first you should define the "problem" correctly before you can solve it.

the "problem" is not "crypto hacks" the problem is exchange hacks. and that is what you are focusing on here. this problem is not something that we can fix or we can do anything about. this problem is something that these companies (like coinbase, kraken, bitfinex, binance...) should solve themselves by increasing their security.

and by the way this has absolutely nothing to do with "universal acceptance of cryptocurrencies"!!!

no bitcoin is not heading into any kind of breakout patters.  the only pattern that it currently has is a stable horizontal line signalling accumulation. but there is a breakout pattern here too. the pattern of some investors getting anxious and heading towards nervous "breakout" and giving up on bitcoin and this is a very good thing because historically when these types of people get out of the market price rises up fast...

the only big move that i can think of is the ETF approval which will be an upward movement bringing the price up to somewhere near $10k otherwise even ETF denial is not enough for breaking the buy support at the bottom which has been proven to be $6k and be very strong.
there is always possibility of unexpected things to happen but we are not speculating based on unexpected things but only what we can expect and predict.

haha, there is always going to be a group of people that are not satisfied with things everywhere you look and in every community. in bitcoin things are the same. when price is volatile people complain, when it is stable they complain again. when it is rising they bitch about how they wish it was lower so they could buy, when it drops they cry about why it is dropping and not rising....

it is a never ending whine in my opinion. of course sometimes there is some merits to it too but usually it is just that whining because they didn't meet their dreams with bitcoin.

technically you can create an infinite chain of transactions none of which confirmed. so it IS possible. but that doesn't mean the transactions are final. think of it as writing checks. you write a check but you don't have money in your account, then you give the check to another person and that person writes a check of his own spending your check and so on. but until you fill your account with money and until the bank clears the check transaction none of the others would get any money.


this is a confusing statement!
i am not familiar with localbitcoins' internal work but maybe he is talking about funding your "account" although i don't think there is such thing there. in any case unless you see funds in your wallet you shouldn't be making any payments.

usually when a certain price level is reached it will be reached again at some point too simply because people will psychologically expect the value to be that much.

that is the simple way of looking at things. more detailed way is the fact that bitcoin potential is still a lot more than just $20k! there is much bigger target for the price speculated to be reached that $20k will look like nothing in comparison.

you have to go look at what "double_sha256" method is doing under the hood. that function only understands an array of bytes. it can not understand a "string" which happens to be a hexadecimal one in this case. so you first "translate" it by calling "decode"

these so called companies should really stop trying to advertise themselves disguised as speculation about bitcoin

no minimum price will ever be "reliable" enough to be called "minimum" when it comes to bitcoin. so far we actually have had that "minimum" price a couple of months ago and those who were real investors with experience (not some newbie company in the field) took it as their signal and have been acting on it...

there are a lot of ways to overcome this problem from both the merchants' end and the customers. for instance most sites have a sign up account (like Amazon or steam for example) the customer doesn't have to wait that long based on their account activity and age,... and that is just the centralized way of doing it.
there are simple transaction and network analysis that can be performed to deterministically decide how risky accepting a transaction is.
and finally we have lightning network that will make bitcoin transactions instant and practically free!

when you are talking about what price is the possible price for bitcoin then you are speculating!

this has little to do with bitcoin. this trend or better said "cycle" of pump and dump happens among altcoins every now and then. usually every summer we have something like this when there is a lot of altcoin pumps which eventually get dumped on their newbie bag holders.

that doesn't sound like a logical move from a normal person to me. you are saying a person who has held for 10+ months from $20000 down to $5800 is going to sell if price goes to $9000!
let me ask you this: why did this person hold for this long? why didn't he sell the first time price recovered to $9900 after dropping to near $6k?
why didn't he sell the second time price fell to $6k and recovered to $8-9k? why not the third?
what makes this time any different for this particular type of person?

there are already a bunch of topics about this speculation and the answer is still no. price may rise or it may not rise but in either case it has absolutely nothing to do with what happened last year.

besides it has been time for a price rise for some time now. we are getting to the point which you can call it long overdue!

