to be fail there has been a lot of interesting ideas in altcoins. i have not yet completely given up on them despite most of them just being copy paste crap of projects not doing anything at all!

the future is hard for all of them because they will all be seen with one eye when there are lots and lots of useless projects. but eventually i do believe that good projects will survive and grow.

and as we can see, currently it is time for getting dumped

Not!

and i don't say that just because there have been scams and large losses but i say it mostly because when you participate in all the ICOs and give them "free money" it will create more and more scams and best case scenario it will create lazier developers who don't even care about their own project because they don't have anything at stake, they have already gotten their money!

bitcoin never stopped pushing though! it has always been "pushing" and rising even when the price were seemingly dropping, it was in reality a stepping stone to go even higher next time.

with the trend that is going on right now, i am expecting a much higher price before any "retracement" happens. there is nothing going on that can cause a big drop anyways, the way to higher prices is perfectly clear with no obstacles for some more time at least.

i don't remember anything about Korea banning anything, maybe i missed it but China didn't ban bitcoin exchange it banned a couple of them that didn't have license. they may even come back in a month or two like the last time.

anyways Japan is the leading country in bitcoin because it regulated bitcoin and people are adopting it all around Japan. both in shops by merchants and in exchanges by traders.

you have a very good point here and i agree with it but remember that you can not begin to compare online with offline storage specially if by online you mean "web wallets" which people usually call them.
in other words you can say offline storage (no matter how created) is by far more secure than any online one.

thanks for the link but that just raised more concerns for me!

1. they say they only had 1 core developer and added another recently. this change they are doing is so huge that it shouldn't really be only 1 unknown person working on it.

2. the fork seems rushed. they even claim that PoW change is not yet completely finished. such hard forks need a lot of extensive testing.

3. the difficulty changes, same issue as 2!

4. there is still the biggest issue of the Premined coins!

i still don't change anything about my speculation in OP though.

bitcoin gold fork is on October 25 which is about 14-15 days from now. the dumps started 2-3 days ago and they have been going on for at least 2 weeks before that too but at smaller amounts.

if people wanted to get their BTG airdrops they would have sold at least on 20th not from now!

this is only because bitcoin price is rising and whenever that happens traders leave altcoin market and go back to bitcoin.

i completely disagree. read what i wrote under my avatar. it is not a joke.
first of all the percentage of the profit is important not the amount. everyone can afford to invest a certain amount of money not unlimited. someone is willing to invest $100, someone else $1 million. both can make the same percentage profit. but second person takes a much bigger risk and in case of loss his loss will be much bigger.

secondly there is a difference between a solid investment with (moderately) low risk but high reward (being bitcoin). versus a high risk high reward investment.

if you invest in bitcoin, the chances of making profit are there and are good.
if you invest in altcoins the chances of making profit are there but they are low and you must have to be a trader and understand how to do it.

with bitcoin you can "invest" and make profit over time. with altcoins you have to trade and make profit.

regulating something has nothing to do with it being centralized or decentralized. you are still living in a country under the rules of that country and you are using the local currency of that country to buy bitcoin. and you use that bitcoin to buy stuff from shops that are working under the laws of that country.
that is what regulation means.
for example some countries see bitcoin as an asset and say when you buy it and hold it, you have to pay capital gains (i think it is called) taxes.
or some other places say when you open a business with bitcoin you have to get a license first. just like when you open a business with fiat.

by now you have probably heard about the new controversial fork of bitcoin called Bitcoin Gold or Bitcoin GPU.

i have speculated about this coin's price a couple of times in different places, i thought to make a new topic and share my thoughts here.
this is mostly a long term speculation.

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coins that are mineable usually become the favorite of the community pretty fast. when mining them becomes profitable, they become even bigger favorites, and when they get pumped people can't shut up about them!

i believe one of the main reasons for popularity of ETH was mining of it. there is a huge community of miners with a lot of money invested in mining rigs (GPUs) who have been supporting and advertising ETH so far.
with the hard fork (first step on October 16 reduction of block rewards from 5 to 3), this is going to stop.

all this hashrate needs to go somewhere. where else better than something with bitcoin name in it.

with that said my speculation is that if miners really migrate to BTG chain and start mining it, advertising, hyping and pumping it, this coin can gain some fast popularity out of nowhere and even replace ETH in the bags of investors. essentially gaining the same price even!

