The life-time contracts are noob traps. Seriously, one doesn't need to be a mining expert to understand that these life-time contracts aren't viable investment products at all. A little understanding and common sense is all you need.

It's a marketing gimmick that I am not sure of whether or not it's a legal claim to make, but then again, most cloud mining sites are scams that can take everything down today and disappear for ever.

As for the increased minimum withdrawals, that can happen everywhere. Even if you read every line in the TOS of whatever site or service, nowhere do they state that withdrawals are fixed to be a certain amount.

It is big in terms of the overall ratio, but you can save a lot in fees by using the bc1 address format of SegWit. It can save you like 30-40% in fees without doing anything, so isn't that enough reason to upgrade?

I use the Electrum client both on my desktop and smartphone and it works extremely well. Give it a try and see for yourself how much you save in fees compared to legacy format addresses

If you want even cheaper (and faster) transactions, then LN is the right option for you. The only downside for now is the fact that it is very early on and the overall adoption isn't as widespread yet, but we'll get there eventually.

It's not sure yet. The CFTC will not allow them to go live without Bakkt having dealt with the storage of Bitcoin. Bakkt's recents acquisition won't change much about it because not enough time has passed to comfort them.

It's a daring move from ICE to open up, but one that potentially might end badly. I'm sure that this move is the result of the improving market sentiment they want to tap into so that they can ride the bull run up further.

Launching during a bear market with very low demand would make them look like a failure. Interesting to follow for sure.

I find it rather ironic that people have been begging for a bull run all year, and now the price is going up fast they suddenly prefer to see a gradual increase. Not saying you're one of them, but a lot people are like that.

I have noticed the same with crypto related youtubers like sunny decree. This dude talks about how bullish and strong the market is, and when we have gone up he's like the price can go tomorrow bla bla.

There is no shortage of people that are here just to speculate their way up, and I'm afraid that things will go downhill even harder with how bull runs generally attract moms and pops and other gamblers not knowing how markets work.

Since when has anyone here or elsewhere on social media successfully caused the price to dump or pump? Never. If tens of thousands of people calling for a bull run can't even increase the price $1, individuals here can't do shit.

Dumb money reacts to what smart money does. Smart money pumping means dumb money buying and ride the flow of the market, and the same applies to when the price dumps hard.

Most people here aren't spreading FUD, or at least, not intentionally. It's just their ignorance that makes them think/believe a certain scenario will play out the way they think, or that their theories are right.

No country in the world is a cashless society yet, and this probably will take over a decade or more to actually change. It's impossible to shift over a country entirely to digital payment forms.

I find it quite funny how people cheer for a cashless society but don't know what the consequences of such a shift are. I really hope that we'll never reach that state and we always have cash as an alternative option.

The danger is directly the convenience all these centralized digital payment forms provide. Average joes are very simple in that regard--if something works, they'll use it. Easy bait.

I don't think so. These developments are the result of months and months of behind the scene negotiations, hard work, etc. This pretty much means that they started when we were bottoming out.

How much worse can it get? At most we see a sharp selloff taking the price back to $6000 or maybe test the $5000 mark, so what? With the block halving coming up that will prove to be a super entry point.

What we have seen this month is a glimpse of what we can expect moving forward. It's a clear signal that the market sentiment has shifted and the improved charts make institutions like Bitcoin as asset.

It's impossible to demand anything like that from the market. When the price is going up rapidly, people automatically get hyped up and buy in to no longer be the loser that keeps missing out on these rushes.

Another thing is that retailers in general love to buy things that are going up. For them it's literally a matter of Bitcoin going up means it's doing well, where price down means they think it will fail and could even become worthless.

It's completely stupid of course, but that's how they think. We hovered below $4000 for quite some time, which is an indication that retail money wasn't interested. These people are buying as we speak.

How so? People have their lovely Tether and a bunch of other stablecoins to hedge a potential drop in value. I doubt we'll see an effect on the price when they resume operations in full.

I would even like to add that it's unlikely to see people part with their coins at this stage because selling now could just as easily mean that you're missing out on even more profits, which is a factor to take into consideration.

I hope that people rethink why they shouldn't leave their funds on an exchange, especially with how not every exchange handles hack incidents like Binance. If it was an other exchange people had to swallow a loss right now.

Every regulated exchange forms an initial obstacle as far as verification goes, but after that you're good to go. Even some of the current mainstream crypto exchanges take over a week to process verification requests.

They have done $1.6 billion in revenue, which doesn't seem all that unprofessional to me. Too bad exchanges list all types of garbage coins nowadays. All they do is tempt noobs to buy what they shouldn't buy....

I knew Roger was a jerk and a conman, but overcharging innocent people on fees like that is something that once again points how he doesn't want people to enjoy cheap transactions, but to make Bcash look like the 'better' version.

