most people talk out of their asses when it comes to predicting bitcoin price so yeah they are based on intuition! but in reality you should be able to analyze the market, technical and fundamental can help. and in the end the experience you have about the market will do the trick.
however it is not something that someone can just tell you in one comment!

this doesn't sound so bad in my opinion. this is more of a warning and it is a good warning that every bank in any country has already released a long time ago, ever since price went high and media was filled with bitcoin news. they have to warn people because there are always some of them who will throw everything they own at cryptocurrencies and when they lose they lose a lot.

the negativity was from the US banks like GP Morgan which has been attacking bitcoin constantly and went as far as directly calling it "fraud".

this is starting to look strangely familiar and extremely suspicious to be honest!

usually when an exchange gets hacked, based on history, there is a good chance that they are lying and it was they robbed their users not a hacker robbing them and users. ... this is first suspicion.

when the exchanges continue to pull these publicity stunts like offering a ridiculous amount of money ($10 million) reward instead of hiring some people and paying them a LOT less to do the job, that increases the suspicion even more.

it depends on what you are holding and what you plan on achieving by holding that thing!

what?
- bitcoin
bitcoin has a good future so it will continue being adopted more and because of that its price will continue to rise. so even if you ended up holding in a loss, you can be fairly certain that its price will go back up again and shoot up after that.

- altcoins
most altcoins are completely useless and all of them are pump and dumps. the whole altcoin market is usually looked at as a side market for small and risky trades. most of them won't even live long enough for holding to give you a good return and many of them have terrible supply plans which means in long term the sell pressure can not let their prices to go up.
holding these is not a good idea.

why?
- as a trader
if you want to trade anything (bitcoin or altcoins) then holding doesn't mean much. if you have bought it in a dip then you must sell it when price goes up or sell when it drops lower than your stop loss.

- as an investment
since not everyone is a trader then holding comes in here where you buy something that you believe has a good future or potential to grow then hold that even if there are fluctuations. but the part that i marked by an underline is very important. you can't just buy anything and wish for it to go up and have a good potential you have to know it has it.
and it is up to you to come to that conclusion and not fall for advertisement[/b].

it is always a good idea to learn technical analysis and the way to read the charts properly and actually use them in your trading but unfortunately i have to say that none of it will work as well as you may hope when it comes to altcoin trading.
it is simply because altcoins are all very manipulated and that makes it impossible to treat them with any kind of logic.

no bitcoin is not supposed to do any of that. it is not a key to anything. bitcoin is just a currency, or a tool and tools don't do the same thing for everyone. it depends on how that person uses that tool that can determine what will their future hold.
you can be an irrational investor and lose money by investing in bitcoin or you can use your head and become multi millionaires like many who have done it already like Winkelvos twins or the infamous Roger Ver.

first of all bitcoin transactions are not as private as you may think so it may even be pretty easy to track them in some cases. and that is why bitcoin is not used for anything illegal on large scales. there is always some usage which you can't do anything about.
secondly i wouldn't call that bitcoin's disadvantage. literary anything in the world can be abused, specially currencies and most of them are already being abused and usage doesn't define the tool.

well not entirely but for the most part yes it is a pump and dump coin.

you see value comes from utility, and people who understand cryptocurrencies invest in coins that have some real potential. this was true about ethereum at some point in the past. but all the mess that has happened during the time has made everyone to just leave it and look at it as a pump coin.
the mess that i am talking about is all the exploits, the bloated blockchain, serious scaling issues, and worst of all the roll back they did which eliminated immutability of ethereum.

OP seems to be forgetting one key information and that is the fact that ethereum is centralized and the foundation has millions of dollars to pump into their coin and keep it alive. on top of that there are a lot of hard core bag holders around which make the drop even harder. $1 is simply impossible because ETH will either die in a short time which means going to zero or it will continue on this downward slope and in long term continue to lose value despite the foundation pumps.

the only thing that a trader needs to be successful is experience if you ask me. none of the above will help him if he has no experience, you can have the money, you can have knowledge (theoretical about the market), and you can be patient but if you don't know what to do you will wait until price drops to zero with your patience!

you need to have experience to know when to be patient and when to use haste instead. for example when a dump starts, you should not use patience, you should be fast enough to dump yourself before it is too late.

exactly. ever since they officially killed immutability of their coin this project lost all its value and all its supporters. but unfortunately people only look at price and that is the only thing they consider when giving projects value!
and since ETH has been getting pumped a lot, many make the mistake of thinking it is a good project!!!

and the funny part is when it comes to price, thanks to ETH huge supply + its no cap for supply it will continue to go down in long term.

since you said you read it in New York times, didn't it already mention that taxes on cryptocurrencies have been in place ever since 2014ish by the IRS and people have been paying their taxes whenever they have bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and make a profit?
so what is the difference now?

calling bitcoin different names doesn't change what it truly is. you can call it commodity, or call it security, or call it dead even and lots of other things but in the end bitcoin is still the same peer to peer digital cash that was intended to be.

you need to decide if you are a trader or an investor.
if you are a trader then when bitcoin starts a crash you need to sell (before the drop or at the beginning, NEVER at the end) and buy back near the bottom as fast as possible. if you can not do all of these at perfect time then you should not trade in first place.
if you are an investor then you shouldn't even be asking this question. you look at bitcoin and if you see a potential for long term success then you keep on buying it and buy even more when price drops.

nah, it doesn't look like a bull run to me. not for altcoins anyways.

and if i am not sure about the bull run of the altcoins but i am sure that there is no bull run for ICOs and i would consider the risk of investing in ICOs 10 times more than it normally is.
right now they are under observation, there are a lot of ICO bans all around the world, a lot of warnings from the rest of the places where they are not banning them and there will be lots of regulations and taxes for ICOs which may pose a lot of problems for them in near future hence making their pumps impossible.

we can not deny that tether has many benefits for traders. for example the fact that it has been worth $1 fixed for more than 90% of its lifetime is a good feature, also it can be transfered with a very small fee compared to fiat transfers. so it is a convenient way for traders to escape to fiat. and it can be used in many trading strategies.

but we should not end up thinking it is the same as fiat. because it is not and we should not forget the risks that this coin has. it is always easy to forget that tether is centralized and that poses a serious risk! not to mention that they are not even guaranteeing anything for their users.

nothing has changed so far to give you any new insights. everything is still the same as before.
bitcoin has real usages as a currency, ethereum does not.
bitcoin has a big adoption by people other than speculators, ether does not.
bitcoin has a small supply, ethereum has a huge supply which is nearly 6 times bigger than bitcoin
bitcoin has a cap at 21 million, ethereum has no cap so its supply will continue to grow. and according to supply and demand it should not even be able to rise in long term.

most of the people calling bitcoin a bubble just love doing so, they don't even have to believe it themselves they just want to talk about how bitcoin is in a bubble. most of them wish for a drop so they can buy more an i am sure even if price were to fall to $10 they would still call it a big bubble.

i am not familiar with EOS bu any of the coins that has an ICO and raises a lot of funds through a platform like ETH, they are receiving ETH tokens and they can dump those whenever the time comes. this has always been a big concern among ETH investors because ICOs are creating a huge demand for Ether and at the same time they can create a huge dump too. and if some day ICOs stop being created, like in case they are banned, that big demand for Ether will vanish and only the dumping will remain.

first give us the link to where it says they are banning Petro.

then lets talk about it. this is a centralized shitcoin that is created by the country's government (Venezuela to be exact) nobody even cares about this coin and is never going to buy it. this coin was created mainly for their government to make money and fill their pockets. and if i am not mistaken it had an ICO too