@Daal Okcoin like Bitfiniex is having USD deposit/withdrawal issues. That's why your wire is getting rejected until they can sort out their correspondent bank relationships.
Reading about many problems funding bitcoin accounts, what do you guys do once the exchange you trade with also gets issues with intermediary banks or regulators and you can't withdraw funds anymore ? Is it even possible to take your bitcoin from the exchange to a private wallet than try to use them elsewhere later on, or sell them privately to a third party (it doesn't seem to be that easy) A bit confused here, on one hand a whole bunch of articles talk about bitcoin beeing the favourite black market currency, a great currency for money launderers and other criminals, on the other hand it seems to create way more regulatory challenges than regulated financial products. Read today that most banks handling offshore accounts would not wire money out to bitcoin exchanges as well
Curious about that part as well, are they able to receive any USD at all ? I know some smaller financial institutions in difficulty with their US relationship use PSP (payment service provider I think) to still deal with USD but not sure how it works. If one decide anyway to work with institutions in such a situation, it sounds safer to at least avoid USD - but if they get get sanctionned by the USA, all activities can end up frozen, it happened to several banks internationally.
I got an offshore bank, so far it has not complained about my wires to bitcoin sites. IB certaintly has, I tried a 3rd party wire to save money in fees, and they turned down the instructions. With regards to sites getting shutdown, I'm still a newbie at this but from what I have seen, you can always own your digital coin under 'cold storage', that is a public key + private key. Which you can keep in a secure note on Lastpass.com (with 2factor authenticantion plus not accepting logins from countries other than your home country) or in a paper/USB stick in your home. That prenvents the mtgox issue. The problem is that I want to short-term trade this stuff as well, not necessarily long-term hold them (except the convexity ICOs). To short-term trade and have access to some levarage, I will have to send some digital coin to an exchange site. I will try to use Tether USD, just so I don't have a speculative position in BTC for no reason. But yeah, that will be a bit risky because Tether USD can blow up and the Exchange site can blow up, so there are 2 ways I can lose. I plan to send the minimum and rely on margin leverage to get exposure if possible, quickly cashing out any profit and keeping the base minimum Any tips are welcome
Simple, if the intermediaries go down, transfer out in non USD fiat or buy a crypto and transfer out that crypto to another exchange you can wire out from. Or in the case of China, just wire out CNY. If they all go down, consider that the black swan. You can send any crypto from an exchange to a wallet you have personally and secure it.
Gonna cut back 20-25% of my EWZ position, the ones I bought during the tank plus a bit more. It looks like the President will stay on and a grilockish scenario is shaping up, but he will also lose popularity overtime so there is a lot of uncertainty about what will that lead to. I rather take a little bit of gains now and avoid panicking later on
Thanks both for your replies above, I've suspected for a while Bitcoin is interesting at least for diversification purpose if not for short term trading ( for my style at least ) but it still looks obscure/dodgy. Just checked some bitcoin ATM in Hong Kong and Macau, in Macau some are located in pawnshops, authorities there and in the mainland have been cracking down on their currency control evading through Union Pay activities and this might be the new gold mine for them - check the fees. For those who care, and I'll stop the off topic there, it was worth checking the high end USD watches in those shops (they usually carry a whole bunch of watches selling from 10 to 100k USD) to notice they didn't really care about the proper pawn shop business, they seemed to be doing a lot more money in parralel activities - but then again there has been a crackdown going on there, not sure how it goes now. Anyway going through the ATM links doesn't make bitcoin very attractive (limit per time is 120k mop it seems, so roughly 15400 usd, not sure there are any compliance requirement or limit on the number of transactions one can make, but the fees are insane : https://coinatmradar.com/bitcoin_at...-coin-macau-gf-148-rua-de-luis-gonzaga-gomes/ https://coinatmradar.com/
These ATMs seem scammy. I went to the only one in my city (the largest city in brazil only has 1 bitcoin ATM) and the markup was 25%. I had to pay 25% more than the market price to buy bitcoin. I still bought it because I wanted to test but it was just a nominal amount. Not that this premium is unique, seems to be going on across the board right now in many venues to buy bitcoin (GBTC being the biggest one with the ridic 100% premium to NAV). Proper documentation and using a good wallet site seems to be the only cost effective way to purchase bitcoin now
I watched the Comey testimony and the things that suprised me were -McCain seemed quite protective of Trump, which makes me think he wont be obstructing much his agenda in the Senate -Comey described Trump in a way that shows that if he doesn't come back to earth soon, his presidency will blow up. I think he will though, I think Paul Ryan is right when he says he reason he did all that was because he is a newbie in government
I've defended Trump many times, mainly because there is hardly any articles around in the web that do that and I like to write when I got something different to say. But I usually stuck with the market/economy side of him, I think he will be good for both. That said, its becoming more and more clear that his style is too polarizing, he is too studborn in a lot of things. I suspect he does that because he doesn't want to weaken his 'image' by backing down (so it will be very hard to get him to stop tweeting, that would be news on itself and he doesn't seem to want that headline). He doesn't want to be seem as weak. This Comey testimony showed that he will also make some serious errors when trying to get his way. The whole thing about asking The Att General to leave the room and then try to nudge the FBI chief, its something that resembles what I would read in a Brazilian newspaper. So is the whole 'loyalty' talk. Trump is very bad at communication (violates Marshall Rosberg non-violent communication principles all over the place) and doesn't know where the boundries are. US politics has been going down the path of polarization way before him but he is acting as a catalyst to make that worse. I need to read up on Charlie Wheelan book where he talks about the need for American politics to go more towards the center (The Centrist Manifesto), I suspect that is the only solution. Trump will not bring that solution, he is lucky that he's got a majority in congress and Republicans are desperate to have something to show for in the 2018 mid-terms, if it wasn't for that, he would be presiding over the mother of all gridlocks but given that such is not the case, healthcare, tax reform/cuts and maybe some infrastructure still seem a baseline scenario for the next 12-24 months