that is the stupidest thing that I have ever heard and that only proves that despite all the bullshit that they have been saying about bitcoin and showing themselves as "supporters of it" and "experts" they have no idea how bitcoin works.
bitcoin is not some shitcoin that THEY can request rollback every time THEY messed up. they have to accept their stupidity and start thinking of ways to pay back their customers.

actually despite having no reason to be similar this bear market (in 2018) has been very similar to the last one (in 2014). they both happened in the same size of nearly 85% drop from the ATH. they both took nearly the same amount of time of about a year and the patterns of the drop was very similar too with the big drops and slow downs and then the bottom being the result of a big FUD not because of the downtrend.
if the market participants continue to believe in repetition, then we will see the same bull run as 2015 too which means by the end of the year price has to be at least $9k.

the FUD about China is old news mainly because it was overused to the point that it became see through. you can blame all the FUDsters who came before you, they kept on using the same thing about China banning bitcoin and everything related to it for years and slowly but surely people stopped believing in the lies and nowadays whenever they hear the word "China" the first thing that comes to mind is bullshit

there is also the fact that with all the things that Chinese government has been doing over the past years such as closing exchanges,... every business has exited that country. even Bitmain is no longer under the fingers of Chinese government.

I used to do it but not anymore.
it has reached a point where it is a waste of time to argue with these certain types of people. not because of what they say and not because of their lack of understanding but only because of lack of want of understanding. they simply don't want to change their mind and they are absurd enough to want to force their false opinions on other people too! I  never waste my time with this group.
of course there are times when someone is seriously misled by that first group and needs to be clarified on some reality in which case I try to enlighten them to the best of my knowledge because I believe that you have to spread the knowledge that you have even if it is small.

the media is only going with the flow! they don't decide the attitude of people. if people were positive they will be positive and vice versa. for example during 2017 when price of bitcoin was rising almost every day all you could read online was positive news! and then they did a 180 turn in 2018 when the drops began!!!
as for ease of use, it only depends on the wallets (basically the user interface) to make it easy. and that only requires some GUI developers to start contributing to existing projects.

this belongs to gambling discussion since you are want "gamblers" to answer you.

you should also know that there are a lot of gambling sites already offering lots of different gambling games including lotteries to their users. in my experience those new ones that come up and offer lottery never gain any popularity mainly because people don't really like lottery games and lack of interest means the jackpot is always smaller. there is also an additional problem that it is very hard to prove the lottery was legitimate and not a scam.

I wonder if you would say the same thing in the near future when you start feeling what having "unlimited supply" really means and whether you still wish to bag hold your "hundreds of thousands of ETH" when it is worth $1 again.

nobody is forcing you to buy 1 whole bitcoin

sometimes there are people who don't ever want to learn from other people's mistakes unless they experience things for themselves. it is like wanting to touch something hot and be burnt on your own before you realize that hot things burn although everyone else is telling you so.
in this case I say let them lose money to a bunch of these ICO scams and all the other types of altcoin pump and dumps then they will learn it the hard way themselves and come back.

I don't really expect what people are calling "dominance" (falsely) to increase that much anytime soon because there still is an unbelievably huge supply of altcoins that bitcoin with its teeny tiny supply (in comparison) is being compared to when calculating that "dominance". on top of that they are injecting trillions of new coins into the circulation every day so despite their value loss they still are bloating the total market capitalization.
this is actually why it is not real dominance and that is why market cap is a worthless number.

the bounty hunters and all the rest of the newbies like them in this market don't have enough power in total to make a difference in the final price result. they usually are either too small because of having such a little amount of money in bitcoin or they don't even own bitcoin since they get paid in pennies and sell them to fiat as fast as they can. the result is that even if these newbies get hyped up, price won't go up because of them. what we have is the in-flow of fresh money and also the money that investors pulled out due to the drops and now it is coming back in pulling the price back up to where it belongs.

no, bitcoin can not be considered a religion. if it could then basically everything else like USD, JPY, EUR, GBP,... could also be considered a "religion" but then again you are bending the meaning of the word to brand bitcoin with it.

there are certain people who choose to treat bitcoin in their own ways, worship Satoshi, the developers,... as god(s) and do weird things like that but it is their own choice, and doesn't change the nature of bitcoin as a decentralized currency.

there is no updated version of it created by anyone. in early years that the number of users was small, someone started a topic here asking everyone to add what they know is truly lost. most of the comments were from people who lost their private keys which is not "truly lost".

random nonsense is not considered "speculation". when price hit $3100 a lot of idiots were repeating a lot of random nonsense about how price is going to hit $1000 and stupidly low prices in that range. that  doesn't mean they were speculating or they were a possibility. this is the same thing as when the same newbies were saying price is going to $100k when it was closing in on $20k in 2017.

as for them "joining" it depends on how much they believed in their own nonsense. most of them were only spreading FUD to buy at a cheaper price (like buying at $3500) so they are already in and are laughing at those who fell for their "speculations"!

actually there is a correlation between bitcoin price and altcoin prices. the only thing that causes some differences in certain cases is exception cases.
we all know that the relationship is that whenever bitcoin price is changing at a higher percentage than 5-10% no matter if it is going up or if it is going down, the altcoins will get dumped. that rule is always true. but the exception to this rule is the case with altcoins that have something special going on. for example if an altcoin is already starting to get pumped and then bitcoin starts rising then that altcoin get continue its pump because the pumpers don't cancel what they had started that easily.

I disagree, it is not difficult at all to make profit trading cryptocurrencies that you decide to go to Forex trading and earn profit there. what is difficult is when you try to do something you have no experience in and don't know how to do it. it is like wanting to fly a plane without even knowing how to let alone having some practice! it won't work, and it won't work if you go to trade Forex if you are not familiar with that market either.
in my opinion if you are here and interested in taking the risks of trading then stick to trading cryptocurrencies instead. it is a lot more profitable specially if you are willing to buy the pumping altcoins.

"accurately" is an overstatement. nothing could have predicted the top and the bottom of the recent ATH and the bottom afterwards.  specially since the bottom was the product of a big manipulation in 2015 where a large scale "bitcoin is dead" campaign started running which crashed price to $150 momentarily.

if you consider that type of buying things then you can literary buy anything you can think of with bitcoin. the problem is that when you purchase this way you are not purchasing directly from the real shops but instead from small online shops that in times are even risky to use because they may turn out to be scammers. the risk is higher since bitcoin has no charge back so they can take the money and never send the product.

no, not everyone. a lot of people are here to make profit and their numbers have grown in the past couple of years compare to early years where people were mostly interested in what bitcoin offers but there still are a great number of people who are interested in bitcoin itself not fiat.
bitcoin offers a good financial sovereignty that nothing else can offer you and that is why we want it. of course the profit is a good bonus too, nobody can deny that but it is secondary to many of us.

it is more like if you don't have your 2FA enabled you are going to get hacked a lot easier no matter what email application you use on your computer. Outlook might have issues but it is not as easy to hack into. besides when you are storing coins on an exchange there are literary a dozen different ways that you can lose them without your email getting hacked.

this last chart here has been one of the oldest charts that existed for a long time for bitcoin predicting the future prices in respect to their time. and surprisingly enough we have been hitting most of the targets so far with each of the rallies that bitcoin has.
but still I wouldn't rely on it for speculation though because we all know that the volatility is always changing. nobody was predicting the surge to $20k but it easily happened.