yes but only if they are in a different country not all of them in one place like US or China! that is not going to end well. we need more exchanges all around the world, preferably in other countries that are not so volatile regarding bitcoin one days saying it is good the other day wanting to ban them. some place like Japan may be good.

and i agree with the need for more decentralized exchanges too. they should be the aim of any bitcoiner who is in it for the decentralization.

no the first factor is increasing adoption of this new technology which happens to be pretty useful for people because it is decentralized.

and the second factor is the people like you who miss out on the rise and then they start feeling left out. at some people they all come back running to bitcoin and buy it so the rise becomes bigger than it normally is. that is why it went to 19k anyways.

what i know is that PIVX has a lot of potential and it is seriously underpriced right now. and when you think about it when a coin is still new like PIVX and also has a pretty low price, it doesn't have as much blocks in front of its rise compared to when it is old and already high like being worth 0.04BTC!

not to mention that PIVX doesn't have the premine that DASH has.

the most important question is actually: how much you understand bitcoin and by extension its market and potential and if you do really understand bitcoin and its potential you wouldn't be asking this question about "when to sell" here because it would be clear to you already.

you either see the potential and selling means a foolish idea unless you are a day trader. or you don't see the potential in which case what the hell are you doing here, get out fast!

well, every one of them that are based on the same technology and require a blockchain to be stored in a decentralized manner and blocks to be mined are facing the same issues.

the blockchain technology is not really a complicated thing. it is data that is being stored somewhere. there are always going to be limitations for that. you can decrease the block times, increase the block size and with it increase your scaling. but you will be sacrificing a lot by gaining so little.

of course there are other technologies too. like what IOTA is using, but i am not familiar with it so i won't talk about it here

well, these people have lost their credibility a very long time ago because they have been saying the same thing for years now.
calling bitcoin a bubble is not new. they have been calling it a bubble for a long time and still bitcoin keeps getting adopted more and more and rise in price.
also the same so called "financial analysts" used to say bitcoin won't rise above $10, then when it broke $50 they said it won't go above $100 and when it was already $200 they said in 3 years bitcoin will not exist anymore and now bitcoin is $16,000

so if you want to believe the same people then it is your decision!

you seem to not be aware of the serious scaling issues that the "closest market cap altcoins" are facing. for example ETH which is having worse problems than bitcoin has. people's transactions are getting stuck each time there is a big ICO going on. and these days a simple project called cryptokitties fucked up everything pretty nicely

well that is just not true.
the difference is that bitcoin goes up and stays up but altcoins go up and then come down. people are calling them pump and dumps for this reason! it is not just some term they use for no reason.

as i pointed out above.
let me put it this way for you. the altcoins are creating an illusion of not having the same issues and people believe it because they are not used.
it is like bitcoin if nobody used it! there were no scaling issue if every block only had less than 20 tx instead of current ~2000 tx. and that is why you think altcoins are "superior"

next year there will be 17 million BCH available but at the same time there will be 120 million ETH. that alone wouldn't let ETH to go higher than 0.05BTC and that is for its hugest pump imaginable.

meanwhile BCH has the Roger Ver pumping group behind it that will take advantage of bitcoin's huge backlog and big fees to pump BCH again and do it soon. and when they do it will be 0.2-0.3BTC again.

it is tough to say really but things are just getting started. the futures are not the way people buy and end up hoarding bitcoin, the actual markets are. people are literary pouring into exchanges such as Coinbase and Gemeni to buy bitcoin. these exchange servers are having a tough time even handling this increase in demand all of a sudden.

the "big money" that you are talking about is big but it is not bigger than the total money coming from millions of people and coming from "all around the world". that "big money" of yours is so centralized and in one place.

bitcoin doesn't "need" any of these forks. in fact the usage of term "fork" is only technically true. but in reality what is happening is that they are simply using bitcoin's fame and the "bitcoin brand" (or better said abusing it) to create some altcoins.

and their purpose for creating these altcoins is to become rich. there are multiple ways of doing it too. most common one is to premine it either publicly or hidden ways like releasing the code later to others and mining it themselves silently for a while before releasing it. and of course there is always pump and dumps.

the more people start buying bitcoin the higher the price will go and that means i am not going to be able to buy as much bitcoin as i want to have before the real exploding rise happens.
so i usually not-encourage people to invest in bitcoin. and i mostly warn them that it is very risky and they should not invest. ... more for me.

maybe some new coin in the future which is laying low but it certainly wouldn't be ethereum or most of the coins that are currently on top of the market cap list because they are all with big supplies which is why they are on top.

but it is not impossible to see an altcoin that nobody hyped ever to grow big. maybe some new project that is not created yet.

we all know about the fee issues, which are pretty fucked up right now. you don't have to lie about it like this which is too obvious!

if your friend did really "buy" bitcoin he only has 1 transaction in his wallet. spending 1 transaction to create 1 output is going to give him a transaction of size 180-190 bytes. lets round it up to 200 bytes.

blockchain.info is known to give very low fee estimates so i doubt if it gave him any more than 250 s/b but lets take the highest fee which was 435 s/b.
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/fee-estimates

your friend paid 435*200 = 87,000 satoshi fee = $12.18
and that is the highest fee, people usually pay 100 s/b which makes it $3

actually the thing that people  forget regarding bitfinex and USDT possible pump is the fact that even if it is true, you are injecting something into circulation not into thin air and make it disappear! and people do sell it for USD.

not to mention that the volume that USDT has is only 6-7% of the whole market. if you want to imply tether is pumping bitcoin first you have to prove that 6-7% which only 0.39%  belongs to bitfinex is the cause of the pump!

why wouldn't it last long?
it has miners like bitmain with lots of mining power behind it and deep pockets like Roger Ver pumping it. possibly even others.
besides there are lots of shitcoins out there that are still alive where they shouldn't be. the top 5 altcoins that everyone is so hot about are all useless junk that are full of bugs.

and at the end of the day, all everyone is caring about is "money" and when an altcoin like BCH is pump and dumping nicely everyone starts loving it just like they do ETH.

ethereum network has always been as safe as it gets, ignoring all the ETH hacks that have happened so far of course. and it is still the same safe as before. the problem is that you can not send any transactions because the network is heavily congested and it is not able to process all these transactions despite having 13 second blocks!!!!

these cannabis industry related altcoins such as Potcoin, HempCoin, DopeCoin,... are usually getting pumped together. it is nothing new and it doesn't really show anything about their future in my opinion. it is just a simply pump and dump which comes and goes periodically.

and generally speaking limiting the usage of a coin is not such a good idea ever. specially to something illegal like marijuana!

i think this was the longest time ever that kwukduck stayed silent because this rally was a very long one which meant kwukduck had nothing to say. but now that rally stopped and the correction finally started, he has open mouth to speak the same FUD about bitcoin which was supposed to crash to $10 soon for years

true about bitcoin only these days.
but about this, i should tell you that you have been fooled by their sales pitch because ETH is even worse than bitcoin when it comes to processing large number of transactions. you have not been experiencing it so far because nobody used ETH.

but now that more are using it, the issues are surfacing and people are realizing it was all a hoax!

the biggest issue is scale-ability which is not yet solved even after all these years of argument over scaling issues. we keep hoping something happens, like SegWit being used or LN does something but the mempool keeps growing without anything happening


the whole point of bitcoin is that it is decentralized and nobody can ban it. saying government can ban something peer to peer doesn't even make sense. it is like saying they are going to ban torrent!