i don't think privacy is going to be that great because it is not the main concern of users.
instead what most people are concerned about is two main things:
- making money: which means more pump and dump altcoins, more ICOs and more high risk investments with lots of scams and lots of money losses.
- transacting funds, or looking for a currency: and for that we may see some improvements and hopefully something new. but i don't have much hopes for competition with bitcoin ever since bitcoin started its lightning network.

Tether (USDT) is extremely risky and shady so i will never own any of it. but this doesn't mean i won't use it either. it is convenient at times to use Tether for example when you are on an exchange that doesn't have a fiat market and you want to get out to fiat but not withdraw fiat from the exchange because of its high fees. and i believe one of the main reasons for its high trading volume is exactly this!

any new coin and a new technology like IOTA is a riskier investment but also can reward you greatly if it gains more popularity. i believe IOTA can do that actually but it seems to have a large supply and little adoption so it may prove hard to achieve.
i would personally keep any investment to a small amount depending on my funds.


$1000 depends on your financial situation, for example if it is your whole life savings then no it is not a good idea to invest it in IOTA. but if it is like your pocket money which you can afford to lose and also if you already have bitcoin then i would invest it in IOTA.

the current weird fluctuations that bitcoin has does NOT mean the follow up rise or even fall that some people predict won't happen. it just means that this current period is unpredictable. how long will it last, is something that nobody knows. it may last a couple of more days or a couple of more months and price stays within the same channel then break out and reach $15k or ... prices.

this is because it was not a price related news or adoption related news so it didn't have any effect on the price.
also because the timing of it is not right. the market is neither on the rise nor on the drop side. it is mostly on a weird unpredictable ups and downs phase without any breakouts and denying all expectations.

but this is a good news nonetheless. i am very interested to see how much SegWit adoption will increase when they actually implement it, so far it is around 10%.

bitcoin is not popular yet. it will be considered "very popular" only if it reaches mass adoption and by that time price is going to be somewhere around $1 million.

when you make something useful which is offering something that people do really want, in this case a decentralized payment system that no corrupt banks or governments can control, then you automatically gain popularity because there is a real demand for it.

exchanges want to make more money, that is all they care about and higher withdrawal fees is one of their main sources of income after trading fees. and since they are not trustworthy people make a lot of withdrawals since they don't want to leave their coins on exchanges and so they keep paying these fees and the exchange enjoys the free money they get.

this sounds more like a new version of the same old scams known as "Pumping Groups" where they pretend they are giving "trading signals" and use fancy words for it but in fact they a scam pump and dump group ripping newbies off.


ICOs have been around for a while now and they have been receiving a lot of money. show me ICO that actually gained some real world usage and not just remained on exchanges and got pumped and dumped then we can use that as our own point of reference for analyzing ICOs.

...but the problem is such ICOs do not exist!

Rootstock (RSK) without a doubt.

first of all it is a second layer solution like lightning network and works on top of bitcoin which gives it the security and popularity that it needs.
second it will be as fast as humanly possible compared to everything else.
third it will be nearly free because unlike all of these smart contract platforms, RSK won't need transaction fees.
and finally the smart contracts on bitcoin are already in place, the hype of it alone can put everything else out of business!

to be honest this is a very weird question to ask! and i had to double check the date of the topic because if you asked it back when price went up from $5900-$6000 to $7000-$8000 then you could have been on to something.

but now it is up from that price to $11000 which is >80% increase. you need a super cat to make that kind of bounce when dead!

that's the thing about bitcoin, if someone chooses to remain anonymous they can. look at satoshi for example.
and all these "lists" called rich lists,... always contain popular addresses. for example if you loo at the list most of the addresses belong to services such as exchanges.

a whale wouldn't let others know his addresses so that they can do any kind of speculation based on it. and even if you by any chance found an address like what OP said here:
"...When he sees activity, Samani immediately calls the likely sellers and..."
you can never call it a "sell". it is an "activity" and you can't speculate based on that. for all you know the owner of that address just mixed his coins!

i think Vitalik is trying to justify the fact that Ethereum has been getting dumped hard in the past couple of months and could not recover its price despite all the hype and advertisement they have been doing for it. and each time they pump it again over $1000 it again gets dumped back below it to $800-$900 and no matter how much their pumping team tries they can not achieve the ATH anymore because of the high sell pressure.

he doesn't  care about ETH or any other cryptocurrency anyways. i think he has proven that when he became a millionaire overnight and sold some of his premined coins. his involvement and relationship with banks also proves this.

he probably missed a zero there. but the low was $160ish not $170 and when we are talking about possible drops you should consider all the buy supports that there are and also consider what you think of as "horribly wrong". for example is it a bug in bitcoin? then why not go to 0 instead? or is it simply some exchange getting hacked or some FUD about bitcoin ban? in which case the drop is not going to be bigger than last time! it probably won't even go lower than $10k!

you should only invest in what you can predict and logically say it has a lower risk. it doesn't matter what it is. it can be an ICO or it can be an altcoin or anything else.
so far ICOs are the most unpredictable of all. which means investing in them is always going to have a much higher risk than investing in an altcoin which has already been around for a while and also has some charts which you can do additional analysis on.

simply use google.com to search for it and you will find your answer fast: https://www.google.com/search?q=BTCP
the first two results are the website of bitcoin private: https://btcprivate.org/ and the announcement topic of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2675257.0
it is just using famous names "bitcoin and zcash" to create yet another useless fork of bitcoin. i lost count but i think this is the 26th fork so far!

like always if you hold your private keys you can access your funds.
if you hold your bitcoin on an exchange like Yobit, they will automatically give you this new shitcoin.
and for wallet it will always be their official wallet and on rare occasions coinami wallet.

not it wouldn't. all it can do is help pump XRP for a short amount of time before it gets dumped again.
nothing about XRP has changed. it is still the same centralized coin which the owners have full control over the supply and also have full control over your funds and it doesn't matter if you have the keys they still control your funds and can take them as they did take them before from one of the developers wallets!

and this news (if it is true and not just some hype) means WU is adopting the technology that XRP uses to create a system for their own purposes.

i think that is just your opinion. and i have a different one. because all i see are signs of rise so it is not a 50/50 sitation it is more like a 90/10 situation for a rise to happen. and the strength of this rise is pretty good as the slow but constant rise with a high volume suggests.

they don't have to!
and it is simply because all these "new cryptocurrencies" that you keep seeing are useless tokens that will never have any usages in their whole miserable lives. they are created purely to be traded on some exchanges and the government simply regulates that exchange and effectively regulates all these shitcoins.


i know you are just advertising a token here but this sounds interesting. have to check it out to see if it stops at being interesting or has more to it

bitcoin is a big revolution of our time which has been changing the financial world. it may never replace fiat completely but bitcoin will surely become very big and adopted all around the world despite what some people are trying to convince the world about bitcoin with their FUD.
even if the governments ban bitcoin in a couple of countries, it won't matter not for bitcoin in general and not even for those countries. people will continue adopting bitcoin and continue using it as much as they can.
it is best to get involved with this revolution even if your involvement is too tiny, that way you won't be left behind.

technically end of holidays means traders will come back and also a lot of money will come back from investors to be invested back in bitcoin. so it can lead to increase in bitcoin price.
but mainly the effect that Chinese holidays had on bitcoin was a little part of the recent panic sell because people thought the price will drop and so obviously when it is over that same panic sell should reverse and lead to a little part of the rise. part of the current rise we are seeing now may be because of that.