The thing that will result in other payment processors to gain market share is SegWit and LN, both of which BitPay will not use. You only have to use both to be cheaper and more reliable from the fundamental aspect.

Banking aspect is still a thing BitPay has paying off, but it won't take long before others will try to claim their cut of the pie. Markets in general don't let these opportunities open very long, so it's a matter of time before BitPay is pushed back.

Exactly. It's more likely that he had enough funds to last him a long time, therefore didn't mind spending so much time on a project that just as easily could have failed badly.

The fact that the currently ancient satoshi coins haven't been touched at all, also indicates that satoshi isn't and wasn't in need of money (obviously assuming he's still alive and has full access to all the private keys).

Satoshi is such a mysterious entity that people talk and think on his behalf without knowing who he is. Just let satoshi be who he is and focus on your own goals in life. Bitcoin is the tool helping you to achieve them.

I would say that the ratio between winners and losers in legacy markets is similar to the ratio of winners and losers in the crypto market. Retail traders are everywhere and they make the same mistakes that lead to losses.

At the end of the day, you have a 50% chance to make profit if you're flat out gambling, so based on that, it makes sense that the ratios of winners and losers will be similar regardless of the market you are participating in.

People often think the stock market is stable and is easier to trade, but that's not really the case. If it was easy to trade, it wouldn't be profitable anymore because most people would be looking to trade the same events.

How come people don't consider the increase from $4000 to $8000 a bull run? Isn't in legacy market it so that a bull run is an "official" thing the moment prices have gone up like 20% in a certain period of time?

It seems that people have been spoiled to such degree in 2017, that only a 500-1000% increase is seen as a bull run. By the time we hit $20k people will start celebrating the start of the bull market, while the reality is that it likely came to an end.

I really hoped to see the price show a significant multi-day drop, which is what you want to see during a sustainable increase, but this run has gone beyond everything that makes sense. The pump is sweet, the dump will hurt....

People celebrate the demise of altcoins, but what we see right now is just a temporary occurrence.

I'm sure that when Bitcoin starts cooling off, altcoins will pump to extremely overbought levels and decrease Bitcoin's market cap dominance to 50-53% where it hovers around normally. We have seen it happen more than once already.

Another thing is that when Bitcoin's market cap dominance approached the 50% mark not that long ago people said that it was a useless metric, and now it's playing out in Bitcoin's favor it suddenly matters again?

CNBC is a counter indicator. As long as they don't start hyping up the current run on their main channel (which they haven't yet) we're good to go. The moment Brian Kelly starts about how bullish he is, it might be a good time to dump.

That being said, seeing the price fall back to anything above $5000 is still incredibly bullish while the charts in the short term time frame show a massacre. I am ready for it when it happens.

I like how the current run shut up the squad around Tone Vays with their sub $1500 predictions. The most annoying one is Leah Wald. Seriously, what's she doing here? Big mouth but very little exposure to Bitcoin.

Tone & Co are among the most stupid Bitcoin maximalists I have seen so far.

That's an understatement. Bitcoin today from its low to high went up like ~$1200 which is a mad gain. It really looks like $8000 will be cracked in the coming few hours and who knows what's next.

I expected a correction from the $7000 mark with how weak the support was getting, but it got an unexpected boost. I will refrain from making calls because the market shits right in my face due to its current fomo state.

Being a hodler in my case means hodling firmly through good and bad times, and that helps me not selling anything. I however spent a small fraction on Purse this weekend and bought a new HDD with a sweet discount.

Gemini has lately been a subject of discussion when it comes to their fee upgrades that hit the traders there hard. A lot of them have said to look out for a different exchange, and I can't even blame them.

I doubt BitPay will lose sleep over this partnership. BitPay does well over $1 billion in conversions a year, which Coinbase hasn't been able to do since they offered their service to merchants. BitPay has that first mover advantage.

I doubt we'll get to a point where everyone is using a decentralized exchange, because there just isn't a way to make every single coin move back and forth as quickly as it does through a centralized exchange.

I hope that I will be proven wrong and decentralized exchanges turn out to provide a similar level of usability and convenience, but if so, it will take more than a decade for sure.

Building decentralized exchanges is something that doesn't yield anything at this point. Who's funding the best developers in the world to work on something like this when the reward is just respect and recognition?

In crypto money speaks, and when there is no way to get back what you put into whatever project, it very likely won't end well.

I don't recall the exact date, but these bad news events do seem to coincide with a strong increase in the price. It's almost like they carefully plan these attacks on Bitcoin hoping that they can scoop up some cheap coins before the rally.

That being said, I am not seeing 2017 in current rally, more like what we have seen happen in 2015 where the price peaked out at $500 then went down with 40%. It went up just as quick as we have gone up in the more recent weeks.

Currently there is a lot of selling pressure around the $7000 mark and from what I can see, the buy support up there seems to get weaker and weaker. I expect a 10% correction to kick in testing the $6400 mark.