The years of experience in price action here taught me that you should never discard certain price levels from being retested.... we have enough historical evidence that this market is irrational and full of surprises.

$7k isn't even that bad would we revisit that level. I would consider a $5k visit to be more worrying, but then again, when people start to get worried it usually is a great time to open some long positions. In my case it means buy more spot.

People are still fairly optimistic which makes me think that they haven't suffered enough yet. Maybe that another $1-$2k red candle will be that last shakeout of weak hands and profit takers.

There is no such a thing as a recovery as long as we hover below the 200MA. What we are experiencing is just sideways movement where we are stuck within a web of moving averages that will likely keep the price down.

A recovery would be to close above the 200MA on the daily chart.... even though it looks like we're very close, it will be a major hurdle for the price to overcome. People saying it will be an easy task are wishful thinkers.

As for the bottom, I don't think we're there yet. The VPVR indicator has shown that there would be support coming in, and it did. Let's hope $7.7k was the bottom but I'm not holding my breath. I expect more red in the coming weeks.

Maybe that we can see something happen before the block halving takes place, because there might still be new investors believing that a pump will happen, and when enough of them think so and buy Bitcoin, it happens.

I'm however of believe that the technicals need to improve first. Bitcoin is being judged by the smart money based on what the charts show, and not so much its fundamental roadmap.

Another thing I'm still keeping in mind is that we might be due for a brutal shakeout. It actually surprised me with how soft the market has been in the last couple of months. Calmth before the storm maybe?

It's funny if you think about how hard we have gone down in the last couple of weeks and how silent people were, but when the price shows an increase of a few percent (which is peanuts) people wake up to get excited.

TA is useful in the sense that you can seperate bear from bull markets, and it seems that we aren't very far from making lower lows in the coming days. People can cheer themselves up as much as they want, but the direction is down.

Overall, just like how we don't go up in a straight line, we don't go down in a straight line-- there will be bounces from time to time, but as long as the trend is down, these bounces will be sold into heavily.

It pushes up everything. What people don't really pay attention to is how much risk capital flows into tech and bio startups with little to no working business model. Cheap money means investors are willing to take higher risks.

No way this will drag on for another decade. It's a ticking time bomb that will take down everything with it. I doubt anything but the strongest fiat currencies will be able to preserve wealth during that period of time.

I wouldn't call 5% inflation healthy at all. In fact, it's something I would consider moving to another country for, especially if the taxation system is also designed to empty your pockets.

If you think logically, 5% inflation means that your money will lose 50% of its purchasing power in a decade. That's something I only see happen in financially weaker countries.

Between $8k and $10k we have various moving averages algorithms will sell at, plus we have fresh sub $9k buyers who will be dumping their coins the moment we see the price make a move up.

Whales aren't cooperating with each other.... when one whale tries to pump the price, other whale(s) will dump it back down. Similarly, an attempted move to dump the price will be bought up. It's whale versus whale versus the smaller fishes.

Also, whales aren't going against the trend without there being a good reason for it. The trend has been down and I'm sure it will be respected until we find support somewhere and mark that price as bottom.

It pretty much depends on the severity of the term you violated. My point basically is that an exchange such as Coinbase will try to get to the bottom of your income sources, based on suspicious activity or completely randomly.

Another thing that could play a role is the country you are from, because there are various brackets of risk that each country fits in. I'm sure there are plenty more variables that come into play that they don't want to disclose.

Overall, it's not the exchange's choice to be this strict, but their banking parter that demand them to follow their rules, otherwise they can kiss their precious bank accounts goodbye. They rather kick you out than lose their bank accounts.

If you think about it, the risk is negligible from where they are right now. If they went for Bitcoin a long time ago, they wouldn't have lost thousands of percents in purchasing power, but just a 50-60% if they bought at the very peak.

Obviously, the dollar or gold would have held their value better in the short term, but they are in need of an alternative that can't be censored and is easy to move, which is Bitcoin.

I however wouldn't want to see them use Bitcoin because all it does is point unwanted attention from opposing governments to Bitcoin. Let them use Ethereum or some other wonky smart contract platform.

He didn't say that nothing has happened. In fact, there have been reports of losses that I read about on Twitter. It's probably so deeply buried that crypto news outlets are too stupid to find them.

I already know their headlines.... LN is not secure and therefore Bitcoin isn't secure either. I'm sure they will exaggerate by a factor ten just to make people click on their articles and generate a few pennies.

It looks like people don't learn because of how many newbies we have enter this space on a daily basis, newbies who have no clue about anything related to security and other risks associated with crypto.

It translates into what seems to be an infinite number of sheeps walking themselves to the butcher.... there isn't a different way to describe it. Scammers know that and patiently wait to reap the fruits of their "work".

Similar ponzi scams have existed for decades in the regular financial world too. It's not going to stop or decrease unless we run out of newbies who chase after profits because they can't succeed in life otherwise.

