Yet again the focus is on a bull market. I get it that bull markets are important, but what's happening under the hood is just as important. Without Bitcoin there are no crazy bull markets, so people should have a little more understanding.

As for the institutions entering this space, it's such a waste of time waiting for this to happen. We have always pumped hard without them back in the days, and I don't see why we can't do it again without them.

Sure, it's good to see this space become more professional and more liquid, but come on, you won't find out they're in until they announce it themselves, and I don't think they will do that with how thinly traded this market still is.

Is there anything wrong with it? It's widely known that decentralized exchanges aren't offering the usability and convenience people are looking for, so it's normal that the volumes are very low.

I guess the few people who do use decentralized exchanges do that because they don't have a choice or simply don't want to go through KYC/AML measures just to occasionally buy and sell Bitcoin.

Sounds like a whole lot of problems only people buying altcoins go through. I have never had a problem with Bitcoin and that for years straight now. Maybe a good time to reevaluate your altcoin holdings?

Most of the altcoin do somewhat ok in terms of development when the price is booming, but near completely abandoned by the developers during bear markets. I wouldn't want to expose myself to that at all.

Maybe, but NY has always been a problematic state for exchanges, which I expect people from NY to have paid closer attention to, and based on that not leave any funds on an exchange (which you shouldn't do regardless of your state).

I don't care one bit. I like to see more merchant adoption than less, but people just aren't willing enough to spend their coins. Accepting Bitcoin or any other crypto yields more problems than it generates income for you.

Most people who want merchants to accept Bitcoin only want it because they believe the price may pump as result, but never actually spend a satoshi themselves. Just let merchants do whatever they think is right. It's their business.

If Bitcoin was such a great payment method none of the merchants that dropped Bitcoin would have done so. Bitcoin is a horrible payment method. You also have to buy back your coins afterwards. So cool. Not.

I can't blame people for trying to work their way up on the financial ladder. Those who joined this market under $10,000 last year probably thought that it was normal for the price to keep increasing rapidly.

Greed that they very likely never before dealt with suddenly takes them over completely. As long as the price keeps going up they gain confidence and become more greedy, but these pumps don't last endlessly.

The correction that followed afterwards was a shocker to them. For the first time since they entered this market the price didn't do what they wanted it to do, and that continued throughout the whole year of 2018.

Good thing is that going through a bear market makes people stronger and become firmer hodlers. It's a costly mistake, but one that they no longet have to make in the future.

Why will the next block halving be remarkable? It's just so that the block rewards are being cut in half, so technically speaking, the price going up 100% is enough to compensate for it.

People were talking about the block halving even below the $4000 mark, and we are hovering around the $8000 mark right now. In other words, the price has already gone up 100%, so it could very well be that the halving is priced in now.

This doesn't mean we won't go up anymore, but I doubt it's coming from speculation based on the block halving. It will be driven by demand, and eventually fomo kicks in exaggerating the rally to higher levels.

From what I have read, there is no way to send or receive Bitcoin at all.

The way I understand it, it works with what you have sitting in your Gemini account. The POS terminal will present you a QR code to scan, where in the background the converting happens by Gemini according to the paid amount.

This means that you don't have to ask to pay in Bitcoin, and the merchant you are purchasing an item from won't ever find out that Gemini converted Bitcoin for you in the background. They receive fiat as with any other payment.

Even gold doesn't have that much of an impact on the global economy, and that while we're talking about an asset with a market cap of $8 trillion. I don't think Bitcoin will go further than gold in terms of usability.

People in well developed countries are mostly pretty keen on their local fiat currencies because they work exceptionally well. It's close to impossible to dent fiat's supremacy with how its offering more and more convenience.

Bitcoin offers less and less convenience because it just isn't useful as daily form of money, and it's getting more expensive to use year after year due to the increase in adoption.

Don't you like to be offered more time to buy lower? 

I personally doubt we'll break the heavy resistance and will likely be faced with a correction soon, but if we do happen to break through the resistance, nothing prevents the price to pump over the $9000 up to $9500.

From there we have to reevaluate the market conditions, but with the $10,000 as major psychological barrier it's safe to assume that it might form another major point of resistance.

Back in 2018 we also had somewhat of a pump to $10,000 where some exchanges slightly breached that level, but it fell down hard afterwards. This doesn't mean we will exactly repeat what happened, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Or another major move down. I don't really like the lower highs, which some might counter that we also have higher lows, but at this stage I consider it to be more bearish than bullish.

Since when has Bitcoin gone up in one straight line? There has always been a major correction that lasted for about a couple of weeks at least. Right now we only had wicks to the downside, which I don't consider a correction.

I increased my fiat position just over $8000 to be ready to buy the next proper dip. Patience is key here, and that same patience helped me to not rule out a sub $6000 dive last year, and it actually happened.

