I've used Cryptopia before; it's ok.  But I'm a fan of Poloniex.  Their trading interface is quick, even in fast-moving markets.  They also let you put in stop orders, which I think is really important if you're going to trade and not just invest.  In general, if you're trading popular coins, it's better to use the larger exchanges.  The smaller ones tend to have much bigger bid-ask spreads, which can cost you if you're trying to get in/out quickly with market orders.

I know that you wrote this before we blasted through $5k, but I would say that at least in the shorter term, things changed when we broke above $4500 a couple days ago as right below that level was where things started to crash from the China issues.  A quick run to test $5k made sense, and the breakout today also made sense, IMO.  As I think the market may be driven right now by people wanting to hoard as much BTC as possible before the bitcoin gold fork in a couple of weeks (if it happens), I think we might go much higher than the current ~$5300 over the next week or two.  In any case, it was great to see a decisive break of the $5k level.  While anything is possible, the move's strength would seem to suggest that this was not a false breakout.

I agree with this for the lesser/no-name alt coins.  You need a market that's at least somewhat mature for technical analysis to be useful.  Along with bitcoin, I would think (although I haven't looked into it) that trading other majors like Ethereum and Litecoin, and perhaps some of the others like Dash, Monero, DOGE, etc., would benefit a lot from using TA.  There needs to be some balance in the market--if everyone's just dumping a coin, it's not going to behave well from a TA perspective.

Yes, exactly.  Much of trading has to be self-taught.  Different people look at the market differently; there's more than one way to do it, and whatever system you use, it must fit you/your personality if you're going to do well with it.  What works for one person may not work for another.  For example, I simply do not have the patience to trade on longer-term charts.  Others might do really well using daily charts.

While I agree that it's important to learn the basics from reading books and articles, in trading I think experience is more important than knowledge.  In fact, I think too much knowledge can hinder your trading if it makes everything too complex.  A couple good indicators is all you should need.  If you try using ten or twenty of them at once, you will find that you will not do better; you will probably do worse as you'll end up filtering out too many good trades.

It doesn't seem like anyone has anything good to say about bitcoin cash.  The continuing decline in price pretty much says it all.  You might be able to take advantage of a dead-cat bounce, but your timing would have to be perfect.  The one thing that surprises me a bit, though, is that the bitcoin cash network hashrate is still fairly steady around 500P - 1E.  I would have thought that more miners would have abandoned it by now.

Really?  Which cryptos have you looked at?  I mostly just look at bitcoin, for which TA seems to work pretty well.  MACD-price divergences on a high enough time frame (hours) seem to indicate at least short-term reversals pretty well.  Support/resistance breaks commonly lead to a rush to the next level.  Like when we recently broke through resistance around $4500, price quickly shot up to almost $5000, as one would expect.  The same was true on the way down to $3000.  The initial run up to $5000 and subsequent drop formed a head-and-shoulders pattern.  It was a little sloppy, but it was there.  I'm not sure how well fibs and elliot waves work, but I'm not big on using those for any financial instrument.  Although I did find some use in fib extensions when trying to determine where price might stop or at least pause after it broke out above the previous high around $1100.

As others have warned, learning to trade well is a lot of hard work and takes a lot of patience, and be warned that the majority of traders fail sooner or later.  But I think it's important to keep it as simple as you can.  Learn some of the basics of trading from Youtube and this forum.  Look up some basic technical analysis techniques including support and resistance, divergence, and basic patterns like double tops/bottoms and head-and-shoulders patterns.  Once you have some idea of what you're doing, transfer some bitcoin to an exchange that has very low trading fees (most do), and start trading with very small amounts at first--like maybe 1000 or 10,000 satoshis.  You want to have some skin the game so the trades are real, but you want them to be small enough that you can make rational decisions without being consumed by your emotions.  Trade like this until you become consistently profitable, doing more research and modifying your trading system as needed.  Then slowly increase your trade size so that you remain comfortable in your trades, and so that losing trades don't upset you.  It will take a while (could easily be years) to become good, but once you do, it will be very profitable.

I would suggest that you don't make it too complicated.  Some people are good at using things like Elliot Wave Theory and fibonacci retracements.  But I don't think you have to go into all of that.  Keep it simple.  Support and resistance lines, divergence with a basic indicator like the MACD, and common patterns (double top/bottom, head and shoulders, and maybe triangles/pennants) should be enough technical analysis tools.

