I think that we have seen so far is a classic example of how markets tend to do the opposite of what people expect to happen. From initially super bullish we went to bearish and right now we're going towards bullish again.

I still think that we might be due for some more downwards action, but this current move admittedly looks very bullish on a more technical level-- we're not far away from a bullish weekly close.

Another weekly bullish close will make me a bit more confident about the current price action, but the first step is almost set. After what happened last year I can't be conservative enough with how ugly things can become fast.

Roger artificially inflates the number of on-chain transactions too, so it wouldn't surprise me if he ends up doing the same on his own exchange. It's easier to do too because he doesn't even need actual funds.

He can credit his accounts with non existing money and trade between accounts to make it appear that there is a lot going on while nothing is happening in reality. He is and stays a scammer and a cheater.

Nothing good will come out of this. I hope the regulators are watching.

CSW can only do one thing to stay relevant and enjoy news coverage, which is to threaten everyone that doesn't agree with him, or the people he simply doesn't like. This is his ONLY weapon.

He has never turned words into actions because he's too broke for that, and he isn't as knowledgeable as he claims to be. He knows how to trick weak minded people into thinking he is satoshi and he will continue doing so.

I am still unsure about who the actual bad guy is here in crypto, CSW or Roger Ver.... I think Roger Ver has done more to actually scam people while CSW is just a social media warrior that likes to talk trash.

This statistic is cooler than it looks because if people didn't know that 85% of the coins have been mined already, they wouldn't notice anything. The price already reflects the current stage we're at.

The most important aspect of the supply is that we'll be seeing Bitcoin's net inflation be cut in half next year, which should bring it to more or less a similar inflation rate as gold and the more established fiat currencies.

Important to note is that even with lower inflation and thus fewer coins being mined, the price will still be extremely volatile due to how speculation driven this market still is. I don't see this change at all.

People here might be convinced that Bitcoin will make it and be worth trillions, but the institutions entering don't look at it as such-- they will exit the moment the charts turn ugly and that means they will take their money with them.

That wick to ~$9100 was slightly above the previous low of ~$9050 which understandably made people believe lower levels were due. Those who quickly shorted thinking to ride the market down are rekt now.

At least wait for the ~$9050 low to actually break and then short. It would have saved them a lot of money. People tend to be so greedy or overly confident in their own analysis that they legit think they can't lose a trade.

I do watch the videos of Alessio Rastani on YouTube, and it doesn't matter what Bitcoin does, he always assumes that the price has to come down in order to confirm a bottom or a test of the 21EMA.

He was like that when we pumped from $4000 to $5000 and he is still like that today....

Pretty much that. BTC-E was a large exchange and pretty dominant overall, while Yobit has never really been anything other than a cesspool of noobs hoping to get rich trading the most trashy altcoins this industry has ever seen.

On the other hand, with more and more exchanges abiding by the regulations they are subjected to, Yobit will experience more growth as people will seek to find an alternative exchange where they can still use it without KYC.

Maybe that this will make Yobit grow large enough so that authorities will care and take them down. The bigger the fish the more there is to gain.

BitPay is the most popular option due their SEO and the banking side, which other payment gateways don't have. If you want to accept Bitcoin through a payment gateway and receive dollars without headache, BitPay is it unfortunately.

I also have to point out that their funny political games are only a thing within the crypto community. Merchants not familiar with how things are here have no clue about how BitPay is being used by its shareholders to work against the real Bitcoin.

I doubt it. BitPay doesn't want to adopt SegWit and LN and this payment gateway is their way of accepting Bitcoin. Unless they want to manually set up something like BTC Pay Server I don't see it happen.

Double spending is quite easy if you know how to do it. I have done it once (before RBF was a thing) in order to actually have the coins I sent to my exchange account confirm, which otherwise might have taken a day or so.

Scammers have double spent on ATMs and noobs they "sell" Bitcoin to. Noobs see the Bitcoin show up in their wallet and think it's all right, not knowing that they don't have these coins until the transaction confirms.

And yes, this is actually a pretty common occurrence. It doesn't require you to "break" the network and therefore no one will panic sell. Safest option is to always wait for that 1 confirmation when transacting with someone you never met.

I find it a bit odd that someone with +100BTC knew how to collect them, but lacks the understanding of how to sell them. If noobs can find an exchange such as Coinbase, why can't OP with a simple Google search?

Unless OP's country is on the blacklist of a lot of exchanges and therefore can't sell them, but if so, that should have been pointed out in the OP. Interesting how some people assume we exactly know what they refer to....

Bitfinex is an exchange to avoid with how they don't seem to be keen on letting go of their actual dollars. There is enough to find about how people ended up waiting for weeks without seeing anything post in their bank account.

The more exchanges the better. It's not that you have to use any of the new ones that pop up-- the competition aspect of all these exchanges leads to better overall service at lower cost.

Cryptopia has been a trash exchange from the very beginning while blockchain.com has always been a serious player within crypto and has provided enough utility to new users up to where we are today.

Hackers will attack anything related to crypto so it's not that your funds are safe over at the exchanges you do think are competent-- at best other exchanges can be safer, but safer doesn't mean safe.

