Just because you don't seem to experience any problems with OKEx doesn't mean they are equally as good of an exchange to other users. OKEx has been exposed to fake 90% of their total volumes not that long ago.

If I look at their current volumes, which have gone down a bit, but they still seem to wash trade their way into the top 5 exchanges on CMC in terms of volume. No way they're just under Binance's volumes without cheating.

Are you referring to promotions where they "give" people x amount worth of coins? I don't see what's so special about that now pretty much every major altcoin exchange has jumped on the promotion bandwagon to please noobs.

Bitcoin doesn't need any of these bimbos, however, more capital to Bitcoin is always a good thing from the liquidity perspective. It's quite shocking how illiquid this market still is today, even on exchanges such as Coinbase.

I think the main point is that he does what his clients ask him to do. If clients aren't asking for Bitcoin, then what's the point of getting involved? This may change in the future, but there is not much latent demand right now.

Most of the institutional players interested in trading Bitcoin in the US use CME already. It's also going to offer options trading on Bitcoin, and they will bump the futures limit from 1k contracts to 2k contracts per month per trader.

Considering that most of the regular public full nodes have now turned into hybrid LN nodes, the growth is largely calculated in at this point, so don't expect it to rocket up to 15 or even 20k nodes any time soon.

I would love to see how much actual transactional use there is on LN, but that's near impossible to measure, which at the same time provides people additional privacy they don't have on-chain, so to good outweighs the 'bad'.

I would love to have that be the case, but I doubt it. It's not that retailers or institutions experience problems entering this space without Bakkt. It can be done through the many spot exchanges or through derivatives.

It's important to highlight the fact that not everyone is interested in Bitcoin for its fundamentals, which means that they have no problems holding derivatives with how they are only out to capture the exposure.

I surely believe that not everyone is open to invest in Bitcoin, but it's hard to imagine that people don't know of Bitcoin's existence yet, unless they have been living under a rock.

This forum is a great representation of the overall crypto market in terms of measuring the sentiment. I however don't think that it means the bottom is in or that we're near a bottom, so I would wait a bit before jumping in.

Bearish sentiment can drag on for months straight where the sentiment turns worse each month that goes by. I really think we have to see some form of capitulation selloff before going back up again.

I also want to see the mainstream media like CNBC turn bearish for some time to actually be more comfortable about the current price action. Lately, they have been extremely bullish and we saw what the price did....

It happens on all levels indeed. The difference is that in the legacy markets the manipulation is much more advanced and less in the picture, while in crypto you can reek and actually see it from miles away.

I think the underlying problem is that people assume that regulators (doesn't matter what part of the industry they guard) are constantly monitoring market activity to curb down potential abuse, but that's definitely not the case.

In most cases they are being tipped or start an investigation after many complaints. From there it's not too surprising that it may seem they only go after the most obvious cases of manipulation.

The problem I see here is that these celebrities don't have a clue about what's going on here and for that reason back anything they deem interesting and rewarding enough, even when it's a clear cash grab.

We have seen quite a few celebrities enter the crypto sphere already, and they haven't contributed to anything but their own wallet. People need to stop following celebrities like blind sheeps. They're not here for you.

If celebrities really cared about the fundamentals of crypto, they would finance development, set up businesses utilizing crypto, etc. None of that is the case so it makes more sense to warn people against them.

I don't think there is much to improve as long as the economical incentives 'force' miners to play the game as per the rules. Bitcoin's mining ecosystem hasn't ever been this healthy and distributed.

There has been a proposal where individual miners pointing their hashrate to a pool will be able to select transactions to be included in blocks themselves instead of the pool operators, which is how it works right now.

People have to accept that we're working with a decentralized protocol that won't ever be perfect. There will always be something you can point out that could be done better. Let it slide.

Spot on. It can't be stressed enough that when there would really be a method people could make a lot of profit with, the 'inventor' of that method would NEVER disclose it. Period.

If you think logically, it makes no sense for someone to sell a method guaranteeing x % of profit while only asking for $20 or any other insignificant amount of money. How can't they earn that $20 themselves if it was so profitable?

Just by asking yourself some simple questions (like how does it work, how can they guarantee profits, why are they selling it instead of using it themselves, etc), you can easily look through any of these scummy practices.

Fair enough, but the whole point is that people have a choice, and despite sellers being in a clear disadvantage pretty much on any marketplace, sellers go where the buyers are, and that's something we can't change.

People who are interested in weed for example, they will use a darkmarket, where people interested in buying something more commonly used such as a pair of shoes, they can do that on eBay or Amazon. No problem to be solved here.

