Yes, that has been mentioned a couple of times.

So, the BTC vs BCH shite fight is escalating.

Did some quick reading on Roger Ver (pro BCH, anti BTC). Dude seems like a psychopath with deep pockets that seems to hate on anything other than BCH.

The thing with crypto, definitely Ethereum, is your security can be as strong or weak as you like, with the hazards and benefits of whichever option you go with.

I keep my private keys encrypted on Google Drive, with no record of my password, which I'm trusting I'll remember. I'll eventually go for multiple hardware wallets. One in a safety deposit box with the bulk of my funds, another for regular use. I just use myetherwallet to manage transactions, but I'll probably eventually get a machine dedicated to runnig a client for Dapps in the future... Although I suspect that may become unnecessary.

I think most users will need to rely on third parties, to manage their own incompetence. Which kind of negates the whole idea of a trustless system, but I imagine someone will come up with an elegant solution.

It's real creepy how there are organisations promoting Bitcoin, like some giant ponzi scheme. Or maybe to become too big to fail/regulate?

Press Council rules on Bitcoin fake 'stories'

Bitcoin may have died already if there weren't so many vested interests pumping the hype train.

You could say the same about Eth and every other altcoin.

Currently posted at the top of dashboard screen in Coinspot

Fortunately BTC Markets and a couple of other smaller exchanges still accepting BPay and Poli payment deposits, so can make a deposit and coin purchase then send over to Coinspot addresses for trading.

I pulled out all my initial crypto investment the other day (nice little bonus back in my standard bank account for Xmas), and now playing with pure profit in my Exchange wallet. Have split off most of the funds into Nano ledger and just leave a balance for quick trades online for those tasty swing trades. Colleague of mine made more in crypto trading last month than he was paid by work _b

Not at all. ETH would be better off having little value, allowing developers to progress without having to worry about anyone's bankroll. There is significant technological difference between BTC and ETH.

Eth is basically a very cumbersome fintech platform with a crypto side hustle. And it needs a certain critical mass to remain viable, just like other alts.

That's an oversimplification. It only needs enough interested parties maintaining the physical network, and people who trust the network to use it. It doesn't need lots of people pouring money into it hoping to make a buck.

Uh...

I sold a small percentage of my ETH, I haven't been shopping in awhile. The buyer was keen to buy all I had, I was like "yeah, I bet you would."

Still anticipating a crash, which should knock out a significant percentage of the ~1400 cryptos available. Then it's the long term wait for maturity.

There's speculation that Vitalik will be the world's first trillionaire. I doubt anyone's made so much money so fast in history as he has right now.

Yeah, crossing the $2,000 AUD mark on BTCMarkets.net ... man it's hard to return to work..

Intend to trade half my LTC stack for ETH... was going to it today but LTC is down a bit due to BTC. Will wait for more favourable conditions...

That FOMO though!

I had a friend preaching IOTA to me. It sounds like most genuine alt-coins: a solution to one or two problems.

Ethereum is certainly going to have to deal with the file size of the blockchain. And it's in the pipeline. And that's a strength of Ethereum right now. It's got a robust and tested development team in a position to solve these problems as they arise.

I really have to get my head around the shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which is the next major change.

The esoteric nature of crypto in general is definitely a hard solve.

Proof of stake: you get a payment/dividend by staking your ETH holding so that it can be used to validate network transactions. This requires CPU resource so can be compared to mining.

The more ETH you stake for validation work, the greater your payout.

Payments go up and down against the total # of ETH staked in the same way difficulty adjustments work in PoW.

That is my crude understanding.

I liked the idea of IOTA and bought some a few months back just to check it out and play around. To begin with, it was a dogshit user experience with a primitive wallet and almost no guidance whatsoever. Following this, some of my transactions didn't attach to the tangle for no apparent reason and had to be re-tried hours later. Then, the network was subjected to a spam attack which brought it to a complete standstill for several days.

While researching how a spam attack could possibly freeze the entire network I discovered there are a number of serious (largely unaddressed) question marks around IOTA's security, best summarised here:

Anyway, IOT is in a primitive state right now and I suggest buying with extreme caution.

Unless you enjoy playing the market, or you think you've got special insight into the workings of a particular crypto, I wouldn't put money into any alt-coin.

Even with Ethereum, only put in what you're happy to lose. Ethereum has momentum and a good technological foundation, but who knows what's around the corner.

Great article - The Anatomy of a Pump & Dump Group.

Recommended reading for those trading alts.

Dip dip potato chip.

Market reacting to China ban news maybe. Pretty sure this has become a quarterly phenomenon.

Market was ridiculously over extended, badly in need of a dip.

IMO small dips like this just spur growth overall when people see how much it could have gone down but didn't - giving people a chance to buy at a "bargain price" *cough*Jodi*cough* which just causes even more demand and prices to increase further.

This time last year ETH was valued at $10. If this time next year ETH is above $300 I'll be happy.

It just needs to stay high enough to maintain momentum, to keep the developers on board.

Presented without comment (related)
 

Granted it is laughable but mass Segwit adoption and various off-chain innovations will bring the fees down drastically.

Suggest reading this article about Tether. It’s not looking good.

https://tonyarcieri.com/the-tether-conundrum

It only survives because everyone puts their trust in it shifting to the sidelines on a regular basis (ie, every 3 Months or so). God help everyone when the curtain is pulled back on their operation and they do a Bitconnect on everyone.

