I have (if you check my post history) and will always say that biotcoin is a better choice than altcoins even if we focus on 1 reason.

Bitcoin influences all altcoins. If it fails all altcoins will fail and lose value. Let's say you choose bitcoin. It comes with some degree of risk. You can gain or lose money from this investment.
If you buy an altcoin instead you're taking the risk that bitcoin brings plus additional risk of the altcoin failing on top of it.

Luna is a great example where it went from about $300 to 0 but bitcoin did not. If Bitcoin were to go to 0 you could expect luna and all other altcoins to follow.

This isn't going to happen. I'm not even talking about the transaction but there's going to be no offer from musk.

He overpaid for twitter and has too many things going on at the same time with space flights, starlink and tesla. He's not going to help bitcoin in any way and buying a bitcoin forum is so unlike him.

There's a theory circulating around that FTX was a laundering operation for the democratic party. SBF's parents are closely tied with the party and he donated a lot of money to their cause. Democratic senator Warren is anti Bitcoin and so is Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, who is also a democrat.

The mother, Barbara Fried is, according to Wikipedia: "a co-founder of the political fundraising organization Mind the Gap, which advocates for Democratic Party candidates and funds get-out-the-vote group"
The father, Joseph Bankman "was involved in FTX, including raising funds for the firm before its bankruptcy"
He also has close ties with Elizabeth Warren and helped her with tax legislation.

According to former FTX employees, Sam had access to all wallets and his parents were using it to help run political campaigns for the party that doesn't like anonymity, freedom and being your own bank.
Makes you wonder how much access into the company books his parents had. Remember that they're both professional lawyers with a lot of connections. It's hard to believe that a lawyer with access to the company wouldn't know that the books are being cooked, unless he was doing some cooking himself.

Then there's Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda that, according to Sam, lost all the money.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11438875/Questions-SEC-chair-Gary-Gensler-agency-miss-signs-FTX-collapse.html

The connections are just too obvious.

There's many use cases.
Here's a few examples:

Bitcoin

A decentralized store of value. Some say it doesn't work because it has its bull and bear runs, but that's where the whole trick is. It's a store of value but it has moments when the market price goes down and this is the time when you shouldn't convert it to anything else. When you take a 4 years out of a bitcoin's life you'll see there were moments where it was higher and lower from the average and this lack of stability doesn't mean it can't be a store of value. 

Freedom to move your wealth around the world from one jurisdiction to another. This is something people in China and many other countries can't do freely.

A way to avoid abuse by the government like in Canada where the government was trying to curb protests by stealing the money from people's accounts and making them unable to buy food and fuel.

Great if you want to donate anonymously or buy something online without your bank knowing about it.

A way to avoid currency exchange fees and bank fees - great if you travel a lot and meet a lot of people. You can easily book a flight or a hotel with it.

Allows you to circumvent government bans and restrictions. Some countries will not allow you to gamble and block bank transfers but having cryptocurrency can help.

Gives you 24/7 access unlike banks and stock exchanges that don't work on weekends.

I recommend people have some bitcoin in case of emergency. People in Ukraine who had to get away from war had problems getting cash from their banks but packing a drive with your wallet on it and accessing it once you're in a safe zone is fast and easy.

Great conversation starter. Many people around you could be bitcoiners!

An investment opportunity that outperforms even in bear market. If you had fiat money in 2021 in Turkey and decided to buy bitcoin at 60 thousand you made a good decision. With 80% inflation their fiat currency is down much more than bitcoin and people say its bitcoin that crashed.

It's great that people are withdrawing. I know it's mostly caused by fear instead of awareness like it should be but better late then never.

It won't cause a bull run but it won't cause a breakdown either. It may also start a pump because with less coins on exchanges volatility goes up. A pump like that is followed by new deposits of people who wanted to sell but held on their wallets and the res a correction but that's all normal.

The market now is far from normal everything is oversold and there's too much panic we could use a relief rally.

Do you really need Musk to tell you that it has potential?

The man who was spreading environmental FUD about bitcoin is the last person I want to listen in this matter.
He can be a billionaire but he knows nothing about bitcoin and he sees it only as a tool to make more fiat money.

And that crypto winter... We're in a bear market for a year and after 12 months Musk is waking up to tell us that he now sees it and thinks bitcoin will recover... no shit!

Do it and have no regrets. In this world you either push forward and take a risk or be that average person who struggles to pay the bills.

I'm not saying take a risk and become a drug dealer or rob a bank but putting some money in bitcoin or in your case an old house that you don't live in is a great idea.



People in Ukraine might have something to say about the safety of real estate 

I used to tell everybody that futures trading is a scam. It's a casino that tries to look like an exchange and has nothing to do with real investing.
Sam also had nothing to do with bitcoin. He affected the crypto market as a whole but that's because he invested and held a lot of altcoins.

Bitcoin got affected by this only because dumb people held it on SBF's exchange and when he paused withdrawals they tried to sell their bitcoin and try to withdraw stable coins or fiat.
An exchange that is insolvent should've been immediately cut from the tickers so that it can't affect spot price on other exchanges but the system is far from perfect.

In my eyes bitcoin remains unaffected. It's good that SBF got his ass handed to him because he was a proponent of centralized blockchains and regulation. We don't need people like him in the space.

Thank SBF. I hope he rots in prison for this.

