one thing about a forum that people usually forget is that when you put something in here, it will stay here. even if you later on edit/delete it, the shame doesn't go away

lets review what happened with that 18000 BTC and the "dump" OP was talking about on 15th.
by the time this topic was started price was around $6400, then it started rising up towards $6600 in a couple of hours and then came down to $6200!
in other words that day and even in the following 6 days until today we never had anything more than normal fluctuations (3% up and down)!!!

you can not restrict who is using bitcoin and how they are using it. that goes against the very nature of bitcoin and the censorship resistance of it. and that is exactly what you are trying to do. and it has nothing to  do with "bitcoin anarchy". you are saying people who want to use bitcoin in a regulated environment are not allowed to do it! who died and made you the decision maker of this decentralized currency?

of course anything is possible with bitcoin but when certain people are talking about certain things they are not talking about possibilities they are trying to achieve their own goals. for example the case of Jamie Dimon they wanted to crash the price and buy the bottom at a 30% discount. Paypal dude is obviously worried about his own business since bitcoin is a serious competition for centralized payment systems such as Paypal.

do you have a link to this wallet source if it is available? i have been trying to build an SPV wallet using bloom filters and it is good to have a source code in front of me for reference. i could only find this but none of the sources seem to be related to this: https://github.com/schildbach?utf8=%E2%9C%93&tab=repositories&q=&type=source&language=

in any case i believe the Electrum team was trying to solve the man in the middle attacks which is why these Electrum servers which are using SSL encryption are being used. or at least that is the only reason that i could ever find.

i think a realistic goal in life is one that always evolves. you are never supposed to reach your goal. you always push it further down the road and then try to catch up with it. for example i had the goal to reach 0.1BTC back in 2014, then i pushed it back to 1 whole bitcoin and so on.
it is always good to have long term and short term goals. for example you can set a goal that you reach in a month and set an ultimate goal of being a millionaire that you reach in a couple of years.

i wouldn't call these "numbers" as "predictions" really! they are more like guesses, specially some of them that are very unlikely to happen. and as far as i can tell all of these people made these guesses because they wanted some sort of publicity, the best example case is John McAfee's case which has been milking his popularity and making lots of money from it.

well coinmarketcap.com is bad (in my opinion) but it is not useless. all i am saying is that when you want to look at a better chart specially for bitcoin, there are a lot of better options. for instance TradingView is the best place which also has altcoins, then my personal favorite is bitcoinwisdom which is faster and easier to load and finally bitcoincharts that i posted above.
CMC is very good when you want to find where each coin is listed or find their links such as ANN topic, website, source code,...

your "want" doesn't increase the price at all. it will be increased if someone actually fulfills your "want". for example right now price is $6.5k and i have 100BTC and want to sell it at $1 million each, that doesn't increase the price because people aren't going to pay me that much. but they are willing to pay $6.5k
in other words if you buy price will go up.

i have no idea what this even means

any form of manipulation is only going to affect the market temporarily. you can't expect FOMO rise to stay just as you can not expect a panic sell drop to stay.

these aren't "main" factors affecting bitcoin price. these aren't even important.

every day that passes and with every increase in adoption, banning bitcoin becomes harder and harder specially as they regulate bitcoin. for example in a couple of years as price hits $60k and we start seeing big businesses shape around bitcoin (like Coinbase which already exists), then they can't just ban bitcoin and kill these multi million dollar businesses. so we may end up seeing bitcoin banned in some under developed countries like India and Bangladesh which this one has already banned bitcoin, but there is no way it can be banned in developed countries like US, Japan,... that will have already been mass adopted bitcoin by then.

i don't follow anyone's predictions so i don't know who that dude is, mostly because they are not telling us their real predictions but what they want to happen . for example when someone was telling you price is going to fall to $3000 in the past month, what they meant was that "i want to buy bitcoin at $5999 and i want YOU to panic sell so that i can buy there". same is with rise predictors!

but the idea of selling because you expect a lower price is not a bad thing. it actually is one of the most important strategies in any market. the only thing important in this strategy is "when" you are selling! for instance if you sell when the price has already fallen a lot and there is no indication of more fall then you are doing it wrong. but if you sell  before the bottom or when you sell when the drop has begun but it is in its early stages then you are doing it right!

not to mention that even if you made  the mistake of selling at a bad time, that is not the end of the world. the decisions that you make after the mistake determines your final fate. for instance if you sell now speculating there will be a drop and price shoots up, if you sit around crying you lose, but if you simply buy back accepting a small loss for a bigger gain then you will win!

