we are only lucky when we see a big drop. it is a gift to us by the market like the discounts the big shops give, like always say when there is a dip, buy it or regret it for the rest of your life.

the $8000 was finally broken for the second time now and we are officially on the big ass rise now.

but this rise has left behind lots of wounded people who forgot to listen to advice of "buy in the dip" and were left behind.
right now so many of them are creating new accounts saying how bitcoin is going to crash and how it is all a bubble that it is starting to make me laugh

anyways, enjoy the ride. see you at $10k

most of them really. specially those smaller ones that have recently been pumped like Vertcoin and Potcoin which is being pumped now. as i said it is a seesaw, these coins are currently high on top and they have to come down (out of their bubbles) to recover at the bottom and build up for the next pump.

lets see.
bitcoin has real usage mostly as a currency and is adopted by real world businesses not virtual fake ones. the shops like restaurants, coffee shops, all other kinds are actually accepting bitcoin as a real money.
ethereum is not a currency and it has no usage apart from creation of ICO! which is not going to last that long since all the countries are banning ICOs these days. and it is not the only altcoin that can do this and it is not even the best one that can do this

bitcoin has a limited supply. and currently there is small amount of it available.
ethereum is limitless. it is all about supply and demand! and currently there is a huge amount of it available.

so no, i say ETH can never rise that big, specially in 2 or 3 years it will be back to $10 because by that time there will be at least 10 billion ethereum available. you can see what happened to Dogecoin with unlimited supply (it is worth 16 satoshi now)

this is exactly what i have been saying for years!

people think the drops are because of bitcoin rise, bitcoin fork,... but the fact is that bitcoin related stuff was only one of the reasons (the smallest reason) for the altcoin dumps. the reality is that bitcoin stuff was mostly like the catalyst which hastened the inevitable dump of altcoins which were in fact in a big bubble which had to burst.
and since many still don't believe this, many of the bubbles still remain and will bust slower but it is inevitable. the dump part of the pump will always come. it is like a seesaw, you can not just go up, you have to come down at some point before you can go back up again.

the strategy used for bitcoin never changes. it is going to be always the same.
bitcoin is a long term investment while altcoins are penny stock market, only good for short term.

in my experience the sooner you accept this fact the sooner you start making real money in this market. because holding altcoins like ETH for long term means you are imprisoning your money in something that best case scenario doesn't move and normal case scenario gets dumped hard.

but instead if you move your money around from altcoin to altcoin and participate in their pumps you make a lot of money and you can always come back to the first altcoin if you saw it getting pumped again. you don't have to hold the shitcoin until it is pumped!

i would stay away from Ripple and Ethereum if i were you. at least for a while until their dumping stops and the pumps begin. but i am mostly an altcoin trader and i'd like to think i know what i am doing when i buy these altcoins. if you are new, it is best that you stick to bitcoin only and not to think about investing in any altcoins at all. try sticking around and watching the charts of these altcoins in long terms and see how long does it take for them to go up and how long to come down. then think about investing in them.

i excluded BCH intentionally because BCH is currently on a pumping spree which can become even bigger soon as the SegWit2x fights heat up. and in that case there would be a lot of short term profit to be made

selling bitcoin is always as much risky as buying bitcoin. because we all know bitcoin is rising and will continue to rise and when you sell the price may bounce back much faster and you miss the chance to buy back what you sold and you will eventually be forced to buy bitcoin at a higher price so you will have less BTC than before.

with that said, selling these days and right after the fork (only if you can be fast enough) is a good idea. not to sell all your stash but sell something so that you can have some additional fiat at hand in order to buy bitcoin in the possible dip.

it is always impossible to predict the price of these forks. we know for a fact that their prices will fall after they are released because many will sell. bitcoin price will also drop since many will also sell bitcoin. but the thing we don't know is how much they are going to sell.

right now BTC2 is worth $1500 or 0.212BTC in the future markets and just like BTG and BCh before it, when people receive their coins they will dump it. how low it will go depends on the pressure. but in this case i don't think it will fall below 0.08BTC and probably be at 0.1 anyways.

why should creating a new fork out of bitcoin even affect altcoins? worst case scenario is that they are just adding another one to the pile of altcoins. and the old altcoins will remain the same pump and dumps they used to be before the fork of bitcoin happen!

but this upcoming fork can affect bitcoin at least in the short term. we hope the damages are minimal and the result is like before but nobody can see the future so we only speculate about it.

