why do you think bitcoin is a weird thing that needs to be different than other things?

think of 1BTC as a bag full of small gold coins.
when you buy 1BTC it is like you bought 100,000,000 one of those coins. if you pay $15000 for those 100 million coins to get your money out you need to sell those 100 million coins. if you sell all you get all your money out and will be left with an empty bag and if you sell some you will be left with some number of coins in your bag.

of course it is because there are a lot of newbie traders with money at hand wanting to get rich and also because of the always active pumping whales in the whole market.

but the main reason is that nobody cares anymore!
in fact i think for more than 2 years now, people have stopped caring if a project is good, has a whitepaper, a website, open source code, or eve i have seen in cases that they don't even care if the coin exists in real life! the coin may not even have a blockchain (0 transactions for months) and they still trade it happily because it can give them profit.

1. look for high liquidity first then in that particular day (last 24-36 hours) look for increase in volume and obviously price but mostly volume. and also news since the altcoin market is a pump and dump market news is the bread and butter to pumpers

2. you should look for more security and trustworthiness, something that is hard to come by these days. for now i believe binance is the leading one in this front until they scam people like the rest of the did so far.

3. i have none!

in my opinion coinmarketcap.com is not that popular a site that can have such effects, believe it or not. specially not popular enough for you to use it as a short form and call it "CMC"... i bet 90% of the readers here if they saw this out of context of this known news wouldn't have recognized it either.

in any case i don't see any relationship between the two. they have removed big volumes from their calculations in the past multiple times. last biggest one was during the Chinese fake volume season before PBoC came down upon their heads. and nothing was affected by it.

TL;DR: OP is holding ETH and hopes mistakes he has made with not investing in BTC is not repeated now.

most of the ETH investors are like this these days which is the scary part of it and it is the exact reason why i never get involved with it in long term. i have never had more than a couple of days of investment in ETH.

i always imagine how in a year from now a lot of bugs have surfaced from ethereum and how many millions of dollars have been lost because of it.
i imagine how other platforms which are quite better than it are going to grow bigger and take the market out of the hands of this centralized pump coin.
and finally how side chains on top of bitcoin such as RSK are going to put an end to the ICO hype that has been pumping ETH so far.

well so far the media is filled with all kinds of stuff about bitcoin and most of them are contradictory. even sometimes you see contradiction inside one news agency. you see them call bitcoin bubble one day and you hear them hype it up as the best thing the very next day!

not to mention the loads and loads of false information an misleading information that is out there, specially in the social media. from people who don't understand things much about cryptocurrencies but they insist on explaining it to others!

and last but not least are the bag holding pump and dumpers. they are the worst if you ask me. they keep fooling new people into putting their money in things they don't even understand so that these guys can make money from them like a parasite!

my goals are a big more complicated and bigger than just having 1 bitcoin, maybe because i have been around for a while or maybe because i know that having any amount of bitcoin is such a precious thing to do.

mainly my plan is to keep adding to the ways i am earning bitcoin. having just one method to earn it is never enough. i do trading, some ad payments on my website/blog, some tiny businesses, etc. but i am never satisfied, i always try to add new methods of earning bitcoin to my long list of methods. i have tried quite a lot of them and most were waste of my time

you'll never make money by holding an altcoin. you will however make a huge amount of profit if you trade them. you invest a little amount of money and then join their pumps each time they have one and make a big amount of profit, then you use that profit + your initial investment to put in another altcoin that is getting pumped to make a lot more profit there while the first one is getting dumped and does nothing for a long time.

you continue this until you run out of options and come back to the first one when it is taking off again. and the cycle continues....
and that's how you become rich. otherwise you have to invest a million dollar in something and hold it to dump and get a huge profit.

i don't like it to be honest.
in the past couple of months i have seen some growth in the number of people who think like you, they look at coinmarketcap.com and don't even visit the other coins out of the first 100 and mostly stick to the top 10 or 20 of them and think they can make profit that way. it even led to creation of a lot of alert websites and tools based on this!!!

it may work sometimes but i don't see it working always. there is actually a lot more profit in the smaller coins than there is in the biggest ones. for example you can see a useless junk coin which is worth 1 satoshi go up to 20,000 satoshi but you can never see a 1,999,900% rise in ethereum for example because it is already big more than enough.

