In general, it's all very short term minded. The main purpose of these features is to make people buy and hodl their coins because it can do more than just go up in value. Great for those behind the projects, not so much for you.

I can't think of any legit profitable platform that has been worth it over a longer period of time. The more legit a platform is, the lower the rewards generally are. Easy money doesn't exist, especially not without there being a catch.

I personally would put some thought into diversification of my fiat holdings. During a recession the most desirable asset is fiat---which people need to pay their bills, especially if they end up losing their job.

The most speculative assets will be sold off first, which will apply to Bitcoin just as much as it does to stocks. I'm sure that even gold will not come out well with how much speculative money floats through its derivatives market.

Fiat is what you want to have during a recession. Don't let your hate or dislike for fiat make you not hoard more of it when you see the first signs of a looming recession (signs which I believe we have seen already).

Not likely. It's so funny how people always behave the same---we have gone through a major correction in the last months, but every minor increase (such as today) makes people regain their confidence in the market.

Yesterday people were overly bearish, today people are overly bullish. Make sure to keep an eye on the moving averages to see where we close today. No bullish close means that it isn't likely going to be followed up by more increases.

Don't pay attention to perma bulls who always rehash the same bull crap narrative---people need to be made aware of the different phases in a market, and that it doesn't always look rosy in the short to mid term.

How about selling to secure profits? Or selling out of fear? Regardless of how low people consider certain price levels to be, there will always be sellers selling because of the aforementioned reasons.

We went from $20k to $3k last year, and each time the price went down by $1k people were wondering how there can still be sellers even so far below the all time high. $3k turned out to be a level with more buyers than sellers.

There is no underlying value the crypto market participants will respect like what happens with stocks for example---crypto will always be sold off or bought up lower/higher than what people think makes sense.

As long as charities accept Bitcoin directly it is an extremely powerful tool, but when they use third party payment processors things will be different, especially after what happened with BitPay.

The main reason for them to accept Bitcoin through a payment processor is because they are in need of fiat. When they accept Bitcoin directly they need local buyers to sell to if they want to liquidate their donations.

I doubt registered/legal charities will bother without a payment processor. Just imagine the hundreds or thousands of inputs they have to consolidate would they accept Bitcoin themselves....

I actually bought most of my Ethereum largely for the purpose of staking them. I however don't think stakers will end up generating a ton of profit as you say, but just enough to make people sit on their coins and not sell them.

Time will tell how long I will keep holding them, but I like the idea of having a passive income stream. This is what a lot of people are after and therefore invest in a wide variety of scams where they lose their money.

I am not entirely confident in the shift from POW to staking because it's not as easy as people think it is, and there are a lot of other incentives that come into play. I would say that the odds of seeing Ethereum staking are about 50%.

People have been pointing at signs of altcoin recovery this whole year and none of them have done much other than go down. BNB has been somewhat of an exception, but it has been beaten down too lately.

It makes much more sense to let the market bottom out before being bullish.... when Bitcoin takes another dump we're back to square one. Great time for satoshi stackers, not so much for get rich quick noobs. Accept that.

Limited supply makes it easier for Bitcoin to be used as a ponzi or pump and dump scheme---the distribution of coins is so poorly regulated due to the early adopter advantage, that it made a few people very wealthy.

New market entrants today are buying up the bags of the early adopters who are looking for that liquidity to enter so that they can cash out. I'm definitely not saying that Bitcoin is a scheme, but it happens organically. No one hodls endlessly.

Even a lot of the people who are waiting for $100k will do the same. Not many will keep their current exposure to Bitcoin for ever because they want to reap the fruits of their confidence in Bitcoin eventually.

Easy way to make yourself understand that is to ask yourself why these companies are selling profitable contracts.... it literally makes zero sense and for that reason should make you avoid them.

The main reason why cloud mining is still a thing today is because of all the newbies entering crypto. They don't know what we know, which is that it is a scam only profitable to those selling these contracts.

It's important to keep telling newbies to avoid investing in them, which seems to be the case on this forum. Every newbie we can warn early enough means less money flowing into the pockets of scammers.

It's an interesting matter because there are various definitions of mass adoption. I think the mass adoption people here focus on, which is to have billions of people use crypto every day, will never be happening.

Crypto being as decentralized as it is has scaling problems that it can't solve long term speaking. The more use there is the more data each node has to store, which isn't going to be done by people like you and me, but corporations.

Bitcoin can perfectly reach mass adoption as store of value. People don't need to transact much. All they have to do is buy and hold. Looking at how people use Bitcoin, we're going towards that direction already.

From what I understand, he's not voluntarily paying his taxes, but does so out of force and the fear of imprisonment. If he's comfortable doing that, then that's up to him. I don't see much wrong with people doing so.

