first of all you should never invest with other people's money. and when you are new to the market yourself you absolutely shouldn't do that.
second learning how the market works is not something easy, it mostly requires experience which will be gained by spending time watching the market on your own and analyzing it on your own to gain that experience which you will need to make better decisions.
you can always look at other people's speculation too such as using tradingview.com
also learning some stuff about technical analysis will help. there are a lot of stuff online for that since it is not bitcoin related but general trading.

you are confusing the fight against scammers with the fight against cryptocurrencies. what you are calling "hammer drop" is the first fight and there is nothing wrong with that. it is eliminating all the scumbags that have been scamming newcomers all this time, like the ICOs.

and the price of altcoins have been dropping like always it has nothing to do with anything but their pump and dumps.

the same relationship that there is between any fiat like USD and assets such as gold, stock, ... people buy these assets to make profit on their USD and then sell when they are higher to get that USD out.

altcoins have the same role for bitcoin. people buy altcoins with their BTC or fiat in some rare cases to make profit on their BTC.

neither!
bitcoin transactions do not contain any IP information and blocks in the blockchain contains these transactions. in other words no IP address is recorded.
if by any chance you mean blockchain.info website then the IP address they list is different, it is the IP address of the node that sent them the transaction first. it may be the Electrum node or it may be another node that is just relaying that tx.

regarding privacy and Electrum the only thing that happens is that when you connect to an Electrum node you are asking them for your transaction history so you give them all your addresses which means that node sees all your bitcoin addresses and can connect them together and also record your IP address and associate these two together. whether they do it or not is another discussion.
in other words there are two things here: they see list of all your bitcoin addresses and link them together even if they are not connected + your IP address. you can hide your IP but you can't hide your address list.

official websites of each altcoin is the best place to find the answer to this kind of questions. according to Monero Ann[1] it is getmonero.org and visiting that website there are 2 light clients and mobile wallets and neither are Electrum fork [2].
there is also a way to use monero without syncing by using a remote node which may not be as safe read this [3]

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0
[2] https://getmonero.org/downloads/#mobilelight
[3] https://monero.stackexchange.com/a/3274

only time!
the drops have to happen and finish and that takes time. and also everyone has to start accumulating bitcoin at the bottom and that also takes time. if you can't analyze the market during the bear market and make profit then stay away.


it could but there are already new investors coming in. in fact the drop (lower price) is a good time for many to start investing in bitcoin, so at least you can say a lot of fresh money is coming in bitcoin. it may not be as much as the money that comes in during the hyped up rises but it is still a considerable amount.

would you mind telling us where you are getting your numbers from?
the only thing strange that i can find is from blockchain.info [1] which is showing a big drop from 25.6 EHS to 10.9 EHS which seems to be more like a bug to me since other sources are showing something else [2][3] from 28.3 to 27. EHS which is a negligible drop

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate
[2] https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/hash-rate
[3] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3m

stop looking at blockchain.info stats or at least cross check it with some other sources, you will see that their numbers are crazy for some reason (possibly another bug in blockchain.info). the number of transction per day is over 200K which is normal and the hashrate is still as high as it ever was (26 E Hash/sec) and the fluctuations it has are normal and like always.

a small drop in both of these numbers is perfectly normal.
- there are less transactions since the spam attack stopped and also since the massive hype and the constant huge rise and the constant huge dump afterwards has stopped. during stable price times people don't make that many transactions.
- hashrate as i said above is not dropping, there is ups and downs all over the chart with the same size and any possible drop will be small and it can be because of the lower current price compared to ATH and hashrate of that time.

https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/hash-rate
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3m

we are in a downtrend all over the market, NEO included. there is no indicator to say otherwise. the falls are slowing down for many altcoins but they have not ended yet. it is impossible to say where the bottom is but i'd say NEO is one of the altcoins which is very close to its bottom mainly because of its big drop but also because it has a smaller price compared to similar competing projects such as ethereum.

this is what happens to most exchanges out there. Poloniex is not dead yet but like many of them, they grew too big and started earning a lot of money that they stopped caring about customers because they thought they were going to  continue making that much money even if they gave their users a hard time or even scammed them like what bittrex did.
this always opens up market for competition to swoop in and replace them. that is what Binance did. they will probably do the same thing and be replaced by another new exchange in a year or so!

i have never tried this so i can not say for sure but technically this should not matter because a merchant is not looking for a specific transaction ID (your TX ID changes if you bump the fee which is practically changing the transaction), they instead are looking for payment to their pubkey in the mempool and in the blocks for confirmation. so if you bump the fee it should still see the new payment transaction and replace it with the old one.

