it is about adoption, and as long as adoption is increasing the price will continue to increase with it. sometimes there are periods of time when this rise is faster because of being hyped up which would cause downtrends like this. but it will continue to go up.
that is unless you think adoption has stopped and there would be no more of it? in which case you must explain why you think that where the best speculation says less than 1% of the world has adopted bitcoin.

it is not about changing people's minds, it is good to help some newcomers think about things that actually matter (real usefulness of bitcoin for example).
not to mention that with all the FUD topics that has been getting posted in the past week it is good to see someone attempting to open newbies eyes.

well you are too late to literary everything!

the "dump" happened and is over now.
the bottom of the "dump" was reached and has been long gone too.
buying should be at the bottom of a dip like that which means you are too late.

right now we are in the recovery / nobody knows what the hell is going on phase of it!
all we know is that bitcoin will surely rise in long term and this manipulation state will end soon.

the weird part about salvation and god's plan for bitcoin aside. i would argue that what price is doesn't matter. how it got there matters a lot. for example you mentioned "the lower it gets". why do you think it should go lower than this? i say it shouldn't because that would mean bitcoin being a lot more undervalued as it already is and not to mention that to go any lower it would require more manipulation. so you are basically asking for more manipulation! there is no "salvation" in a manipulated market.

there has always been a lot of good news all over the media. in fact 2018 is filled with them but the problem is that price was on a downtrend for most of 2018 and in this last month we also had a new manipulative dump that crashed it even further... all of that meant that the good news is overlooked all year long but it is still there.

you could say BCH fork/drama was the excuse that was used by the whale manipulators to dump the price.
as for the rise, i don't think it is going to happen. at this point the market needs a long time to heal and recover. the confidence was already weak due to the accumulation and stable price and that little confidence went out as they started dumping. it takes time for it to come back.

a big difference that is usually forgotten about bitcoin price is that when you look at other markets, the rises and falls are actual growth and bubbles and bubble bursts and corrections and .... in short they are market cycles.

but when it comes to bitcoin what you see is similar and it consists of the same cycle steps but 90% of what you see is irrational and emotional market behavior. if you see similarities some days, it is because people are emotionally deciding to react that way not because the market went that way.

that is not called centralized at all to be coincidence or not. it is done by choice and under different circumstances so it is not centralization.
centralization of mining would be if someone (the centralized authority) could prevent you from mining bitcoin which is not true so it is decentralized.

exactly what i was talking about with a friend in real life who has been so hot about BCH. i always say that if a merchant wants to accept cryptocurrency they go for bitcoin. if they want alternatives they choose a copy of bitcoin (a fork) which is going to be LTC which is at least faster and safer since it copy pastes reviewed and tested code from bitcoin!!! and if they want to broaden their horizon they would go with a DAG coin that is different and much faster although it may not be as safe and tested.
nobody chooses BCH as it is evident from their empty blocks...

you are wrong.

the most usage of blockchain technology is in creating cryptocurrencies. and cryptocurrencies are mostly used for speculation or in other words for trading on exchanges.
in comparison usage of cryptocurrencies in gambling is a very small percentage.

it is not even close to being the "worst" market crash of all times. the only difference which may make it look like the "worst" is the fact that today there are a TON of shitcoins available compared to olden days of crashes so the market seems like being bigger otherwise the total market is still the same thing but filled with a lot of garbage.

well, get used to it because the market is not going to stabilize for many years and things will be more or less the same until exchanges become a lot bigger than this or we reach mass adoption.
the good news is that the volatility is decreasing compared to previous years. so the growth is happening but it is not yet enough to prevent manipulation and the resulting big drops.

i will say the same thing i said last year, if you want to invest in bitcoin first decide whether you want to invest in it or become a day/short term trader. because you can't be both at the same time and that makes a big difference.
then break down your investment into different steps and start buying. for example at current market you could have placed 10% at $3000, 20% at $3500, 30% at $3800, 20% at $4000 and so on. the percentages are based on your speculation about chances of that price being met and how much risk you want to take.

this is just your perspective not the reality.
you can check the payment processors to see a small part of the total amount of payments that are happening through bitcoin. they are processing millions of dollars worth of transaction. and that is only one payment processor (bitpay) there are more and also there are a lot of merchants that are accepting bitcoin directly without any processor.

that is part of the problem: the cycle!

there is cycle in a market. you can never look at the history of a market and then say it is going to be repeated. it is the case with any market but around here with bitcoin people seem to insist on breaking that rule and set this market apart!!!
and guess what they succeed... when everyone believes in the "cycle" it will happen. meaning price drops, the bear market last a long time whereas it should have lasted a little and there will be a huge "pump" that will result in a gigantic bubble afterwards!!!

be extremely careful with Paypal it has charge back and you may be scammed. you didn't provide any information about who are the people paying you but there are lots of scam cases that you can find online that they made the payment and then scammed the client by taking the money back and Paypal doesn't give a shit about its users.

maybe they said "gold is dead" back in the time too. how are you so sure nobody said it? the thing about bullshit is that it doesn't really stored in the history. for example if that website never started the "bitcoin obituaries" thing we may not have known that there were a lot of people bullshitting about bitcoin all these years and bitcoin is not even 10 years old yet. now imagine if it was as old as gold, all this will be forgotten by then as if nobody ever called it "dead". every one of them would praise bitcoin as if they have been doing it all along

for as long as i can remember some people have been expecting these kinds of drops, black Friday, Christmas, Chinese new year,.... and a lot of others. and each time their expectations doesn't come true.
i believe it is because you forget that price is set on exchanges and by investors/traders and these people don't liquidate their investment and their positions just because it is some occasion!

the real absolute bottom in my opinion has been $6000 without a doubt. and  we had every reason and market signal to believe that. not to mention that the real value of bitcoin is at least $3k above that mark around $9k.
this current price is fake and due to unrealistic reasons and pressures from manipulation and that makes it unpredictable. anyone who comes up with a number as the bottom is throwing in the dark at this point.

an interesting attempt for  sure although two things come to my mind.

first thing which may be because of my lack of information about all the altcoins is that why some of these categorizations look out of place? for example Waves is also a platform. or Byteball and IOTA are mroe of a currency rather than anything else.

the second one however is the fact that just like periodic table you can't list all "allotropes" of the same thing in the table. for example you don't see diamond, graphite and fullerine in the table. you only see carbon. so here it shouldn't have listed fork coins such as BCH, BTG, BCD, ETH/C,... in the list