there is always a good reason why a coin is worth 1 satoshi which means investing in such coins is not such a good idea. try staying away from them specially if you have to ask others which one to invest in!

with that said these coins can get pumped ridiculously big! i have seen some of them go 10000x bigger. but the real question is how to recognize the pump before it happens? usually you can see the price rise, some hype surrounding these shitcoins and a lot of volume being injected in them. only if you can find the pump, then invest otherwise it is a waste of money.
and remember they are high risk investments.

price of anything is based on supply and demand more than anything else.
so far the companies producing ASICs have not been so competitive, it is mainly Bitmain out there!!! so the more competition in different countries such as Japan, Russia, Canada,... will create a more competing market which not only reduces the price of it but also improves them a lot.

it can also contribute to decentralization of mining.

who is this "they" you are talking about?
it is code and anybody can change it, it has already been done by many people. for example https://yobit.net/en/trade/SMART/BTC is one of them with 21 billion coins as its max supply if i am not mistaken. the thing is, when you change the code you create an altcoin unless the majority of the bitcoin network accepts your change and switches to it, it will remain an altcoin. otherwise anyone can change the limits and variables, consensus rules so to speak.

it is perfectly understandable that Facebook banned these advertisements, specially the ones involving ICOs because they are illegal at heart and the way of raising funds through an initial coin offering has never been a legal method. not to mention all the scams that are happening through these!

no it has nothing to do with that. nobody cares when a platform like FB changes their advertising rules!
the recent drop was purely market manipulation and FUD.

nah, it wasn't manual i used this https://www.smartbit.com.au/blocks?sort=size&limit=20
i may do some analysis manually if the UTXO count continued going down like this picture above, i am very interested in blockchain analysis in general.

this is true since it happens every time bitcoin either drops or rises.
but also altcoins would have dropped anyways even if it wasn't because of bitcoin because they were pumped a lot in the past couple of months and the "wise money" which got in before the pump and initiated the pump itself had to exit to make profit.

and i also disagree with saying it is "a good time to invest in altcoins" because most of them are dead because of this dump and won't recover for a long time. and others may have some dead cat bounces and then continue dropping more so it becomes riskier to invest if you are not a day trader.

considering the following in the past month or so i would say it was not the reason:
- mempool size has been ~60-100 MB with ~80k-200k unconfirmed transaction on average.
- the blocks were ~2 MB which is 1 MB bigger than what they are most of the times.
- there has been only 5 of these 2 MB blocks so far. to be exact:
    2x 2.1 MB
    3x 2 MB
    3x 1.9 MB
    3x 1.8 MB
    2x 1.7 MB
    9x 1.6 MB
    10x 1.5 MB
    in the same period which is only an additional of 22.1 MB which is nowhere near capable of making up for 100 MB mempool if it was not a spam attack.

---

as a side node, have you noticed the number of  empty blocks today? most of which mined by AntPool
https://blockchain.info/blocks

the FUD by OP was never real and will never become true. as i said before OP is just spreading it at certain times with different topics because he wants to make money, stupidly i should add. and it is not just tether, not long ago he was advertising the shit out of Bitcoin Cash and how that is going to kill "SegWit coin" (as he called it), only because at that time bcash was getting pumped.

not to mention that bitcoin price is generally higher on Coinbase than it has been on bitfinex. so how can bitfinex be "maintaining high price of bitcoin" where USDT is not even on coinbase? plus there have been a lot of other places with higher prices such as the Korean exchanges which had $1000-$2000 higher price than USD markets! with bigger volume too.

bitcoin is not "like a bubble", bitcoin as something that is traded and has value goes into baubles from time to time which is kind of a normal market behavior in any market.

and yes bitcoin was in a bubble, a lot of bubbles actually some of them big and some of them small which lasted a short time. the last bubble bitcoin had was the $20000 price which burst and was corrected last month when price dropped down to ~$14000 and with the recent drops it went below the real value like an over-correction because of lots of weak hand newbies.

since not all of the blocks are like this and there are still blocks with more transactions in them, then it is not 80-90% (even if it were 500 tx compared to 2000 is 75%)


one way to spam is to take a transaction worth for example 50BTC and break it into multiple new transaction outputs (increasing UTXO) this will do 2 things: increase the size of your transaction so you take up a bigger place in a block and also make nodes have a harder time loading the UTXO set. then break them down to more and more and more... the rising part of the chart below. of course part of the rise is genuine more adoption.
then when you are  done spamming, you continue spamming with combining all those outputs and getting a new one so for example 20 UTXO turn into 1 and .... until you get the 50BTC - fees (or 50BTC if you were a miner spamming ) back in one address getting ready for next spam attack.



