people have been shouting lots of shit about bitcoin ever since it was created, like from day one. and one of the things they love to shout repeatedly ever since 2013 is saying blank is the next mtgox and bitcoin is going to die because of it. they have even been seeing the same chart and call each price (nearly every $100 step) as the top of the "bubble" like $1200 was for mtgox

it has never been true and it never will be true either.
mtgox was like the only exchange of 2013 which controlled nearly all the bitcoin market (it had about 80% of volume which might as well be 100%). in comparison bitfinex has only less than 10% of the total volume and the volume coming from USDT is much less than this which makes it negligable.

unless you think some exchange can pump bitcoin price globally with that kind of "share of the market", then there is no way what you said is true.

based on what i have seen in the past couple of years, most people who hold an altcoin are doing it because they bought it on top of a bubble and now the price has dropped and since they don't want to lose money and have the illusion that price will recover, the keep holding on to their now-worthless tokens. this is where the term "bag-holder" comes from.
the forum hype spam helps in this case to have more bag-holders but eventually they do a panic sell which will crash the price.

the few others are only holding an altcoin because they have bought "at the bottom" not on top of a bubble and now they are waiting for the pump and  the resulting bubble to occur.
the forum hype makes these people to take it as a sign and start dumping. because you always buy when nobody is talking about these things and sell when everyone is over excited.

this is cool and all but since you are already doing stuff online (all micro jobs with micro payments) and say you don't have any special skills, then why not try and acquire some skills? with those skills you can earn a lot more and then use a much bigger capital for your investments.

in any case i have been using somewhat the same strategy as you. unlike you i started with dumb methods like faucets
but my luck was that i started when price started with $400 and went down to $200 so i had a pretty good low start to make larger amount of bitcoin. then entered some of it in trading with small amounts and built it up to bigger amounts.

these days with high bitcoin price it may seem like an impossible task to make that much from trading compare to 2014 but also these days there are A LOT more opportunities for altcoin pumps which were not as much back then in my opinion. these days you can see at least 2 altcoins getting pumped per day and that is possibility of large profit every day.

there is no bubble to want to stop or not and if by any chance there were any bubble, it has been burst multiple times when all these big drops happened. or maybe you missed the drop from $7800 to $5500 an back up again?

the market is not a computer game to predict the next movement by looking at the pattern the "boss" had in his previous attacks

and i don't know where you get your 10-12 times from but in bitcoin the price is rising based on adoption and growth and that has not yet stopped, there are still "fresh money" coming in and that will continue to increase the price and expand the market.

no it won't happen like this, the 2013 rise was a fake manipulation with no real buy support but fake orders all coming from 1 exchange controlling 80% of the market.
now it is lots of exchanges each controlling nothing more than 10% of the market and lots of money coming from thousands of investors.

by the way 2013 rise was less than a 6x rise (still don't know where you got 10-12x from)

it will go up to 50K-100K and above but not because of what you said about the 12x rise thing and it won't be a bubble.

it is always easy to find that out, you just have to either check this topic's history and read the previous pages or check out Baryom's post history although it may be posted by Bitsler Support username too. in this case the last record was about 15 days ago which means your 2 week guess was right.
here is the topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2345826.0

the calculations are all correct but bitcoin gold is still very new and it distributed lots of free BTG among all those who held any bitcoin gold (although most of them have already dumped their coins before the release). and that means price is not yet bottomed out.
i think $140 is going to be the bottom though, because it seems like everyone who wanted to sell has already sold. and the total network hashrate has been growing which seems to me like people are interested in mining bitcoin gold and it may actually have a future and in about a month or two it can start a serious rise in which case all the miners today will make a lot of profit from that rally.

the thing about altcoins specially when they are pumped, is that there is no support for them when their dumping begins.
what exists is lots of manipulations, for example things such as fake buy walls placed there by the whales who are trying to slow down or hopefully prevent the crash. but in a pumped altcoin they have to throw a lot of money at it and lose a lot to be able to keep the coin from crashing.
the best example of this can always be seen in ethereum market on poloniex.

now the same thing with bitcoin cash is happening, the dump is serious and all the fake walls can only slow it down but it is inevitable. any come back will be a dead cat bounce and temporary.

sometimes i feel like bitcoin market is becoming too predictable!
the bitcoin cash pump was clearly planned ahead and a lot accumulation went into it before the pump started, you can even see it on the charts! then the hashrate manipulation started. and it was not just the BCH price+difficulty but also the bitcoin higher difficulty and leaving the chain to make everything messed up with the 170K transactions in mempool.

the dump part was also clear as day!
all the altcoins that get pumped WILL get dumped, there is no escaping that. everyone apart from newbie bag holders have never bought any altcoin to keep. they buy them to dump for profit.

there really isn't any kind of target for bitcoin. 21 million coins is such a small amount for us to put a target like this for 1 whole bitcoin. you can however start talking about how much 1 satoshi is going to be worth though. additionally all the 21 million coins is not going to be available!
* there will be some amount always remaining to be mined (although small) because of how halving words
* there is also the Satoshi's stash which is speculated to be 1 million
* there is also all the coins that have been lost due to people losing their wallets/private keys
* there are burnt bitcoins
you can see it is smaller than 21 million even. and less supply compared to the billions of people investing in bitcoin in a couple of years means a lot more than $1 million per coin.

this was not the battle in my opinion! the battle was back in August 1st when bitcoin cash failed to gain any kind of support from anyone and a small group of people including some miners went through with this useless fork disregarding consensus and everything else!