New Tether being generated: 200 million units in the last 12 hours alone; 500 million in the last 4 days. Is all this Tether backed by US dollars in a bank somewhere as Tether claims? I have my doubts.

http://omnichest.info/lookupadd.aspx...o5LsPTW1zBTwXL

This is more exciting than any jump in price:

Exploring blockchain for better business - National Research Council Canada

Tether and Bitfinex (the same people run both) appear to be orchestrating epic fraud that is propping up the entire crypto market. When this shit goes south we will see what a bitcoin is actually worth. My guess is something around US 1K.

Stay safe folks.

Not that I really care about scrub-tier alt-coins and their going-ons, but where are you getting this from?

First read the article at the link I posted above, which explains how the scam appears to work.

Then, check out the @bitfinexed Twitter - the guy has been posting incriminating details for months now.

I'm not partial to conspiracy theories but the evidence is just overwhelming. For example, today's BTC move from $9,900 back up to $11,400 immediately followed another printing of 100 million worthless Tether tokens. This gigantic influx of Monopoly money is giving Bitfinex the leverage to hold the price above $10,000.

I don't really see anything convincing that proves the value in crypto is fake. Sure, there's plenty of diddling in the market, but what of it? The principles of the technology are sound. Ethereum is open about what it is and has support of legitimate, technically savvy organisations. Crypto, blockchain, distributed apps and smart contract tech is real and has huge future utility.

There are definitely big fish that use their massive bankrolls and botnet armies to generate and cash in off market hype. And there are narcissists and scammers trying to convince people that their tech is the next to come up with the billions, without actually producing the substance. Where there's big money, there are people trying to get a piece without doing the work.

It's like that whole Pizzagate nonsense. There's not some grand paedophile conspiracy going on. The reality is much more mundane and grim. It's going on, everywhere, all the time, in little and big ways. Conspiracy isn't necessary, it's just what goes on.

It's really not similar at all. Nobody is questioning the technology behind Tether. The issue is whether it's really backed 1:1 by over 2 billion US dollars in a bank - which is fundamental to the Tether promise.

Problems:

1. Tether refuses to be audited - to guarantee they have the money - despite promising as such on their website. This is a massive red flag. They also won't say who their bank is.
2. Tether's connection to Bitfinex was unknown until the leak of the Paradise Papers.
3. At least one of Tether's owners/directors is a convicted fraudster.
4. Tether is releasing hundreds of millions of new tokens into the market on a near-daily basis. Each of these is supposed to be worth US$1.
5. Following the blockchain trail shows most of these tokens are being funneled directly into Bitfinex.
6. Bitfinex has been proven to engage (or allow) enormous amounts of wash trading.
7. Tether themselves will not exchange USD for their tokens. They are selling tokens but never buying. I believe the only exchange where you can cash out Tether is Kraken.

I could go on. Ultimately, if Tether is backed by fiat then everything is legit. At this point that seems highly unlikely.

It's not an issue of Eth vs BTC or whatever. If Bitfinex and Tether implode, it will create a liquidity crisis in which nearly everyone will want to sell and nobody will be able to cash out. It would ruin the market for years.

I get what you're saying up till: "It would ruin the market for years."

Tether accounts for less than a percent of crypto's total market cap. Not even half a percent. Totally scrub-tier.

You have a scrub-tier understanding. The present market cap of crypto in no way reflects how much fiat currency has been injected into it. The cap simply shows the current trading price of all coins. In a correction, the cap can shift downwards by billions in minute.

Copy-and-pasted example: hypothetical shitcoin has 1 million coins outstanding trading at 1 cent per coin so market cap is $10K. Then I buy 1 coin for $10, market cap immediately goes to $10 Million. In this example, a single trade representing 0.0001% of outstanding volume and representing a net flow of $10 just increased market cap by $9,990,000 (9900%) in an instant.

The actual amount of fiat in crypto is estimated in the low tens of billions. A large amount of that market liquidity is provided by Tether, which represents real dollars. If confidence in Tether/Bitfinex is lost it will create a panic selling environment which would likely drain the reserves of all major exchanges. It would also crash the price of all alts. Confidence in crypto would quite likely be lost for a long time.

Yup.

This I understand.

This I think is overstated. I'll admit that in market volume Tether punches above its weight, but it still accounts for only about 10% of the daily trading volume.

If Bitcoin drops in value, there are plenty of people waiting with cash in hand to take that opportunity to get into the market.

It depends how far the market drops. A 10% correction will eventually bottom out and then people will buy back in. A 90% crash would cause a long nuclear winter - we have already observed this in 2014 with the fall of Mt. Gox.

I have similar feelings regarding USDT. Its the elephant in the room that no crypto related news feeds ever seem to touch.

Its... concerning.

So let me see if I understand this.

I take some real cash and put it into an exchange to buy some crypto tokens, after trading for a while or transferring tokens between exchanges I end up with USDT and not USD but its all good because USDT is backed 1:1 by USD.

The USDT is much more convenient for exchanges because they don't have to deal with pesky brick and mortar banks or shitty transaction times of some crypto tokens. When the Tether Printer "prints" $100,000,000 when the market is going down, its people selling on exchanges and getting USDT in return instead of USD. Assuming that the exchanges that use Tether are buying 1USDT for 1USD using traditional means then it could be all fine. I could happily live off the interest of several billion dollars!

BTW the "volume" of transactions is probably hidden because they will be inter exchange or exchange to vendor.

The market is already much more volatile than that. It's gone from ~US$400B to ~US$800B and then back again in the last couple of months. Right now it's about US$550B.

Mt. Gox. happened and yet here we are. I think your concerns about Tether are on point, but I think the market will recover pretty quickly should anything go do.

A friend of mine made this comment about exchanges: Exchanges are like public toilets. You get in, do your business, get out.