His time will run out when nChain's financial resources are exhausted, because once CSW can't fund money hungry miners who don't mind fucking up another chain, they'll move back to BTC because it's more profitable to mine.

The funny thing here is that both nChain and CoinGeek depend on Bitmain because that's where they bought their gear from. It will be interesting to see if Jihan ends up blocking them from buying gear in the future.

If I was an investor I wouldn't even think about touching any of this garbage, but then again, this space is all about reckless investments so I'm not surprised that others don't give a shizzle. All that matters are cold hard profits.

For desktop users it requires some level of effort, but most competent mobile wallet clients easily let you scan the QR code and clear the payment. I personally use the Electrum mobile wallet and it actually works well.

I prefer to not use BitPay, but some sites don't offer any payment options that are viable for me, because I'm not using a credit card or PayPal. I'm forced to stick with BitPay until these sites switch to Coinbase or something else.

It actually surprises me that merchants still choose BitPay as their main gateway. Coinbase has a greater coin selection it allows merchants to accept, which instantly translates into more potential income.

Banking can't be used as an excuse since Coinbase has that side covered way better than BitPay does.

How are you so sure? It's not over until we actually break through at least the more recent lower highs, because there simply isn't anything that guarantees that the price won't be going down further in the coming months.

I am a bit more conservative when it comes to the bear market. $10,000 is for me the level to break in order to signal that the market has actually turned bullish, because that level is psychologically extremely important for the sentiment.

I expect the market to slowly pick up pace in the second half of 2019 with how the speculation around the block halving is going to be the price driver, which has been the only event consistently driving the price up throughout the last years.

It's not as bad as it looks nowadays. China's economic dominance in the mining industry is shrinking day by day with how miners are heading out before they are forced to head out or to stop mining entirely.

It's impossible to know how much of Bitcoin's current hashrate is still coming from China, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's around or even less than 50%. Scandinavian countries are quickly catching up.

People wrongly assume that pools are one entity, which isn't the case at all. Most of the pools you see consist of individual miners for the most part, and these miners can point their hashrate to any other pool if they so wish.

I honestly wouldn't risk any amount on shorting something that seems to be so easy and profitable to do. You know what they usually say in these cases: when things look too good to be true, they mostly are.

That's what I believe will happen. Don't forget that Bitmain holds +1 million BCH, which basically means that they have no other choice but to pump up the price. They have to protect the value of their massive holdings.

Another point is that protecting the value of their holdings also means that regulators won't use that against them to entirely reject their IPO plans. In other words, there is a lot to lose for Bitmain.

Binance fled to Malta not that long ago, and for the time being they are safe in my book. The only thing I expect them to do in the near future is to start rejecting US citizens in an attempt to shake off the US authorities.

Some of the largest exchanges have already been doing so for quite a while now, and it's the safest possible move because of how active the US authorities have been and will be getting in the coming years.

I hope that whenever Binance decides to do anything that would require them to terminate user accounts, that they give them enough time to withdraw their funds without subjecting them to ridiculous verification steps.

If Coinbase allows people to withdraw their funds without any hassle prior to their account termination, other exchanges should be able to do the same.

Obviously, that's not what everyone wants, because there simply isn't a way for everyone to profit. People need to stop acting like a bunch of empty headed chickens, especially here in the crypto world.

We're at a point at which people know that they pump money into a scam, but they wrongly assume that they can walk out with profits before the scheme implodes, which is ridiculous.

The moment people realize that they are about to lose their money they start complaining and call out whatever they invested in for being a scam. Does that make sense? These people don't have the right to complain at all.

If you're out to gamble, accept that you can lose.

Bitcoin forced legacy institutions to look into the blockchain as a whole to get the efficiency and lower operational costs they badly need, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'll see them dig into Bitcoin as well.

If people are lucky, and their banks allow them to enjoy the advantages of a blockchain, they'll settle with that. The average person doesn't care about how things happen as long as they happen and offer the convenience they want.

Bitcoin needs it rise out of its speculative phase to be used as it should be used, and I think it will still take like a couple of years at minimum, especially when LN isn't ready yet to be safely used by the masses.

I still have a dozen of old 330MHS USB block erupters. It was a mini project meant to bring in passive income, but it turned out to be an utter waste of time and resources. I'm glad that I quickly noticed how futile home Bitcoin mining is.

I don't think there is much to worry about as long as the main incentive is to keep Bitcoin unharmed to generate the best possible mining returns. It has been a successful business model for years and I don't see it change.

I am actually happy to see that Bitmain's dominance as main ASIC manufacturer is falling continuously with how other players have noticed how profitable it actually is to do the same, and that with faster and cheaper products.

No wonder that EOS is the first ranked, that platform, blockchain, server operated project (what is it?) allows transactions to be reversed and balances to be put on hold upon BP agreement, which is the wet dream of any government.

I know that most of the get rich quick rookies don't care as long as they can get their EOS airdrops, but eventually it will hit them in their face. It can't continue as people want endlessly because there will be a moment the fun part in crypto is over.

I am not anti altcoins at all, and while there admittedly are some decent ones in this industry, I never had any desire to use them. I go straight to the source because Bitcoin has the best shot at surviving the massacre that will happen eventually.

As long as people dollar cost average their entry points, it doesn't matter at what price they buy.

