you are simply ignoring the millions of actual dollars that are going in bitcoin through all the bitcoin exchanges and causing the rise for real and only focus on a small percentage of the total volume (about 5%) that is from USDT and is coming from Bitfinex. that doesn't sound like a logical case to me!

and remember that just because YOU didn't expect this rise that doesn't mean it wasn't expected! there are dozens of reasons for this rise to be like this and it was perfectly expected and even long overdue.

the problem is that if you want to use blockchain technology in centralized way for a social media platform then there is no point, using the old way of a simple database is more efficient and makes more sense.
if you want to use it in a decentralized way then you will face a very big issue of the availability of that blockchain and also the enormous size of the blockchain that everyone has to download just to be able to have a Facebook-like account.
this may be the reason why we still don't have any decentralized platform either. for instance the biggest one which kept talking about it (Steem) turned out to be a centralized website like reddit,... with no difference!

i personally have never celebrated it. i weep for this market because what Satoshi started with bitcoin has turned into a money grab pump and dump with altcoins. i can't remember last time i saw a new cryptocurrency that was created to solve a problem like bitcoin. all they do is premine, ICO (fund raising) and pump and dumps. that is why they get dumped when bitcoin moves.

obviously!
that is why they exist. whenever bitcoin traders can't make same profit with bitcoin (bitcoin cools off and becomes more stable) they switch to altcoin market to increase the profit they made so far.

it is like asking "why do we need so many brands of shoes, why not have only Nike for example!". that is how the businesses in an open market work. everyone can make a new business and invite people to use their services. that is what leads to multiple exchanges existing. and like any business some of them can only truly succeed and the rest remain small. of course this market is quite wild and with all these hacks and exchange scams the successful ones keep on changing so there is always room for the small ones to become big and replace the old big ones.

there is also the difference in their services. for example the big ones enforce KYC while the small ones don't so they still retain their attractiveness. there is also different types like altcoin exchanges versus bitcoin exchanges, or centralized versus decentralized exchanges.

yes, if that is your only question here. obviously if block size increases the cost of running a node increases with it, even if it doesn't increase and remains fixed the  cost still increases as the size of the blockchain and the UTXO set increases.

that is not a Windows related issue though. the problem is all in your browser that got stuck with a cache and possibly there was a bug or something preventing it from fetching the updated version. the same thing could have happened if you were using any other operating system.

if you don't like to see other people's opinion and call it rant then don't post on a forum. as for the supply it is not supply alone, it is the demand that comes with it. no matter how much "usecase" you think EOS has and how much they build DAPPs they are still one in a dozen that are doing the same thing. not to mention that DAPPs don't really have that much real use cases in real world to begin with.

centralization is bad no matter how well the token performs. it still can fail in an instant if when they go the same route that MtGox, Cryptsy, and dozens of other big number 1 exchanges went before them.

bitcoin is not a centralized company to have an "official" wallet software. bitcoin-core is called the "reference client" because it acts as reference implementation of Bitcoin (protocol) but there is nothing "official" here.


it is worth adding that although both of these options are bad, but there is a big difference between them. Coinbase is not a wallet but an account since they control your keys and you only have an account which they can close. but blockchain.com does not have any access to your keys so they can't close anything.

a terrible idea specifically due to the last option.

generally speaking investing in things that go down whenever bitcoin price goes up or down is a bad idea and you can never call that a "portfolio" because they are linked all to bitcoin. and when you buy a coin that has an enormous supply (~1 billion) you can be sure that in long run the only direction for it is down.

as for your last option, it is terrible because it is centralized and worst of all the centralization is on an exchange and we all know exchanges all have an expiration date. so when that date comes the price of the coin you were bag holding tanks hard. we have already see the Binance hack and how that affected the market. not to mention the fact that it is a 100% premined coin.

i don't think it is that much about the market being bullish but mostly about that particular price being a very strong bottom (a strong buy support at that level) that makes it impossible to break into. so even if we see a retrace, it won't go any lower than that level because of its strength.

your $5700 is a good estimate in my opinion although i would choose a slightly higher price at $6000 or even $6100 because i still believe that the bottom was at $6k and all the previous 3-4 months we were in a reverse bubble and prior to that this price level has been a very strong one which is now becoming strong again.

