well you have to learn the difference between a pump, rise, rally/bull run, moon/bubble, spike, fomo and dump, dip, correction, crash. these may look the same but they are very different. so when you say "it is starting to fall again" it means you don't know this difference (you are not alone though). this is a fall but it is only a correction. look at the past  couple of weeks. price has gone up from $3k range to $8k range and now it is coming down from that $8k to $7k. that is called a correction.
of course in bitcoin market when such a drop happens, many start panicking and manipulation is always present so it sometimes gets bigger than usual meaning a $1000 drop (12%) instead of a simple correction of 5%

that is a good option for between-exchange transfers. but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
you already mentioned one of them which is the number of confirmations. sometimes you have to wait for hours before your transaction is credited to your account because that altcoin requires a very large number of confirmation due to its weak network prone to 51% attacks.
the other thing is the volatility of their prices, specially these days if you wanted to transfer bitcoin between exchanges. you buy an altcoin with your BTC and the time it reaches the other place its value has dropped at least 5%
and finally is the spread in the orderbooks that some altcoins have. for example you buy an altcoin at 20 satoshi from the "asks" and when on the other exchange (that has the same 20 satoshi ask) you wanted to sell it, you will realize that you have to sell to "bids" if you want your money right away and the highest bid is 18 satoshi. it may look like 2 satoshi difference but it is 10% loss!

bitcoin like everything else has certain characteristics that defines it. for example a car has 4 wheels and if you cut one, it can still run but it turns into garbage. one of the characteristics of bitcoin is immutability of its blockchain. it has nothing to do with ethics anymore, if you rollback you are removing that characteristic and bitcoin is not longer bitcoin. i will go as far as saying it will turn into garbage and every user and miner and node owner knows this well. so nobody would want such thing.


i disagree with this and i say this is wrong because you are "assuming" that there exists a (singular) miner that "controls" more than 70% of the mining power and that is simply wrong. there are pools that many (multiple) miners are sharing the work but the pool is not in control of their hashrate, there are big farms that have high hashing power but they are nowhere near enough percentage to even make a difference let alone to a 51% attack and a successful rollback.

remember that a 51% attack (or calling it a pretty word like rollback or getting stolen money back) is going to crash bitcoin and the miner's ASICs is going to probably turn into bricks. in other words the "payment" that the "Octopus" pays is probably the last time they make a decent amount of money with bitcoin.

it will 100% depend on trust because bitcoin does not have a charge back so when i see a store that only accepts bitcoin i have to first be able to trust that store not to be a scam. and so far i have seen some stores that were "like" Amazon but they weren't that trusted.
but if it was indeed trusted, then my answer is yes and i have used some in the past.

but if i wanted to see something new, i would prefer something "not-like" Amazon because Amazon is centralized and that design doesn't match bitcoin's decentralized nature. so i would prefer to see a decentralized marketplace instead. and that already exist too and it is called Open Bazaar

just so you know, both of these sites are unreliable when it comes to fees. blockchain.com is known to give weird suggestions (usually too low) and bitcoinfees always suggests a much higher fee for high priority transactions and causes a big overpay for those who rely on it.

you are correct though, fees have indeed increased over the past weeks due to the price rise and the large number of people who are both selling and buying bitcoin.

this is clearly a big whale manipulation followed by a bigger panic move by the bots with their stop loss orders (big red sell button they push at times like this!), it doesn't really need any news to get triggered, just the price to go down below their stop loss levels to trigger an avalanche effect.

the news might have something to do with Binance opening up again. that is why in the past couple of days the groundwork for the FUD was being put in place all over the internet with FUDsters saying Binance is the reason for price rise!!!

FOMO is not something that happens once and at a particular price, FOMO is happening every day and at all prices and we have many different types of it with different levels of "fear".
for example when price reversed out of $3100 we had a FOMO, but a small one as price went up to $4.2k and the "fear" factor in that was small too. but then when we broke the $4.2k resistance the bigger FOMO began and price shot up to above $5k. then we have seen 2 more FOMOs as price kept pushing upward and as people "feared" more and more about how they were missing out on the rise.

so in other words from the bottom ($3.1k) up to $8k+ we have already had multiple FOMO cases with at least 2 big ones. and we will continue seeing different types and levels of FOMO.
$10k breakout will be newcomers mostly and a moderately size FOMO, the $21k breakout will be a lot more newcomers and a much bigger FOMO and finally the biggest FOMO will occur near the end (similar to 2017 and the rise from $9k to $20k in one month) possibly at $80k to $100k.

re-broadcasting doesn't do anything to a transaction with low fees! if a node (a miner or other nodes) doesn't have the transaction, it won't accept it with your re-broadcast and if they aren't going to include it in their block due to its low fee, again they won't "change their mind" if it is received again.

i think you are trying too hard to find a reason for something that doesn't need a reason and is normal. bitcoin price must have risen no matter what. that is how the past 10 year rise has occurred. it wasn't China that pushed bitcoin up from $0.01 to $20000, it was the adoption. so is today's rise from $3k to $8k. the short term spikes are due to the fact that bitcoin was under priced and also in a big bear market for a long time so as soon as the reversal was undeniable everyone started jumping back in and that causes the big spikes.
other than that this is the rally that everyone was expecting.

