these are two sides of the same thing.
on one side there is adoption and we need good publicity in general so that people stop listening to the FUD and start seeing bitcoin for how good it really is.
but on the other side, there is no stopping illegal activity such as silkroad incident and all other darknet things.

i say as long as there is more power in the good side, meaning some legit big companies accepting bitcoin, the negative side doesn't matter. the same way fiat is used for illegal activities.

ethereum is known to be pumped and we have been seeing how much money whales of ethereum actually have a while back when they were putting up those huge 700-1000BTC buy walls to prevent the price to crash hard.

the POS change can be a very good reason for a new pump in ethereum and when it starts i am sure there is no stopping at 20-50% profit, it will go at least up to 100% and more profit.

but until then, price is going to be like this with small changes and even dropping overall in long term.

nobody is good to follow. people aren't giving away advice for free. they either ask for ridiculous prices to give you bad advice or they give advice for some hidden purpose for example to help panic sell and buy cheaper coins themselves.


check out tradingview there are sometimes good analysis there. but in general i don't like TA for bitcoin much.


if i were you i wouldn't trust someone who discusses  things in PM and not in public!

and remember in the end it is you alone that should make decisions for your own money!

you can't go up two steps at a time. you should start at the bottom, learn about bitcoin and how it works then start thinking about how to earn it!
and for that you should start from many online sources. best and fastest is bitcoin.org
read the basics and learn how to make a wallet and to make it safe then ask us which part you didn't get, which i don't think there is going to be much.

as your second step come back and ask about earning it.

well it actually is possible to make a huge profit, but maybe not become rich in a meaning of becoming a multi millionaire. some of these altcoins that get pumped have very huge volume, now imagine investing a rather large amount in one of them.

for example ethereum first pump from 0.002 to 0.03 bitcoin had 30 million dollar daily volume.

it is not band aid, it is not even a solution, and it is not even good option.
you better say use fiat instead, because bitcoin is bitcoin as long as it works the same way, meaning you are your own bank and you spend on your own, only paying network fees and not rely on anybody else apart from miners to mine blocks in general.
if we go out of this line, then it is no longer bitcoin.

there is no Chinalize to de-Chinalize unless by de-Chinalize you mean we should kill the mentality of people thinking China is controlling bitcoin. there is even multiple topics about it. and when you look deeper into the issue you see that it comes from the numerous FUD that is being spread everywhere each time China makes a move.

the mining power is getting distributed with passing of time, Georgia is now becoming big, so that reason is already dead.

the volume they were reporting is also dead since now we all know it was all fake volume anyways.

so the question is how much longer the FUDsters are going to milk the China-controls-bitcoin-cow!

all that information is never in one place, you need to find them individually. on coinmarketcap you can click on the individual coins and then see the max amount of coin available.
example: http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/

also on the left side there are links to website, announcement on bitcointalk, and explorers and explorers usually show you the number of blocks, time between them and number of orphans.

for algo you can check the announcement or website. or check the coinwarz website which is about mining.

there are no such investments because people treat bitcoin as an investment (commodity) not a currency. so when you say bitcoin investment it is like saying where can i invest gold!

another problem is that you invest bitcoin in a bitcoin related business and such businesses are either rare or take investors through other channels and not publicly.

if you know a business or an investment opportunity out of here with fiat then invest there and use the profit to buy bitcoin. that is the safest option you can ever get.

anything else is either scam or highly risky.
you can find lots of examples in different topics. good ones are investing in a casino bankroll, lending, or generally invessting in any business. for example bitmixer used to accept investors with at least 10BTC

why are you even surprised?
they have been working so far without any regulation or even following the law. and to be honest i wouldn't be surprised to hear that millions of dollar were laundered through their service.


panic sellers never learn and they are never going out of this market and when one goes out 10 new come in.

the difference now is that the panic sellers aka weak hands are flushed out of the market and they have not bought back in at higher prices yet. let there be a rise or a longer time of stability then we see them again.

whatever it is, it's going to be online.
and it has already started, we can see lots of places online that accept bitcoin as payment aka as currency.
some of them are old and big companies such as steam (the gaming platform) and some of them are big new services such as Gyft and some are smaller services that shaped up to give services to people online.
there are some offline things you can find too, such as coffeeshos, restaurants and other businesses accepting bitcoin but they are too little and in certain countries.

one thing about litecoin that you should know is that it has always been alive through all the previous years, and so little number of coins can say they could stay alive for that long.

and litecoin's staying alive has never been just staying alive and being around (like doge for instance) it has always been more of constant development and going towards the future.

the latest biggest development is the implementation of Segwit in litecoin.

with all that said, we have been seeing a big volume in this coin for as long it existed and the price has been rising and having awesome rallies with huge profits.

don't forget that Chinese exchanges have only 2 coins: bitcoin and litecoin and nothing else.

if you remember a couple of weeks back, price was rising with a very string buy support and it was a good trend shaping up but some circumstances with China accompanied by whales wanting to accumulate more and then the FUD about China caused the price to stop upward movement and stay at this point.
currently the price of bitcoin is unpredictable at short term but in long term it is mostly obvious that it will have a big rise, it just needs a small nudge to explode to the moon.

there is a serious amount of profit involved but not all of them are making that much and surely enough not all of them are even successful. many fail.

but the important thing to know about a bitcoin oriented business is that the market is open wide and empty. we still need lots of businesses and services and merchants to start working with bitcoin but there are either none or so little of not so good services.

and one of the big problems nowadays is that people copy each other so if there is a successful business you see others do the same and fail!

bitcoin is now a long way from becoming mainstream and being mass adopted. but it is already an investment, and lots of people are trading it with serious money and that makes any kind of bubble or crash impossible at this point. so forget about $2500 and $600 just because country X did something.

the price was about the same as today for a short time back in 2013 but that was a fake pump leading to a "bubble" in bitcoin. and bubbles are not real prices and will pop as we saw it afterwards.


nobody said you should have 21 bitcoin!
have whatever amount you can have, whether it is 21BTC or 0.21BTC price is rising overtime anyways!

the key in investment and trading is only one thing:
invest what you can afford to lose.

specially in trading cryptocurrencies that the exchanges are not safe at all! we have seen so many exchanges getting hacked and steal their users funds that we all know there is always a huge risk involved with using these centralized platforms.
and that is just half the risks involved with trading.

any error has a reason and can be fixed, consult the wallet creator to find a fix. it may even have a simple solution. the links are usually in the site where you download the wallet.


as long as you are not the one holding the private keys, or generating them with a legit wallet you are taking risks.
also it is always preferred that if you want to store large amounts always do it in a cold storage (generating the wallet/keys offline)

the only thing that matters is "demand" and yes supply too but since supply is not changing and there is always nearly the same amount of bitcoins being sold on the market, the only other factor is going to be demand.

and that means the number of people who are investing in bitcoin.
the nice thing about bitcoin is that it doesn't belong to one nation or one group of people. instead it is global which means all the people from all around the world are going to buy bitcoin but this takes time since not everyone trust the system at first and many don't even know about it.
and as more people come in, price goes higher and higher.

the only limit is the population of the world!

i don't like to kick people when they are down, but that is what you get when you fall for the manipulation. and you will continue losing money and lots of opportunity until the day you change the way you think about bitcoin and see the manipulations by reading between the lines.