I'm kinda in a similar boat. It's not as easy as you make it look to just avoid taxation and clean after your paper/digital trails. Another thing is that it requires you to pretty much dig yourself into the ground and give up on a lot of things.

It's fantastic and all that you have made it your top priority to not pay any or as little taxes as possible, but that doesn't justify your behavior towards those who do pay taxes and make them feel like they are a problem.

I don't see why people still care about it after Bakkt being such a fail. Vaneck has launched a trust not that long ago, and it is a fail as well. Based on these institutions not generating volume, how well do you think an ETF would do?

Coinbase had a Bitcoin backed fund for institutions and wealthy investors, but they ended up pulling it back due to the lack of demand. It should have been the first major sign that there is no latent demand for these products.

The only successful institution so far is CME with tens of thousands worth of BTC traded every day.... downside is that these are cash settled contracts and not actual BTC, so there is no positive impact on the market.

Inflation bugs will be forked out very quickly, so for me that has never been an issue im too afraid of. The more critical the bugs are, the faster they are being worked on, especially within Bitcoin's ecosystem.

I would worry more about extra inflation when it comes to privacy coins. As we speak XMR might have a bug exploited where millions of it were printed. The more you do to obfuscate the origin of a coin, the harder it is to detect.

If the trend continues (the trend is bearish) we'll be ready for lower lows. If we get to see the $10k level be hit this year it would really be a miracle. It would then immediately signal a bullish trend reversal.

I have seen some people point out how bearish the sentiment is and for that reason can expect a counter (bullish) move, but I doubt that. Everyone expected the triangle to break down and it actually did.

Having a contrarian view mostly works either when we have bottomed or peaked out. If you keep guessing that this or that will happen just because people are bullish or bearish, you're more likely to lose.

That's not true. Technical analysis is quite neutral if applied without a bias to favor your own position. In 2018 the charts clearly pointed out how bearish the market actually was, but noobs as usual disregarded that.

The first sign of a bull market happened this year where the price broke through various resistance levels, including $6k, which was indicating that the trend has reversed from bearish to bullish. The price action afterwards confirmed that.

People always expect a bull run to happen, regardless of how much we have seen the price go up or down before. It was like a week or two after the 2017 peak where people started to speculate about $50k before the end of the year.

I remember that very well. People were calling the top at every round price level ($3k, $4k, $5k and so on), but they ended up seeing the price go up much further for the rest of the year. It must have felt bad after having sold so low.

The funny thing is that people did the same on the way down, where each round price level was said to be the bottom.... reality was that we didn't bottom out until we nearly hit the $3k mark, where people then expected even lower levels.

That perfectly shows how irrational the crypto market really is. It goes up and down well beyond what people consider over/undervalued. Never underestimate the risk of investing in crypto.

There are cycles of price growth where people tend to sign up to an exchange to get starting. 2018 was a horrible year overall, where 2019 started off much better, but it seems that we're going back to much lower levels.

It costs a lot to keep an exchange running, and without sufficient income the reserves they have will run out usually in 6-12 months. It's sad to see exchanges close their doors, but something impossible to avoid.

That explains why a lot exchanges are inflating their volumes through wash trading to get people to sign up. If they didn't do that, people would flow into Binance, Coinbase and so on.

There are various degrees of decentralization though. Banks could potentially distribute their data amongst other banks and institutions, but don't actually allow any other entity outside their trusted circle to participate.

People often think that there is only one type of decentralization, but there is much more depending on who you want to trust, and what the actual goal is. Bitcoin level of decentralization mostly isn't needed at all.

Banks don't need blockchains to do so. They have been using databases for years now, and not once did they run into troubles. It's efficient already, but they pretend that it is slow so that you keep paying for faster service.

The article is a bit confusing.... is it only 3% that you save on a monthly basis, or is that on top of the 3% in discount when you pay with Bitcoin? I personally think it's just 3% on a monthly basis.

I'm not sure what other cash back programs are running in Japan as we speak, but if it's unique to Bitcoin, then it might incentivize people to actually pay their gas bills in Bitcoin. If it isn't unique to Bitcoin, then probably not.

Either way, this is great news for Bitcoin nonetheless. I have seen people complain about not being able to pay for their every day spendings in Bitcoin, well, we're getting there slowly but surely.

It did disappoint, but it's not only Bakkt we should blame for this, but also the many perma bulls here who kept telling others how much impact it would have on the market the moment it goes live.

If you think logically, there isn't much latent retail or institutional demand. Retailers already know where to go to buy spot Bitcoin, and institutions already know that they are well served by the CME when it comes to monthly futures.

The CME also announced options trading, which means that there is even less incentive to use something like Bakkt. It could be that the volumes pick up later on, but I really doubt it. Bakkt's volumes keep declining.