the altcoin dumps is mainly because of bitcoin price rise, I agree there  but also there are many cases of some of the big coins that the dumps are because they were recently pumped (a small pump but still a pump) and they needed to be dumped and the bitcoin price rise was like the ignition that kick started that dump.

as for Binance's tweets, it is mostly to keep their users calm and prevent a small part of the panic withdrawal and sell attempts that has been going on ever since the hack news came out. otherwise the hack happened and they lost $40 million, it is too late to have sleepless nights to increase security.

it is because the bitcoin market is sometimes filled with people who entered only to make a lot of money in a very short time and when the obviously didn't happen they started panicking and started looking to others to explain to them what was happening. obviously those "others" took advantage and gave them bad explanations and suggestions to benefit themselves.

this was a very good educational experience for everyone who "panicked" here thinking a drop is coming. it can teach you not to go against the market trend when it is obviously in an upward movement just because you saw SMAs looking a certain way because they don't indicate anything specially when all the rest of the signs (the market trend, the sentiment, the volume,...) pointing to a rise instead.

that is true but not a fair comparison either. because bitcoin is new and is growing so it is supposed to rise like this. but USD is old and it should be stable and it is apart from the fact that since it doesn't have any "cap" it also has inflation so its value goes down.
in comparison bitcoin has a cap so it has deflation and should go up. and if you want to compare you have to compare bitcoin after its mass adoption with USD. and that would happen at least after another 10 years.

if this was the first time an exchange gets hacked then you might have been correct about your first point regarding "Give bitcoin a bad reputation". but this is not the first time, it is about 50th time an exchange like this gets hacked. we have at least one big exchange hack of this magnitude every 6 months and over a year we have at least 10 hack cases of smaller magnitude.

so all they do is that they give the exchanges and the centralization a bad reputation at this point and they lead to more decentralization. so a good thing can come out of it too. if you look around the internet you can see a lot of people are talking (once again) about decentralized exchanges which is good.

I don't think it will happen any time soon and when it happens it won't be a big scale thing, maybe some small bank in a small country would do it in a couple of years but I don't see it happening now because they still don't think bitcoin is threatening them because it is not yet widely adopted as a payment method.

additionally the banks want full control that is why they have chosen to create their own tokens (example JPM) instead and try to sell people that centralized idea. and that will take a couple of years of trying and failing before they realize it was a mistake.

there is also some laws in some countries that prevents banks from getting involved with bitcoin. for example the common thing you have been hearing over the past years saying "China banned bitcoin" was in reality China banning "banks" from buying bitcoin.

technically this bitcoin bull run was confirmed the day the drops ended and accumulation began since the accumulation is the first step of a bull run and in bitcoin this step can be longer but it always signals the coming bull run. and that started a couple of months ago. so even if you had doubts, they should have been resolved the day price started rising with a strong buy support behind it in the $4k range which was last month. now we are already in the bull run mode.

is this an advertisement of your own website here? then why do it as a question.
just start a proper announcement in Services Announcement board and introduce your website and services there and explain to us why you think it is "decentralized" and why should people trust it.

the most important  thing in trading based on what I have seen so far is experience you can call it mindset, luck, plan, ... but in the end only experience matters. for example the mindset of being able to make decisions under different circumstances in the market requires the trader to have experienced similar situations so that he can know what is the best course of action based on actions he had made in the past both good ones and also those that were mistakes.
although it may sound hard but it is not really. it only takes time for a trader to gain that experience but they will only gain it if they are trying to gain experience which means analyzing their trading history, analyzing their mistakes and most important of all to watch the market and charts for hours.

currently there is a very good momentum shaping up that is leading to all these rises and breakage of price levels which looks to some people like "resistances" but the thing is that although this momentum exists, there still is a lot of forces opposing the rise including the whales who don't want to see the rise since they made mistakes of shorting bitcoin while it was rising and lost millions and also lots of newbie day traders who are selling on each turn and are slowing down the rise.
with that said the "$6500 target" may not be here as fast as you think. I was expecting things to be more excited and with jumps specially when price reached $5500 but ever since the FOMOs didn't happen as they should have, I have come to the conclusion that the rise will be a slow one.

as I have been saying all through 2018 a quick look at the history of bitcoin and some research about bitcoin itself and the utilities it offers could have shown them the true potential of bitcoin. there is no room for disappointment when you are facing something as great as bitcoin!

that sucked for sure but it proved once again that the market is still susceptible to FUD if it is large enough and with enough manipulation in the market behind it.