How is it not important? He is clearly of believe that Bcash will become the dominant coin in the long run, and with how the ratio peaked around 0.40BTC per coin, he might have gone nuts on Bcash before Bitcoin would become the minority chain.

For a moment the big block camp had more hashrate on their chain than Bitcoin, which scared off a lot of people. The fomo buying that was happening at that stage was beyond insane.

The moral of the story is that he holds most of his funds in Bcash and for that reason has an incentive to keep promoting it. Unless he converts back to Bitcoin, he will go down with Bcash, and that's something he is serious about.

I think so too. If you look at how much work and money he put into promotion and adoption, he surely is convinced that it will succeed. It's not a get rich quick thingy for him because it made him lose more than he gained.

He must have been a very large buyer when the ratio was still between 0.10-0.20BTC. It's not fiat he used for that, but his precious Bitcoins. He burned himself because of his believe in payments being the most important aspect.

This exchange is his last weapon in terms of pumping life back into Bcash. If this fails then he has done everything he could to try make it work, but there simply doesn't seem to be any demand for payments.

Bitcoiners tend to glorify everything just because it's decentralized, while completely ignoring the fact that you don't need everything to be decentralized. Centralization isn't an issue everywhere.

I honestly find that marketplaces like eBay are doing an exceptional job providing the uttermost convenience for those buying with a solid service of buyers protection. You don't need this to be decentralized. It works better centralized.

I know of people who have been misled by sellers on eBay and they got their money back swiftly after having provided all the info eBay demanded. This gives buyers a lot of confidence to shop online with peace of mind.

You're absolutely right there. Bitcoin's fundamentals haven't improved much, and the "mass" adoption of Bitcoin in shaky countries such as Venezuela people are talking about isn't of any significance either.

The value of the Bolivar has gone down so much that while the volumes as per the Bolivar standard has gone up considerably, but the actual US Dollar value of the volumes are consistently going down.

People have been generously rewarded this year with the bull run that peaked at $13.8k, which honestly speaking, came as a total surprise to me. My main target was $6k, while a lot people expected even lower levels....

Apparently, not. News outlets have been getting worse with every month that went by, but people keep donating traffic to them. They hold the golden formula to keep triggering overly sensitive perma bulls.

And then we have social media influencers who keep reporting about these articles, which only adds fuel to the fire. You can't escape from these attention grabbing articles anymore. I guess we just have to accept it and move on.

Agreed. People seem to forget that the sole reason blockchain has become a thing, is because of Bitcoin's emergence. The world never really needed blockchain and still doesn't need it today.

Banks in my country have formed an alliance and currently accept in-country bank to bank transfers near instantly, and that every single day of the week 24 hours a day, even during holidays. That's progress without blockchain.

At one point I am strongly of believe that this whole blockchain thing will come to an end because it doesn't add much value over how smart businesses utilize databases already.

Makes little sense with how such a move could easily backfire on them and cause more damage to their operations. Miners want a healthy market to extract the most dollars out of their efforts.

It looks more like that there was a team effort of news outlets to create a market scare by spreading this nonsensical news, which might be financed by deep pocket investors/traders heavily shorting the market.

At the end of the day, the drop in hashrate was negligible. I have seen worse drops in hashrate, and these drops weren't covered as aggressively as the minor drop we see news outlets cover right now.

It is not. I checked various sites where hashrate is calculated using more refined metrics, and they indicate a minor fluctuation that isn't even 1/10th of the 40% drop you are referring to.

This price drop is purely related to a negative break of a bearish triangle that we have been in for quite a long period of time. I expect the price to further decline and there is nothing other than that to 'blame' it for.

Similarly, the increase we experienced back in April this year was the result of a positive break of a bullish triangle. There was nothing to point at for the price to go up other than the improved technicals.

This auction has a total value of around $575k at today's prices, so no way that it will decrease the price. Another thing is that these coins will be sold through an auction, which means that it doesn't affect the price.

In order for the price to be decreased, thousands of BTC will have to be market sold on an exchange, and then still, a whale may appear and gobble up these coins to thicken his position without losing too much due to slippage.

Not surprised. It was hanging in the air. The only thing I am surprised about is the fact that Tether hasn't taken any significant number of tokens out of circulation, which they did last year.

As long as there is 4 billion USDT in circulation there is still liquid capital available to buy the dips, which I assume will happen with how people don't want to hold on to their USDT with how shady that company is.

I'm aiming for $7k in the coming weeks. It might not be a very popular opinion, but it will provide a good buying opportunity nonetheless. It's up to the people to utilize that opportunity.