link: https://blockchain.info/charts/utxo-count?timespan=30days

to some extent yes. but not for long.

what he is doing is classical pump and dumping of altcoins. he buys some shitcoins then after he was satisfied with his bag size, he posts something online on his twitter, etc about it so that he can hype the coin up. there are of course other things that go in to it but the final result is that the coin is bought by the newbies and he makes a lot of money if it is pumped successfully.

but no pump group can last forever, and McAfee is not an exception. he will either give up, get beaten down by the real pumpers that have been doing it for years, or is prosecuted for market manipulation and fraud since it is illegal!

it is a good idea to learn the patterns, analysis and everything related to that. all of it is a good tool to have but you should know that none of it is accurate enough to use and give you a "prediction". and when you are trading altcoins you will notice this even more since they are extremely volatile and manipulated that they defy all the rules.
for example there are no phases anymore like there are in a normal market. in 6 hours an altcoin can be accumulated pumped and dumped... move on to the next.

short term we will probably continue seeing the same price for at least 1 more week. meaning staying around $11000.
in medium term price will go to the previous bottom of $14000 and probably we will have a big bear trap over there with a little drop to kick bear's butts.
and finally the breakout can happen by the end of February and we can expect a new ATH pretty soon afterwards.

it has not stopped completely as it seems. when you look at the mempool-count it is a bit misleading in cases like this. but when you look at the mempool-size you can see it is still big despite it coming down a lot.
you can also look at the number of transactions in blocks. normally there are ~2000-2500 transactions in a full block. but for the past couple of days there are lots of blocks with 200-500 tx/block!

the spam bot is consolidating the UTXO set to get ready for next time?

"let" is a big word specially when you are talking about a decentralized network. it is like asking will they "let" the torrent network, the Tor network, .... and other peer to peer networks survive!

you see, when it comes to decentralization, nobody has a say in what the peers on that network should or shouldn't do. of course fighting crimes and illegal activities is a must, and by preventing things like bitcoin you don't fight crimes you just made yourself look like a fool.

any coin that supports the following technologies can also support Lightning Network:
* Multi signature
* Check Lock time and Check Sequence Verify
* hash lock time contracts

$10000 has been the bottom that nobody could break it for long and keep the price there because of the huge buy support that exists there.
but a more logical bottom (if there were no FUD) were $14500

meh, i don't like the second part "pouring back into alts" because the risk of investing in altcoins is a lot bigger than the risk of investing in bitcoin and bitcoin investment is pretty risky.

i prefer a more cautious approach of investing in bitcoin and then only investing part of that in altcoins and only take profit from them and never hold any.

when you put it like that, this statement is not correct.
a correct statement is that bitcoin price has nearly zero chance of going to zero. and it has a low chance of dropping lower than $10k. but it can go to zero. bitcoin is just a code, and an experiment still. there can be a serious flaw in it which is also unfixable that can kill it. but the important thing is the chance of that happening is nearly 0 so we trust it and invest in it.
and this chance is not just for bitcoin, lots of things are like this.

reading the article i don't get why they ever are talking about "going to zero", that doesn't make any sense. specially at this point that bitcoin has grown this big with lots of adoption not just from speculators/investors but also from lots of merchants and millions of dollars is changing hands by these merchants on monthly basis.

not so far and probably not for a while either.

so far existence of bitcoin meant more money for banks! their revenue has actually increased thanks to bitcoin and the traders. the money they are earning from fees that they take from bitcoiners who are going in and out of bitcoin has been great for them.

and bitcoin doesn't have to be the end of banks like digital photography was to Kodak. banks are just services which are being offered for money. and bitcoin being money can need many of those services such as a bank account which pays you interest, loans, some services that credit cards offer like the credit you get and then pay it later.

as long as there are newbies too desperate to make money using cryptocurrencies and too lazy to learn how to do it, there will be other newbie scammers out there wanting to make easy money by using these people. and nothing can be done about it. there are lots of newbies pouring in this market. all of them coming in because of bitcoin but since there are lots of FUD scaring them away from bitcoin (the real deal) and into altcoins (the fake advertisement) so they think they are catching something valuable which will be worth as much as bitcoin one day.