last massive dump which created a lot of panic was back down to $9000 from $11395 meaning a 21% drop. and right now we are on the recovery from that panic dump to  flush the weak hands out of the market. price needs to rise first before you start thinking about "next dump".

so lets talk about the first things first. the rise can easily be to $13000 and since nobody likes 13 price will fall back about 20% to $10500 as the support line.

well my guess is that things will continue this way. meaning bitcoin stays an investment with a big backlog of unconfirmed transactions and high fees but rising price because of all the new investors and all the new money that keeps coming in.
then it can go only two ways:
- either the scaling issue is solved and bitcoin stays a currency or if you like a "payment system". and that means the price keeps on rising and the adoption grows a lot with it.
- or nothing will change with the scaling and the issue remains. that will simply kill bitcoin because some other cryptocurrency which doesn't have the same scaling issues or doesn't have worse scaling issues (like most top altcoins with horrible issues) will replace bitcoin and become the decentralized "payment system" that everyone wants.

most people are too lazy to search for something and spend some time reading a proper article to educate themselves so they prefer opening up some place like a forum or even a chat room to ask and get a short answer to their question!
the most asked question these days is "what happens when all bitcoins are mined" and sometimes the starters don't even bother reading the answer.

of course this forum being filled with spammers, sometimes they create redundant questions to be able to answer with their alts when they run out of things to say

how did you get "portfolio" from this?
all I see is someone trading altcoins that are getting pumped each day and making a very good profit. and that is a good thing because OP doesn't seem to be caught up in the hyped and making things like portfolio for himself to stuck to a coin and lose money.

it is actually very motivational. I have to pick up trading again, I have been busy so I put it aside for a while. maybe I even start a topic like this and report daily results. I like challenges like this

good luck @berluscoin .

you are giving bad advice in my opinion.
because first of all being high or being low is arbitrary and you can't make plans on just calling it "high" or "low". what is high? was $2000 high? was $5000? or is $11,000 high? you see any number can be a high at some point and a very low one at other.

the factor you should keep in mind is if bitcoin is on the rise, stable or dropping. for example your suggestion turns into: if it is rising (on the rise) keep holding, if it is dropping sell and if it is stable hold or buy more.
there is of course the timing factor. which means where on the rise are we. every rally, and ever dump has its duration. they never last forever. they all end. and each decision you make must be at the beginning of the period or in the middle and never at the end or you will lose money.

one thing is for sure, there is no right or wrong when you are talking about bitcoin's value. the only thing that we can all agree on is that bitcoin is undervalued but there is no real possible way of telling "by how much". what OP is saying here is pretty interesting in my opinion, and I have seen some more like this and sometimes they try to use models that are not so compatible with bitcoin and when you add the unpredictable nature of adoption to the equation everything becomes a guesswork.

satisfy? haha, people are never satisfied. that is the greediness in human nature and we are all like this. some more than others. and because of that if you have 1 then you want 2, if price is $1000, you want it to be $10,000 and so on.

the rise and how much it is, have nothing to do with your main subject though! the rise happens only because of supply and demand of bitcoin. since the demand is constantly rising, the price rises with it too. and how much of it depends on how much adoption grows that year.
for example this year we had a mass adoption take place in Japan and on some smaller scale in a couple of other countries. we also had a couple of big news this year including scaling solutions and major mainstream adoption by NASDAQ.

not at all.
just because bitcoin price was low once in million years before, it doesn't mean anything else with a low price is like bitcoin!
in fact many of these shitcoins that are currently low will always remain low and even go lower. they may get some pumps temporarily but in the end they will end up lower and lower as they get dumped!

that is one of the main mistakes that newcomers make,  and they ends up losing a huge amount of money. they think if they invest in an altcoin and wait, that altcoin will be $10000 someday too. but they continue seeing their money fade away.

when a company, or similarly a country, a bank, a financial firm,.... creates a new coin based on bitcoin using the blockchain technology, they are always creating a centralized token and that is a creating huge difference. it may seem like nothing in words but in reality the difference between bitcoin being decentralized and global without any kind of restrictions regarding usage whatsoever and a centralized token that a company issues is a huge one.

they can try and make their own version and many of them are doing it, but in the end it will be just another altcoin in  a sea of altcoins.

yeah, there can be many reasons for it. like if you are scared and can not make up your mind and also if you are incapable of investing what you can afford to lose. some people have to invest big!!! but some adults are capable of controlling themselves and they can manage their money. they simply invest a small amount of money like 100 dollars and buy half a bitcoin in 2014 and then think of that 100 bucks as a money they spent on something. then they come back in 3 year sand see that 100 dollar is now worth $5,000

another reason I can think of is if you are too lazy to learn a new technology, learn about bitcoin that is. or if you are incapable of learning about it. then you shouldn't invest in it.

