actually i think what he says is somewhat true. many of us did invest in Bitconnect but at the same time that doesn't mean we didn't know it is a Ponzi scheme. we invested in it as another shitcoin that was being pumped and make a lot of profit from its pump just like we are making a lot of profit from 100 other shitcoins very similar to bitconnect that are being pumped every day.

that is the market we currently have in altcoins. 90% shitcoins and 10% half decent projects that don't even get in the top 10 or 20 altcoins.

price of what? you say market as if the market moves as a whole but it is not true.
bitcoin affects the rest of the market and whenever it is moving big, the altcoins drop as a whole. that much is true but in normal situations everything is moving on its own. and altcoins are having the same pump and dumps which means some of them are going lower and some aren't.

right now the bitcoin FUD has ended and the market newbies are milked to the maximum potential. and as you can see price has been rising for a while now with a strong buy support. that is why "the market" is showing recovery.

actually i say the mooning began at least 4 days ago when the drop began!
when the whales started the dump and the FUD began to come out so that newbies panic sell, that was when the mooning project officially started. by that time the whales and smart money so to speak started being invested in bitcoin as the price reached the bottom and idiot newbies were thinking bitcoin is dead "this time".

we will have some more fluctuations and accumulation while the price creeps up and eventually when it reaches certain level the same newbies panic buy because they know they missed out.

it will remain decentralized because to majority of the "real" bitcoin users, the decentralization is the main factor that made them want to be a part of it. and secondly it is the currency part and as long as these two are together and true, bitcoin will stay strong and grow bigger.

but if some day either one of these dies for good, like if bitcoin becomes centralized like many altcoins out there, it simply dies.
of course there is always an option to fork it and remove the centralization.

you are naming things that are all over the place and none of them are a bitcoin wallet!

first "electronic wallet", i have no idea what that even means. we have no such thing.
second "bitcoin accounts". it is obviously not a bitcoin wallet. an account is what you create on sites like coinbase and they store your money and they can steal it just as easily.
third "trading floors" if you mean something like exchanges that is obviously not a bitcoin wallet either and they can and have been and will be stealing your bitcoins whenever they can.

a bitcoin wallet is what you control the private keys and you generate them. and as a result the safety of it falls upon you. if you do it in a safe manner, meaning cold storage then there is no way that someone can steal it. but obviously if you neglect security you will be at risk.

my overall strategy is always going to be short term investment in altcoins because in long term they lose their value and in short term we have the peak of the pumps which if you miss it you can no longer make the big profit that altcoins are offering you.

in your list i would drop Ripple but keep the rest and the number of coin (7 without XRP) is good for an investment. and among you list i am not so sure about Cardano although it has been performing very well so far, but the rest i would keep.

ripple like most other altcoins only gets pump and dumped. it is a good coin for that but not much else. this means i only hold it during the pumps because any other time it is a struggle and a lot of money lost due to all the dumping that is going on during that period of time.
we are currently at that period of time when there is more dumping that there is any kind of buys taking place. you can see there are small recoveries here and there but nothing major any more. it is all down the hill right now.

so the best course of action is to get out of it and go in other altcoins that are currently getting pumped and rising big time not those that are struggling to keep the price they have.

i say it is a very risky investment because of multiple reasons:
1. it is not such a good coin with any future. it is pure pump and dump coin with a massive supply similar to Doge!
2. right now we are after a "major pump" back in 6 January where price went to 100+ satoshi so you are buying after every pumper was done with this coin. and unless you bought at 50 satoshi yesterday i don't think it is a good investment.
3. unless i have missed it, i don't see any major hype coming for this coin that can help with the pump, but you never know these things.
4. 13k is a huge amount to invest...

it has never been exactly because of the bans because in past maybe 250 times a ban news like this came out and caused a big or small dip, 99% of the times it was pure FUD and there were never a ban to begin with. 200 of that 250 times it has been China banning bitcoin from 2011ish until today. and the rest have been Russia, India, and now Korea and some other countries.
the interesting thing is when a country actually banned bitcoin (example Bangladesh) nobody even talked about it and there were no drop whatsoever!


these things will surely slow down the progress of bitcoin (and possibly any other decentralized cryptocurrency like bitcoin, but has no effect on centralized altcoins) because it will make the adoption harder. for example merchants won't accept bitcoin as payments anymore in those countries. but it can never stop the adoption. bitcoin is still a decentralized currency and will be adopted by people and grow bigger.

additionally it is only rare cases when a country actually bans bitcoin. the rest of the world (80% of them) have adopted bitcoin one way or another. like Japan with open arms and easy regulations and no taxation on bitcoin payments or like US with a bit more strict laws regarding taxes,...

