market manipulation is not as easy as you think. it is not about having a lot of funds, it is about knowing how to do it and knowing the trend of the overall market so that you don't go against it. for instance right now if a manipulator tries to push the price upwards he will be crushed but he has a better chance of pushing it down.

for instance last year during the $2000 breakout a couple of bearwhales on bitstamp tried to push the price down. there was a lot of FUD about how Bitfinex is going to be closed down and go away and price fall down while these whales kept on dumping on bitstamp. long story short they lost a lot of money because the market trend was a rising trend and they got crushed.

the bear market ended a while ago. this is just a residual effect and some people wishing it to continue some of them have the power to make it continue so they are dumping to push it down.
and it is basically because they believe bitcoin will soon be $50k in a short time and ... $1 million eventually. so imagine if you have $10k and price is $10k so you can buy 1BTC which will be $1 million. but if it drops more you can buy 2BTC which will be worth $2 million which is why they keep hoping for the bear market to continue and push for it.

Bloomberg published another "doomsday" article right as the drop started. why am i not surprised. half of the articles here (https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/) are from bloomberg

right now there is a big weight pulling bitcoin under called "the altcoin market". there has been a massive dump going on over there for the past <10 hours and the sell pressure is also being felt in bitcoin of course it is very interesting to see that bitcoin drop has been very small while the altcoin drops have been huge! and that is the only reason why we are currently seeing $5960 otherwise the only way price could have gone below $6k was the rejection of ETF.

today will determine a lot of things though. if bitcoin can hold the support here at $6k, it will become a lot stronger for the next attack. but if the dumps were stronger then we may see a lot lower prices specially with the ETF rejection on the way. i still wouldn't even expect $1000 though.

first of all the way an altcoin dump (generally speaking) affects bitcoin price is when people dump that altcoin for bitcoin then transfer that bitcoin to their bitcoin exchanges and sell it for fiat there. that creates a sell pressure that brings bitcoin price down also.

so with that said you need to look if these altcoins have the following characteristics:
do they have a fiat market themselves? and which market volume is higher?

in case of ETH, it  does have ETH/fiat like ETH/USD markets so if people want fiat they will dump it for fiat not bitcoin. but lets see if they are using these fiat markets or not.
according to https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/#markets the highest volume belongs to a Tether market (ETH/USDT) and second place goes to ETH/BTC
looking closer you can see the ETH/BTC volume of big exchanges such as Binance is nearly the same as ETH/USD on big exchanges such as Coinbase so it is a possibility.

imagine you are trading on Binance and want fiat. your only option is to either transfer your ETH to the exchange you are using or dump it for BTC and then transfer BTC to sell for fiat.
now the thing is most exchanges nowadays have ETH listed so there is no need for that but now you are facing the problem with ETH network itself. it is started to be congested again as everyone is panicking to sell faster and are transferring their coins AND tokens to exchanges to dump so your other faster option is to use bitcoin.

this is easier to explain for other altcoins as they don't have the ALT/USD markets as ethereum has so the only option is either tether or bitcoin then fiat.

in short i think ETH dump is affecting bitcoin price in a negative way but it is not a major thing but the other altcoin dumps (which is a lot in total) is certainly affecting it.

then US dollar is also an investment.

i'll tell you why. where i live the value of local currency is dropping so there are many who are now buying USD to stay ahead of the inflation that is going on. in fact they are investing in USD. and what they are doing matches the description you posted here, they will sell it in the future to get a huge profit.

but it doesn't make USD an investment. US dollar is still a currency no matter what you do with it.
the same thing is true about bitcoin. bitcoin is a currency by nature even if majority are using it as an investment.

actually now that prices are falling like this with a fast speed, the day traders are coming back to the market to trade more. you see the real traders make profit from change in price not rise in price. and change can be up or down.
even in a down market you can make profit. this can be margin trading or simply buying the dips and selling after the small recoveries for a small profit.

LOL. $5990 is not $5k
and the reason for that is exactly because of what i said about the massive altcoin dumps. as big pumped altcoins like ETH is getting dumped the money usually exits either to USDT or bitcoin then they dump bitcoin to get fiat that brings bitcoin back down.

again for the millionth time your problem is that you are looking at market capitalization and then call it dominance. that is NOT dominance. the dominance of bitcoin has always been near 100% and it has always been "investors first choice", this is not a choice they made yesterday. they have made this choice a long time ago and it has remained that way and it is mainly because the top altcoins are so bad and everyone except newbie bag holders already knows this!

it is called "pump and dump" not just pump and always pump. when an altcoin gets pumped, after a while it starts getting dumped. but for big altcoins like ETH for example the dump was slowed down to a near halt for a long time because the advertising campaign has been active and was telling the bag holders to bag hold and they listened thinking they will become rich.