Even if you bought near the all time high levels last year, if you bought the market down to where we are today, your break-even point is probably around $10,000 now, and will continue to drop as you accumulate below $7000.

I get it that people might not have all that much confidence in the market right now, but I would do everything I can to not make myself wait for the price to reach +$18,000 again to break-even. It's called torture.

It might take a few more years before the price breaks through its previous high, and when that happens you haven't achieved anything. If you buy now you'll be able to profit by the time, isn't that a solid deal?

I look forward to see what Namecheap comes up with, because they usually have pretty sick deals when it comes to hosting packages, and dedicated servers, and I might scoop up some $0.99 .coms if they don't run out instantly.

Everything better than cheating local stores with their fake discounts. They usually increase their prices in the runup to these special sale days, then act like they took like 25% off the price while you pay the price of 2 months ago.

Too bad we're in a bear market right now, otherwise people would spend Bitcoin left and right to work around taxation legally, because spending Bitcoin and other crypto currencies isn't subject to taxation in most countries.

The only reason Poloniex surpassed Bittrex in terms of volumes is because of the BCH fork drama. They run the standard BCH pair, and BCHABC BCHSV futures pairs, which automatically leads to higher volumes.

Considering that these futures pairs require regulatory approval, I wonder how they managed to get them up and running this fast. People might not see it as such, but it is in fact one of the most regulated platforms in the space.

The thing with Poloniex is that half of its users never had a problem to begin with, and the other half continuously experiences stuck withdrawals, spontaneous verification requests, blocked accounts, and so forth.

It makes me wonder though, who's there to blame? What is the half that never experiences any problems doing different from the rest?

CZ knows how to conduct business well. All the coins they listed for free (we have only his word to believe) in the more recent months have generated very high volumes, which obviously translates into high fee income.

He uses the market in his advantage, regardless of what way it goes. Binance literally extorted ICOs because of the insane amounts they managed to raise. Now the ICO hype is over, he shifted his business model.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with what he does, I even think he's doing a fantastic job operating Binance the way an exchange should be operated, but my only point is that not everything he is doing is done out of goodwill.

Behind his innocent looking appearance hides a firm business mind. He's a billionaire for a reason.

Schnorr is quite far away and doesn't translate into much of an advantage if you don't consolidate multiple inputs. At best it will result in a slight throughput increase, but that advantage is gone quickly with more demand for block space.

LN is far away from becoming rookie friendly, so that's not much we can do with right now. What we do have right now is SegWit, and there is no way the big block camp is going to change anything about their anti SegWit campaign.

This isn't 2016/2017 anymore. We're dealing with way more entities all trying to use the network at the same time. One spark causing the market to bounce up and down again will result in the fees to explode.

It's not about being pessimistic, but more realistic.

That's right. If we didn't have centralized platforms emerge, how would people else get into Bitcoin? The more of these platforms emerge, the better it is because more competition in the space leads to better and cheaper services.

From there people can always have their coins be sent to the wallet they own the keys of. There are so many solid mobile wallet clients available that you don't have any excuse to point at for not taking care of your own keys.

Another factor that will continue to stimulate people to not store their coins on exchanges and online wallet services, is how they keep getting hacked. The only way to avoid losing coins is to avoid using these centralized platforms as a wallet.

Without the centralized crypto economy growing it would stay a niche for ever. Don't forget that.

The thing is that most people only feel that they gained something from their investment when they actually convert it to fiat. Only when they get rid of their bias towards fiat they can keep hodling endlessly.

What I do is simply convert 10% of my monthly income to Bitcoin, and transfer another 10% in fiat to my savings account. That way I don't face situations where I have to convert my coins to fiat. If I need money, it's in my savings account.

I kept it up for almost 2 years now, and I'm sure that I can continue doing this for many more years to come. If you have your priorities in order, you'll be fine. It doesn't even have to be 10% like me, it can be any percentage that works for you.

Smart thinking. I'm also happy that I have the opportunity to still buy my coins below the $7000 mark, because I'm also dealing with the Euro that lost a large chunk of its value against the Dollar.

A lower Bitcoin price means that the lower Euro to Dollar rate isn't affecting me all that much. On the other hand, I can also understand those who bought way higher, because all they can think about is the price to go up.

I don't want to see anyone lose money, but this isn't a game at the end of the day. People are responsible for their own actions. People don't realize it yet, but this bear market will turn them into the next firm hodlers.

At some point the base block size needs to be increased, because we're nearing a point at which we're exhausting all the voluntary options to better utilize the current block space, and I'm sure that the next bull run is that deadline.

SegWit won't ever be globally utilized with how the big block camp controls such a large percentage of the ecosystem, that we should be happy with even 60% support, because there simply isn't much more to gain.

LN will take some time to be user friendly and safe enough for everyone to use. It might even take 12-24 months from where we are today. That's why I seriously hope to not face another bull run any time soon.

It's almost impossible to keep up with how news outlets either fail to get the proper context of the original releases translated to English, or they on purposely try to deceive their readers. It may even be a mixture of both.

News outlets don't care about how trashy their articles covering these subjects are, because most of their readers have no way to actually fact check what they read, nor the time and will.

I'm glad that the market doesn't seem to care about China anymore, so whatever the nonsense is these news outlets come up with, it won't affect the market. It took a while to reach this state, but it tremendously helped the market forward.

The less China the better.