as it was mentioned Binance as an "altcoin exchange" has no effects on bitcoin price. the bitcoin price has always been determined on its own bitcoin exchanges for instance exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken, Bitfinex,... specially since altcoin exchanges such as Binance do NOT even have a fiat market and the "fiat lookalikes" do not count.

but another things you are missing out is that if anything, the price should have fallen not risen because what the hacker has is bitcoin and the only thing you can do with having bitcoin (instead of fiat) is to sell and sell causes drop not rise. if he had stolen fiat then you could have said he is injecting that fiat in the market and "pumping" the price which is obviously not the case!

haha, yet another new group of idiots who are looking for other idiots who buy into their bullshit. and they are all trying to make money out of it too.
the worst part is that it is not even the first time someone does something like this, it is not even the biggest. the biggest one is the case they started with (Craig scammer) and we soon will see a lot more cases like this trying to rip people off and make some money by selling them lies.

all of the options will happen at the same time because not all traders are thinking alike. you should have asked what will the majority do and of course that is going to be only a guess on our part because only the exchange knows his own traffic and how much of it they have lost.
i think initially there will be a large number of investors who will leave the platform. then depending on their plans of "pay back" more people may leave but in a prolonged manner as they have to wait to be paid first to be able to withdraw .

why not use that curve?!
it is a 256 bit curve with a very good security that will remain safe for decades. it was supported by OpenSSL which Satoshi Nakamoto decided to use for bitcoin-QT (the  client he wrote as the first implementation of the protocol). because the size is 256 bit the signatures and consequently the transaction sizes aren't that big compared to if 384 or 521 bit were used. other curves like Curve25519 were around but weren't popular at the time.
it is a Koblitz curve so there are some characteristics that allows some performance boost which is good for a system like bitcoin.

the real start of the bull run was last year when everyone agreed that price has reached the bottom at $6k and have been accumulating then the wide scale manipulation occurred out of nowhere and it was postponed for a couple of months and now we are back on track. but if you ignore that part then you can take the previous couple of months and the fact that price has been rising consistently from $3100 ever since it was hit and that second accumulation started.

abstract talk in this board is meaningless, move it to reddit if you just want to talk drama. otherwise you have to post actual data with verifiable test cases to support what you are saying. the data should look like this:
- first categorization of hardware based on what people use to run a node. example 5% raspberry Pi, 15% PC with Corei7 CPU, 20% PC with Corei5, 10% with Pentium 2!, 20% VPS with different specs, ...
- then 4 sets of tests:
-- most common cases meaning from 2500 to 3000 tx with certain scripts that are used every day (99% of the blockchain)
-- same but with higher number
-- edge and rare cases with the same number of tx but with complicated scripts that require more time to verify
-- same with higher number.

then you can conclude how many "weak nodes" we have and whether they fall behind or not and if it matters.

altcoins have already been going down ever since bitcoin started to rise but people miss it because the only website they check is coinmarketcap.com and it reports it in USD terms instead of in real value which is in BTC.

but you are correct, in case of a bitcoin price correction there will be another type of altcoin dump like it always happens.

that is why as a trader in this market you have to know your timings. altcoins had their time for a couple of months prior to this rise when bitcoin price was stable. in all those months many altcoins got pumped big time and all the experienced traders increased their bitcoin wealth. now it is time to come back to bitcoin which why they are all getting dumped.

another new one that is growing at an alarming rate is "address cracking" meaning the attempt to find the private of an address. most of them are of course people who have not yet understood how cryptography works and how big a space they are in but there are cases where they have a code on GitHub that does that "search" but also has some backdoors and even malwares that does other things in the user's computer like searching for his bitcoin wallets and stealing them while the user foolishly runs the application hoping to find something that he is not going to find until the end of the universe.

i don't think the number of people who have not been scammed ever in this world is that many unless they have never used exchanges in their life. all the exchanges that i have used and there are many, have scammed their users or at the very least have gotten hacked and i have lost bitcoin in some of them because no matter how careful you are and how short you keep your coins there, there will be a time when they catch you and scam you!

what did you expect? when people willingly give their precious money or bitcoin to anybody who is copying code and changing name, then it is expected to see an increase in the number of scams. it is not just about bitcoin price rise but mainly about the fact that there is a an increase in number of gullible people!
take a look at 2017 and the sheer number of ICOs which were all scam without exceptions. take a look at all the bitcoin forkcoins that were all scams without exceptions... none of these would have ever existed if people weren't gullible and didn't gamble with their bitcoins.