are you just copy pasting different quotes out of context here? because the way you   are quoting them here is contradictory and misleading.

you should NEVER EVER use exchanges as a way to store your cryptocurrencies. you should use cold storage yourself not trust the exchange to use it for their funds. when you deposit on an exchange you give up your ownership and depend on them to be honest enough to pay you back what you gave them, it doesn't matter where they hold these funds.

who said I want it to go to the moon? it will go there but I want it to stay here and go lower as much as possible so I can dump my fiat into bitcoin and own a lot more bitcoin when the mass adoption hits.

and just because you call something "fact" doesn't make it a fact. as I said the chances are the same because you are basically making a guess. and as guesses go, you should also "guess" $100k by the end of the year.

a couple of things here that you should not confuse with each other.
first one is that you should confuse "patience" that people keep repeating these days with "bag holding". for the past couple of months what has been happening among newcomers was that they bought a lot of different altcoins because the social media was telling them how good they are and now they are being lulled into having "patience" where in fact they are bag holding and losing money  every day.

second is what you called "original" doesn't mean anything. a certain price that happened before doesn't have to be the real value and coins certainly don't have to go back there anymore. in fact a lot of the altcoins will never go back up let alone going back up to their ATH in a bubble.

bullshit.

nobody can deny the chance that bitcoin may go back down to $1000 but at the same time there is the same chance that bitcoin can go up to $100000 before the year ends. and both of these prices have the same reasoning and same chance of happening behind them.

posting that silly chart that has been posted here a million times in a different form is not a valid reason it is just text to make the topic look longer than it really is.

from what I understand from your post here I think you also suffer from the most common problem that people usually have  during pumps. you buy any altcoin (even a shot in the dark) in 2017 and you make profit and that makes you think you can earn money from this market and sometimes even leads to believing you are a "trader". where in fact what happened was that you made a bet and you got lucky and your gamble turned out good. now you are making the same bets but you are out of luck so your are losing money.

specifically this part:
"So I just buy and wait... then it goes down even more".

this is a downtrend for all the altcoins that have been extremely pumped last year. they won't come back for a long time, even if bitcoin starts rising again. meanwhile there are lots of other altcoins that either weren't pumped as much or they were pumped but they also were dumped just as hard so they were at the bottom and now they are experiencing another big pump. you can invest in those.

so far only bitcoin has been a currency and a "tool for transactions". the rest are purely treated as investments.

not really. last year we had a lot of hype and that meant many people heard about cryptocurrencies but t hat  doesn't mean they rushed to invest in them. some of them did but many stayed away because they are still afraid of them for good reasons. and many only invested in bitcoin not others.

wrong. bitcoin and by extension the rest are legal in majority of the world. in fact it is only "illegal" in less than 5% of the world.

as I said they are not illegal and also people aren't using them as currencies, they are using them as investment, conversely as some illusion of becoming rich if they buy X and Y.

@IndigoRed
just about everything that you said here is wrong!

- LN is already implemented
- LN may indirectly help keep transaction fees low like how low they currently are but it won't be decreasing it "drastically".
- we will have almost instant transactions on LN not on main chain.

true only about transactions that happen on LN but LN still needs on-chain transactions to open and close channels so it does require miners.
not to mention that miners don't validate transactions, they just find blocks. nodes do the validation and in case of LN, the LN nodes will do the validation.

completely wrong. everything is still online but on a different "layer".

again LN does NOT remove need for miners.

WRONG.
this used to be the case at least 5 years ago but today it is no longer true. we already have a lot of markets for altcoins that consist of many different currencies and even other altcoins. in other words you can buy most altcoins with USD, JPY, CNY, EUR, .... USDT, NZDT, TUSD,... LTC, ETH, DOGE, .... and these markets are on big exchanges like poloniex,... and small ones such as Yobit, cryptopia,... and at the end of the day people have all these options but they choose to use bitcoin (as it is obvious from the volumes of each market). they are not forced to and that is why bitcoin is dominating everything.

I opened this topic expecting one of those poorly repeated topics talking about Satoshi for the millionth time but I was surprised to see this nice compilation of all the theories so far. it was merit worthy.

I specifically like the "Samsung Toshiba Nakamichi Motorola" thing

very interesting theory but we already have this month (June 6) that the reversal has started about a week ago on May 29 when price reached the bottom ($7026) and the trend was reversed ever since and price has been rising up (currently at $7700+).
and also we have April 6 which this theory doesn't fit in where price stayed the same and it lasted another week until April 12 when the reversal started big time.

what OP is saying (specifically in the end paragraph) mostly concerns the day traders and those who want to make a profit in a very short term from ups and downs not a longer term trader like those who are trading mostly as a hobby or a second job and certainly not the long term investors. for these waiting for a bigger sign and a bigger movement is a better idea.

topics like this are only created because price is going down (or has gone down). otherwise when price was rising nonstop last year and we had one of the biggest rises in the history of bitcoin (from $10k to $20k in 17 days) people like OP weren't complaining about how "whales are destroying the market". but now a 1% natural rise is a pump and dump!!!

no, that is not the reason for it.
for example if you ask random people in the street "why don't they have bitcoin" most of them will say they don't even know what bitcoin is. and if they do know what it is they are either scared of it because of high volatility and FUD that has spread a lot of misinformation about it. or they see it as an investment with a high risk instead of a currency so they don't get in.
hence the slow adoption.

bitcoin is not considered a currency by the Russian government (I think they consider it as a commodity but I am not sure) so I do not think something huge like World Cup in Russia is going to accept payments in bitcoin for the tickets they sell. if this was in another country that has already accepted bitcoin as a currency such as Japan you can be sure that they will accept bitcoin as payment as we will see in 2 years (?) when the Olympics starts there.

again this is not an argument about whether it is good to do it or not, it is about the fact that it is being done.
as for centralized altcoins I can say it is a total bullshit because we already have them and all of them are pure crap.
as for government centralized altcoins I can't say because we only have one that started very recently. it doesn't seem like a good idea but we have to see how it turns out to be when other countries also do it.
as for other fields such as the SQL thing you ask, I have no idea because I have never seen any in action, I have only read news about them wanting to use it. and it doesn't seem different to me when it comes to speed. SQL database and blockchain are both a form of database but that is just my opinion.

existence of these things have nothing to do with bitcoin though. bitcoin is unique and exists and works and is growing in popularity because it is decentralized and secure. it fulfills a different purpose: a censorship resistance currency.
but centralized altcoins do exist and are popular. for example XRP is also popular because it  fulfills a different purpose: a shitcoin to be pumped and dumped and people have made profit from it.

what do you mean by "official"?
there are a lot of different merchants selling a lot of different products on the internet. some have websites and some only use other platforms like this forum to sell (visit goods board). there are also big companies such as Microsoft that was mentioned above that are accepting bitcoin payments, in case that is what you meant by "official".

being a trader and holding at the same time don't go together at all. it doesn't even make any sense to call yourself a trader and at the same time hold!
trading is a completely dynamic process where you have to constantly be active in the market. your money has to move around and you should never hold. you buy something "low", decide where to sell and sell "high". as I said it is a dynamic thing, the sell price or buy price can change but not that much. being active is the important part.

if you are holding then you are not a trader. don't fool yourself. you are an investor. then things become different. you need to ask yourself why you invested in what you bought. and ask whether it was a good move. and then decide when you want to sell it.
for example you buy a land in an up and coming neighborhood because you know price is going to shoot up in a year or two. then you sell after that time comes. you don't randomly go around buy any piece of land you can get your hands on and wish it gives you profit.
same is true about investing in cryptocurrencies. why did you buy that altcoin for example? was it because they advertised it a lot and someone told you it is a good investment or did you make that decision after studying the code and using it and seeing its usages?

as a trader when price is dropping you should never hold because you will end up losing a lot of money and before you know it, it will be too late to do anything else but hold and continue losing money.

what you should do is to sell as fast as possible. as for buying there is always a good window of opportunity to buy before the rise/dead cat bounce/recovery/... ends. you just have to either watch the price or set up some alerts if you can like using a bot or an online service and then jump on board and buy when you notice the signs of that rise happening.

it FIRST needs time. you may think something is positive and can jump start the bull run but if the timing for it is not right, it won't be as effective and may not cause anything more than a small jump.
TIME is needed first for the bear market to end and price to reach a level where majority of investors feel like that is the "bottom" and start buying.


there are two things about fee rise: when it goes up because of more usage and when it goes up because of spam attack.
what we had in most of 2017 was the spam attack and that can happen at any time and under any consensus rules (even the bigger block size) and can make fees ridiculously high.
but the usage one is not a serious problem. whenever there is a big rise or a big fall that can lead to more on chain activity (people buying and moving coins to their wallet while some others move to exchanges to sell) this means more transactions and a slightly bigger backlog and a slightly higher fees.

I still wouldn't call it gambling because when it comes to gambling (like rolling a dice) you have absolutely no way of speculating about the result. it is pure 100% chance. but in trading, even trading the most unpredictable altcoin there are still ways to speculate it and it may be 99% chance for such altcoin but for the rest and specially bitcoin it is not that bad it can even be less than 10% chance at times.

as for litecoin, it has been having more real usages for the past 2 years specially ever since they enabled SegWit and it gained a lot of publicity. and on top of that when bitcoin fees were ridiculously high it kind of pushed everyone towards altcoins, one of which were Litecoin.