haha, don't get excited. majority of them are only copying code not the blocks. on some rare cases they did something weird and paid all those who had a balance like Bitcore. but the number of coins that forked similar to BCH is about 60 (according to OP) and about 4 or 5 of them are worth claiming (according to my experience, although at this point it is too late since they have all gotten dumped hard).

if their business expects a big enough portion of that $50k per day to be through bitcoin then it is worth to pay a developer to set up a simple full node connected to their service on their server with a master public key to keep generating addresses for payment and another system, preferably offline for storage of keys and spending coins.
don't bother with Bitpay and be in full control and earn more be cause they won't have to pay the fees.

i haven't really checked Stellar but if you use XRP, the developers can easily take your money if they choose to since they have full control over the coin. that is why it has never been used for anything apart from trading all these years.

because bitcoin is decentralized so it doesn't have any owner like a company behind it (similar to what altcoins have like Ripple Foundation, Ethereum foundation,...) to advertise it! bitcoin is its own advertisement when it comes to utilities, people see how it is used and then decide whether to use it or not instead of looking at some hyped up mostly fake ad and be fooled into buying bitcoin.

besides who is going to pay the fees? will you put money in advertising it since it is your own idea?

trading is also a part of bitcoin and its usage. it is one of many.

additionally trading bots are working on exchanges, a trader who is using a bot wants the maximum speed possible which means they have to leave their coins on exchanges and constantly trade them by going in and out. and as a result they don't make that many on-chain transactions.
this is also why when exchanges get hacked so much money is lost.

as they say over in the chantry:
"The deep dark before dawn's first light seems eternal, But know that the sun always rises".

right now we are seeing the dark stage of market where newbies are losing hope and handing over their bitcoins to the whales who are happily accumulating bitcoin from them. this is the "deep dark" and before you know it the first light will shine as the newbies are all asleep. then when the sun is in the middle of the sky they wake up and realize what they have done the night before

they either don't know the meaning of "constantly" or they are idiots who think by spreading bullshit they can increase the size of the dip so they shorts can become profitable.

gamblers are always having emotional and psychological problems and they need professional help. it has nothing to do with bitcoin, not even with its price drop! these people had the same issues last year too. they gamble with their money and have no idea what they are doing so they lose money.
if you buy something without knowing why you are buying it then you are in their category and you need professional help. but if you bought bitcoin while having a good reason for it then you are not worried right now! specially since a wise person invests what they can afford to lose.

if you want to count forks of bitcoin and call them "bitcoin children" then you have to go back to day 1 instead and try counting ALL of them not just the ones that happened recently

there was actually a website for it too although i think it has not been updated for a long time. it is called mapofcoins.com and according to that site there has been (up until the last update of the site) 667 altcoins forked from bitcoin.

we all know bitcoin is number one, we don't need this picture but this is yet another proof that it is easy to create a centralized altcoin and pump it up to keep it on top. you can clearly see from the old XRP and the new ETH which both are similarly centralized and bad while keeping their market cap bloated to keep them on top by premining the shit out of their coin.

my observation is that this drop was due to manipulation and not much else. it started by CSW's lies about dumping bitcoin and continued by whales taking advantage and dumping bitcoin.
the situation was also perfectly ready for such a drop because of the stability which made everyone bored and most traders to leave the market.

absolutely not. volatility like this is never good for bitcoin's image specially when it is volatility out of nowhere and due to manipulation.

as i said in another topic i think it depends on the the performance of bitcoin in the following month. if it under performs or drops more then we can expect most of 2019 to be the same boring market too. but if it ends this month we can see 2019 to be a bull run year.

it is impossible to predict bitcoin at this point. but in my opinion it depends on how December is going to be like. if this nonsense with BCASH stops and we see the recovery starts in December then we can see the market go back to normal and bitcoin to starts its long overdue rise in early 2019 but if December continues to be bad like this then the recovery would take longer.

accuracy is not the goal for timestamps that are used in different places on bitcoin network. so you shouldn't "sync your time" with others this way! try syncing your time to real time by using something like time.is website.

this talks about accuracy of it:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20479/how-accurate-is-bitcoin-network-time

this talks about its usage:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/68653/the-role-of-timestamp

when you connect to another bitcoin core client, they send you an initial message called Version message which contains that node's date and time.

your choice of title is very bad, specially since it is wrong and it has little to do with your post!

