all of it is true, bitcoin is borderless, decentralized, has finite supply,... and i truly believe that price will be $100k and then $500k and even $1million+ but i can not see bitcoin going up 1119% in only 5 months. that is simply impossible in my opinion.

and not just that, i hope that such rise doesn't happen because it will become a huge bubble which will burst and create a very long bear market which nobody wants.

competition is always good. it keeps businesses honest and on their toes forcing them to always try and provide the best and cheapest services. otherwise if we end up having 1 or 2 giants they end up taking the whole market and never improve and eventually they may even turn bad.

not to mention that we need more payment processors in other countries that are not US. BitPay and Coinbase which are two of the biggest ones are already in US!

instead of thinking of ways to silence trolls (which is impossible in practice) start thinking of ways that we can make the market bigger so that it is not affected by "panic sells".

for example the real problem is the fact that exchanges are not trusted enough for people to use them as much as they should. if they become more trusted so that we see a lot more open orders (both bids and asks) then we can see less volatility, and a much smaller drop due to panic sells and a much smaller rise due to FOMO buys.

i fear for you my friend. you sound too hyped up about bitcoin and you are making a huge mistake by investing in it irresponsibly like this. i suggest looking back at what you have done so far and making better decisions by investing a more reasonable amount in bitcoin and stop forcing others to invest in bitcoin, that never ends well.

you will be disappointed soon if price doesn't shoot up as you wish it to. and all the while you don't have a house anymore. not to mention that if by a little chance you lost your wallet and backups then you lose EVERYTHING and go broke.

based on what i have seen so far from the Indian government and their banking system i can say that quite the opposite is true. at the very least we will see a hard future with a lot of restrictions and going back and forth for cryptocurrencies.
their government doesn't want to give up control and they see bitcoin as a serious threat to their control and corruption.

all i know is that people have been saying nearly the same things last year about bitcoin futures. it is also an extremely hyped up situation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-31/bitcoin-futures-could-open-to-floodgates-of-institutional-money
that is partly where the $50k-$100k by the end of 2018 comes from. the result as we can see today was a bubble for 1 months and a bubble burst and a bear market follow up for 6 months and no institutional money came in really.

i don't see anything different about ETF either.
the only thing i agree with is this part in OP "Most importantly, etf approval will take bitcoin out of the shadows and encourage mass adoption." mostly because it will put an end to bullshit FUD about bitcoin and scared off investors may open their eyes.

it is not just greed that leads to market manipulation it is at least 10 other factors that lead to it and then greed enters and makes it easier. otherwise the manipulators are using their large funds and the small size of the market to pump and dump altcoins for instance. then they are using the fact that the market is filled with newbies who are lazy but want money so the pump and dump groups shape up which end up with scamming these newbies.

whatever you do, don't look for a mentor online because there is a 99% chance that you only get someone who either will troll you or mislead you and you will end up losing money!

the thing is, altcoin's market cap can grow faster and bigger than bitcoin's which is why we are at 47%-50%,... instead of being at 90%+. for example when some altcoin has already 40 billion coins in circulation and it rises something like $1 then it will increase the total market cap by $40 billion easy. and that is just a small pump for said coin.

by the way where did you get that money flow chart from?

actually i believe that bitcoin adoption in Africa is good enough considering the situation and comparing it to the whole world. for example in most of the world the bitcoin adoption is already slow  with exception of some countries such as Japan. but in Africa as somewhat of a developing country we have already had a good level of adoption which we may not even have in many other countries.

if you have any particular reason to believe it is otherwise i am eager to hear it.

what does online gambling have anything to do with bitcoin? it is like one of the many usages and it is in the list of smaller ones out there. using it as a reason for making a decision on bitcoin is like saying since terrorists are using US dollar then we should ban US and everything related to them!

