that is how altcoin rises have always worked.
it is a pump and dump most of the times. they rise up so suddenly and big. for example they go up 100% in 2 days then they stop, stay there and get dumped. if it is a small altcoin they dump will also be fast and big. but if they are bigger altcoins that actually have something going on like litecoin the dump will be small and slow.

true, but right now bitcoin has risen too much. it may not rise at the same speed anymore.

my suggestion is still to invest in bitcoin, but be extra careful about it so that you don't get caught under any drops/corrections/or panic sells which are pretty likely at this point in my opinion.
then use the bitcoin you bought to trade altcoins. different ones, don't just stick to one and stay there for eternity. as i said altcoin pumps are sudden and last a short time. try catching the next one and then next one and so on to make profit consistently while the first altcoin is stagnating.

no. it is not a  huge driving "proponent".
what is important is that bitcoin supply will be limited and will be limited to a reasonable number. it is not small like 1 million and it is not huge like 100 million.
and it is not the "unit" of bitcoin, the unit is 1 satoshi.

correct!

your assumption is wrong. and it doesn't matter if we "hit 21 million" or not.
there will always be some people who sell and some who buy and some who hold. and the balance between these 3 groups decides which way price is going. if the sells and buys are at a balance price will stay stable and if one is bigger price will move in that direction. and again it has nothing to do with 21 million limit.

this doesn't even make sense! the limit is there regardless of people buying or selling or holding!
and again as i said about people are selling and some others are buying at all times that is how any market works.

you are misinterpreting what people are saying for some reason!
i suggest you educate yourself about "Supply and Demand" which is a pretty basic topic and it is exactly the same with literary anything else in the world including bitcoin, gold, stocks, fiat, potato,...

there are not "consequences" in the "global economy" because bitcoin is still pretty small compared to that. and at this level it can not really have that much of an effect that you may think despite it seemingly be big. you always have to think about these in comparison not just on their own when you want to talk about effect of it on something else.

with that said, i think the effects are only on individuals. for example some people invest in bitcoin and because of that they make a lot of money. and at the same time, some others who are not familiar with any kind of investment who also make emotional irrational decisions will lose a lot of money. the balance is restored though.

if you ever had time, go check the bitcoin charts. on there you can visibly see that a rise like this which is only a 10% rise is the most common thing in bitcoin world. it has always been like this:
-  price goes up fast and big sometimes 10% per day some times more
- then it reaches the end of the rally where price is a lot higher than when it started at
- it stops and has a little drop, maybe a tiny rise afterwards
- then the  correction starts, where price comes down about 10% and sometimes if the rally was big it can drop more like 30% tops
- and then a tiny recovery where price gains back a portion of what it lost
- consolidation where price becomes nearly stable. this can take a day or two or up to a month with bitcoin
- then rise again and the same thing repeats.

interesting information, i wish you included some links to the survey with some additional information about it. in any case this is before the "Futures trading mania" started if i am not mistaken. after that CME news filled the media and then NASDAQ said the same and multiple others have been following in the past week. i think if they did the survey again, it would be at least 80% saying they know about bitcoin and from that at least half would be holding their coins for a much higher price. specially with all the speculations saying it will be $500k,... and all the signs saying it can go that high.

as long as a coin has a chain (its blockchain) or like these days the tokens of projects that keep being created mostly on ethereum but also on other platforms like Waves, as long as they exist, there is nothing "fake" about them.

however, this doesn't mean they are any good though! majority of them are useless junk which is why people call them shitcoins. they are created to get pump and dump for the main part of their lifetime but in most cases these days they are related to some ICO which is used to raise some funds so the developers get rich fast and easy.

and it is pretty damn easy to create one of these. you just have to have a little knowledge of programming and some information about these platforms.

don't let the numbers alone fool you!
100k is only 2x rise from 50k and it is not unheard of for a scarce object to become super expensive.

also you are thinking about this all wrong. 1BTC is going to be worth X but 1 satoshi is gong to be worth 10^-8X
for example if bitcoin reaches $100k, 1 satoshi is still going to be super cheap at $0.01


going back down is something that always happens. after each rise, after each bad incident such as an exchange getting hacked or some bans or even the debates that hard bitcoin. but none of them mean it won't rise. in any asset there are these down-times where price falls temporarily then rises again.

being a bad coin has nothing to do with traceability of the coin. and you are exaggerating the power of tracing who owns what by the government!
if you buy the usual coins (BTC, LTC, ETH) or even the fully anonymous coins (XMR,...) from an exchange like poloniex, bittrex, ... of course they will know who owns what, that is easy and it has nothing to do with the coin itself it is the method you used to buy those coins.

a bad coin (worst coins ever) are those which created a big expectation but didn't even live up to 10% of that expectation in my opinion. i would like to nominate Ethereum for the top of that list. because all the advertisement of it was focusing on being scaleable, cheap, fast, secure, easy to use, decentralized, ... and so far all of these have been proven to be wrong.


with IP? no
with same wallet? there are some chain analysis techniques that can be used to "guess" this but it is never 100% accurate.

bitcoin has grown so big lately and it probably will grow bigger still but it will be something like $50,000 not $1 million. in order to reach $1 million some things has to surely change about bitcoin. it currently can not handle the adoption that it already has!
people aren't buying bitcoin to just put away in a cold storage and never ever touch it! they want to be able to use it, whether for just transferring it around to sell or to use it as an actual currency. and they can not do it with the block size being this small capped at 1.1 MB.

