I know it's cool to hate cryptocurrencies, but the whole "FOMO" part of this article is almost entirely made up.
Even if it's true, the author has no way to know that for sure, and anecdotally I haven't seen it.
Most of the people that I know that are buying right now are doing so because for the first time in a while (unfortunately) Bitcoin is in a fairly stable state. There are no (serious) forks coming up, no massive scandals like a major exchange going under, the mempool is back to a reasonable size, and there are some really cool things on the horizon like lightning network, and even further out possibly schnorr signatures.
Coming from the past months of forks, infighting, contentious upgrades, and lots and lots of FUD, whenever I was asked about bitcoin I'd gladly talk their ear off about it, but would end with a warning that it's a very iffy time to be getting into things with how much was happening. Now it's starting to be in a state where I would feel comfortable introducing people into the space.
Bitcoin is not in a stable state. Price rises every time Tether decides to fabricate 20-30 million dollars they don't have, which coincidentally happens every time bitcoin starts to lose steam and the price drops a little.
> no major exchange going under
Not yet, but every exchange trading Tether will probably sink, along with the price of bitcoin, when Tether (aka Bitfinix) can no longer keep up their fraud.
I thought I saw some threads a while back saying that tethers had been audited, and the speculation that they were not actually backed wasn't true. Am I imagining that?
The "FOMO" bit is the same kind of thing these finance articles always use: "market moves, and here's why."
For the most part, nobody truly knows exactly why the market moves the way it does from day to day, but these journalists always try to provide a narrative- even if it's not true it's usually not provable.
Looking at this (7-day average over the last year), it is currently at 100 MB. It was higher than this for about two weeks in late May/early June this year and has never since reached 100 MB. The last maximum was a brief peak at 80 MB in late August. For much of the year it was below 20 MB.
I would not attempt a transaction before it's back down below 40 MB or so.
If you look at this[0] representation, you'll see that the vast majority of transactions (like over 90% by size) are extremely small fee transactions (most under 10 sat/byte, 90%+ under 20 sat/byte)
Ignore those low fee transactions, and the mempool is under 8MB (and you can ignore them as long as you pay over 20 sat/byte, since miners will take the highest fee transactions first)
It's my go-to site for looking at what the mempool state is!
Most of the time if you just use the estimation from your wallet software you should be fine, but if you like to craft crazy transactions to clean up a bunch of dust or like to save money, it's a great resource.
... There are no (serious) forks coming up, no massive scandals like a major exchange going under, the mempool is back to a reasonable size, and there are some really cool things on the horizon like lightning network, and even further out possibly schnorr signatures
Bitcoin just survived possibly one of the largest market manipulations ever by it's rival Bitcoin Cash. I would NOT call Bitcoin stable at this point.
Even if it's true, the author has no way to know that for sure, and anecdotally I haven't seen it.
Most of the people that I know that are buying right now are doing so because for the first time in a while (unfortunately) Bitcoin is in a fairly stable state. There are no (serious) forks coming up, no massive scandals like a major exchange going under, the mempool is back to a reasonable size, and there are some really cool things on the horizon like lightning network, and even further out possibly schnorr signatures.
Coming from the past months of forks, infighting, contentious upgrades, and lots and lots of FUD, whenever I was asked about bitcoin I'd gladly talk their ear off about it, but would end with a warning that it's a very iffy time to be getting into things with how much was happening. Now it's starting to be in a state where I would feel comfortable introducing people into the space.