ETH is dying because it was pumped and it is a centralized shitcoin, it has nothing to do with bitcoin going to $5k.

as you have already seen for the past week bitcoin has stayed between $6000 and $6400 (5% up and down) while ETH has been falling down from near $400 down to $250 (40% drop) and it will continue because now the bag holders who have been holding from $1500 but still were hopeful for getting rich are now panic selling.

at this point the only reason why bitcoin could go below $6k is that if a huge altcoin dump happens which brings bitcoin price down as money exists using bitcoin or ETF is rejected. there is no other reason.

that is not dominance and the "market" is not being ruined. it was ruined a long time ago when you were allowing centralized shitcoins to stay on top and be pumped while ignoring other real decentralized altcoins with decent developers team get pushed down and be forgotten.
coins like ETH are simply going back to their real values after coming out of their big bubbles. your problem is that instead of listening to the warnings you listened to the hype telling you it will be worth $2500 by the end of 2018 and held on to your bags while losing money. now you will continue to lose a lot more.
and none of this has anything to do with bitcoin.

sometimes it is more than enough reason to keep a price up above some arbitrary level. it doesn't even have to be true it just needs to be accepted by majority of investors which seems to be the case here.
on top of that each time we test $6k and it stands strong it increases the confidence in that number so next time the target of everyone else would be there.

i usually don't use TA because i am not good at it and also i believe it doesn't work for bitcoin. but yeah if you see it as a descending triangle then it should have dropped below and went lower.

they still have to buy a bitcoin miner, and as a student i wouldn't have wanted to pay $500-$3000 for a miner just because i could have had free electricity and take the risk of mining bitcoin and getting caught. and they are noisy which means you will be producing a lot of noise in the dorm


why would the "network" be compromised?!!!
it is against the rules of the school to abuse the electricity they are providing for you for free. an explicit rule may even exist in some places that prohibits students from using it for mining cryptocurrencies.

actually during this bear season you should have learned a couple of things and none of them were "not selling" alone.
the most important one was to know not to fall for the altcoin pump and dumps and to never think the dumps of a pumped altcoin is just going to end for no reason.
and the other important one was to learn to detect the bottoms and not sell in the bottom but sell when you are before that bottom. of course that only concerns bitcoin and when you are a trader.

why don't you check it out yourself?
start by reading the lightning network paper or at least skim through it since it is long. then start by searching the internet and reading on how you can run an LN node and maybe start one yourself. this is a decentralized network, in the end it doesn't matter what others think about it. what matters is if you like it or not.

don't you think this will slow own the development process both harder and slower?
i know it would be more decentralized and i actually would love to see other implementations, specially in other programming languages so at least i can understand the code more, but i think having multiple teams may make things messier.

the thing about "hitting" a price like this and then rising back up is that you shouldn't just focus on the numbers but also on the how tos.

market is still pretty small and on top of that people aren't trusting exchanges to leave their money there so despite the strong buy support there, a bigger sell can drop the price. which was $5995. it is hard to figure it out now but it was about 200BTC volume on that candle in a 14096BTC daily volume on bitstamp.

maybe it is ALSO miners but i don't think that is all. it is a lot of traders who know $6k as the bottom and buy there.

part of that fear is rational if you are a trader because ETF is a news that traders are watching and then acting based on which way it goes. so if it goes in the way they want they would speculate a rise and start buying so price can go up and if it doesn't they  would speculate a drop and start selling. so as a trader you want to keep your eyes on the news and the price to make the most profit in this short term swing.

but if you are an investors or ... then you should not even care about this because it is a short term drama with a short term and small effects, specially the negative effects will be short and small and will go away soon enough after the date.

the  dates mentioned here are quite wrong.
the early days there were no criminal activity. then in a couple of years it increased with things such as SilkRoad and the dark market and the fact that people thought bitcoin is anonymous. but even then at the peak there wasn't more illegal activity than legal activity ever. then as SilkRoad was closed and as people found out bitcoin has never been anonymous the illegal activities dropped down significantly. this is years ago!

well it is true. but it has nothing to do with market cap and what they call "dominance" though. the reason for that "dominance" change is what i said above and also the fact that altcoins are dropping a lot faster than bitcoin. for instance a 5% drop in bitcoin price in past 24 hours has been equal to 10-15% drop in top10 altcoins.

people exiting altcoins is either one of two things. they dump them for tether which is why tether volumes are high at times like this or they dump them for bitcoin and then since bitcoin is also falling they panic sell that to get real fiat and make a complete exit of the market. in fact this can be one of the reasons why bitcoin price drops at times like this.
neither of these two increase bitcoin's market cap.

generally speaking light/SPV wallets are not as safe as a full verification wallet and they are not fraud proof. at the very least you are losing privacy.
when it comes to Lightning channels and Atomic Swaps (although i still don't have enough information about this) things are still not 100% safe. and i believe there are problems with it such as needing to trust the server with your transaction revocation private keys. and i think there are some other attack vectors there too.