these are two different statements here.
1. you can draw a conclusion based on the past with analysis and all that crap. you can say "bitcoin is undervalued and will go up a lot more because of the potential, because TA says it, because the adoption of it is growing,...."
2. saying "it was $20k so now it is undervalued" is wrong. it is basically people getting caught up in the hype and some of them who have actually bought at the peak so they want it to come back.

and as fro these charts,... you got it upside down. price doesn't go up because of more activity on forum, google trends, ... but instead when price is going up fast (or even when it is dropping down hard) there is a lot of activity (people posting on forums, idiots creating throwaways to spam FUD, news sites writing click baits,...). so you can't even use the trend for anything meaningful because it happens after the price move not before.

if bitcoin goes to $1000 then ethereum will definitely drop down to $1

basically when you are hit with the reality that there is a ginormous supply of ethereum around and you are hit in the face with the 100 billion or possibly 150 billion by that time you will dump your bags as everyone else before you have been doing on a much higher price. and the real crash will come. not to mention that pump and dump altcoins like ETH will always be replaced by another pump and dump shitcoin which means money will exit to that new coin.

that sites seems to be so much better than the earn.com site. but i still prefer my mempool analysis way of determining the best fee. basically you are better off letting Electrum decide, you can also set it on mempool fee estimation


the way it works is that you basically look at the following chart and decide which fee falls in less than block size which is about 1.2 MB on average these days but i usually choose 1 MB to be safer and to be a round number.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,2d

it is also worth mentioning the first rule of investment which is "invest what you can afford to lose" and if you do it then all the damned scenarios won't matter anymore. for example if i have invested $100 and i can afford to lose it then even if price were to drop to zero then i wouldn't have minded it at all.

but i like the idea of "profit taking" and i have been doing it in the past 4 years too but you only take profit while still in profit, on the top of the peak, in a bubble, after a rally,... but never  after all these are done and price has fallen. for instance right now price is more than 60% lower than the price that you should have sold at!

no, you are not allowed to touch my bitcoins. i would like to buy and hold them for hundreds of years and i don't want to move them at all and you are not allowed to force me to do otherwise. what you are doing is that you are calling my coins lost and you want to steal them from me!

last time i saw this problem it was because the person trying to send funds he wasn't actually sending anything, he created the transaction and then saved it on his computer (in the wallet). this is happening when you click the "save" button instead of "send" button after signing your transaction.

in your history tab it will look like the following picture and it will say "local"


if this is the case then remove this tx and recreate your transaction, you may have to get a new address from BitPay because i am not sure how they work, maybe that address expired and you may had a limited time depositing there.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
but be warned that this site is known to give higher fee suggestion than normal most of the times. for example currently it is suggesting 10 s/b now while paying 2-3 s/b is more than enough.

basically the estimation is based on how much others are paying in the mempool this is a much better link: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h but you have to understand the charts.       


for you as a user it is simple. you go to your history tab, if the tx is still unconfirmed you will see a different icon on its left side. and when you right click it there will be an option to "increase fee" you simply select it and a set a higher fee for your transaction and confirm it. you are done.

what happens under the hood is that your transaction already has the RBF flag so the mining pools that have this feature enabled will see it and will look for possible new replacement transactions. if you make a new one they will simply drop the previous one from their mempool and put the new one in it.
what your wallet does is that it simply take an extra amount from your change output and puts it in fee (basically you pay a smaller amount to your change so it  automatically goes to fee). you are in fact creating a new transaction but with the same keys and different amount.
something like this:


after bumping fee:

the CEO might have been an exaggerated example. in a case like that you want to hold your funds in a multi signature wallet as @TheQuin said above. which is mostly because there are more than one owners or a board but also because of the increased security and the fact that you keep the keys separated from each other.

no because people don't need to understand bitcoin. in fact they should not understand it! if everyone understands bitcoin that means the projects is too simple and poorly made. when it is complicated enough that average Joe doesn't easily understands it that shows it is a complicated and strong project.

and why should they understand it?!! in fact i say the arguments he made are the most bullshit ones anybody can ever make. we are using shitloads of stuff that we don't understand. it is like saying "I don't understand how internal combustion engine works so i don't use any vehicle ever"! obviously you trust those who understand how it works and when they give you the thumbs up you use cars without wanting to "understand them"!

i agree with this statement but the problem is not with bitcoin, it is not with the market nor the users. the problem is with the altcoins themselves. they are useless and they are practically built to be speculative assets. and when you make a secondary adjoining market to bitcoin then you are making a tool  for people to earn bitcoin and that is what everyone is doing.
in fact the most common answer to the question asking "how to earn bitcoin" in these mass spam topics is "trade altcoins".

my theory is that it has been rising slowly because of shipping time!
when price went up, mining because profitable so many new people decided to get into mining. but when they buy mining equipment from Bitmain it takes a long time (at least t hat is what i heard) people report it has taken even 2-3 months to get their miners. for example those who bought Antminer when price was $6000 in November 2017 got their miners on January 2018 when price was $20000

it is called bitcoin.
if you see any trailing words it means it is an altcoin. bitcoin classic, bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold, bitcoin silver, bitcoin private, bitcoin blahblah are all altcoins.
and electrum is designed for bitcoin only. anything else which is not in the following links is a fork of electrum and is not by the original team
https://electrum.org/
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum

this was answered by @TryNinja above, i just want to add that when you see forks of bitcoin like BCH you can most of the times use bitcoin tools (like bitaddress.org or even electrum) to create addresses and receive those coins in.
for example you can create a BCH paper wallet with bitaddress.org and receive bitcoin cash. but for spending you need to download a BCH wallet.

