that is not incorrect and it is not manipulation either.
it simply is an average price that a couple of hundred exchanges report. so it will always have a certain percentage difference from any exchange that you look at. higher than some and lower than others. next time when you visited CMC check out the "Markets" tab and see how many values they are using to get to that average.

for example the current price in BTC/USD markets listed on CMC are in the range from $8,599.84 down to $8,201.80 so the average reported price in this site is $8,309.94 while Bitstamp price is $8,292 Bitfinex is $8,311 Kraken is $8,288,...

because it is not profitable for them! binance like any other exchange is aiming to maximize their profitability. that means doing easier things with least amount of effort and sometimes risk to make the most amount of money.
creating their own token (with no cost) and selling it to people to make millions, practically inventing IEO scam and making millions for letting scam tokens to be listed as legit ICOs on their platform.... are so much easier than doing anything else. so they put all their focus on these things instead.

until the market grows more and exchanges become safer so that people could feel safe using them and leaving orders open so that the order books could become more packed with orders effectively shrinking volatility.

well there is nothing forcing the "weak hands" to sell their coins. it is their own choice. if i tell you to shoot yourself in the foot, it is still your decision whether or not to listen to me

a copied address doesn't just randomly change and you said it is not happening again so the possibility of a clipboard hijacker is nearly zero. it is better if you start retracing your steps. go back to the start and check what address did your fiend send you. for example if it was sent to you in an email then check that email and see if it was actually the other address!
also try to remember if you copied the entire string not just partially or with additional stuff, blockchain.com wallet is known to have weird bugs which could be the cause. try to see if you can reproduce it.

nobody has predicted this "downtrend" apart from those who are always seeing drops at all times no matter what. some expected drops but not a trend.

bitcoin market is a global 24/7 market and you don't leave it to come back! besides you have to believe it is the "bottom" to buy it. right now the market is scared of the drop and the manipulation and the decision of investors like always is to wait until it is over.
you also seem to be stuck in 2013 having some illusions about China's market size and its effect on the price...

your problem like many others is thinking that bitcoin is one thing: price

when the fact is that whether people ignore bitcoin or not has nothing to do with its price. price rises and falls only attracts one type of people and that is day traders who are interested in fiat not bitcoin and want to use bitcoin to earn fiat.
the funny thing is that the price drops attracts these people nearly the same as price rise does! because day traders make their profit either way.

your post doesn't make any sense because you are all over the place.
it is not rant, it is complaining about things that are not even related to bitcoin! if you are unsatisfied with exchanges, their fees, regulation,... you are not complaining about bitcoin. you are complaining about a company that is offering certain services about bitcoin. and not to mention that their rules only affect day traders not regular bitcoin users!!! and bitcoin is not meant to be traded, it is meant to be used as a currency so maybe your views are misguided.

in short in answer to your entire wall of text, bitcoin is still the same decentralized currency that it was supposed to be from the start. you can still get paid in it as you do with any currency and you can still make payments just like any other currency. but when your "interest" is not in bitcoin but in fiat and how much profit you can make from bitcoin of course you are feeling restraint right now because of the regulations,...

he advertised a ton of ICO projects where he got paid for that advertisement a very high fee and also alongside that he was pump and dumping some small shitcoins where he bought them up, advertised, pumped and then dumped the coins.
among all these there have been many that were actually pure scams. not to mention that if you closed your eyes and selected an ICO there was a good chance it was scam, so it is obvious many of them were advertised by McAfee.

i don't think so, exchanges (specially altcoin exchanges) have nothing to do with adoption. simply because exchanges are only used by traders and traders can not be counted as adopters. they are here to make money (fiat) so they are only interested in fiat not bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.
the adoption is only when people start using bitcoin as it was meant to be used, meaning as a currency to pay for stuff. when merchants start accepting it as payment,...

just using it is not enough, you have to check the code and see what it is doing. it is written in JavaScript and i have no knowledge of it, otherwise i would have reviewed it already.

stick to wallets that are popular and have been peer reviewed many times by others so there is very little chance of having any bugs in their RNG system, seed generation,... eg. Electrum for bitcoin. of course your options are practically non-existent if you want multiple coins.