You might be happy about it but many people are not.
Among those are people who bought bitcoin this year for the first time, bitcoin miners who are in trouble because of low prices, investors who were smart to buy 2 years ago in 2020 and thought that was a good entry point (which it was) but then some scammers decided that they'd destroy bitcoin price with their stupid shitcoins.

I'd be ok with prices from 2018 as long as it was 20 thousand. Now not so much.

2 days have passed and we're already beyond that.

Latest rumors:
Sam might be on the run.
The police entered his main office in the Bahamas
Sam sent 10 bln USD to Alameda and Alameda has none of that. CEO admitted to losing it all.
Alameda spent money on attack on Binance Futures and LUNA
Nobody knows where Sam got the money to start arbitrage.
Both Sam and His girlfriend Caroline had no idea how to run a company. They were lying to people and the business was made to be a scam from the start.
Caroline's father used to be Gary Gensler's boss at MIT. I guess that is going to raise a lot of questions about the lack of SEC's supervision over Alameda.

To me it does. I think it's Sam that's behind all of this including the "hack" that happened like a day after he stepped down as CEO.


I don't know how many of you already know about this, but there's a rumor the CEO of Alameda Caroline Ellison (who was Sam's girlfriend) was given 10 bn USD by Sam and some of that money was used to attack other exchanges and tokens. The money was used to attack Binance futures exchange and also to crash LUNA. Each of these attacks costed them a lot of money which is why so much f the users funds is missing from the exchange.

IMO we got ourselves the greatest villain of crypto since Karpeles.

Can you elaborate on the "connections" part? Connections like you can make someone's withdrawal on a bankrupt exchange get processed?

What experience are we talking about?

If you want to educate us on how to be bears, I'll pass. I'm allergic to bears.


LOL

Does horse racing require skill from the person who's betting? Does football? You really chose a strange example!

When it comes to gambling the most skill based game is poker but other card games also require some skill. Sports betting is best if you have some knowledge but knowledge is not skill.
Luck based games are those where you just press the button like slots. Roulette also has some skill involved because the best players don't only bet on red or black but also clusters of numbers. I think that you can beat red/black by knowing how to bet with clusters.

I wonder if his mother - the lawyer - is going to get him out of this. She must be moving heaven and earth right now.
Your boy fucked up, lady!

I think that anything backed by Sam is now going to backfire. Nobody will want to be associated with his ideas and businesses. Even companies he helped bail out will feel the heat.
If legislators decide to follow through it will be on their own terms. Don't believe anybody is going to ask Sam to work as an expert in crypto matters anymore.

I don't think that it's as simple as you portray it in a market with no liquidity, driven by fear and emotion and a very small amount of bitcoins traded. On most exchanges it was a drop of about 4k BTC that made us go all the way from 19k to 17k. 4k is nothing when you compare it to the total supply which means the circulating supply worldwide is less than 10% of the total supply.

People who had money frozen on FTX sold in panic but their money remained frozen - they gained nothing.
Possible scenarios?

Their money gets unfrozen and they move to another exchange and buy back. If only half of them buys we'll be above 19k in an instant because we went from 16 to 18 on money from other sources than the dying exchange so other people bought the panic. If the panic calms down and get back on the market the situation will return to what it was before the drama.

Levered longs got liquidated so most people are now either shorting or out of the market. A short squeeze to 20k is possible.

It looked like BTC was bottoming at 17k and recovering. This situation is not a normal macro trend but rather a black swan event. I wouldn't look for macro lower lows here. If we get lows these are going to be a result of further drama with exchanges.

The examples of failed companies listed above aren't a proof that lending is impossible or that the business idea is doomed. Those are examples of greedy companies that were playing with the funds they had.

They wanted to make more money so they were engaging in risky games of investing with leverage and like SBF did throwing money at every possible investment option. They threw billions at Alameda but how much did Alameda make for them? Not nearly as much.

I agree that it's more risky than simply holding volatile cryptocurrencies. You'd have to find a regulated transparent company.

Patterns mean nothing. S2F is a good example but not the only one.

Benjamin Cowen, one of the most popular and respected cryptocurrency market analysts, has admitted that his flagship market model “is dead.” He did so in the context of Bitcoin’s falling price, while also falsifying the hypothesis he has been arguing for since 2019.
https://beincrypto.com/benjamin-cowen-lengthening-cycles-are-dead-end-of-a-great-narrative/



I like charts that you can find on https://www.lookintobitcoin.com They can give you a perspective of where we currently are compared to other years.

It always happens again and again. Sometimes the loss is covered, sometimes it's not but most exchanges have their problems from time to time. You don't want to leave your money and ultimately your future in the hands of some random dude even if it's the "mighty" CZ.

People will never learn because there's more crypto users every year and those newcomers will once again repeat the same mistakes.

You can check my post from a year ago where I said that the biggest risk of trading is the fact that you have to hold money on an exchange.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5348828.msg57451823#msg57451823

A year later and one of the biggest exchanges implodes.

When talking about bitcoin it's important to use the word at least twice in each sentence so that bitcoin feels appreciated.

Good job OP, you're giving bitcoin it's well deserved love!

Ask mods to give you a special title since you saw how much Sam is trying to achieve before the rest of the people who held money on his exchange. If they had only listened...

The name of Sam will forever be mentioned alongside such renowned figures like Mark Karpeles, Alexander Vinnik, Gerry Cotten and Do Kwon. Only 12 years and we've got ourselves a hall of fame.