there has been some shady things going on over at wex.nz exchange for a while now.
first they started having some server problems.
then suddenly the withdrawals/deposits were disabled for all their coins. which was supposed to be fixed 2 days ago https://twitter.com/WEXnz/status/1018872081994436608 but i don't think it is fixed yet.
then suddenly they started having maintenance on their site without any prior warning https://twitter.com/WEXnz/status/1019864877568061440 and the site went down.

the rise is partly because people have been turning all their balances to bitcoin and then changing that for btc-e code (or wex code) and selling that code cheaper to get their money out because they fear an exit scam.
other part is possibly wex pumping bitcoin on their platform because nobody else is trading anymore so that anybody who buys has to pay a higher price to them and in case they come back they would have already made a lot of profit.

...no centralized authority to dictate how you use your own money
...highest security possible
...the best privacy that you can hope for when making payments
...offers protection for merchant from charge back frauds that is common
...being scarce
and a lot more. these may sound simple in words but if you start thinking deeply about them you can see what the "true value" of such system is.

you expect such statements from people on a forum with lack of education and being lazy to do a quick search. but you'd expect someone who writes an article to at least google where you can spend bitcoin and see how many are spending. i keep reporting bitpay because it is the easiest reference: $110 million per month in 2017!

i still think this might be a small rise instead of being a big bull run like what he had constantly last year. after all this is just a 30% rise from the absolute bottom ($6000) if you take the higher level where the rise really began it is about 20% rise then.

for a big bang and breakout above $10k we need the ETF to be approved first. otherwise we may end up having the rise postponed which may not be such a bad thing either as it would make the rise stronger.

there are many altcoins out there called a lot of names that include bitcoin such as bitcoin core, bitcoin cash, bitcoin dark, bitcoin gold,... what OP is talking about is bitcoin. it doesn't have any trailing words.

as for BCash fee, it doesn't have near zero fees it has the exact same fee and fee mechanism as bitcoin meaning minimum fee is 1 satoshi/byte and when blocks are full it grows as it grew a couple of months ago when someone spam attacked Bcash for 2 days for fun

there has never been such a "normal market cycle" that you have in mind. a normal market cycle was a slow rise then a big one ending with a bubble followed by a big drop correcting that bubble and then the same thing be repeated.
there is no timeframe for it and there is no certain months of year to rise or fall for it either.


first of all bitcoin price is rising, in  fact it has been rising for about a month now so your title is wrong and also the downtrend that we had was an appropriate length. it lasted about 6 months and the size was more than 70%.
secondly the altcoins are getting dumped like always so the "normal market cycle" is still intact and as before.

well it depends on how much bitcoin your friend owns and also it depends on how much he values his security!

for example if he owns a large sum of bitcoin then it justifies buying a hardware wallet and be safe instead of having a false sense of security by storing his wallet file on a USB and loading it into a possibly already infected windows machine!

or if he values his security but  doesn't want to buy/trust a hardware wallet he can learn how to use Linux. he doesn't have to become a super expert in it to be able to use it. there are some pretty basic stuff that he needs to do and they are all easy.

"fall for sure"?
how are you even sure about it? it is impossible to predict the market unless you are confusing a "correction" with a "fall". the former is a natural course of the market and as you can see we have been seeing small corrections to keep this rise healthy and strong but the later is a big drop which is highly unlikely since the bull market is starting to show itself now.

well when you are trying to buy bitcoin without revealing your identity, you may not be a thief but you are a tax-evader which is another illegal act that you may unknowingly perform. which means you will have a tough time finding legit places and safely trade. and you will have to pay higher price for bitcoin because you are not just buying bitcoin you are also buying your privacy.

the main reason for this rise in my opinion is the fact that a lot of investors have been waiting for any kind of signal to get in. the drops and the staying at the bottom (aka $6k) which lasted a couple of  weeks meant that many started getting nervous about investing in bitcoin. many investors were still having doubts and the rise removed all those doubts.

now that they are bringing their money back in the market the price is rising like this as their deposits from banks confirm.

of course there is ETF hype but it is icing on the cake.