The issue of government crack-down on BTC can never be ruled out until government can find way to make huge money off bitcoin like tax.
But i believe power belongs to people, and if the community of bitcoin users doesn't understand this, the pressure of government ranting will make them to keep selling off their treasure bitcoin.

Think the main worry is the extreme volatility of Bitcoin which will eventually stop investors from investing

I'll have to take little bit back my statement. I wrote this without looking the writings for few days. It seems now that we broke 10k there has been more people talking about bearish sentiment..

To people to better understand where I'm at I could tell you that I'm holding btc from the days when it was around 10$ a piece. I bought few of them to try out couple of transactions. They have been long forgotten but they caught my attention again after summer 2017. So basically I have been long time holder but not by a desicion. There is only gains for me at this point but still I feel I'm loosing money here just by holding. I started to prepare for cashout when price was already over 15k. But for some reason I slipped over the zenith and I'm still holding them. First I thought that consensus seems so positive that bullish momentum will continue after few weeks.

Now I kind of a feel like a deer in a headlights. I should make up my mind to do something. wheather it is doing nothing, that is holding, or selling everything off and come back later. I'm quite skeptical about technical analysis and market timing. Usually I have bad luck with these. If I now do the move and sell them off I'm sure that trend will reverse instantly. One thing that I could do would be protecting my stand with futures. If trend changes those same futures will take off any gains from increasing price. Buying such futures to protect my price point would be so strong statement from me to be bearish that why not sell all bitcoins and buy only the futures to get big gains from the drop.

Although I said that I'm not big believer in TA still I think that people never change. Ultimately markets are all about people and psychology. I think that some patterns are repeated all over again because people tend to behave in a same way time after time. I remember one youtube video (sorry don't remember channel and video name) which showed TA from first +1k spike which occured late 2013 to begin of 2014 and compared that to the current situation. they seem to be quite similar in nature. Even the dotcom bubble went in similar fashion. So if we try to bracket where we are going by looking the past (which is not usually advisable). We could say that 2013/2014 spike topped at 1200$ and declined to about 200$ over the next year before starting to rise again. that is about 83% drop. From 20k it would make somewhere around 3k before it should start rising again.. If looking at the dotcom bubble NASDAQ 100 it took 2 years before we saw reversal. High was 4691 and went to 815 before reversal that is almost 80%..

Does anyone actually use Ripple? It's been around for so long, but there doesn't seem to be any community around it, not an eco-system of people using it.

What's the problem? People make decisions based on specific situations and time frames, and as you know, situations and sentiment can change in an instant here. As bad as the market may look right now, we can be up for an increase again tomorrow, or perhaps even later today. This correction attracts capital, and this capital will soon be ready to flow into this market. And to add; people will not continue to keep selling as they will soon realize that it's just a stupid practice.

I was talking about profit and losses on paper, and not about paper money. Profit or losses on paper occur when you buy 1BTC at a certain price, and you'll see an increase or decline afterwards. In reality you haven't lost or gained anything because you still have your 1BTC, but if you purely look at the value aspect, it is then considered to be an on paper result.

Holding is always the best option. I have been holding for years, and the peak to nearly $20,000 made my holdings worth more than ever before, but it's nothing more than a profit on paper. In the same way, you have just a loss on paper. If you have been following the market for a while, and see how profitable these movements are, try to trade the market. One stash is purely for holding purposes (you don't touch these coins for a very long time), and one stash purely for trading purposes. These insanely volatile days allow you to take advantage of these money making opportunities, but you have to understand what you are doing, and have to be willing to trade against the volatility. If you're not a trader, then just keep holding and use these lower levels to accumulate (if you have free capital).

What do we think the future for NEM is from here?

Will it compete for the top spots or start to fade? Feels like it’s just not getting buzz even though it’s a top coin. Don’t want to see it fade into obscurity.

keep calm, update and send the coins out. but is my hardware wallet really more secure than Electrum or any other wallet. bloody hell. sometimes it is really horrible to have bitcoins.

this looks good, doesn't it?

It does not, if your wallet creates the signature correctly.

When you spend the transaction/sign a message, you are giving out the public key only, together with the public key. The signatures are signed using ECDSA. As of now, the repeated signing of a signature using the private key does not weaken the address by any extent. However, it would be a different story if your client is flawed. If your client generates the same "K" value for each signature, it is possible to derive the private key using the public key. If quantum computing were to be more advanced, it can potentially break ECDSA.

I've had addresses which were used for more than 3 years, with 700+ transactions and nothing happened. I trust ECDSA to be safe enough, at least for now. The only concerns regarding address reuse is privacy.