i am not really familiar with bitcore myself so if i am wrong hopefully someone will correct me, but i believe that you can do both. meaning a standalone Bitcore as your full node or just add it on top of another full node (bitcoin core) and use it. what Bitcore does is basically indexing the blockchain so it becomes easier/faster to find things like a block explorer finding any address balance. which is why it takes a bigger size.
https://bitcore.io/guides/full-node/

please note that i was talking about regular businesses that accept bitcoin additionally not a business that only accepts bitcoin payment. for example a restaurant that was accepting fiat so far starts accepting bitcoin, they have increased their revenue.

as for bull market, i was actually discussing this a while ago here. those stats suggest that people were actually using bitcoin MORE during the bull market as price goes up.
and yeah higher fees were a bad thing last year but that is an exception case which hopefully won't happen again. but there is always a risk for it since bitcoin is susceptible to spam attacks no matter what you do.

the same arguments can be made about bitcoin nodes! on this network if we have more nodes run by individuals from different parts of the world, as spreed wide as possible, then we have a more decentralized network. and if we have more centralized nodes run by corporations it will be more centralized.

but LN has the benefit that you have the possibility to now earn something from running a node! before this you just ran a bitcoin node if you wanted to contribute to the network and benefit from having a full verifying node. but now if you run an LN node you can buy some small amount of satoshi. so i guess we can say if bitcoin nodes are decentralized LN nodes will be too, even more because of the incentive.

no it is not better at all.
usually when you see your country's currency value dropping like that, you want to store your money somewhere that is safe and can "store your value". in "crypto" this is not possible. most of them are not even safe and all of them are volatile.
as for bitcoin, it is the safest thing that you can find but the price is volatile and specially these days there is a chance of drop. so i don't think that many people are considering bitcoin at least not as their primary investment.

no we won't. because cases like this are mostly related to altcoins and altcoin exchanges which happen to be unregulated and unknown. and people will always use these, maybe even more in case of regulations. for example if exchanges in US such as Bittrex and Poloniex start being regulated and ask for hefty taxes from their users as they report all their activities to IRS, everyone would leave and migrate to other platforms and many of them being bad means scam cases like these would continue to happen, even more than before.

a bad news coming out and price dropping because of it is not the same as whales manipulating the price and trying to crash it. the reaction to bad news is coming from the market itself as everyone sells, for example if ETF is rejected it will be a bad news and there will be panic sells and every speculator would want to take advantage so they'd sell. but a couple of days ago when they kept trying to push it below $6k was manipulation and it failed.

you do realize that it is not "us" that are comparing bitcoin to other altcoins!

in other words usually people who are comparing bitcoin to some altcoin are not even comparing them, they are instead advertising that altcoin by trying to say that altcoin is "better" than bitcoin. this is not limited to centralized shitcoins like ethereum but it has happened  with many different ones. for instance last year at least a dozen altcoins like Dash were supposed to replace bitcoin by now but after their pumps were done and they earned their profit, the dumps began and their "advertisement" also stopped.

no coin can reach its "former highs" this soon because they are still recovering from that bubble they set and unless they are dumped properly down to their real bottoms you can not expect any meaningless rises from any of them.
in case of ETC, it seems like they have pumped it in the past 24 hours but it was a small pump of 15% but at the same time since it was small it is hard to say if this pump was really because of this news or was it just the recovery from the 2 days ago's dump.
looking at the charts it went from $20 down to $10 and now it is up to $14.... so i don't think it can be that relevant to this news!

you are a bag holder and you are encouraging others to make the same mistakes as you and become a bag holder! this is wrong. you should never do that. it is like going to the beach with a bucket and creating a "portfolio" of grains of sands from different beaches thinking if you hold on to them they will be worth a lot some day! but the difference is that you get sand for free but you spend your money and possibly your time on these useless coins you are bag holding but the result is the same, they don't have any value specially in long term.

the question is never just about the speed, it is about the speed + security.
when you send a bitcoin transaction it takes only 1-3 seconds to propagate throughout the whole network and for everyone peer on the bitcoin network around the whole world to find out about your transaction. but the confirmation takes about 10 minutes on average. but when it has 1 confirmation the risk of it being double spent is near zero.
now we have altcoins with faster blocks so faster confirmation, but 1 confirmation in them doesn't mean the same as bitcoin. there is still a high risk of double spend there even with much higher number of confirmation. for example there are exchanges that require 100-5000 confirmation for certain altcoins!

as for DAG coins, i agree that it is a great technology and i also like it but you should ask whether it is as safe. i don't have the answer since i am not familiar with them completely but they don't seem to be.