i don't think so.
real estate transactions aren't that significant to have such a significant effect on bitcoin price. the amount of each transaction is big but the number of them is small which means less people are doing it. it is not something you do day to day.
if anything is to change things for bitcoin, that is when bitcoin is used in day to day transactions like when it is accepted in grocery stores.

i think you are mistaken about this. first of all they never said "they will stop until ....", they just said they stopped "because...". at least that is how i remember it.
additionally the reason had nothing to do with bitcoin volatility. bitcoin has always been volatile and if anything its volatility has decreased, even in 2017 that looks so volatile it was actually less volatile compared to early years for instance.
the reason was high fees. in case you have forgotten during that time fees had gone up to $30-$50 and that is (in some cases) 10 times the value of a game on their platform! IIRC the most expensive game was about $50 without expansions,...

will they change? i don't think so. not anytime soon. fees have been low but the blocks have also been full and sometimes it goes up again. maybe with LN they do it in the future.

ps. steem was using BitPay for payments so they didn't care about volatility at all.

in order to see if this is correct we should first discuss "who are the investors in ICOs?" more precisely, are these investors coming from outside of crypto-space or are they already in.
i believe that at least majority (if not all) of the ICO investors are already in this market. they are not coming from outside seeing an ICO and then finding out about bitcoin. they already own bitcoin,etc and now want to invest in an ICO to increase their bitcoin/wealth when/if they make profit.
in that case their investment in ICOs won't have any effects on bitcoin price but their exit might because usually it is bitcoin price fall that triggers the avalanche of altcoins so the same investors see their token dropping hard while bitcoin is also dropping so they choose to exit to fiat. the way they do it is to sell token for bitcoin then bitcoin for fiat and that can put sell pressure on bitcoin.

unless the exchange makes a public announcement there is no way for us to know what they are doing and when they are going to list these coins. some exchanges (usually the small ones) have a page that is dedicated to new coins that are being added. sometimes this is accompanied by voting and they add the top voted coin to their platform. you can use that list.
apart from that their news, forum or their announcement on this forum, trollbox, twitter are places you can look for this kind of information.

it is simply because the "Market" is tired of SEC's nonsense and has decided that it doesn't want to react to their shenanigans anymore. so no matter how many good (fake) signs they show us, in the end we know the result is not going to change, most probably. so we don't care about who is in favor of what now.
not to mention that we are not so sure about ETF being good for bitcoin anymore. it may actually end up being a terrible thing in the long run.

two huge mistakes are found in this little statement here.
1. if anybody had lost 70% of their investment then it means they shouldn't be investing in first place because they have no idea what they are doing. and this is a very serious thing. 70% is ridiculously huge even for a volatile market like cryptocurrencies.

2. calling it "portfolio" when it  clearly isn't one. what it is however is a bag of similar objects with same performances. they go up in pumps and they all get dumped like each other. some a little bigger than the rest. having multiple of them doesn't make it a "portfolio" it only makes it into a tool to fool yourself into believing you have diversified.

why do we need that?
and more importantly what would a "real world business" gain by tokenizing their product?
i honestly can not see the benefit in that apart from small failing businesses being able to use the hype of the cryptocurrencies in form of an ICO to raise a lot of money and cover their asses!

certain people are still trying to convince the crowds that the SEC decision is going to be positive. i recently read some news about some letter to SEC about bitcoin, blah blah. but in the end this is exactly like all the previous times. they hype it up and SEC keeps delaying it until they finally reject this ETF too.
but i think the effects stopped being noticeable a while ago. people are also catching up to the nonsense. it is like the old "China banned bitcoin" news at this point.

wrong. in a bear market price is going down. it has nothing to do with not being stable.

wrong again. no analyst has ever made such speculation. there are idiots making guesses and FUDsters who are spreading FUD. other than that there is no reason for price to go down to $3k similar to no reason for it to reach $10k

a little more than a year ago bitcoin was worth about $1000 and miners were "alive"!

there you go: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

no TA is not as good as you think but even TA is not saying anything about $3k. i don't know where you even got that price from