this comment and the usual statement mentioning "most expensive pizza" is a clear indication of the major differences between people's view towards bitcoin.
in early years (like the pizza time!) people weren't thinking of bitcoin as an investment to become rich by holding it. they were instead seeing bitcoin as a currency, a decentralized one that changed their lives. and that is why 10k bitcoin was spent that easily.

last year (mostly near the end of the year) a common saying started to show up when people kept saying bitcoin is falling because the stock market is falling (an example) and although that was probably the first time bitcoin's drop coincided with stock market crash, this particular speculation became popular for some reason!

now the stock market is crashing due to trade war between the United States and China and meanwhile bitcoin has been rising consistently setting a new high each time it rises.

this topic is meant as a reminder that bitcoin market is a completely independent market taking effects from lots of things most of which are specific to bitcoin and usually concern adoption of it.

every time you start your "node" nobody knows you yet to connect to you, so you first have to announce your existence to the rest of the world you do that by sending them a message over the P2P network to the nodes that you know of (you might have connected to them previously or get the list from seed nodes or have them hardcoded in your node software). the message is called "Version message". inside that you include all the required information about yourself including the blockchain height you have, relay option, protocol version you support,... and your IP and Port. you can change  your port here to anything else and others can connect.
8333 is what we agreed on to all be on a same standard port but it is not enforced.
now that you've sent them your Version Message, they store it and send it to others too. so other nodes now know you are on IP:X and Port:Y and can find it that way.

here are 3 nodes with other ports (the numbers in link after the dash is their port):
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/149.28.134.80-56792/
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/54.199.214.32-48333/
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/47.244.126.66-8999/

getpeerinfo for the last one for example will return 47.244.126.66:8999 while this is a bitcoin node it has 8999 as its port.

it wasn't like that. it was done to increase their node's performance at the time because the mempool size was gigantic. so what they did was that they increased their minrelayfee so that they only receive transactions that they were including in blocks so imagine there is 100 MB transaction and only 20 MB of it is paying high fees and you can only select 1 MB of it, that means you are wasting 80 MB and that change saves that much.
the problem however was that they were lazy to change it back when the mempool size decreased so at some point they were still rejecting transactions while their blocks had empty space for them.

the rise is natural and doesn't need any reasons whatsoever apart from adoption increasing. this was inevitable too and should have even happened a couple of weeks ago. but now that it is happening all the rest of the positive news such as Bakkt, eBay,... are acting as the contributors to that upward movement and helping it happen more smoothly and at times even faster since less day traders try to sell and go against the market now.

we shouldn't even be talking about these coins because what they did was an advertising technique so that they can say our token can handle x times more transactions than bitcoin hence it is better and also because their block sizes are around 200 kB in reality not that big MB size they have as their cap, so it doesn't even count.

we might not have the traditional spammers who was spamming in 2017, active at the moment but there are still other type of spammers like the altcoins that are using bitcoin blockchain for their coin and their dump/pump is causing more transactions hence more spam on bitcoin network too.
but of course that is only a small part of the problem. we are still facing scaling issues that need solving.

this is not new. every time there is a fee war, there are some small number of transactions that pay a very high fee probably because of what you said, there are some more that pay higher fees because of using broken wallets suggesting crap or using websites such as bitcoinfees.earn.com that intentionally suggest higher fees.

as much as i dislike ethereum but it also has intrinsic value. having the possibility of having a vulnerability doesn't change that. vulnerability can exist in anything else including bitcoin too. the problem with ethereum is that its value is a lot less than the current one and it will continue to decline because of its inflation.

if you stop thinking about Binance for a moment and look at the development over the past couple of months and how this rise was already too late you can see that it had nothing to do with the Binance drama. in fact Binance hack delayed it a little bit and in its initial stage there was a slowness to the rise which would have not existed if that "fear" didn't exist and price could have reached $8k so much faster without Binance.

the thing is, bitcoin has been undervalued for a couple of months ever since price was dumped with manipulation below $6k and that unrealistic price had to be "corrected" just as a big bubble needs to burst. that is why i have been calling it a reverse bubble ever since it occurred.

"no longer" is the part that i have problem with. not much has changed in blockchain analysis techniques, there are just more companies doing it and getting paid to. there has been some improvements in their ways but also there has been improvements in the techniques that mixers use.
as for some of the mixers mentioned in the article, there has always been all kinds of mixing services, some shady and unknown, some with bigger history and more trusted. but in the end you never have any way of knowing for sure what they really do and what kind of records they hold. using 2 or more of them doesn't solve much in my opinion either because bitcoin is not anonymous, if you want full anonymity then use an anon coin or ultimately switch to cash!!!

merchants who were accepting bitcoin must be introduced to the decentralized marketplace since they are already using a decentralized currency there is no reason to still continue to use centralized platforms anymore.
there already are good projects such as OpenBazaar (https://openbazaar.org/) available for their ease of use too.