one of the worst things that has been happening in the past couple of months that led to an even worst case of a bear market for the cryptocurrencies that has been going down is the fact that people have been encouraging each other to "have patience" and bag hold. that kind of mentality has led to a lot of bag holders who were in small loss at first but they decided to bag hold so their losses grew and some even reached 90% loss. eventually everyone wakes up from this kind of mistake and when they do the first thing they do is to panic sell which crashes the market further down. that is why we keep seeing these steps of dump in altcoins instead of a smooth dump to get it over with.

that the important part of it though! ETF has always been 90% hype and whether it is approved or rejected will not  change a thing for bitcoin and its price apart from its hype and fear factor. these "institutional investors" that everyone keep hyping about with ETF are not even going to come in "bitcoin market" since with ETF whey are not buying bitcoin but they are buying ETF!
and since now everyone is tired of the same meaningless hype and most of them know better to think it is more than a hype, the effects of this type of news is vanishing.

it is not commodities they sell, it is goods. and they don't necessarily have to be enthusiastic about bitcoin to start seeing the potential and wanting to keep at least a part of what they receive. it doesn't have to be receiving bitcoin and holding all of it! you can sell as much as to cover the costs and keep the profit of your sale as bitcoin as an investment. it is still business and has nothing to do with "passion" it would be passion if you were blindly buying bitcoin (small amounts) to test it and have fun with the technology not when it is money involved.

you know what, 90% of the times when people talk about whales in bitcoin market they are not talking about actual whales. instead they are talking about scare crows that they call whales that they create in their head to scare people with. for instance recently there is a trend going on about "watching whales". or "whale watching" as some people like to call it! (it's a thing now haha)
what they do is that they try to find a big transaction on the blockchain and then start making up stories about it saying it is a whale moving coins to exchanges to dump and crash the market. the funny thing is that if you really analyze the blockchain you would see such large fund moves happen regularly and it has nothing to do with whales and dumping.

this theory has been posted by others too all these years that people keep bringing up the subject. and I still can not accept this as a valid one because it is hard to accept that a developer who created a system doesn't keep a proper backup of his keys!
it is not about the value of those coins though. it is about doing the basics of storing your wallet file.

you are looking at things in a very simplified way by using halving as a point of reference for a 4 year long period! no market is affected by one cause like halving like this for 4 years!

1. from the early days that altcoins were created with the goal of being pumped and dumped we are having big altcoin pumps nearly every day. it has never been consistent 10x per day but pretty close to it and it is still happening as we speak today.
2. again from early days whenever an exchange needed to work with fiat and banks they were asking for KYC because that was required of them. these days in some countries regulations are becoming more serious but I don't see your point in mentioning this here!

the alt scene is pretty much the same bullshit as ever. just because YOU don't see more than 2x pumps over a month that doesn't mean they aren't happening. of course the 2017 pumps has left most of them damaged and still dumping but the big pumps are still happening because the pumpers still want money and there are enough newbies left to scam.

bitcoin will never pump again. in fact it has been about 5 years that bitcoin is not pumpable because the market has grown big enough that prevents any "pump" from happening. besides bitcoin is not some pump and dump shitcoin that you can pump!

none of the things you said so far has anything to do with bitcoin though! bitcoin price will continue to rise as its adoption is going to continue to grow. with more demand and its scarce supply that is inevitable.

but no it will never be pumped again. 2013 was the last time we saw a pump performed by Mt Gox.

but from what I have seen, there has ben no "crack down" of cryptocurrency in India! what we had was the Reserve Bank of India stopping their support of anything cryptocurrency related and people switching to p2p ways of trading bitcoin.
this move is a move to make more money as long as people need alternative ways of trading bitcoin. so it is more like taking advantage of an opportunity with their outrageous fees.

you are talking about volatility but only talk about one side of it which is drop not the other side which is the rise. in other words there is a higher chance of making a lot of profit when accepting bitcoin as its price continues going upwards specially in the long term. for example someone who has been accepting bitcoin payment in the past year has made a ton of profit since in a year price has grown >600% not considering the ATH.

you can not call some long term investor who is buying bitcoin every now and then to store more and more of his money in bitcoin a "fool" just because YOU are focusing on the short term fluctuations. of course everyone wants to always buy the cheapest possible but that is not how real world works.

the only thing you can say is that people shouldn't sell way too late after a big price drop happened and price reached the bottom, that's all.