It depends on how you explain it to people. Using a third party LN works extremely well, which I have been for a while. I only top up my balance once or twice a month with $25-$50 at most, which is enough to start with.

I know the risks of what I am doing because I did my research, and whenever I explain people how it works, I'll be sure to point out the risks so that they understand what they are getting themselves into.

Most of this LN nonsense comes from the Bcash, Dash, BSV, XRP camps. It by no means is secure in any way, but it's perfectly usable if you understand what the risks are. If it was total garbage there wouldn't be 800BTC tied up in liquidity.

Let me get this straight.... by Bitcoin not being safe you are referring to its volatile nature? If so, then you should review your wording because some people may get a different idea and really think Bitcoin isn't safe to use or hold.

Cheap in relation to what people think it might be worth in the distant future, but definitely not cheap today. I like to use the most recent exchange rate as metric to measure Bitcoin's 'true' value because that's what people pay for it.

People can say that Bitcoin is severely undervalued as much as they want, but if buyers don't agree with that, then it clearly isn't undervalued, neither do the sellers agree with that because they crash the price down.

I think you're mixing things up here.... the inflation bug affected the main-chain and not LN.

As for 'seasoned' Bitcoin users not upgrading their clients.... it's not that simple with how a lot of nodes are operated by entities (we don't know who they are) who might not be aware of what's going on.

Another thing is that the clients that aren't upgraded aren't public nodes, so the risk is extremely limited in this case-- what matters is that the public nodes are upgrading whenever they have to, and they fortunately do.

Better in what way? And what altcoins are better according to you? I honestly consider XRP one of the better altcoins to pick if you're out to enjoy super fast transactions to for example benefit from arbitrage opportunities.

It's probably the most accepted altcoin alongside Ethereum. The downside is that we don't know how centralized XRP exactly is. I'm wondering if Ripple can reverse transactions at will.

People keep complaining about Bitcoin's slow transactions, but there isn't anything that will change here as long as LN isn't fully deployed. You either use Bitcoin or an altcoin that's faster. People are free to choose.

Binance doesn't allow you to withdraw fiat. All they have listed as fiat are stablecoins, and these can only be cashed out on a few exchanges, which you would need to verify yourself at.

USDT is near impossible to withdraw to fiat with how Bitfinex isn't keen on handing you over precious dollars for the garbage they created out of thin air and that very likely isn't backed. That's not an option.

Cashing out USDC on Coinbase would require you to provide so many documents to prove that you aren't a criminal that it will only be a viable option if you actually have that proof.

Decisions.... that's what it comes down to. I mean, you can choose to lock in guaranteed profits of 100-200% when you're up, or choose to wait some more years with the risk of not making an awful lot of extra profit justifying the wait.

I have thought about it myself, and I will probably end up selling 25% of my total holdings whenever we hit $20k and from there carefully follow the price action. Thinking back now, I probably should have sold 25% during the peak in 2017.

I noticed that I'm not so comfortable anymore riding out those deep corrections. It's psychologically quite a bitter pill to swallow because you get used to the higher prices and then wake up to the reality of this volatile market.

It's all relative at the end of the day. If we fall to $5k then it's possible that what we have seen this year was a bull run within a multi year bear market. I would consider a revisit of $5k to be super bearish.

In that case I wouldn't even rule out a retest of the 2018 low of $3.1k. We have gone up too hard without building any support so don't be surprised if we go back down in a similar fashion.... a reverse bull run that is.

When the price goes down even those who bought higher will have a breaking point and dump their coins out of frustration.

Risk appetite is what matters here. Older people who worked hard to get where they are financially won't be taking unnecessary risks because there is close to no way for them to recoup their losses if so.

The younger generation is where risk doesn't seem to be an issue at all, not only because they have less to lose and it's easier for them to recoup losses, but they are more adventurous overall and take opportunities as they come.

I don't think so, unless you have millions to invest and see your investment do a 10x in the next 10 years. I'm not of believe that we can do another 100x or even 1000x as some people think is still possible where we are today.

I'm glad that as simple user of LN I won't have to worry about that too much. I'm perfectly happy using a third party client (which I have been for months) as long as they don't suddenly ask for KYC information.

If even these third party clients are no longer an option due to KYC restrictions, then sure, the best thing to do is to set up your own node with all bells and whistles included. You know what they say.... don't trust, verify.

What's your most optimistic call on when we could see the taproot proposal finally be implemented? And the same goes for Schnorr.

Binance is the only exchange on that list that can be rightfully there, the rest is pure cheat where 90-95% of the volume has been wash traded back and forth over and over again. I would avoid the rest.

It's funny how OKEx always pops up in reports when it comes to faking volumes, manipulating user data to make it seem like many users are trading there, etc. I would steer clear of this exchange.

It's not worth to get funds stuck on any of these wash trading exchanges because chances are that you buy or sell into fake (nonexistent) orders and then can't withdraw whatever coin you bought or sold.