how much altcoins recovered? 3%? lol
i started buying bitcoin yesterday at the bottom when the major buy support at $10k was broken and now i am in 15-20% profit based on the orders that were filled during that dip (from $9200 to $11500 and rising).

i have been buying bitcoin for a couple of years now because i find it useful and i believe that a "decentralized digital cash" which is the definition of bitcoin is something that i want to be using. whether it is now or it is in the future when it is more adopted.

so far i have not seen the same thing in any of the altcoins and what they offer seems to me more like a short term potential that vanishes as fast. which is why i have been investing in them with this view and only hold them for a very short time during their pumps.
so the way i choose them is by looking for pumps. which is usually looking for a big price rise or some upcoming hype that they team is advertising.

if you think that then it means you have never used any of these coins apart from buying/selling them on exchanges, or probably you have no idea how these cryptocurrencies work.
and you chose the worst two coins for your examples. if you chose anything else it would have been harder to argue, but when it comes to these two it is easy because they both have proven scaling issues worse than bitcoin.

in other words if 10% of bitcoin users start using any of these coins the backlog that will be created on them will the exact same scenario that is currently going on with bitcoin: high fees and slow confirmations.

i am not a fan of technical analysis in general even for bitcoin and i believe it is absolutely useless in altcoins.
in any case i still use it!

time frame i am using is weekly with 1-6 hour steps for bitcoin. because i find it more suitable for the kind of movements that bitcoin has which are most of the times slower to a 1 hour step.

and daily with 1 hour (or even smaller if the platform allows) steps for altcoins. because what i see is that altcoins move within a short period of time, sometimes it only takes a small amount of time (less than 2 hours for example) to get pumped and reach the top. and this is one of the reasons i believe TA is useless for them.

it is because if you hang around for a long time in bitcoin world you will see the same thing over and over again where price drops with absolutely no reason apart from pure dumb panic of weak hands. and at some point you make some topic trying to warn the newbies that this is not the first time they are being "flushed".

these are not pokemon coins! why do you even think that?

it is a dump, when whales who started this manipulative pump exit to get their massive profits out, the market starts to crash like this. it is like a cycle. they start the manipulation, pump the altcoins, newbies join in, they take the profit and start selling, price drops, newbies panic, they start dumping, market crashes.
whales move to another altcoin, newbies follow, rinse and repeat.

you should always sell coins that are losing value preferably before the dump begins and move to those that are not pumped yet or are starting to get pumped.

your title should be bitcoin price increase from $150 to $1200 was fake back in 2013

yeah well when it is 2012-2013 and market is so tiny and also it is controlled 100% by one exchange controlling more than 85% of the volume, it becomes super easy to manipulate it.

if you want to understand what that article is talking about, compare it with a small altcoin today which is only listed on poloniex for example and 90% of its volume comes from there. it is very easy to manipulate that inside poloniex. this is the same thing we had in bitcoin back in 2012-2013.

but now that has changed.

the biggest misconception these days specially among newcomers is that "you can get rich over night with bitcoin". and that is more harmful than good because it is now creating a large wave of people who have invested in bitcoin and are wondering why they aren't millionaires yet. and it also creates the well known "weak hands" which are causing most of the volatility in bitcoin and help the whales get richer by milking them!

i don't understand LN completely, i am not denying that.
but also i did not say you open/close channels "constantly"! but at some point you need to go in and out like moving funds from your wallet into your LN wallet for the first time. or getting them out to cold storage for the good security after you were done. or charging your LN wallet when you ran out of funds like spending it on buying coffee every day.
and we are not just talking about 1 person, it is about (hopefully) millions of people using bitcoin and wanting to make transactions on-chain and also to go in and out of LN.

there is always a level of risk involved when investing in cryptocurrencies. you should first try to assess that risk and accept it before trying to make any investment.

for bitcoin i'd say this risk is small even though currently there is not much movement in the price. bitcoin will always remain the biggest cryptocurrency because it is constantly improving and with all the additions it will be very far ahead of all the other altcoins. and with the adoption it has, it will grow much bigger.

altcoins including ethereum are so much riskier because of a lot of reasons. such as problems they are facing including scaling. and the thing about altcoins is that there are a lot of them. the competition is among those and since most of them such as ETH has big premines and lots of manipulations it makes their market a lot less trusted even if it is more profitable.

what do you mean by AI? does artificial intelligence has anything to do with cryptocurrencies or is it a general prediction?

and i prefer calling 2018 the year of cryptocurrencies instead of using "blockchain" because there are projects that are currently out there without the blockchain. and that gives them an edge and although they are not so popular in general, i do believe that this is the way forward in the future. to remove blockchain entirely.