thing is the daily value that moves back and forth on-chain. It keeps going up while altcoins remain stagnant. Bitcoin by far isn't perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as people think it is.

I doubt many have been lucky enough to buy. Most orders in that book must have been spoof orders (orders being withdrawn the moment the price comes near them), which is why the price went down that much.

If there was any form of real liquidity in that pair, it would have dropped to a few thousands at its lowest. This is a good time for Kraken to look into who's spoofing its books to prevent this from happening again. This is bad marketing.

Binance doesn't need to market itself anymore, people everywhere on social media are doing the work for them, and that for free!

I too have to recommend Binance as main exchange for crypto trading, while an exchange as Coinbase Pro is a good platform to safely buy the crypto that you want, and has lower fees than Coinbase's regular platform.

Noob exchanges such as Yobit, HitBTC and Cryptopia should be avoided at all cost. They may have a lot of very low valued altcoins listed, but the risk of account closure and fund freezing is too high to consider these good options.

I'm talking about dollar cost averaging, not buying in big. I have done my main buying part below $4000 already, but it sucks dollar cost averaging at these prices. I want the most out of my fiat, not less.  

Who is Lucius? Every random forum member is just guessing. It could go to $20k or plummet back to $6000 in the coming months. No one expected the price to touch $9000 so soon.

Before the pump people thought that 2019 would be a slow year and $5000 before the end of the year would be a great price, but we have been generously rewarded. This market is full of surprises.

I like that. I am hoping for a massive crash so I can buy more BTC for the same amount of fiat. The price pumping has made me stop dollar cost averaging for a while now, so I have some fiat that wants to be put to work.

The dump yesterday from $9000 to $8000 was a confirmation that we're in an ascending triangle which has a bias to the upside when breaking out, so I'm not very confident in a massive crash.

Last year people were a fool to hodl their coins while this year people are a fool for selling their coins. Taking profits at $5000 was a mistake, $6000, $7000 and maybe even the $8000 mark. We'll see where it goes.

That's a good thing at the end of the day. If governments aren't chasing after mixers, and shutting down websites, there will be no progress, which means that you're by far not as "anonymous" as you think you are.

I'm obviously not cheering for mixing sites to be taken down, but this will help the existing ones to become better and less vulnerable. It's a massive win for the user looking to enjoy more privacy.

I'm not exactly sure yet if the blacklist feature is something I am comfortable with because I am against blacklisting in general because Bitcoin is meant to counter that, but it's an interesting feature on paper nonetheless.

From what I have read, taxation and freedom to operate an IEO scheme is what really stands out, and it makes perfect sense. They're very aggressive in their way of operating, which is quite interesting actually.

It wouldn't surprise me if Binance is trying to accumulate as much profit as possible before governments really starts cracking down on them, and they slowly might convert BNB to BTC to lock in the profits for ever.

BNB could become worthless would governments actively chase after them, but BTC not, so another thing that makes sense here. Overall, it's a great exchange but also somewhat of a ticking time bomb.

These Coinstar machines are pretty neat. I wish we had these ATMs here in Europe. Instead of spending low value paper notes on things I don't need I can buy Bitcoin with it instead.

The only thing I can see become a factor to take into consideration are the fees that keep going up. If people think we topped out at $1-$3 in fees, then wait for when the real fomo starts. +$10 fees will be back.

News outlets are lazy. If they can just vaguely describe how the market has changed to the level where the elite is buying Bitcoin, that's enough for average joes to start getting excited.

I from time to time watch YouTube videos where they basically cover news articles. While we keep trashing these articles, they consider everything to be very bullish without questioning the legitimacy or sources.

I guess that news outlets found the perfect balance in the way they release their articles and the amount of effort that goes in creating them. If the clicks are piling up, the article is a success.