there are two big issues though. and that is the premined coins that goes to the developer. but by comparison ETH also had the same kind of premine (even bigger).
the other is the airdrop. BTG is practically giving away 16,617,000+ coins although this will create a short term dump and as i said i am aiming more for the long term speculation

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so where do you see BTG price in long term?
can it reach $300-$500 in a couple of months after release?

there is no way to force them into any naming convention the same way there is no way to stop them from forking and using the name of bitcoin. if you found a way to force this naming convention i suggest something like "some new name" instead of "bitcoin ....".

the reason why these people are doing it is because they want to have a nice name. they want people thinking it is a proper coin worthy of investment. so they call it bitcoin plus some name that attracts attention. these include but not limited to : cash, gold, core, unlimited,...

they will if you pay them

there is a cap for these "gains". and when there are hundreds of them being created, there won't be any gains anymore.

and so far these new "mimic" coins are doing a lot of airdrops which are free money giveaways. and people who receive them are not about to hold them or buy more, they instead dump what they got for free to turn the useless token to something of value: bitcoin or fiat.

i sometimes feel like i am missing a lot of money from these airdrops but then i check them out and see i am actually saving money by not wasting my time on them!

all the trouble of finding them, getting a wallet, signing up for the airdrop, claiming it, finding some place to dump it, signing up on exchanges that you never knew before, dumping, paying fees, withdrawing,... and how much will i get? 0.005BTC best case scenario!

Switzerland has been one of the more bitcoin friendly countries but i wouldn't call it "the bitcoin country". it is not close to that title at all. a "bitcoin country" would be something more like Japan, where bitcoin is actually legalized and regulated, there are not taxes on bitcoin payments, and lots of merchants are accepting bitcoin there. in comparison Switzerland does nothing!

whenever there is an altcoin dump the first reason that comes to mind is that it is the normal way of things with altcoins. it really isn't something strange. they altcoins get pumped then they are dumped. some faster than others. and they are "at the end of their cycles" the cycle of pump and dump and then bottom and below bottom and maybe in far away future, another pump.

bitcoin has never been stable, at least not for long and it is not about to start becoming stable anytime soon.

my strategy is to ignore all the altcoins that are getting dumped and start looking for those that are getting pumped. there are a lot of them out there and every day at least a couple are on the pumping side.

that is the whole reason!
the price of bitcoin WILL remain in a balance no matter where it is being traded because of 1. markets move together as they react to movements 2. arbitrage trading if they don't move

but that balance will remain as long as you can trade between exchanges. in case of India, for a while they could not because they had some bank issues in their country so price kept going up because the demand for bitcoin was increasing, again because of the bank issues.

does Zimbabwe have an exchange or are you telling this price from some P2P platform such as localbitcoins?

they all have restrictions in the same range. usually it is amount of bitcoin you get in return and in 90% of exchanges it is smaller or equal to 10,000 satoshi.
for example in case of bittrex it is 50k as you said. but with that said, OP's question doesn't make any sense at all!

if a coin is worth $300 that means what he is calling "leftover" and says it is 0.5 token is worth $150 or ~0.034BTC and that is way beyond that limit!

effing bitfinex always adds these coins way before they even become a thing! this just proves they don't care about bitcoin, they just want to take advantage of the situation and attract more traffic (traders) to make more money.
they did the same thing with bitcoin cash and bitcoin unlimited adding each of them way before they even existed. BU didn't even come to exist and they had (don't know if they still have!!) the market for it

no matter what happens you should always keep what you can afford to lose, at all times. it is not just a hardfork, November kind of thing. this is always true. and when you start doing that you never fear about the future at all.

in this case, if you are hodling bitcoin firs you will get an airdrop on October 25 called bitcoin gold and you can enjoy that bonus because it is an altcoin created for pump and dump and no use.

next there will be SegWit2x in about 40 days (if i am not mistaken) and for that you will have to wait and see. we can't really talk about what will happen to that at this point.

think of orderbooks as Queues.
when you place an order, you go inside a queue, and have to wait until your turn. it is a first in first out kind of situation.

so here two things are happening:
1. when you place an order on the top of buy orderbook (bids) you are placing your order after all those that already exist. so on 0.00157780   there may be 10 other orders with some total size which you can see prior to placing your own order and it needs to be filled before it is your turn.
2. nobody may sell or some others may place higher bids than you. like placing orders at 0.00157780+ 0.00000001 and be filled before you.