it is not really "crazy". i would call it uncommon because it is understandable why bitcoin price went up like this and will probably continued to rise the same way in the upcoming years. that is what happens with anything that is scarce but has a growing demand. people keep paying more and more for it because they want to have more of that "thing". and that is a general principle which happens to apply to bitcoin too and since bitcoin is limited and scarce the rise happens like this.

this statement is incomplete!
...be less profitable... IF
1. price remains the same or drops
2. hashrate remains the same or increases

first of all history shows that price rises because of this supply cut to half. every halving price surges upwards. secondly if mining become "less profitable" miners will leave and with decrease in hashrate it become "more profitable" again. and with the high and increasing price that is not a problem.

that is going to happen in about a hundred years!

true, but not for a very long time and there are a lot of things that  can easily be done to prevent it. a simple algorithm change comes to mind to change the PoW, and lots of other things.

discussing these things a long way before they even become a thing and without mentioning the simple solutions is very misleading in my opinion.

first of all STEEM is an altcoin and a platform which as nothing to do with Steam which is a gaming platform owned by the company Valve.
and it has been accepting bitcoin for over a year and a huge number of people were using it during that time no matter what the fluctuations were. the only reason they stopped was the high fees which are a lot bigger than most of the games they are selling/

that is what happens when a country considers bitcoin as a legal method of payment and then they also remove all taxes on bitcoin payments. businesses and customers alike will benefit from using bitcoin as their payment method in a lot of ways.

the taxes are only effecting the investors and traders and with bitcoin going up like crazy (eg from $1000 to $20000 in a year) i don't think people are minding it much.

generally speaking you should buy when prices are low and then set a profit for yourself that you must sell when it is reached. you may change it depending on the unpredictable future but you should never wait around and be greedy for more profit.
profit is profit!

speaking of XRP, coins that are pumped a lot like this coin and have nothing really going on for them should be dumped as fast as possible. they may go up higher too but the bigger the pump gets the higher the risk of a catastrophic dump right afterwards. and in trading a manipulated coin, everything comes down to this risk assessment based on chances.

this just shows how fragile the altcoin market is.
it is not always a good thing when they manipulate the market and pump the prices to fake higher number, that makes every single one of them unstable. you think only bitcoin has weak hands, wait until you see an altcoin get dumped then you'll understand what a weak hand means
they panic buyers are also in the altcoins too. they buy after the pump is already done and then dump at a loss with the fear that they may lose ALL they have.

unless you know the settings they are using for rejecting/accepting transactions or have the whole mempool yourself it is not possible to say for sure whether this is a bug or not. 2 GB seems unrealistically big though.

for example Statoshi shows mempool at 85k unconfirmed transactions and 110 MiB (116 MB) size but they are rejecting low fee transactions

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool

you are too late to write an article on your .club website using this news! it doesn't matter that you used a different title it is still cold.

and this has nothing to do with him thinking price will go up, all you know is that he has invested a large amount of money in bitcoin about a year ago and that may very well be because he likes the idea of a decentralized currency that nobody can control.

it will continue to go much lower than this but it is not called "dominance" despite what coinmarketcap calls it.
with all these new shitcoins being created and these billion supply centralized altcoins like ripple being pumped the percentage will grow smaller.

no they do not.

people, which means traders, move from bitcoin to altcoins whenever bitcoin price is stable and they can not make enough profit. they go to altcoin market and pump the shit out of them to make a huge amount of profit so that they can invest more in bitcoin in the end. this has been the story for at least 6 years.

exactly! when altcoins have 0 utility they also have 0 real value. the price you see is purely speculative price.

these are good days for altcoins. with bitcoin price being nearly stable without big movements (yes 10% change is stable) everyone is pouring their money in altcoins and they obviously get pumped big time. i wouldn't be surprised to learn that a big chunk of current spam attack against bitcoin is orchestrated by altcoin pumper whales.

in any case be careful about the altcoin bubbles that we are creating these days. everything is fun and profitable but soon as the whale pumpers leave the newbies will get crushed under their dumping load.

#investwisely

just because "ripple.com" says ripple is not centralized doesn't mean it is true!
of course they are going to deny the shit out of it. what else did you expect? did you want the owners to say our product is shit? no, instead they will call it the best thing ever existed and try to hide all the flaws in it including how centralized it is.

it is only one company who controls all the supply and releases it and the worst part is just like Paypal,... they can freeze your funds and take it away from you if they wish to. not call it decentralized!