Since the exchange will operate within the bitcoin dot com portal, I'm pretty sure that we can expect Bitcoin to be referred to as Bitcoin Core. Another thing is that he will pair BCH to other coins and ignore the BTC pairs.

It's quite a bummer that he isn't on our side with how influential and dedicated is. He turned into a jealous ex who thinks he has been cheated on therefore will do everything he can to inflict pain on the opposite side.

I kinda understand him though-- he did more for Bitcoin than most of us combined who are here just waiting for the price to increase. It turned into a store of value tool now that people accept that this is all we have....

It doesn't surprise me that CashApp has been this popular, especially with how Coinbase, which is usually the main newbie fiat onramp, is annoying people with their insane fees.

People now have an alternative option that's cheaper (cheaper means more BTC for your money). Not only that, it also offers an alternative to PayPal with how it has been annoying users with account blocks and other nonsense.

The benefit there is that even people who aren't into Bitcoin can accept it for their goods and services and from there cash out if they so wish. Jack Dorsey definitely has his priorities in order.

As for the weekly limit CashApp subjects users to, I don't think it's a problem with how most people don't have $10k to blow on Bitcoin. Those who do want to buy more go to an actual spot exchange to buy in big.

I think they already ruined their reputation when they started to lock thousands of people out of their accounts before they wanted to become compliant enough to add actual fiat trading options.

As nasty as these moves were, they are not a scam exchange. The only problem is that they are so understaffed, that getting your tickets resolved can take weeks or in some cases even months.

Their volumes aren't as high as they used to be in the past, which means less income and therefore less capital to allocate to employing more staff members. They have gone backwards hard.

Similarly, I can name up plenty of reasons to why declining volumes can favor the bears. At the end of the day, a decline in volume has historically lead to more declines than increases for Bitcoin, especially during an already bearish momentum.

I'm not sure if there are massive stops below $9000 because we were very close, and if the stops where located there, it would have tempted market movers to trigger them with how thin the order books were/are.

The thing with stops being triggered is that it will very likely not respect support levels until the last stop has been liquidated. Bots are quick to withdraw buy orders which might lead to a mini flash crash and therefore much lower levels.

It's even scarier when you think about how it dumped below $90 when everything was tanking. On the other hand, what other people consider scary is a fantastic entry point for those looking to get in at a better price.

The thing with Ethereum is that it needs to go back up without ICOs being the main price driver. Currently it's trying to gain ground as dapp platform as it was intended to be initially until ICOs took over and dominated everything.

I managed to grab some Ethereum sub $100 and have no problem holding them for a couple of years if needed. I still think that Ethereum is the number two coin based on use and demand, and that by far.

I remember my first days here without any understanding of the technical side. I just knew how to install the client and to send funds to an exchange and receive them back in my client.

Technically speaking, that's more than enough for most of the average users, but you quickly find out that the security side is incredibly important because of how you can literally lose all your funds either due to a mistake or hack.

I'm really thankful for businesses to have developed hardware wallets which makes it so much easier and less risky for the average users to deal with crypto. Without these hardware wallets things wouldn't be the same.

Crypto in general by far isn't user friendly or secure enough for the average user-- hardware wallets close that gap where possible and it resulted in way fewer cases of theft and coin loss.

NordVPN is my VPN of choice too. I have tested other VPNs before but they seemed rather slow (not acceptable slow but annoyingly slow), which is a problem I haven't dealt with while using NordVPN.

I do wonder now you mention Germany how Coinpayments is going to handle crypto payments after 01-01-2020 with how Germany introduced a new law where crypto related payment gateways need certain licenses.

BitPay already paused its operations in Germany so it might be that Coinpayments (temporarily?) pulls out well before the aforementioned date.

https://bitcoinist.com/bitpay-suspends-service-in-germany/

For now there are still exchanges that don't require KYC, but it's going downhill where each week or month one announces that they no longer provide that type of service due to regulatory concerns.

What will happen is that the last standing non KYC exchanges will be shit exchanges such as Yobit. The logical path for other exchanges is to become compliant and cover the risk of potentially being penalized.

As for Brave, I have used it for a while just for the sake of trying it out, but outside the earning feature it doesn't provide much utility over what some other browsers/extensions offer. Won't lose a second sleep over this.

I still see people around me who use the blockchain wallet. It's definitely more popular than I hoped it would be-- it's nearly on the level of Coinbase that people use as wallet while in reality it's not a wallet at all.

On the other hand, no matter how much we dislike the blockchain wallet and their attitude as business, newbies at least use a legitimate wallet instead of the countless crappy wallets you see pop up when you search for crypto or Bitcoin wallet.

The thing here is that I don't see it become popular with how Roger and Bitmain are such a large shareholder, that they will prevent blockchain from adding too many coins, so people will still prefer Binance more.

I watched it on Ran's youtube channel and it was as expected, Peter is not willing to accept any argument as to why there is value in Bitcoin. He keeps saying that it isn't a store of value because there is no value to store.

His definition of value is that you can't use Bitcoin for anything outside what people currently use it for. Gold can be used for the production of jewelry, medical equipment, mobile phones, etc.

I wonder if he purposely ignores the point that the actual use outside speculation and store of value is just a fraction of where the demand for the metal comes from. It's not going to improve but only get worse.