there is a golden rule about buying and selling that says "sell before the drop and buy before the rise". when you do each of these after their time you are taking a bigger risk. for example when you sell after the drop happened and price went down some considerable amount, you are selling too late and risk not being able to buy back at the best discount.
same is true about buying, when price is at the bottom and staying there, that is when you should buy not after it started rising up. by then you are facing a couple of risks: 1. risk of not getting the best price 2. risk of getting caught in a bull trap.

you are mainly using this article to exaggerate things and even spread some FUD!

this has been happening for as long as bitcoin was around. not everyone trusts exchanges or wants to use them. they prefer a more decentralized (peer to peer) way of trading bitcoin. it may also sometimes be because of taxes.

you say this as if it was a thing! maybe someone was idiot enough to do something like that but it was not a major thing. most people invest more responsibly than that. some always take dumb risks.

this doesn't even make any sense!

i call conspiracy theory at best. the drop would have come anyways because of the bubble at $20k and whenever a big drop happens and weak hands are flushed out for good the prices drop more like this. it is inevitable and doesn't have to have some evil group of people behind it.

nobody invests that much money in anything, not just bitcoin. if you invest $500 million in stocks or even gold in one go, you will change its price significantly! what they do is that they invest slowly and based on market size.
and by the way neither polonies nor binance are considered top when it comes to trading bitcoin. they do NOT even have a fiat market!

not a good suggestion. there are a lot of options when there is a big drop on the way. HODL is only true when price reaches the bottom and you are too late to do anything else. other than that the dips are a good place to make a huge profit and increase the amount of bitcoin you own.

it depends on the country and whether "ban" means what it really means not just a fake usage of the word to scare newbies.

for example they say bitcoin is banned in Bangladesh. so yeah if you use bitcoin there, there is a jail-time waiting for you.

but they also say bitcoin is banned in China, India, Russia and so many other countries. there is no reality to that. there are some restrictions, regulations,.... in each of these countries which the FUDsters called "ban". the fact is people are still using bitcoin in all these countries without a problem since there were no actual ban.

no "major investor" can prevent death of anything. if anything is to die, it will die.
bitcoin won't die and instead will grow bigger and stronger every day even if the price doesn't show it at times only because it has lots and lots of investors, small and "major" that are creating a huge demand for bitcoin which is always there to buy it and use it. and this comes from the real usability of bitcoin in real world outside of exchanges and speculation.
that is not true for any altcoins out there that is why they will die if bitcoin ceases to exist.

it depends on why they banned that account. i seriously doubt they just banned it because of what it was posting, they don't care about that. but they may have banned it because it was a stolen/hacked account.

also as for "free speech", if that is what you think is free speech then we should created a @BitcoinCash account and post 30 tweets per day saying bitcoin cash is a scam and will steal your money. how does that sound?

the only thing that makes Asian countries such as China affect bitcoin (basically its price only) is the fact that people think they have a great influence. the fact its Chinese market may be big but it is nowhere near as big as the rest of the market specially the USD market since it is mostly global not just for US, like Coinbase which is getting users from many countries.
other countries like Korea and India don't even have that influence.

i've never heard this one before but i liked it.


this is the problem with most people who invest in bitcoin. they want a certain thing: to become rich overnight, and as that doesn't come true they start acting strange.

the fact is, it really doesn't matter when you buy. what matters more is what you do after you bought. for example if you bought to trade bitcoin only then falling or rising ,... should not even matter, you should be able to make profit from any market trend that comes up.
and if you bought just as an investment then it still shouldn't matter what happens next. if prices were falling then sell in early stages not after a long time and the bottom! and then simply buy back.
making mistakes is always ok as long as you don't repeat them and try fixing the mistake you made.

this is a bad move though. i also believe in the future of cryptocurrencies and have a lot of investment in bitcoin but only bitcoin. but i still am not going to invest all or almost all my money and profit in it. bitcoin is still volatile and very young, all the potentials that it has doesn't change the fact that it also has risks. and when there is risk you have to manage it properly.

p.s. next time you copy paste an article try to have the courtesy to mention the source

it depends on the topic itself!
for example there are pointless questions on bitcointalk (known spam topics) that go to hundreds of pages. like asking "is trading gambling?". nobody will even read the first answer let alone a comment on page 100!

but there are topics that have a lot of replies but people are active in them for real. for example the Wall observer thread on speculation board has 20178 pages but people who are active there are reading each other's comments. or the announcements of altcoins or services is another example.