what happened in the past week, was just a simple pump and dump attempt to make some money. nobody including the miners have no faith in bitcoin cash but they keep pump and dumping it to make profit from its lower difficulty to make a lot of money in short time.

people call a lot of things scam just because they want them to be dumped for many different reasons but mostly they do it because they want to buy that thing at the bottom and then ride the pump of it.

in case of bitcoin gold, i still wouldn't call it a scam. but it definitely is a shitcoin. that doesn't mean it is not profitable to invest in it.
your mistake is that you bought it at a bad time. you bought when everyone was dumping their free BTG tokens. there has been 16.5+ million bitcoins when they forked it and people received 16.5+ million BTG from this fork which many will surely dump and continue to dump in the near future until it reaches the bottom.
if you want to invest you should invest by then, when the dumping has stopped or slowed down.

don't expect anything big out of this premined altcoin but it has potential for getting pumped.

bitcoin gold and bitcoin cash and 90% of the altcoins (specially ethereum an the top 10 coins) are the same thing. they all were created for pump and dump purposes. they have no actual value, no usage, no real contribution and in most cases they have lots of bugs.

like it or not, everyone is looking for more money. or to be accurate they want to add to their bitcoin stash by joining in each of these altcoins. a small percentage of them are successful and are doing it because they know in the future bitcoin stays alive and will be adopted as a currency all around the world with a very high price.

we never left "the game" the drop was actually part of "the game"!
whenever these FUDs start spreading, everyone starts selling fast and even depositing more money in their exchange accounts to buy bitcoin at the bottom without anyone noticing. and that is exactly what happened. the "smart money" always buys these dips and that is why only some people are getting richer every time there is a dip and not every one.

the funny part is that the size of the dip seems to be always the same 30% drop!

the short answer is: never accept any transaction which has 0 confirmation
the easy method is: use a service like bitpay.com to accept bitcoin payments

the long answer.
technically you don't own the bitcoins you receive unless they are included in a block or in other words mined or commonly known as confirmed transactions. a transaction with 0 fee can be double spent. it is not as easy as it may sound like but it is possible.

as for number of confirmation, in bitcoin with the huge hashrate and difficulty, and when network is fine, 1 confirmation for small transactions but 3 confirmation is more safe for most cases. for large amounts of bitcoin 6+ is recommended and in cases of emergencies 15-30 confirmation is recommended.
read more:
https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know#instant
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation
some more technical information here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1170/why-is-6-the-number-of-confirms-that-is-considered-secure

also there is this API which many gambling sites use when they accept 0 confirmation transactions: https://www.blockcypher.com/dev/bitcoin/#confidence-factor

using alternative sources for generating electricity always have a couple of issues, the main one is the efficiency of these methods which is not always as you wish. sometimes they give you a low efficiency and that makes the whole mining process non-profitable.

the other issue is the initial investment. which is sometimes pretty expensive specially if you want some high efficiency equipment for example in case of solar panels, you have to buy the good ones and install them which will cost a lot. of course a mining farm which is earning a lot of money can do it but only if they are in a location which has direct sun 90% of the year and little to no cloudy sky for example.

this is done because of bitfinex only. they have been adding these new "future" markets and it seems like they get a lot of attention from the traders and the volume is decent enough that makes any exchange think about adding those.
if you take a look at bitfinex, they have many markets like this. they even have a bitcoin unlimited market which is the most fucked up thing in my opinion!

i wouldn't call this particularly shady. it is a "money grab" opportunity for the exchanges. and since Yobit is shady in pumping coins with fake orders they make a lot more money in addition to the real trading fees.

this is becoming like a big and common mistake these days.
you look at the prices and think people are getting rich simply because the last price you remember was lower than the price that you see today. but the reality is so much different than what you assume.
in reality most people buy altcoins after the pump was finished (on top or in the bubble) and then they become bag holders of these tokens waiting for them to rise some more while they are falling in price. that means they lose a lot more money than it may seem to you.

the only people who are making money are a few who are well aware of how the market works, are familiar with the pump and dumps and things like that. the rest are the fuel for their rocket to the moon!

heh, nobody ever listens. people either know this already and have bought in the dip or they are ignorant fools who have fallen for the FUD.
in fact if you check the topics and some of the comments on bitcointalk and other related social media you can see how many of them are desperate now. they even say weird things such as claiming bitcoin is still dropping and suggesting others to sell. meanwhile you check the charts and see the upward movement for the past day at least!
they will come around eventually though. that is why we always have these sharp rises in bitcoin. the FOMO buyers always wait a long time with the false hope that price will fall again so they can buy but it never does. and at some point they give up and start panic buying.

the good news is that it doesn't matter how many "fools" repeat the same thing about coffee and store of value,... in the end the real bitcoin users don't care what these fools say, they know bitcoin is a currency and it is supposed to be a currency and that is the only reason why bitcoin is valuable not because of being store of value.

and whether you "fools" believe it or not, there is a whole lot of stuff between a "cup of coffee" and "an island" that you can buy!

ps. don't fake-quote Satoshi when you have not even read the paper

i doubt that this type of change would change the number of bets made in bitsler.com
because those people who make bets just because of the promotions will only make those bets as near to the promotion as possible so their effects are negligible on the total number of bets made up to that point.
i believe the main reason why bitsler reaches these milestones so fast is because it has lots of users and with bitcoin becoming more popular, with all the advertisement of bitsler the number of players increase and they make a lot of bets.