something needs to be predictable first before a comnputer program (AI) can predict it! it is like asking whether AI can predict the weather of 1 year from now!
there are patterns and signs that we can work with to some extent but there is still a lot of unpredictability to it which makes it impossible.

it is interesting to see how people in crypto-scene always expect weird things from AI!

what people missed in the past month or so is that bitcoin never got cold! it has been warm and it was actually heating up, starting to have the rally to test the real resistance at $10k.... but then we started pouring cold water on top of it and cooled it down with our ETF hype thinking it will make the rise happen faster but in reality we were postponing it.

and right now market won't become "warm" again until we put this ETF news behind us.

the link you have posted is from those websites that are posting low quality content, mostly click-baits and i keep seeing random low rank accounts advertise their links so i wouldn't really waste my time reading what it has to say specially since OP didn't bother posting more than just the link!

in any  case the guesswork like this is never a good thing no matter how much you hide it under fake reasoning. $60k in mid 2019 is not that far off but we don't know how many nonsense situations like ETF for example we are going to see until then. each of which can postpone the rise by a long time.

at times like this TA is not going to work at all because the entire market is waiting for a certain news so that they can act based on that news not based on the charts or whatever else.

in this case that news is ETF. the short term future of bitcoin price will be determined with this news. for instance if it is rejected we will see a drop and if it is approved then we will see a rise and all the TA you put in so far becomes useless in both cases.

after this nonsense then you may restart using TA again although it still wouldn't be that useful but it would be better.

if SEC not approving ETF was a sure thing then there could not be a drop by the time they reject it. a drop or a sell off happens when people didn't expect something bad to happen, but if they start expecting it to happen then they would sell sooner than the actual incident and by the time the "incident" happens there is nothing left to sell and there will be only buys rising the price.

i have never been an "extremist", and i believe i am more of a "realist".
unlike you, even during the huge rise that we had last year, i never thought bitcoin is going to "take over"! that has always sounded silly to me and i have always told others who ask "will bitcoin replace fiat or banks" that it will never happen.
and because of that i have never liked branding people either. names such as "nocoiner", "bitcoin minimalist" all sound silly to me.

no to everything you said

first of all bitcoin is not recovering from a DotCom bubble phase because it was not a DotCom-like bubble to recover from and it doesn't matter that price has fallen this much, it has fallen a lot lower than the intrinsic value of bitcoin which doesn't prove anything.

as for altcoins they won't just die. if they could just die because of some pump and dump then they would have died a hundred times already because this is not the first pump and dump they are experiencing.
what will happen is that they will continue to get dumped, some of the smaller weaker coins will die and the rest will just restart the same pump and dump again. and we will see newer big pumping coins this time instead.

what you are mistaking is that fees don't go up because of high price. fees go up because of only one things: more transactions

now the question is what increases the number of transactions.
well there are multiple things. the major ones are these:
- people using bitcoin as a currency for purchases, transferring money,...
- traders moving funds to and from exchanges selling/buying bitcoin and also altcoins
- spam attacks
1 and 2 increase during price rises but the second one also increases during price drops. for example today price is not changing that much but 2 days ago when price was playing with $6000 and $5900 there were a lot of transactions from people panic selling and others who were accumulating cheap coins.
and spam attacks can happen at any time.

now to answer your main question, it doesn't matter if bitcoin is worth $1 or $1000000. what matters is how we got there. if for instance price slowly creeps up to that high price we won't see that much of an increase in number of transactions. but if it shoots up there, then we will see a huge rise in the number of transactions because obviously people seeing the rise (like last year from $9k to $20k in less than a month) are selling their coins and others are buying coins and that means tx on the chain.

it depends on the strategy that you are following.
if this is a strategy to make profit from short term fluctuations then make sure to buy in the dip. right now we are in the recovery phase so you are already late, there isn't a rally going on so buying now is not recommended.  also buying in the dip depends on its type, if it is just a silly dip because of FUD then buying at $6000 is recommended (convert it to euro on your own).

but if it is a longer term investment then the same rules apply but with a lot of wiggle room because you are not planning on selling soon so you can afford to buy at a higher price and not wait for the very bottom because you have time to reach profit.

it depends on the upgrade and the reason for that upgrade.
99.99% chance is that all the changes that are made to bitcoin will not concern the way key pairs work and it will remain backward compatible which means the keys you create in 2009, 2010,...2018,... will still work in 2025,...

but there is a tiny chance that some day in the future we find a weakness in ECC and decide we need to move to a new cryptography method for key pairs. in which case the old keys may become obsolete. but as i said this chance is nearly zero. but it is best to keep updated at least every year.