I don't think "new funds" are still coming in. there is of course always a growth of adoption (new funds) but this rise is because of the funds that exited due to that manipulation (fall to $3k) are coming back since they gave up waiting for $1k!!

this is far from being like 2017. if anything it is more like 2015 with slow rises and many small corrections with people still in fear of the "bear market" since it lasted a long time.

people keep mentioning ethereum when it comes to the crazy tweets of Binance but they are missing the big difference here. although the fork itself would be the exact same thing (a roll back that removes an important feature from the coin that does it) but the difference is that bitcoin (unlike ethereum) is decentralized. so there is no owner to flip a switch and force a fork, there is no owner with 75 million premine coins to be able to dump the other chain and force people to sell the other coin and switch to their fork,... if such fork happens, it will be like all the hundreds of forks that happened over the last two years and will create a shitcoin doomed to die.

all of them are inferior to my fork called Bitcoin Pursuer. I have increased the block size to 100 TB so my bitcoin (which I claim to be the real bitcoin) has a TPS of 166000000000000. the roadmap is to increase the blocksize to 100000 TB so that we can increase the TPS to 166000000000000000 and be able to handle more transactions.

it is the altcoin creation trend that has shaped in the past couple of years that has led to this type of situation in the market. for years the only altcoins we keep seeing is altcoins that are created with one purpose and that is to be pumped and dumped. so it is obvious that nobody has any faith in their future when it comes to long term and in comparison to bitcoin. they all dump them to come back to bitcoin immediately because nobody wants to miss out.

it is not so much about having a huge hashrate and the ability to perform such an act but the fact that this is going to create a different fork which the network is never going to agree to follow because it will kill bitcoin and turn it into a shitcoin like ethereum in one action and nobody supports that.

I don't think they have made any "predictions" ever!
all they have always done (specially with Tom Lee) is making statements to make the news so that their name can be heard. there is no analysis in any of their statements either, they bring up some reasoning each time that most of the times don't even make sense. it is just the new form of advertisement that is becoming popular these days.

it is too soon to say for sure since the news (or rather the FUD about it) is still fresh and are coming out but technically Binance is an altcoin exchange not a bitcoin and in the past no altcoin exchange hack has ever led to a bitcoin price fall. there was a big one last year which led to about a 5% drop which might as well be daily fluctuations and might have had nothing to do with that.
additionally we are on the rise, and when the trend is bullish (or semi bullish) negative news can't really change it.

there is no thing different "now" in my opinion for me to advise or not advice a newcomer to enter bitcoin. I have been doing this for a long time and still do. I am not encouraging people to become "investors" in bitcoin which is  the main reason I say it doesn't matter. I am always encouraging people to become bitcoin users instead and benefit from the currency and decentralized aspects of bitcoin. and that knows no time or restrictions. of course it is always better dump your fiat for bitcoin when bitcoin price is in a dip but only as a cherry on top not the main thing.

only things that rarely happen can be considered surprising. but something that happens regularly should not surprise you. it is like being surprised when the sun goes down in the afternoon!
in crypto-space, exchanges getting hacked is the most common occurrence. every year we have about 6 or 7 major exchange scams (not counting the small unknown exchanges). that is 1 every 2 months on average. you can't really be surprised about that!

you can't just consider one aspect and nothing else. it is never about increase the block size or not increase the block size at all. it is about how to increase and by how much and when. for example until 2017 we had 1 MB blocks and now we can go as high as a little less than 4 MB. you see increasing the capacity increases the ability of bitcoin to handle more transactions and support more users which means more adoption. not doing that means less transactions, less adoption and higher fees which can eventually make it impossible to use bitcoin unless you only want to move very large amounts of money which doesn't make any sense and goes against what bitcoin was created for.