but how would these """experts""" eat if we stop talking about their asshole opinion?
that is how they make a living and everybody is a winner in this case.
idiots keep on creating companies to make profit and call it blockchain something then start giving out "opinions" which is basically advertising their company to make their names heard! and the always hungry news sites that have nothing better to report, keep quoting them and practically advertise their crap. and newbies like OP copy past them here to increase their post count.... everyone wins

it is not "stagnant" it is stable while being accumulated.

this "Intelligence commodity strategist" should learn to reach the charts. this is not the first time we have such patterns where price is very stable without much movement. and that has nothing to do with maturity! not to mention that "cryptocurrency market" is not the same as bitcoin market. the whole market also contains altcoins which have been pretty volatile as they get dumped or pump these days unless they are waiting to be pumped.

it is interesting that CCN (a shitposting website) is quoting Bloomberg (bitcoin doomsday specialist )...

not gonna happen this soon and not at all fast. it might have been the case if price broke out 2 months ago but after this stability any rises will be slower too as the money slowly creeps back in.

there is nothing new about exchange hacks. they have been happening from the day the exchanges started and most of them aren't even hacks. it is the exchange scamming you. and because of that the safety of exchanges has not changed.


this only concerns traders not everyone. and everyone is not a trader to be considered about this!
not to mention that you always keep your trading funds on exchanges, in other words funds that you want to have access to every day. and you already accepted this risk. otherwise you shouldn't be even trading!

also stop thinking about making money from something that is not designed to make you money!
most of these problems (exchanges scamming, airdrops scamming, Ponzi schemes,...) are happening because of that greed!

something interesting to consider regarding this is to take a look at the charts and see whether bitcoin has really been that volatile and also see how long does the high volatile states last. for example if you look at the charts for the past 5 years you can see that the stability stages and low volatility stages when price moves up slowly are the majority of the times in past 5 years.
the high volatile stages are usually end of the bubble and the correction of that (like 2013) and then we are left with much more stable market where price is either stable or is moving upwards slowly (like 2015-2018) and (2018-...)

checking the price every day is not a wrong/bad thing for anyone. you are checking to see what is happening in the market. specially when it comes to bitcoin that has a pretty volatile market from time to time. so you need to stay aware of the situation that is possibly shaping up. and being a new technology or currency means checking the price regularly is not a bad idea.

BUT it depends on why you are checking the price. if it is for the reason I explained above in a summary then it is ok. but this is not always the case. we have many who are just afraid of everything and lose their sleep over thinking market is volatile and they are going to lose everything they own! so they panic-check the price and that is not a healthy action.

unless we see some real actions from countries, the first assumptions after reading this types of news is that they are nonsense clickbaits and nothing more. specially when they are published initially by the known bullshit-news-sites.

but to answer your question, to be fair other countries such as Japan have already made the move. and there are many "silicon valley" kind of places in some countries that are "bitcoin special zone" already.

but the problem is when you are using exchanges then you are not using bitcoin. you are using a centralized service that is leaking your identity and removing the privacy from your bitcoin usage not from bitcoin itself. and that is one of the biggest mistakes that OP and usually others make when it comes to bitcoin and privacy. they think in terms of these services but they make the  conclusion for bitcoin.

the bitcoin market is so ready these days that any kind of positive news can trigger the start of the rally and $10k is not a problem at all since in my opinion the real value of bitcoin is somewhere around $9k-$10k which means going back to $10k is just going back to real price from this current undervalued prices.
ETF and Bakkt are only examples of what a positive news  can be and people are too focused on them that they are missing the bigger picture which is the accumulating that is happening by the whales.

I disagree.
when ICOs scam, when altcoins show their true nature as shitcoins,... that kills the trust in ICOs and shitcoins. it has nothing to do with bitcoin. people can see that bitcoin is continuing to be the same as it has always been without diverging from the main goals of it such as being a decentralized payment system. one must be very ignorant to lose trust in bitcoin just because some ICO scammed him!

well that is now what "news" should be like. and when they are publishing something that looks like "analysis" and "speculation" then it definitely shouldn't be like this. and if they do it then we shouldn't be calling them "news site" and quoting them here! I mean these sites are worst that signature spammers on bitcointalk!

if by "positive influence" you mean a rise because of FOMO buys then yes. obviously something that was so hyped up at some point in the past can still get hyped up again in case it is approved and that can lead to a rise. but I wouldn't really consider it as a "positive influence" since such rises are never good and they are always unstable rises.
what we need is another year of solid rises like from 2015 until near the end of 2017.