haha, that is exactly what OP thinks. and you'd be surprised to see how much of this type of thinking is going around. they have even created bots for it!!!
this has been a new trend too (probably a year old). basically people fail to predict bitcoin price movements through normal ways and the more they get surprised by the moves the more ridiculous ways they come up with next to try and predict price with.
"watching the social media" is the latest weird one. there was another similar one looking at google trends to try and associate number of searches with price rises!

there is a good reason, they were lazy!
if you have checked their site in early days you could see that there has been nearly no change in their site. there were a lot of things missing, for example their API has been incomplete for ever and there is a text saying it will be added soon!!!
they never made any efforts to grow their business so they never could make any profit from it. as a result they had to shut down.

all true but at the same time you have to keep in mind that none of the characteristics that were mentioned here are 100% accurate. there is always a certain percentage for being wrong.
- hashrate: we see the increase but we have no way of knowing the distribution.
- addresses with funds: we see the increase but again we don't know the distribution. there was a lot of spam attacks against bitcoin, these increase the size of UTXO database by a lot. there is a lot of change addresses,... and a lot more than increase the number without adoption increasing.
- addresses with large balance: it was said there was no increase, this doesn't necessarily mean a good thing. these types of addresses usually belong to big services, their increase could show more and more big services starting with bitcoin. like more exchanges, more payment processors,... if it is not increasing it could mean there is no big decent service anymore.

haha, although i don't yet see an immediate bull run but that is exactly the first thing that came to my mind when i read this post. but i have to say i think Tom Lee is mostly talking based on his company's performance. when they fear losing their investors they start making positive statements (predicting bitcoin to $50k in 2017) and when they fail to get new investors they make statements like this.

the thing about coinmarketcap and other similar sites is that they should never be interpreted as "ranking" sites. they are just raw lists that contain raw unprocessed data in them which they fetch from those sources. the way to interpret that data is up to the user who accesses that data.
so for example in case of this list, it is just showing us how much volume each exchange has. if we choose to interpret it as the exchange being good just because it has higher volume, is our mistake!

in my experience chats and channels are always filled with a lot of spam and bad advice because people always end up suggesting their bags of shitcoin which is losing value to others to encourage them into buying them so that they could dump it themselves. the best thing i have seen so far which isn't that good (best among bads) is tradingview website.
in the end when it comes to trading everyone is on his own. it is a dog eat dog market.

think of the private key as a special "pen" you use to sign "checks" before giving it to someone else to go to back and cash them out. you can't have any limits on your pen, it is just a pen! what you can do is to add conditions such as "validity period" to your check so for example the person could only cash it after 10 days not sooner.
with bitcoin that pen is your private key and the checks are the locking scripts used in each transaction. altcoins are pretty similar, most of them copy bitcoin scripts others do similar with additional conditions.

first of all making lots of random bullshit statements about bitcoin price doesn't make someone an expert about bitcoin or as you put it "a crypto expert". secondly we already have some good decentralized exchange projects that are open source, free and working well. if anyone wanted to contribute they would have done it with those projects instead of creating a new one. i smell another shitty centralized one that starts by raising funds and then dies after a couple of months.

verifying signature in this case is slightly different. unlike Electrum, here you don't have signature of the file to verify so you don't use the file in your process. instead you use the message that is provided on top of the signature which is a starting message string plus the sha256 result of hashing the file. then you have to hash the file using SHA256 and check that hash with the hash in message.

P.S. if you want to use that tool you should also first verify if it is using good entropy source to generate the random seed phrase. it seems to be doing that but i've never used it for anything but testing and although i think it does it correctly but since it is not such a popular tool for "generating" seeds you may want to verify that.

no, i don't think "majority" of people have heard about bitcoin. there is certainly a lot of people who have seen the name bitcoin somewhere in passing or in the news but to know what it is, is another story. i guess the percentage is high but not majority yet. and from those who have heard the name and know what it is, there still is a much smaller percentage who have bothered looking into it and even a smaller percentage who have adopted bitcoin which is why it is considered lower than 1% still after 10 years.