well i can't say i agree with you. because with your logic saying 109 billion coins is nothing then bitcoin which has 16.5 million coins currently available (0.015% of Doge) with a 21 mil cap should be worth something around $1,000,000 per coin!

so what is your point exactly?
the topic of "how many bitcoins are lost" have been discussed multiple times. and that only means there is going to be even less bitcoin that is supposed to be. and the more they lose the more scarce bitcoin is going to be for us BitcoinHodlers.

lower supply + increasing demand = price to the moon

it will all come down to the fact that Dogecoin doesn't offer anything special! it is a bad copy coin with the same code as other thousands or so coins and it was always supposed to be a joke.

i didn't know about what cryptohunter said about its infinite supply, that is silly in my opinion. and even if it did really have a cap, we already have a huge supply of 109 billion coins and that is enough to always push the coin down to 1 satoshi, 0.5 satoshi and final death.

it is the community that's keeping it alive so far.

that is the whole point, that this calculation is not what a child can do.
if it were that easy you would have came up with a number which was closer to 258BTC than this. you are way off the mark here.

you have another wrong assumption and that is assuming out of 70K-136K tx on 2017-5-5 only 20K were spam

edit:
here are 2 examples so that you can get a better feeling about that range i was talking about:
https://blockchain.info/tx/f8a9bb7e6dad27ef0ff3aa50ba05dbf0f3c7f2d5030821228dd8e314f66b2e4b
https://blockchain.info/tx/889c57f19d26f5094299be7af7da508bc9e6904d281586f8e214f9fda2baef09

the bitcoinHodler in me tells everyone to HODL,
but at the same time when you are expecting a correction, that is a good idea to sell before it happens and then buy back again.
although if you want my opinion i'd say the correction happened already when we came down from $1600+ and stablized on $1500 range.
now any more correction has a less chance of happening. at least for the following week.


this is the price rise effect + Japan and other countries adopting bitcoin effect.

you should explain how from these numbers you concluded there isn't any spam attack because it is not clear.

also you are making a couple of mistakes.
1. you are rounding up the numbers. transactions have a wide range of fees. from 0 sat/byte to 700 sat/byte. and also they have a wide range of sizes from small 190 byte to big ass tens of kilobyte. and if anything you should multiply fee/byte with total size in byte not number of tx * average fee.
2. you could have used blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions. the total fee of transactions in memory pool is currently at 258.915BTC and size is 139 MB

so you want to tell me that if bitcoin was closed source and was created by a private company, you would have used bitcoin and put your money in it (we are talking about all your private finances and all the transactions you make, how much money you have and how you use it) and then each time you sent a transaction you never cared about the "data" you send out and where it goes and what it is? and don't care that that "data" can contain all your private information in it such as the things i said in parenthesis and your IP address,...?

bitcoin: in my cold storage.
altcoins: on an exchange and in open orders.

there is no other way. i have tried it and it doesn't work. if i want to download their official wallets then i have to free up a lot of space on my HDD and i can not do that and not to mention all the network they are going to waste.
and all these other wallets like Jaxx are not to my liking.
and besides i want to sell these altcoins anyways so there is no point for me to withdraw and deposit them back in a couple of days again. and that is the risk i am willing to take working with exchanges.

define popular and what should you even care about a coin's popularity!

among altcoins in my opinion:
* most number of users in social media (fans): Dogecoin
* most amount of usage as a currency: Litecoin and Monero
* highest trading volume: this varies when coins are getting pumped they have ridiculous amount of volume and that lasts for a short time.
* oldest altcoin which is still big: Litecoin and Monero, and i guess Dash too!
* Biggest advertising campaign with lots of shills: Ethereum

you should only sell bitcoin if
- you are a trader
- you are in dire need of money and have no other way of finding it.

otherwise selling bitcoin is like selling Apple shares at 1 cents in early days of it coming out.

then you haven't really understood what open source means.
it is not about you and i being able to understand the code, it is about being OPEN and available to ANYONE to see.