It really does look easy, but that's always the case in hindsight. I prefer to focus on the mass and their sentiment, because the mass is mostly wrong, so if you counter whatever they do, you'll be doing well over time.

Do you remember what the sentiment was back in 2018 before we broke the $6000 mark? People were overly bullish and expected a bull run to happen before the end of the year, but they got a massive crash instead.

Similarly, people were overly bearish before we pumped to $5000 and we got a massive pump instead. People were throwing around even with sub $1000 predictions due to the hyperwave squad. How wrong can one be....

You can easily break it if they no longer are allowed to make use of Google services, which means that even the open source version of Android has become pretty much useless.

I don't see how their smartphone division can recover from this if it continues for years straight. It's incredibly difficult to create and properly market your own ecosystem with alternative apps and whatnot.

It might stimulate non reversible cross border payments through Bitcoin, which is a big deal. Countries in trade war use their financial systems to exercise control over money flows they don't like and censor them at will.

Yup. Technically speaking, even if one manages to sign from the genesis block, it still doesn't mean it's actually satoshi. It could be a thief that stole the key, or a rogue government that seized it.

The only thing that makes satoshi somewhat interesting is his immense Bitcoin wealth, but with all due respect, other than that there isn't much that anyone should care about. He's not a Bitcoin developer anymore and never will be.

Close minded people maybe. They are keptical about anything that doesn't fit in their ideal world, and we have seen how gold bugs still can't fathom the idea of why Bitcoin can and already works as gold.

I have always been open to changes and improvements, and this is how it should be. I immediately saw value in Bitcoin because of how it allowed me to store value outside the legacy banking system that's corrupted to its core.

Gold allows you to do the same, but it lags behind in almost every possible way when you put it against Bitcoin. Bitcoin picks up where gold stopped providing usefulness as money in the current digital age.

I don't think that's possible since the funds are locked up in pre-funded channels. Most people don't have their own LN so they have to do a main chain withdrawal to actually own the coins.

Considering that it in most cases only concerns $5-$10 amounts there isn't much of a risk, especially not when you frequently cash out. I'm using it too and it works extremely well, absolutely love it.

The highest ever fee I had to pay was 10 satoshis due to the various hops, which compared to the main chain fees is still an absolute joke. Tippin has done a lot to make LN popular, respect for that.

It doesn't matter who he is. It feels good to see that Roger Ver in Craig has someone even worse to worry about. Whatever Roger and his fellow big blockers did to Bitcoin is now done to Bcash.

BTC.com and BTC.TOP pools had to obtain the majority of the hashrate in order to deal with a miner that was trying to gain access to coins that weren't possible to spend before the hard fork like a week ago.

Who do you think were the attackers? Most likely CoinGeek and nChain. They own enough hashrate to attack a minority chain such as the one of Bcash, and they aren't done yet.

Not sure what coin(s) you tried to withdraw, but 3 days ago the Bitcoin withdrawal option was working just fine, so did it the days after. Maybe you tried to withdraw an altcoin with network issues, which is more likely.

It's not a misconception. People rightfully believe that it can cause the price to go down, and it briefly did till people realized that losing 7000BTC isn't all that bad with how these coins are taken out of circulation.

If you take that into consideration, and the fact that safu has the funds to fill up the gap, there was no longer an obstacle for traders and investors to worry about. I do wonder though, how much is left in the safu fund?

$9000 is such a non level, just like anything else below the $10,000 mark. Hoping for $9000 is hoping for the price to increase just over 10%, which is peanuts and not worth moving for unless you're a trader.

Funny thing is that CNBC has been quite bullish lately and the price hasn't taken a proper dive yet. They're either rightfully bullish or the correction still has to come. I'm on the side of those who are looking for a correction.

Overall, the market looks a bit exhausted, but that may just as easily be a consolidation phase, so we'll see how it goes, but the fact that we haven't had one single correction yet definitely indicates a strong bullish momentum.

The further we progress in time, the more of a subject satoshi becomes because of his gigantic coin stack. At one point satoshi (assuming it's an individual) will very likely become the wealthiest person in the world.

Right now the satoshi coins are worth a pretty ~$6 billion, which at the 2017 peak was ~$17 billion. That's a staggering amount to have it sit in addresses that haven't ever been touched.

If satoshi no longer has the ability access his coins for whatever reason, we can only thank him for donating more scarcity to an asset that is already super scarce. We're lucky to be part of this revolution, people.

News outlets certainly like to spice up their headlines. I'm not sure what the point is of referring to this as a rival for Bitcoin when it concerns a stablecoin. It will rival Bitcoin in the way that it offers more stability? 

In all seriousness, if this stablecoin is free to transfer from exchange to exchange without KYC bullshit, it will prop up the price of Bitcoin instead of harming it, because that's what every single stablecoin has done so far.

Maybe that this stablecoin will be able to usurp a significant enough chunk of Tether's market share. We'll see how it goes, but it will do more good than harm for Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptos.