bittrex is big but nowhere near as big as poloniex.

OP has an excellent point and i have been thinking about this myself too. ever since this recent outage where people lost a lot of money i am staying away from there.

it is not good at all to "give" all the power to one exchange like this. they may not run away but they are making a lot of money by controlling the market and pump and dumping the coins themselves.

and nothing is preventing them from getting hacked or anything like that. i can see the day that we hear poloniex was hacked and some ridiculous number like 500,000BTC was stolen! and that number is enough incentive for all the hackers in the world to try their best...
it can potentially have the same effect as Gox in 2013 had! and this altcoin bubble is actually like the 2013 gox bubble in bitcoin!

i agree there is a good chance of a drop now that price rise has slowed down and it actually has been a long time since we saw a real drop! we have been seeing constant rise with little corrections so far.

and in case it starts dropping i would be ready to invest a large amount of money in bitcoin again apart from the stash that i already have. this year's rise is just getting warmed up!

on top of using localbitcoins you can always check out the currency exchange board: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0
but don't expect to easily find someone who is willing to sell bitcoin (which has irreversible transactions) to your Paypal (which has easily reversible transactions).

"hold" has a little bit of broad meaning. by how long you mean?
it can be holding forever or for a couple of years or even for a couple of minutes.

i can say that i have always held altcoins for a very short period of time. this never exceeds 2 week most of the times. because i am simply interested in profit.

with that definition i am currently holding
LTC: because it had a nice dip and i still think there will be a pump.
Doge: because it is on the rise
had Siacoin but sold it right before i come here and reason for having it was because i saw the rise and jumped in.
DGB: same reason and same result
LSK: because the rise seems to be just starting.

i doubt that these big coins implode. and that is the worst kind of dump that we can imagine. these are big and have attracted a lot of investors, many of them newbies. and whales are never idiots to cash out all at once and kill the coin right then and there. that is what they do with small coins.

with bigger coins they will start their exit slowly, the price goes on a downward spiral but very slow. it dips then stops, people gain some hope, then it dips again, and same happens until price is crashed without any of the bag holders even noticing.

in the early days of its release when things were so hot and everyone was participating and earning a lot of money, that platform was a good place to earn money and make profit.

but i did some calculations a while back (and this may not be perfect but) i made the conclusion that it is not worth the time and effort. if i can make quality material, then i'd rather make a website or a blog even and publish them there and use the traffic that the high quality content generates and some SEO techniques to earn money and that money will be a lot more.

ROFL. this is so freaking funny.
i am 99.9% certain that his is a bug. the 24 hour volume it is reporting is currently at 78,057,626,000,245 and the others are at 3000 and 7000 according to bitcoin wisdom

there simply isn't enough bitcoin mined

you don't exactly have to watch the charts 24/7 in order to do any trades in fact things are much faster and easier than you may think.
but you are correct, if you don't like it then don't even try it because you won't be successful in something you don't like. and it is really stressful.

in this world you have to pick your battles. you either invest long term and don't bother with any trading, in which case you only invest in something that is worth investing ie bitcoin.
or you want the more work more income method and go into trading, spend a lot of time learning it and then spend a lot of time perfecting it and then spend some time actually doing it.

i hope OP answers but i have seen one other person say this too. i asked that other person and he didn't reply!
i believe they are talking about Amazon gift cards that you can buy from third parties and spend it on Amazon, not directly though. and i have never found anything on Amazon website either. so if i have missed some news it would be great if someone could give us some links.

well you can not change that. some people are just going to continue believing what they want to believe in.
but it doesn't hurt to check with the laws of your country, they may have said something and you are unaware of. for example go look for a website or something belonging to the police or something that has the laws in it and search to see what their stance is. you may find some interesting stuff.

and how is that exactly going to work?
people aren't really getting rich from bitcoin even if it reaches a very high price. many sell their coins and get out, many don't even have enough investment in it to become that rich, and on top of all that nothing was stopping all of these entities to invest in bitcoin and for all we know they already have done that and have 1000s of bitcoin.
after all they have become powerful and rich because they were able to see potential in things others failed to see.

they couldn't have been more vague even if they tried! the text above the investbox is so funny and weird!
for example what the hell does this mean:
"It’s a tool for devs to promote their coins."
at first i thought it may have something to do with their free coin giveaways they have on top, so you donate and they give them away to others!

and it is very reassuring just to hear them say it is not Pyramid/HYIP with the NOT word in capital letters!

i think i need to change my bitcoin address soon since i am receiving my payments there

the excitement is nothing compared to if you have bought bitcoin when it was worth $200. that is simply a 10x profit easy peasy.


the possibility of dump is much smaller now. this time market has gotten way too big, the risk of dumping is pretty high now. you may dump and lose a lot of profit because of it.
with that said price may come down though, there are still things that can affect it, but i wouldn't call it dump.

i don't understand how these go together!
Japan is a country that have already adopted bitcoin.
AustriaAustralia (damn you autocorrect ) is also a country but they have not yet done it. they are thinking about it though.
this company is just a company not a nation-wide adoption of bitcoin and calling it a "legal way of payment"
although Switzerland has been bitcoin friendly for a much longer time. they just went unnoticed in the media for some reason. there is not much talk about the fact that you can buy bitcoin from little machines like tickets all over the country

i think it is a lot more than that.
there is about 500,000 bitcoins being transferred each day according to blockchain.info and 5 million is the sum of 10 days! so i guess the amount of bitcoin in circulation is a lot more than this.

a cryptocurrency in general meaning the altcoins can get hacked because they usually don't have any decent developers and they are full of exploitable bugs, even those altcoins that are staying on top in the 2, 3, 4... ranks and they have already been exploits or hacks if you want to call it.

but if you mean something huge as bitcoin as a cryptocurrency then no it is  highly unlikely because for 8+ years they have been trying to hack it and failed. for 8+ years good developers have been working on it and thousands of developers have gone through the code and fixed any possible bugs in early days and they still peer review bitcoin.

lol, your answer is weird on so many different levels

first of all you are claiming that bitcoin is a gold mine and is in its infancy yet say you can't afford to invest in it! if you think it is a gold mine and will rise up then it means buying 0.1BTC will be profitable for you in the future, surely you can spare $180 to invest that much!

and besides, bitcoin has hit the media hard, whether you tell anyone or not they already know about it. things are unstoppable now.

p.s it is 10K per family

pp.s you should have listened to your own advice:

i don't get what you mean by this part!
if it is not going to crash then why are you waiting
and what do miners have to do with anything! it is the free market deciding the price and miners have always been a part of this growing market.

well, that is what you get for seeing potential when others are having their head in the sand. back then there were same bullshit of "bitcoin is dead and gonna die" flying around. those who kept their ears shot and used their own brains are the winners of today and tomorrow.

and each day that passes it is one cheap coin opportunity that is slipping through their fingers.

come back to this comment after some time has passed.
lets say 6 months to a year and by then you will get a very clear answer to "WHY".