to be honest i will believe this news only when i see them pass the law for cryptocurrencies and not a day sooner. because history proves that the news from Russia regarding cryptocurrencies have always been contradictory and all over the place. one day we hear they are going to legalize it and have no problem with bitcoin and the next time we hear someone saying bitcoin and cryptocurrencies should not even be allowed to exist! of course most of it is news bullshit clickbait but there is sometimes some contradictory views among government officials too which makes it harder to believe anything that comes from them.

you don't need a reason for price fluctuations. it is the same thing that has happened twice  before, nothing has changed about that yet. price goes up to test the resistance and if it breaks it, we will see a breakout and if it can't there will be a drop where traders sell their coins to get the profit out and get ready for the next round of testing the resistance once again.

well, when you pump altcoins to ridiculous prices and they are all in big bubbles that means their bubbles will burst and when it started you can no longer stop it anymore. it will continue to go down. and right now you are seeing that dumping phase of the altcoin market.

i also think that this altcoin dump is affecting bitcoin too. at least partly because bitcoin is one of the ways people cash out from altcoins and the dump can create some downward move in bitcoin too.

no bitcoin has never been anonymous. if someone told you once in the past that "bitcoin is anonymous" that just means they were wrong and misinformed. there is a certain privacy about bitcoin that can also give you some level of anonymity but it is and never was anonymous.

as for the title, real anon coins will always have a place in this world as long as they are really anonymous not just playing at it and also as long as they are properly decentralized. it doesn't have to be a huge thing being adopted by every single person and it doesn't have to be for illegal usage either.

bitcoin is having continues growth. what altcoins have is mostly pump and dumps that only last a short time too.

for anything including bitcoin, we need more real adoption for the price to go up and stay up. as you can see bitcoin price goes up and stays up. but altcoins since they don't have real usage, they get pumped (go to the roof) and then they get  dumped because nobody wants them and they dump altcoins to get out to the next one to pump. as you can see there are altcoins that are getting pumped every day and the wise investors move to them and never stick to one altcoin that is dumping.

i don't know about ethereum because it is 80% manipulation and pump and 10% newbies bag holding, 10% some usages here and there for smart contracts which won't last long.
as for bitcoin this year bitcoin has the potential to reach $50,000 and within March we may see the rally start up.

your way of thinking is wrong in my opinion.
we shouldn't seek or beg the government to do what we want. if they are not doing it already then they are the wrong government that we chose. we should make a better choice next time then.
and it is not just about taxes. the  countries that are not very corrupt have already adopted bitcoin and made it legal and have a clear tax laws that people don't oppose. and those that are corrupt like India are fighting bitcoin and no matter what you do they will fight it.

sorry to disappoint you OP but here are a couple of facts that you need to know:
- bitcoin won't make you rich over night
- bitcoin will not drop big time now because it has already dropped and if you haven't bought it already then you missed the chance.
- bitcoin is not a bubble, it used to be in one and it was corrected after that drop you missed
- calling bitcoin a bubble won't change a thing.

where does the price come from? exchanges
so we go look at exchanges and see how the situation with them are. when we do, we can see that these exchanges are not as big as they should be. for example the order books are not so filled with orders and as a result selling or buying a small amount can make a bigger change in the price than it should under normal circumstances.

that is only one reason for it. the other reason is because the demand for bitcoin changes wildly. for example you can see last year during November and December there was a big surge of new users to exchanges buying bitcoin as fast as they could then the same thing happened in opposite direction during January when they dumped bitcoin as fast as they could.

unfortunately the younger generation at the moment is more interested in making money from this new "technology" than they are interested in learning more about it or trying to expand and develop it further. and this is obviously visible among altcoins where there are loads of them around just claiming airdrops, investing in shitcoins after shitcoins and some of them with a little more programming knowledge have even created their own shitcoins!

so in short i think we are at a dark age at the moment where so few are really open to the technology itself not the money that it brings them.