From my observations, technical analysis works pretty well with bitcoin, as it should with any auction-style financial market.  The basic principles of bitcoin trading are the same as trading anything else like stocks, futures, etc.  That said, news and fundamentals should not be ignored.  The way I see it, news and fundamentals determine the long-term trend, while technicals drive the the price on a short-term (e.g., intraday) basis.

Yes, I think it's way too long when you can pay by other electronic means within a few seconds.  And I've seen delays much longer than 10-15 minutes.  A few months ago, I did a bitcoin transfer between my wallet and an exchange.  I paid the recommended fee, which I later confirmed to be reasonable at that time for the transaction size.  It took more than 24 hours to get a single confirmation!  That is completely unacceptable.

It sounds like this has been your experience.  I'm sorry to hear that.  There are people--I know some, who are good friends of mine--who don't care how rich or poor you are.  Some of them have a fair amount of money, and some don't.  But they care about me, and other people, simply because I am another human being, created by God.  Money cannot buy friends like that.

Yep, I think you're right about the importance of governments here.  Ironic, isn't it, considering that cryptos try to stay as far away from government intervention as possible?  But I think you're right that some sensible regulation is needed.  There are way too many scams out there.  Cryptocurrency users and investors need some protections so they can trust that their money isn't going to be stolen.

Yes, exactly.  As with almost everything in life, balance is important.  Money is necessary, and there's nothing wrong with that.  It's how you go about obtaining it and what you do with it that matter.  Sometimes you may have to sacrifice some of your time with family or friends to earn enough, and that's ok--everyone understands that.  It becomes a problem when you sacrifice too much to get more money.  Like if you sacrifice your morals (i.e., put money above God), or if you sacrifice your relationships to get more money than you need (i.e., put money above family/friends).

Trading is a great way to grow your investments, but be very careful.  Trading is not easy; it usually looks easier than it is.  Short-term/day trading can be very risky business.  Make sure you have a trading plan that you know will work based on historical prices, and then be sure to stick to it, as long as it's profitable over a number of trades.  Keep in mind that the statistics for stock market day traders show that at least 90% of them lose money over the long term.

Hmm, you make a good point--the users/investors really are the ones that determine which fork will survive since they are the ones who decide which fork is going to be worth more.  Most of the miners can go in one direction, but if users/investors go in the other, the miners will eventually be forced to follow suit or go bankrupt.  And from a user's perspective (and noting that I haven't done a lot of research yet on the consequences of the proposed changes), it seems to me like segwit2x is a good thing.  The transaction times are prohibitively slow (if I were to transfer money or buy something, I'd use something faster like LTC), and the fees are way too high.  Segwit2x sounds like it tries to improve both of these.

I think the takers are "the market."  Meaning, when bitcoin is paid to one of these services, that bitcoin is immediately sold on an exchange for fiat, and then that fiat is paid to the receiver (retailer).

As for the online part, you need an app for that.  You can already use a smartphone to make online payments in physical stores.  See Apple Pay and other such apps.  I also just noticed that Bitpay now offers some kind of bitcoin "credit card" (maybe more like a debit card), although I'm not sure how it works.

What is your view of God?  If you see Him as a being who just watches the world from afar, then that makes sense.  But if you believe, as I do, that He's intimately involved in the details of our lives, and that everything--including all of us--exists in and because of Him, then you might see that all of the abilities and skills that we have are gifts from God.  So while God doesn't "magically" pay our bills, He has equipped us with the skills necessary to do work to earn money to pay our bills.

Actually, this is not necessarily true at all.  Some of the happiest people I've met are religious priests and sisters who have taken vows of poverty.  Of course they still receive some kind of income to pay for basic necessities, but they have very few material possessions.  Life is much simpler and easier, in a sense, when you don't have to worry about lots of material things.

I see this as more of a problem for customers than the retailers.  There are already services out there that a retailer can partner with to have bitcoin transactions instantly converted to fiat.  That pretty much eliminates potential losses for the retailer.  Customers, however, have to worry about the wild price swings.  It's a big problem when the price you saw for a product an hour ago is now 2% more because the bitcoin price dropped $100 since then.