not really. maybe some newbies who are new to the market are waiting for some weird news to come and save their asses but not the whole market. for instance you can clearly see that the Google ads thing came out a while ago where google started allowing bullshit ads on their platform again but it had no effects on prices!
ETF is a much bigger news but that has also lost its effectiveness since SEC continued playing around and rejecting a lot of ETFs so far and postponing a lot more.

it is funny to see so many bag holders in this topic talking to each other and encouraging each other to continue to bag hold. note that this topic is old and got bumped. it is a good thing though, this is a good lesson for all the newbies who keep listening to nonsense comments like those on this topic and lose money. some people should learn it the hard way.

bitcoin has been building up towards that reversal for a while now. ever since the price reached the bottom and stayed there a while the accumulation slowly started and continued to this day. some investors are still uncertain which means the rise has not yet started. but it is on the way.


we should already be at that break-even point. not because price went to $6k and stopped but because it went there and stayed there. so if that point was above $6k then addition of more miners brings it back down to $6k (which seems to be the case here) if it was below $6k then miners would have left and it would have reached balance again.

if you buy $20 worth of altcoins today, in 10 years your $20 will most probably worth around $1 or even zero as most of the altcoins will die and disappear and by that time you wouldn't even have a way of selling those coins.

but if you invest $20 now in trading shitcoins that are getting pumped and dumped every day and gain enough experience, you can easily make that into $100k in a very short time. i dare say it is possible to do in less than a year but only if you know how the pump and dump scheme works and are not emotionally attached to shitcoins to bag hold them and never sell!

again with the "patience" nonsense? haven't you learned anything by now?
i could understand why you would say this 9 months ago since you weren't  dumped on as much as you have today but now it is just unacceptable. so you are either spamming your have no understanding of what loss is!

you have already lost about 80% or maybe 90% of your investment because you were fooling yourself with the word "patience" and were bag holding all this time while the rest of the market kept dumping and made a lot of money by doing so or shorting the coins you were bag holding!

lets not confuse volatility with pump and dumps. being volatile is annoying of course as you can see it with bitcoin and it is making difficulties for adoption,... of bitcoin as a currency but it is understandable because bitcoin has a small market and is new. but the pump and dumps that we have in altcoin market are really unacceptable and that is why people are complaining. it is because when pump and dumps occur you can not make a logical investment, you turn into a gambler or part of manipulation itself.

and most of the problems come from people seeing bitcoin and investing in it then they are promised the same thing with altcoins so they invest in them too. bitcoin delivers those promises but altcoins get dumped on them.

it all comes down to the main purpose of each of these cryptocurrencies.
bitcoin's main purpose has always been to become a decentralized payment system that doesn't require any middleman, in short a currency. and people (even those who invest in it only) will eventually see that true purpose and want that too on top of the profit they are making.

but the main purpose of majority of altcoins, specifically the ICO tokens, have been profit making. so everyone who gets involved with them will eventually only focus and care about making profit. as a result all the discussions will also be focused on making profit.

for example you can visit altcoin board and even search about altcoins. you rarely find anything technical about any of them and the discussions are never about anything but price. but searching about bitcoin you can always find hundreds of topics, discussions, videos, wiki pages,... dedicated to technical discussions.

price is important of course because even if we deny it, we have "invested" in bitcoin but it is not the determining factor for my involvement with bitcoin or for owning. that factor is mostly the decentralization feature and the fact that bitcoin is  censorship resistant.
basically for me bitcoin has a certain definition. a decentralized currency without any limitations. if any of these attributes change and some day i feel that bitcoin is no longer satisfying then i will stop using it no matter what the price is or where it is headed.

i sometimes wonder about if Bitmain wasn't demonized this much because of the incidents of last year, then would people still talk about Bitmain's revenues, their IPO, ... and whether they would still speculate about their bankruptcy and demise?!!!
it is interesting because Bitmain wasn't  created yesterday! they have been around a long time and only from mid 2017 they became the center of attention!

that is not what i see to be honest.
what i see is a lot more shitcoins compared to a couple of years back with a huge market that is only big because of these shitcoins. in fact if you remove all of them you can see that there has been growth but nowhere near an acceptable level to be called "good shape"!

no it is never OK to bear losses, you have to take care of your money specially when it is not "some" losses! you seem to be missing the fact that altcoins have gotten dumped a lot. some has gone down more than 90% and 90% loss is not acceptable let alone be "ok"!

no and no.
as i said above the bloat is shitcoins not real legit crytpo currencies. and regulations don't have to be good. in fact in most cases they are damaging.