no matter how many times you and thousands of other newbie "accounts" ask this question, it won't come true and the value of the bags you hold won't go up because of it. you will make more profit if you sit down and pray to the pumping gods to pump ETH for you sooner so you can dump your little bag and make a little profit while the whales of it make millions from your naivete.

to be clear he didn't lose his 7 bitcoin because of not securing it or not using cold storage. instead he lost it when selling his coins to someone using reversible fiat methods. i believe it was a stolen credit card situation where the bank reversed the transaction after the trade was done and he gave his bitcoin to receive the stolen money. so if anything that is the fault of banking system!

because ETH is neither trusted nor easy to transact.
it is centralized and filled with bugs and when they did a roll back despite majority of the network opposition it proved that you can not trust it at all. as for transactions whenever there is an ETH network congestion it becomes impossible to make any transactions let alone having them confirmed.
with bitcoin the worst thing that happens is fees going up! but you can still continue to use it.

i think it is not such a good idea to want to build a PC and then expand it to a full mining thing while using it for regular things. of course you can build a big gaming system which you also use to mine with but if you are looking for profit it is best to build a proper mining rig and then expand that. a mining rig is basically a motherboard with multiple GPU slots and raisers to connect them to the MB. then you can always add more to that. start with 2 for example and finally add 4 more to have a total of 6 ones. visit the altcion mining board for more information.

banks are still used by many people and are still useful and anything that is used and useful will remain important for as long as they continue to be the same. and the "bitcoin era" doesn't have to change that. a bank is a financial institute that gives certain services for money and bitcoin is a new form of money so they can simply change the type of services they are offering.

then you would be wrong because exchanges are only a place or a platform where people go to meet and exchange currencies and nothing more.

as much as i think ETh will get dumped hard but i do not think it will get dumped down 50% for the time being. maybe eventually in the future (like the end of 2018) price can drop that low thanks to the huge supply of it and the declining demand but it certainly won't be fast and easy because there are still a lot of die hard bag holders who bought above $1k and a lot of pumper whales who are milking ETH for now.

this is the keyword. although it is not literary "most" but it happens enough times for some people to start believing it is a thing.

i think we can try and come up with a lot of explanations but in the end i believe that it is not a real trend that is happening for real. it is more like coincidence and also sometimes possibly some expectation of a drop that causes it a little too.

as an opposing reasoning i can say that bitcoin is in a global market and it is 24/7 and people may even trade more on the weekends since for most of them this is a secondary job or even a hobby.

they don't have to accept bitcoin, in fact government doesn't even come in the picture when we are talking about bitcoin!

fiat is centralized, it doesn't get any more centralized than that. they can not track sender and receiver when they use cash and many other forms of fiat. smuggling and black money can and does go anywhere without third party knowledge!
so your point is moot.

no it can not be done. because bitcoin exists because it is decentralized. if you take that essence away you are effectively killing bitcoin and since nobody wants that, and bitcoin is alive based on the people, so it won't happen ever.

the environmental "problem" is not a problem at all. you are making it into one because possibly you have read some bad articles on some FUD campaign news site about this. the fact is bitcoin is providing a very important and much used utility and compared to that the energy that it is consuming to provide that utility is very very small.
as an example i can tell you that when you heat your house during winter and when it is snowing outside you are wasting energy and YOU are an "environmental problem"

besides if you compare the amount of energy that mining bitcoin consumes with other things like branches of a small bank (not all banking system just a couple of them) you can see that the energy consumption is not that high.

there are a lot of development in a lot of different countries, and surprisingly enough most of them are the developing countries while the developed countries are still struggling to find a way to tax bitcoin more and in an easier way!
so i think OP is on to something here. a lot of these countries like Venezuela,... can potentially become big in blockchain technology and by extension bitcoin will flourish in these countries as the original and the decentralized version of it all.

it is because they are scared of bitcoin and the adoption that it has been having in the past year. and with new developments such as lightning network these banks are really scared, the side chains can practically put banks out of business with high speed and extremely low fees (near 0) and high security and being decentralized!

JPMorgan is one of those most vocal banks that has been attacking bitcoin for a very long time, trying to delay the inevitable