i have no idea what you mean by "set up their systems" but if you are thinking about an altcoin can replace bitcoin i say yes it is possible that an altcoin becomes big enough to even replace bitcoin. but forget about all the altcoins that exist today none of them have any chance of doing that. they are too small and full of issues. most of them can not handle a medium number of transactions let alone get near the number of transactions that bitcoin handles every day.

actually i think the moral of the story that everyone will take home with them is this: altcoins get pumped!

and that's what helped you get away with missing out on the rise and also get away with the gambling losses you sustained. and you mostly got lucky with the POT coin. this coin rarely gets a decent pump but whenever it does the pumps are real big and the price goes up high to give a lot of profit.

only Monero is my choice because it has proven to be much more stable and with good rises which stay up after they happen.
other altcoins have had much wilder pump and dumps and they are much younger which means they may not have such a good future specially since a good anonymous altcoin like monero is around and is used. so many of the others also have issues with their anonymity which makes them not such good options either.

there is always a chance for bitcoin price to go down. but predicting it is impossible. right now i am expecting some correction which is practically a dip and a good time to buy in the dip and it will probably come before the fork itself.
the size will possibly be 10-30% tops and the recovery will also be fast because there are a lot of good news around for the price to jump back up.

buy the dips if you want to maximize your profit, and buy any time if you just want to invest long term and have some money lying around which you don't want to use.

there are lots of these things but they all change things temporarily (in short term) and then we will be back to normal rise.

in my experience you should never wait for a "fall" in bitcoin ever. because in 99% of the times you will be disappointed and also miss out on buying bitcoin before the rise begins again. but sometimes falls happen and in those cases i always take advantage and buy more even if it means borrowing money in case i had no fiat around to invest. that is a big profit in it.

to answer your question, i am not waiting for any $5000 nor expect it. if it happened i will buy though.

you can never predict any market by looking at the price or charts. not just bitcoin. and there aren't exactly any patters. there are some pattern-adjacent that people use for technical analysis but whenever human behavior is involved things are unpredictable.

it is because GDAX is based in US and recently the news about CME is booming over there. a large increase in demand on that particular exchange causes a sharper rise.

so many countries have banned ICOs and i hear news of new countries every day talking about how illegal ICOs are. so there is a pretty good chance that Japan can be the next one to ban ICOs.

it is always some people who will ruin everything for the rest of us. a couple of scammy ICOs and lots of illegal money raised by them ruins ICO for all the rest of the ICO projects and they have to burn with the bad ones alike.
although Japanese may take a different rout unlike others. they may allow some of the ICOs to go through.

there is always only one option not two. and that is to protect your investment. and that is a general advice not just related to altcoins. and protecting your investment means dumping risky investments such as altcoins when they are getting dumped hard and giving you big losses. you prevent those losses by selling fast and selling in the early stages of the dump.

now is the time to already be out of the altcoin market and watching it from outside to try and figure out where the bottom is and also figure out which altcoin will reverse more after the bottom was reached. in other words find the altcoin with the biggest dead cat bounce.

i don't understand you say "don't take the profit out" and "invest it back in" but you say to "lend bitcoin" as investment. that doesn't sound like a good idea to me. and it is not a bad idea to take some money out in my opinion.

for example you invest $10,000 and make $1000 profit. it is not such a bad idea to take $100-200 out and enjoy it and invest back the $900-800.
and as for investment, i say it is best to continue doing what you did to make that $1000 profit. lending is not such a good idea even with valid collateral, it is a lot of work and the risk is still pretty high.
to be honest i prefer trading, or if you are a business owner it is best to invest it back into your own business and expand it more.

literary anything else has a much better chance of replacing bitcoin than bitcoin cash! even bitcoin gold has a better chance at it even though it has a 16000 blocks premined!!!

the issue is that bitcoin cash doesn't do anything! it is no different that bitcoin of pre-SegWit. it just has bigger blocks. and bigger blocks don't do shit for bitcoin, they just make the blockchain become bigger and bigger and make nodes centralized and harder to run.
not to mention that BCH doesn't have any proper developers working on it and no bitcoin user wants it.

we are currently having an awesome bitcoin cash pump and that is the only reason topics like OP and the articles like he shared are being created.
we should all enjoy this BCH pump while it lasts. which will probably be until after SegWit2x and there is a lot of profit to be made in this pump...