to be fair majority of those accounts are throwaway accounts that belong to certain people who have been spreading FUD on bitcointalk for a very long time. probably from early days (like kuwakduck for example). they try their best to increase the fear by putting wood in the fire that is already burning so that they can buy bitcoin at the bottom or short it and make a little more money.

i should also mention that you become a holder when you don't want to be a trader. it doesn't have to be because you are accustomed to volatility. being a trader is time consuming, hard and thanks to shitty exchanges that get hacked or go down during rises/falls is risky.

if investors held their bitcoins then price wouldn't have went down in first place. they have been selling which is why price fell. and they also have been buying which is why it didn't go down after some point and it is reversing back up now.
it is not always about manipulation, we can have fluctuations with 0 manipulation involved too.

first of all your home appliances like your fridge are not  connected to the internet! and it is not like people are allowing unknown entities access their home network to connect to the internet. if they do their neighbors would go bananas.

secondly it is not "simple engineering". it is actually pretty hard. because first thing to do is to put an ASIC in and think about  the additional electricity usage and additional heat that is going to generate. for example your fridge is already generating a lot of heat if you add an ASIC that heat will be a lot more!!! and then finally think who would be the idiot who pays for such a fridge in his home when there are normal fridges that don't produce that much heat and don't consume that much electricity.

OP is one of those who opened a short position hoping for a big profit.
basically the lowest price was about $5960 when he started this topic and the lowest that was reached were like this:
Bitstamp: $5880.0
Bitfinex: $5876.5
Coinbase: $5902.8
the hourly charts look funny now:

i don't think we can call yesterday price a good example of manipulation in bitcoin market. we have had much more severe cases of manipulation in the past. yesterday it was mostly the fear that was initiated by the altcoins coming to bitcoin and failing to do much.
of course there were whales who were dumping to see $5000 and below but they failed because the "force" was strong

to be honest, no i still don't think they are going to approve it this time either. although there has been positive signs saying otherwise i still believe they will use lack of regulations as an excuse and reject this one soon enough.

if it is approved there may be more of them coming though, all around the world and the price will have an excited rise but we still need solid bitcoin adoption for a solid growth. ETF is not changing much about that slow process.

it is a speculation and speculation doesn't have a *source*
i don't know why he says it but i also have this speculation and i am not blaming ETF, i am blaming the market for reacting irrationally to a news that is not even relevant to or effective on bitcoin. people started building it up in their heads and as SEC rejected one ETF they panic sold and right now the market is waiting on their decision to start moving in a certain direction based on it. why should this be? do people really think ETF controls the future of bitcoin?

once the "excitement" is over we can go back to normal market where price rises back up.

the good thing about a decentralized currency like bitcoin is that nobody can do anything about it. it doesn't matter what the government of some countries may say about bitcoin, people will continue using it because they can not prevent it. even if they shut down the internet, you still can continue using bitcoin using satellite and radio waves to download the blockchain and send your tans cations to the network.
and that is how powerful bitcoin is.

the only way bitcoin can go to zero is if it becomes obsolete, for example in case of an unfixable bug! but creation of something new or even better is not going to make bitcoin obsolete.

in any case this is no the argument here at all. this is all about certain people not wanting to see bitcoin grow under any circumstances. they see the adoption of it and they feel threatened by its existence so they will burst out against bitcoin like this.

there is something that should be noted and that is the question of Who is investing in altcoin? is it someone from outside of the market not involved with any kind of cryptocurrency who comes in and invests in altcoins as his first involvement in this market
or is it those who have bitcoin and are now seeking ways to increase that bitcoin and try out alternatives?

it is surely the later which means the BTC that went into altcoin market may have stayed in their wallets if there were no altcoin market.
also i should point out that "less asks" is not equal to "higher price"! higher price still requires demand or more buys actually happening. for instance if right now you remove all the asks from bitcoin market price won't move up above $6100 because there still is nobody brave enough to buy while they are dumping

here is the difference, bitcoin is unique in its own way. it is the first (as people like to remind us every now and then with their topics), and it is the biggest. it is the only network that has been working properly with the highest hashrate, security, number of nodes, miners, merchants,... and thousands of other things....
Etheruem is just another altcoin. it is not even unique or good among its competitors. there are better smart contract platforms than Ethereum out there which are easier to use, cheaper (less cost of smart contract creation), not congested, and are more decentralized!

they have repeated the "bitcoin versus ethereum" so many times that we all lost sight that ethereum is in reality competing with a dozen other platforms that are better than it, not with bitcoin which is not even in the same category as ETH!