and scaling is not so simple as just to bump the block size to a bigger number! you need to do it in a way to still be able to keep everything trustless and decentralized. otherwise if we wanted a centralized currency we would have never even looked at bitcoin!

you have made 256 posts, most of which are topics attacking bitcoin and spreading lots of FUD about it, in only 6 days that is nearly 2 posts per hour. i believe you already know the answer to this question better than anybody else. you are just desperate for attention or probably trying to short bitcoin and failing miserably.


what this means is that you are practically saying that nobody will ever use bitcoin cash and its blocks will remain empty for lack of usage. in which case you are correct, fees of unused altcoins will always remain low forever.

you are skipping the most important step!
the first step of proving that bitcoin is indeed in a bubble and then start speculating about when it is going to burst. you are just assuming it already is in a bubble and then you are asking about when it will burst!

so first things first. is bitcoin in a bubble?
the best answer that i can give you is a "Maybe" and you can not be certain of it until price really drops, and drops big like 50% or more and also stays down not just come back up immediately like with every FUD dump

so you are basically saying the $1.2 billion dollar daily volume that comes from GDAX (Coinbase, mostly US users) is nothing.
and all the 3146 (27.53% rank #1) nodes are also nothing.

not to mention all these hypes about the futures market are coming from US right now!

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i actually believe that end of net neutrality will mean a exploding demand for bitcoin. it simply means people will value decentralization a lot more than before.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/15/ryan-hoover-on-fccs-blockchain-effect.html

i wouldn't call either of them a "sleeping giant" specially Stellar but any altcoin that is not yet pumped to the moon like  crazy is a viable option for investment because their turn will come pretty soon. when the pumpers are done with the big coins that everyone sees, they leave the all hanging while moving on to other coins. and after everyone switched to those they move on to something else.

there is this feature in bitcoin that was added some time ago called RBF or replace by fee. when a transaction has a sequence number lower than ffffffff-1 that means the sender can make a new transaction with a higher fee if this one was not confirmed after a long time.

it was added to make "bumping the fee" easier because otherwise you will have to double spend the same coins. and a normal double spend transaction will be rejected by all the noes that have the original one in their memory pool. but an RBF transaction can be double spent easier if the nodes accept RBF.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/faq/optin_rbf/

if by next altcoin you mean something that can get pumped hard like it, then you should know that there are always altcoins in this market that are getting pumped hard like that every single day of the week.

for example currently they are pumping TRON and RaiBlocks and Request Network   and 0x.

surprisingly enough BCH (bitcoin cash) is also having a good time in rising but i think it can be a slower rise but a bigger one this time specially because bitcoin fees are increasing every day, it is a good pumping excuse of the BCH team.

you shouldn't just place buy orders at some arbitrary number just because you see some other bid there or some feeling in your gut tells you to.
instead you should choose your prices with extra care. that is all there is to trading otherwise there is no difference between a real experienced trader and a gambler who rolls a dice. the thought that you put into your actions make that difference and eventually makes you richer. otherwise if you choose to be that gambler, you will become poorer and poorer with every trade.

and the choice is a speculation, mainly based on the movement and some analysis. for example if an altcoin is on the rise (getting pumped) if you place orders below the market price, they will never be filled. you should buy at market price and enjoy the ride.
or for example if an altcoin is getting dumped hard. if you buy it at market price or even place orders at any price it will be filled but you also lose money. you have to wait for the bottom then buy.

my advice is to stop being greedy and if you invest in altcoins that go up and you already make some profit, then be satisfied with that profit.
if you continue being greedy and want a huge profit, like a 500% profit then it leads to irrational decisions such as holding an altcoin even after it gave you enough profit and eventually losing the chance to sell and take that profit because it is going to get dumped.

practically you will be giving up a 30% profit for example for the "hope" that it goes up to 100% but instead it falls and you lose not only that 30% profit but also part of your initial investment too.

there are smaller units in bitcoin, the 8 decimals have different names. it is just that people never used them much mainly because price was always low. for example in the past 8 years price was below $1200 with majority of it being below $700 and that meant the smaller units were nearly meaningless.

but now it has only been a rather short time after the price went up so high that smaller units started becoming meaningful. for instance 1 mBTC is not a meaningful value in USD. and as the price rises people will eventually choose of these units and start using them.

the most popular ones are:
mBTC = 0.00100000BTC
uBTC = 0.00000100BTC
bits = 0.00000100BTC
Satoshi = smallest unit 0.00000001BTC
all the rest: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units

it is never as simple as that. investment in something so volatile is always going to be unpredictable and when you invest in altcoins which are 10 times more volatile than bitcoin, things become even more complicated.

my strategy is that i always have my main investment in bitcoin. it is a long term investment where i buy bitcoin with my money whenever i have some extra cash and add it to my cold storage. it will stay there for years to come.

meanwhile i have some small percentage of my total bitcoin dedicated for trading. i use this fund to risk doing trades on bitcoin and altcoins alike. mostly altcoins because they get pumped and dumped so we can make a lot of profit from their manipulations in short term and immediately move on to the next pump.

in my opinion it is always best to come up with your own strategy. i shared my plans here, you can use it or modify it to your preferences.

it is never "safe" to make any kind of investment in anything even the old trusted and with low volatility investments. something like gold is not even safe. now you want to know if it is safe to invest in one of the most volatile assets out there?

all we can tell you is that bitcoin has a lot of potential to rise. it is being adopted every day and it even reached mainstream adoption this year. this is all bringing in a lot of fresh money and that means rising price.
but that doesn't mean the risk is zero. it is still there, you may lose money.
all you can do is to invest what you can afford to lose.