no. it is a clear sign that yet another person was misled by coinmarketcap.com while reading market capitalization values and comparing it with market capitalization of other meaningful things such as currencies and companies.

in reality, these millions and billions are meaningless numbers. it is as if you start printing your own version of US dollar! imagine you buy a printer and print 100,000 dollar bills. print 10,000 of them with your HP printer! that doesn't increase the total "cash" in circulation unless someone starts using your bills. which people never will!

this is mostly nonsense. Russia says they want to legalize bitcoin one day and they say they will not the other. and they have not actually done anything either! if they want to "never" consider bitcoin legal then they should have made it illegal now! why haven't they yet?

and at the end of the day, people are still going to be using bitcoin whether their government wants it or not. it is too late for them to make it illegal, it is best to legalize and then set rules for it to at least force people to follow them. they won't stop using bitcoin just because the government said it is not legal.

well bitcoin is a decentralized system and such system is only as strong as its users. if the users (the majority of them at least) educate themselves enough to understand basics of everything about bitcoin then nobody can damage it in any ways.

but when they start being lazy and only care about how much money they can make out of bitcoin short term then I believe that is when bitcoin becomes vulnerable. and the more people involved in bitcoin want the money (profit) out of it, the weaker bitcoin will be.
that's just my 2 cents.

maybe once a long time ago but nowadays they are almost all scams or they are legit which turn into scams because they can not earn enough profit themselves.

in the old days there were real companies with real hashing power which you could see and verify easily and trust them with the money. although there were scams then too. but these days with high difficulty and all the expenses they prefer running a Ponzi scheme rather than a legit mining operation. and the legit ones will eventually turn into a Ponzi scheme when they start selling more hashing power than they really own. and each of them will fall eventually because you can not keep a scam up for long.

it doesn't have to be only one option and in fact it is not!

all the Poll options can be true for me.
* I use bitcoin for trading,
* I use it for holding,
*  I use it to buy stuff from the internet specially if I get a discount or when it is much easier to do it and specially when I look for more privacy
* I also have used bitcoin for donations, mostly to the free services that I use such as Electrum servers

ps. I don't know what your first option (to triple my BTC) means but if you had something like HYIPs, then no that is where I draw the line. I never participate in these scammy high risk things.

that is a good point but at the same time if you look at the size of the dips you can understand how a "newbie" can easily panic. it is not a normal or common thing in the whole world to see drops like this or even rises are the same.
in my opinion bitcoin still suffers from having a small market and having lots of weak hand newbies who think they are traders and are playing at this "game" of making money by trading bitcoin!
that opens up a lot of chances for manipulating the price and they are successful too.

luckily the manipulations don't last long and they are always overcome by the general market movement and also when we see more investors, the manipulation also becomes harder. the same 10% drops of now could have simply be 40% 2 years ago.

the funny thing here is that nothing is stopping altcoins from "surpassing" bitcoin, "replacing" it or whatever,... except themselves

if someday, someone creates some better cryptocurrency then surely it will go past bitcoin even with a faster speed than bitcoin had because all of us bitcoiners will also buy that since we know a good decentralized cryptocurrency has a lot of potential.
but sadly so far, the altcoins that are being created focus on getting a higher price in short term and focus on how they can earn more money from this rise. this turns them into pump and dumps with no development, little to no innovation and lots of copycats.

that is what I have been afraid of when I said involvement of Wall Street in bitcoin is bad. as you can see all of them are experienced enough to see that this market can be easily manipulated and even if they didn't know it already, they figured it out after JP Morgan spread the FUD and caused the crash and then they bought a huge amount of bitcoin at the bottom and make millions of dollars profit.

THEY ALL WANT IN NOW.

and this is just a start, we will see a lot of these types of bullshit, and each contradicting one another at different times according to bitcoin's movement. if it is rising they will start showing they are investing in it and start talking about how it will reach $1 million soon and when there is a correction they start talking about how bitcoin is fraud!
all the while weak hands panic sell to make them richer

exactly 1 month ago today the amount of bitcoin you had was worth $230 and today it is worth $350 and you are still complaining that you "missed out on" $50 ($44 to be exact) because you missed out on selling at ATH?!

if you need the money take it and be happy about the profit that you have already made. if you don't need the $350 then just leave it be, it is not really a big amount of money. but leaving it will give you more profit in long term than cashing it out now.

it is not just happening on bitfinex, it is happening on all exchanges and as a matter of fact it is happening to almost all of the altcoins.
the past 20 hours have been a heck of ride in this market. bitcoin went above $11K and dropped back to $9k levels twice now and that is creating a lot of havoc in the whole market, specially for these altcoins that are big and are being traded with both bitcoin and USD at the same time.

if you check some of their charts you can see all the big fast dips on almost all of them. that is not much of a manipulation, that is how the market works. bitcoin drops, altcoins follow. bitcoin rises altcoins drop again!