"forks" are not bad. in fact forks are a necessity for a system such as bitcoin. but unfortunately they have been used in a wrong way and that makes those forks bad not forks in general. in the context of bitcoin any fork requires reaching agreement with everyone or consensus. and when a fork lacks that (like bitcoin cash and any other subsequent forks) they become a bad idea and damaging.

don't let idiots like that user discourage you. he has been trolling on bitcoin boards for months now and he is always so butt-hurt for some reason!

i have been trading too and i have to say if someone understand how the market works and stop bag holding altcoins they can make a decent amount of money.
i personally stick to trading altcoins since i have zero faith in them and that eliminates my emotions. and also because they are pump and dumps! and then convert the profit to bitcoin and hold that as the long term real investment.
i have to say my financial situation has improved a lot because of it.

yeah, well if you look at that number alone that looks dramatic! oooh 10000, much big!
but if you look at the actual measurable number which is hashrate and see the percentage of the change you can see it was about a 4% drop in hashrate which is nothing!

it is like saying Berkshire Hathaway dropped $15000 last weak
but that is $15k in 330K price which happens to be actually be 4% hehe

think about the personality of the person you are talking about!
Craig is an  attention whore who has been using every opportunity to show himself big and powerful, owning a lot of money, and went as far as claiming to be Satoshi himself!

a person like this who you claim has sold a lot of bitcoin, would have stopped at nothing to show his sales to the world and increase the panic.
but so far he has only "threatened to sell" and if you look at bitcoin's history, FUDs like this have always been successful in causing drops like this.

neither of these two are new. things have always been like this, exchanges from the small ones in early days that we have forgotten the name of, to big exchanges like Mt Gox and Bitfinex have always been risky.
as for 2, there are a lot of regulators that are friendly towards bitcoin and helping it grow in their country! so that is not a reason.

i wouldn't call them "communities of developers" because there aren't exactly developers behind these forks but greedy people who are thirsting for power and money.
in case you have forgotten, bitcoin is money and money is power. a lot of people want to take control of that power hence the existence of these forks trying to fool people into thinking they are bitcoin since they couldn't compromise the real bitcoin!

nobody cares about what happens with altcoins! historically speaking their dumps sometimes might have affected bitcoin price but they can never make enough influence to be considered a thing.

if these guys were in need of money and wanted to sell bitcoin then they would have done it before the drops even began. not to mention that Craig doesn't have enough bitcoin to cause a small drop on one exchange let alone affect the whole price. and Ver is most probably currently buying more bitcoin

everything about China has been exaggerated, but they are not exactly wrong. Chinese have always been big traders in every market and ever since they found out about bitcoin (and surprisingly litecoin) they have been trading the shit out of it with a huge volume. big mining farms are also located in China.
but when it comes to news, they say they control 90% of the hashrate!!! they have the highest trading volume,...

in short China is in fact big but not nearly as big as the media portrays it to be.

altcoins get pumped all the time regardless of what is happening to bitcoin or the rest of the market. that doesn't mean they "performed well". a good performance means actually rising not having a pump that lasts 1 day then is followed by a dump!
case of XRP: from $0.47 pumped to $.51 then dumped to $0.43 that is not a "good performance".

if they were buying it then its price should have gone up not down. BCH has gone down from $430 ish to current $231 and the high volume speaks of the dumps that is going on!

it is because the price is determined on exchanges and these exchanges are pretty small still despite the high volumes the orderbooks are not as packed as you may hope. so a small manipulation can cause a big drop.