the name should be more than obvious. bitcoin is bitcoin and anything that is bitcoin (something here) is not bitcoin.
then it is the links. for example real Electrum link is the one i posted above. anything other than that is not for bitcoin. for example https://electrum-ltc.org/ is electrum fork for litecoin.

sorry but i can't help but remember this meme:


in reality if someone really attacks you, they know you own certain amount of bitcoin. lets say you are CEO of a company who owns 50000BTC. being attacked means a gun to your head. and in that situation when you give the attacker your "decoy" he is going to see it is empty and will beat you until you give up the password too so he can get that 50kBTC!
in other words your deniability is not so plausible

there are two different things in a "client" that you should not confuse with each other.
1. the consensus rules.
these are a set of rules that make bitcoin. for example the block size is one of these rules. number of newly generated coins is another [1]. when you say a full node client it must enforce these rules to be considered a bitcoin client. if it is enforcing something else then it is not a bitcoin client and it won't be compatible with the rest of network and be on another chain (fork) as an altcoin. like Bitcoin-abc which is now on bitcoin-cash fork.
in short "compatibility with the rest of the network" that you ask about concerns this and this alone.

2. the rest of the things it does.
a full node is not just a full node to validate transactions, it also is a wallet too. so they may have a variety of options, for example better options for cold storage, a better GUI.
there aren't really that many alternatives to bitcoin core, most of them are forks of core with additions or modifications.
there is a topic here that discusses this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4180898.0

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/52620/list-of-bitcoin-consensus-rules

usually miners go with the biggest project which happens to be bitcoin core because it is tested more, reviewed more and possibility of a bug is small. they may do modifications to satisfy certain needs but nothing rule breaking.

they are (or must be) open source so you can check the code and see what it is doing or trust the others who are familiar with coding to do it.

not familiar with the process myself but this may help: https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-do-mining-pools-work/

well for a company this can be very different. for example there may be a "board of directors" and a transaction may need all of their signatures. like a 9 of 9 wallet. or a 8 of 9 wallet with one belonging to the CEO so that you don't run to the CEO each time you want to spend money.



there can also be different wallets. one for the main company funds in the hands of the directors (8 of 9) and one for paying the employees in the hands of financial department (2of2) which is charged every month before the payments.
in this case you only have to send all holdings to anew wallet if one of the directors got fired. and being a 8 of 9 you can go to the CEO for this matter to create a transaction and send the funds to a new wallet while making the key of the fired person useless.

lets say your "organization" is a family with 2 parents and a child and you need a 2 of 3 multisignature wallet.

each parent and the child creates a new bitcoin address with their own wallets. then they share the public key that they each created. then each of them creates the new multisignature wallet with these 3 pubkeys.
in bitcoin core you can use "bitcoind addmultisigaddress 2 '[pubkeys_here]'" or you can use Electrum which has a nice user interface and give it the keys.

if the child wants to spend he needs a parent's signature to do so, any parent would do.

now when i say public key it can be just a simple pubkey and create 1 multi-sig address or it can be a master public key to create an HD wallet of multi-sig addresses.

obviously nothing or zero. i am surprised nobody has said this yet. people don't like or want to pay fees and if you let them they will choose the lowest fee possible specially when you are talking about bitcoin where a fee you pay can be worth a lot in a couple of years, for example at some point bitcoin fees were something like 0.01 or 0.001BTC if i can recall correctly.


here comes the spam attack
dust threshold is somewhere around 5000 satoshi. you can make a transaction with 100 inputs and 100 outputs (lets use multisig for bigger size) and get a 42610 bytes transaction. 100*5000 sat = 500,000 lets say fee is 0.1% => you pay 500 satoshi fee to fill the blocks with 42.6 kB transactions.

those are not "questions". normal people don't think about "intrinsic value" instead they look at usability, potential, profit, ...
unfortunately some people have heard the word FUD and think if they constantly create nonsense topics and talk about weird stuff and say things like "bitcoin has no intrinsic value", "bitcoin is dying", ".. is dead", "altcoins are better",.... they can affect the price in their own favor!

that is not a risk because there are ways of solving the problem if you paid a lower fee than you should have and had your transaction stuck. and Electrum and Bitcoin core are already marking the transactions as RBF by default which makes that easy to solve.

this is where you are wrong. difficulty is not something that always rises like that. you should know that difficulty is rising and falling based on the hash rate that comes in and goes out of bitcoin. if more miners come in the hash rate will increase and difficulty will rise and vise versa.

so when do more miners come in? when price goes up and mining bitcoin becomes a lot more profitable. check out the hash rate chart:
the gradient is not the same in these 3 steps that i chose on the chart.
α= first one which is when price is still below $2000 and a lot of fear exists about it crashing down hard back to $700 because of the FUD so there isn't that much increase in the mining power also mining profit increased but not by that much.
β= price goes to $5000 and that ballpark so there is a bigger increase rate of hashrate and difficulty because a lot more miners are now coming in thanks to the increase in mining profit.
γ= is the biggest rate because of the biggest price rise falls in this area which covers going from $5000 to $10k (2x rise) and another 2x rise to $20k



you see you can not extrapolate the data like this. unless you also extrapolate the price data too like this:
hashrate increased about 14x last year and price increased 22x last year so in 2 years price would be $440,000!!!