that means if there is anything bad going on in the code, it will be found and caught at some point by someone. and you will hear about it.
also that means if there is some bug or simply some improvement needed in some part of that code, it can be done easily and the best way possible.

also another thing about most open source projects (bitcoin included) is their license. being MIT license means it doesn't belong to anyone, nobody can patent it and anyone can use the code, change it and come up with a new idea (aka altcoins).

these things never automatically make a coin good or bad, they should have a good plan.
for example being mineable in my opinion creates a better way of distribution granted it has no pre-mine and the block reward is properly designed. for example the first blocks shouldn't be a ridiculously big number and suddenly fall off.

not being mineable, should also have a solid plan for rewarding the coins. but usually they fail horribly in this step. they either give away a lot and kill the price, or they hold a lot of it for themselves (greedy devs) and kill the project after they made a lot of money.

i also liked the answer bathrobehero gave about different type of people who are attracted to mineable coins,...

well it is possible if that is what you want, but for someone new to do that, i don't think it is possible. you have to lower your expectations a lot when you start trading, even if you are making 20% each day instead of 1% you should lower your expectations. because as a beginner in trading if you made 20% profit that means you got lucky, but if you don't lose the grip on reality you can gain some experience and never lose anything after a while and actually reach the percentage you want.

also you should remember that trading market won't stay this way forever. some months it is good like this and prices are rising. and some others it is boring and even in altcoin market prices are dropping hard.

i hope there are good news about Bitfinex, for the sake of all those people having their money there still.

but the reason for this gap becoming smaller can be because people ran out of fiat there! you know there is no possibility for depositing money there so the buy pressure is lowered as majority of users bought bitcoin and made their exit.

because people like you who are in those countries still don't know bitcoin is not a virtual currency and it is a real currency. and bitcoin needs demand first then to become recognized by the government as a real currency. when nobody uses bitcoin, then nobody talks about it or recognizes it as a currency!

but when the demand grows in a country like Japan, Russia, Switzerland, and some other European countries, government start thinking about their stance against bitcoin. and we can see these countries are already starting to treat it as real currency.

i have only got two things to say, more like advice. take it or leave it (whoever reads this):

1. people have always been saying the same thing. price goes from x to x + y then they start asking is it too late to invest in bitcoin. then price goes from z to z - y then they start thinking bitcoin is dead. these people will always hodl their fiat until the day they die.

2. don't invest more than you can afford to lose. it is stupid to take a loan just to invest in bitcoin! specially for regular people with no years of trading experience. you have a salary that after expenses you are left with 20 bucks and don't want to do anything with that 20 bucks then invest that in bitcoin

and yet it still happens!

of course it is a part and parcel of altcoin market. that is how they pump and dump the coins. that is how they reach a coin worth $100. it is a filthy trick but it happens and there is nothing we can do about it apart from either staying away from an unfair market or take advantage of the situation and fill our pockets if we can notice the signs of a pre-pump period.

and it is worth mentioning that any group (like pump groups) that claim to have insider information and offer to give it away for free or for a fee, are scams who want to make money out of those who fall for it and join them.

if an altcoin had a real world usage and that usage was good and widespread then price wouldn't go to $1 it would go to $1000.

but the problem is that none of the altcoins have any real world usages. some have some small and specific kind of usage like monero but none of them are really useful at the end of the day. they are not designed to be used they are designed to be traded and made money out of.

that is one of the reasons why pump and dump exists!

they do have a warning and a system for delisting coins.
on bittrex that i trade, there is a weekly average volume. i think it is something around 0.01BTC but i may be wrong. and they do give a warning for it. there is a clear text on top of the market that is in danger of being delisted. sometimes they come back with volume and sometimes they don't and are removed.


i have seen far too many empty promises like this and each time i am disappointed like the last.

USB drives lose their data if they are not connected to a power source in short intervals (i don't remember how long though you can research it yourself) this means holding your private keys, etc on a USB disk and coming back in a year or so to it may lead to a big loss.