lol they have been promising you the return of the "bull market" for about nearly 10 months now and all this time they have been dumping on you while encouraging you to hold promising the big returns while they filled their pockets

we are very close to the bottoms and the end of the dumps. but two steps still remain. 1 is more dumps to go lower and reach the bottoms for real and 2 is to accumulate and reverse which will take a lot of time. it won't just happen suddenly as you blink.

it all depends on the project itself.
for all the ICOs and generally any shitcoin, you usually want newbies that can be gulled easier. which is exactly why platforms such as facebook have been so much better and easier to promote these things and make money from the newbies from outside who have no idea what is going on in this market.

but if the project is real and is legit then you don't want any of that. you want real people to get involved with it, preferably those who already know what a cryptocurrency means. in which case you want targeted audience which means advertising on crypto-related platforms such as bitcointalk, the crypto sites,...

first of all the volatility is not platform dependent. the volatility depends on what coin you are talking about. and if a coin is volatile it will be volatile all over a the market on all exchanges. it won't be less volatile on one platform unless that platform is dead and nobody trades there which is not the case with cryptopia (i have never heard the name of other one!).

secondly volatility is what makes the altcoin market good for traders to make money and that is why most of them are in the market in first place! if there were no pump and dumps and no volatility then the volume would have gone down 80% at least.

i don't know what you have in mind when you say "blockchain based" but there are decentralized market places that have been around for a while now. it is build with decentralization in mind and with bitcoin as one of the currencies that it accepts it is called OpenBazaar and you can check it out here: https://openbazaar.org/

you can always try to come up with reasons to explain a phenomenon but that doesn't mean the reasons you came up with are correct. it just means you made a guess and failed which is the case here. none of the things you mentioned here have anything to do with prices let alone be the reason for the drop.

the reason is actually a pretty simple and obvious one. it is because of pump and dumps and lack of usage hence lack of real demand for altcoins. when the demand only consists of speculators we end up with rise and falls based on their speculation and 0 adoption. as a result pump and dumps happen. which means every pump (2017 pumping season) will be inevitably followed by a dump (the dumping season of 2018).

first of all there is absolutely no consequence for bitcoin or others if bitcoin's dominance (the real dominance or the fake dominance that newbies use) grows or shrinks. if a project is good, it is good. people who are adopting bitcoin (for example a merchant in Japan that started accepting BTC for the goods he sells) is not choosing bitcoin because of some arbitrary number that you call dominance. they choose bitcoin because of a thousand and one reasons including decentralization, security, immutability, no taxes,...

secondly what newbies call dominance is just a fake number produced by market capitalization which is fake itself since it is multiplication of supply and price where supply of 90% of the market is fake.

the first thing you need to do is to learn how the market and also trading work. this is not something you can just one day start and expect positive results in the end. this is something you need to spend a lot of time and effort for learning. of course that is if you want to ensure your profit and success. otherwise if you want to gamble with your money then by all means jump in.

the second thing to learn is security. this includes learning which exchange to use, what wallet to use and how to secure each of these to have the safest method of keeping your money from hackers and scammers.

there are already a lot of topics and sources for both these steps. if you have some issue with something specific then feel free to ask. but ask a clear question and be specific not vague.

buying XRP now means you are going to be buying after the pump and the time after the pumps is always going to be dumping time so in other words you would be buying at a time with a high risk of dumping and you will lose money. if you wanted to buy XRP (or generally any other altcoin like it that get pumped) you should do it during the pump not after it was over.

the funniest part about this topic is not even the $589 price for XRP. instead it is the 5 merit that OP received.

all i'm saying is that it wouldn't have inflated the supply. we already had a bug like this many years ago with an overflow bug which i believe some miner by accident created a block that created a gigantic amount of new coins instead of giving him 50BTC+fees! the bug was caught and since there was an alert system in place back then and the network was small everyone was alerted fast and the bug was fixed while invalidating that block.

as for "anon" coins which i believe that is what you mean by "private or non-transparent" blockchains they also have certain consensus rules checking these things. it wouldn't be impossible to detect invalid blocks like this in an anon coin like Monero for instance. otherwise they wouldn't have worked at all in first place. which is why i said this is off-topic.

short answer is no.

if you hang around in the altcoin market for a while and try seeing the history of different altcoins you can see that these types of things happen too often and there doesn't need to be a "bounty hunter" or even that kind of token distribution for a dump. the dumps are inevitable as long as there is no real demand for the coin.

so far these tokens are 100% speculation so when you buy them the only thing you can ever do with them is to have them as an speculative asset which is in fact more like a lottery ticket that you buy which may win and give you some profit. otherwise the lack of usage means there will come a time when others who bought their lottery tickets would want to encash them and the dump comes.