Any theories/reasons why this is happening? Has it impacted the recent rally or vice versa?

yeah, mine ended up going through finally but took well over an hour.

Chinese government makes it harder to invest abroad. Chinese investors flee to Bitcoin making the price rise. Price rise leads to increase in the number of transactions. Bitcoin already being struggling with full block because of the 1MB limit struggles even more. Irrational Chinese miners keeps mining using Core implying they either hate money, hate Bitcoin or have no clue.

What does that mempool graph mean? Its the amount of transactions waiting to be confirmed?

Yes

Where can I buy bitcoin for Neteller?

Bitcoin is an uncorrelated asset.

Dont read too much into why it's up relative to other things. The market cap is too small for it to be impacted by other currencies.

Bitcoin is up in china because its china and ppl like to gamble over there.
When bitcoin is down, it's just bc that's what bitcoin does. Although I saw some data that it's daily volatility this year has been lower than $twtr

I see several people in the thread advising to increase your fee to get your transaction through. If everyone thinks that way then aren't the miners going to make more money? Those miners are not in it for the long term, they want to maximize their profits now.

Is gambling/trading the primary use case of Bitcoin currently? I'm relatively new to the cryptocurrency world, and see lots of people propagating the idea that Bitcoin is driven mostly by capital flight in China.

Fees are a very small percentage of miners current income. When ViaBTC started mining BU the price quickly increased and miners income rose a lot. Imo it seems very likely that mining BU would be +EV for miners in the short and the long run.

Let's be frank here. Bitcoin at the ~10b market cap scale does not facilitate any meaningful capital flight. Not at the capacity where "a lot" of "people" actually employ it to do such a thing. In china it remains ridiculously easy to get your money out of the country. You can buy fake invoices, fake insurance, fake businesses, fake anything, really. You just give the other side a 25% cut and you get get a lot of money overseas. Bitcoin as a method to fight devaluation is possible for people that are trapped in the mainland wihtout such contacts. I can imagine there are a lot of day-traders, kids, gamblers, dumb ****s who do this. This is evidenced by a btc price premium that exists right now in china.

The primary use case of bitcoin is that you dont need anyone's approval to actually use it.

Circumventing laws about money transfer. So basically criminal enterprise.

If this is true, Bitcoin has to be pretty attractive even for the people who have the contacts.

"Chinese officials are considering policies including restricting domestic bitcoin exchanges from moving the cryptocurrency to platforms outside the nation and imposing quotas on the amount of bitcoins that can be sent abroad."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-1...ntrols-bitcoin

Curious to hear opinions about the implications of China adopting and enforcing the restrictions, and whether that's even possible. In general, how much is bitcoin at the mercy of the Chinese government?

Is there an app or specific website anyone can recommend for tracking bitcoin value pretty constant? Thanks

blockfolio

china has been banning bitcoin for years now... best of luck to them.

bitcoinaverage.com is a decent weighted-average price.

bitcoinwisdom.com is a decent charting site covering all exchanges and alts.

How are they suppose to know where the owner of a wallet is located. I feel like this China stuff is always someone trying to make a quick buck on a short position.

They just attack the problem at the point of the transaction - turning RMB/CNY into BTC, just like the US has done with poker. Sure, it doesn't "stop" everyone from doing it, but it has had the desired effect. Most people in China do not want to cross their government. If they say buying or selling BTC is illegal, the vast majority will listen, and they will make an example out of a few people who don't.

So the whole "it can't be stopped!" argument might be true in the strictest sense, but while people still want to get in and out of fiat, then it can be slowed significantly.

So some extra KYC for the Chinese exchanges to make sure the receiving bitcoin address is actually registered by a Chinese. Then that said Chinese can just send the coins internationally or store them in their head and walk across the border. Seems like a big over reaction from the market for this extra PR for Bitcoin.

Trump-effect: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd

coin is going to the moon

Jamie Dimon, the rumored treasury secretary, on bitcoin - "“No government will ever support a virtual currency that goes around borders and doesn’t have the same controls. It’s not going to happen.”

Combine this with Sheldon Adelson having a big influence on Trump.

Could make for a tough 4 years for bitcoin.

What kind of damage can he realistically do to bitcoin? Iirc 70% of transactions run through China