if the scenario of last fork is going to happen then price should start falling NOW because the drop started nearly 2 months before the fork in late June and the biggest drop was in mid July which was 1.5 month before the fork (August 1).

but as you can see the price has been rising and the drop came before all this and was not even related to the fork!

yeah, I usually take a look at number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool using blockchain.info and if it is less than 5000 then I just pay 1-5 satoshi per byte for my transactions and have my confirmation in the next block.
if the number of unconfirmed transactions were more than 5000 then depending on how much I change it using my Electrum and what it suggests. but I rarely am in a rush to pay anything bigger so I either end up paying the same low amount or I don't make any transactions until mempool is back to normal.

I have seen the 21.co website give bad (very high) fee suggestions though so be careful when using it.

based on the trend of the past couple of years and looking at some charts if nothing changes and this trend continues, we can see $10,000 by the end of 2018 and that would be a simple 2x rise which is based on the current trend.

why would I want to bet anything! the money that I am supposed to bet i'll simply invest in bitcoin and get more profit.

I find it interesting that none of these news are new

maybe their CEO made an statement recently but they have been involved with bitcoin for a long time.

this has never stopped ever since Japan started accepting bitcoin as a legal way of payment. it has been growing every day.

I don't know this one

I disagree with the first part, the price rise or more accurately the come back is the correction of the massive dump/dip that we had recently.
but I agree with the second part, things like this contribute to the long term steady growth of bitcoin. and the upward trend will be sustained.

the best time to invest is in the dip (eg. the $3xxx range) other than that all prices are good when you consider the long term price and how it can be 10,000 pretty soon.

either your wallet is broken or you are creating huge transactions with lots of inputs that you are paying such high amount of fees. my suggestion is changing your wallet to another decent wallet or stop accepting lots of inputs and try to keep your keys free of dust.

I have been paying about 1000-2000 satoshi for the past couple of months and I get a high priority in the next block that comes. that is $0.04 fee

no bitcoin wallet will support bitcoin gold fork because it is a completely different and separate fork although it seems to be forking from bitcoin but it is creating a 100% new altcoin.
it also has a premine which nobody in bitcoin world looks good upon these things.

if you want to claim it you will have to download their specific wallet from what they release in the future on their website and then import your bitcoin private keys in that to claim the new altcoins.

an effective FUD will cause panic, the panic leads to selling and that means a high volume. so in case trading volume was low, you can be sure there is no FUD around or if there is, it is not an effective one.

about the "take profit" part I have to say it is not always like that. sometimes it is an indication of slow down which is a good time to take the profit before the correction. but also it can mean an accumulation phase has started, they usually have a high volume but it will always be much lower than the rising or dropping times.

It really depends on the market not the bot.
the bot just makes things easier and much faster. it can also make sure you don't miss an opportunity depending on the trading bot and how it works, but if the market is good and if you choose your timings wisely and you choose what you invest in wisely, then you can make a huge profit. and if you don't make those choices properly you may even lose money.

you can not really stop this. generations could not stop it. there has always been scammers who want to rob others to make money, even back in the stone ages they robbed other caves with their weapons (being big spears and stones)
this is really not limited to bitcoin. all you can do is to learn how to protect yourself. use your brain, research, ask others if you could not figure it out. it is really not that complicated either.

it is called "chain analysis". the address you send to which belongs to the gambling site is going to go to their cold storage at some point and that makes it easy to associate the address with the gambling site. also you will make a withdrawal at some point and some of these gambling sites will pay from their known addresses or cold storages even and that makes it obvious you got paid from a gambling site.

there are also other types, like those on chain gamblings where you send the payment and if you win they pay from their address which is tagged publicly with their names (like what you see on blockchain.info saying satoshdice here https://blockchain.info/popular-addresses)

in my opinion any amount cant be a good amount for trading. it really depends on you and how much money you have at your disposal and want to enter it in trading and take all the risks.

I am not a beginner but I am not an advanced trader either. for me the proper amount is usually 0.5BTC which is currently about $2000+. I feel more comfortable with this amount. I make some profit then cash that profit out. but this doesn't mean I have never invested more or less. there have been times where I only invested 0.01BTC in some altcoin or I have invested a much higher amount (a couple of BTC) in some altcoins. for example I bought a lot of Litecoin this year before the rise back when price was still $4.

again like August thing, it is impossible to speculate about bitcoin price now.
because just like August thing, there are a lot of things that can change and with them the price may take a very different route. the uncertainty is going to be the worst part of it. and it is going to last a long time until we get real close to the fork itself and start seeing the real support for this fork. by then you can clearly say what will the price be. if they split the community and bitcoin into two, I don't see good days ahead. but if the community and bitcoin continues to stay as 1 (like it did so far) there will be a big price rise again just because the uncertainty that I talked about above will be gone and there will be a rush to buy bitcoin.

these countries support for bitcoin is pretty good, there is no denying that but at the end of the day bitcoin will remain the decentralized currency that the users all around the world will determine the demand for it and consequently set its price not the countries.

all these supports and denials will just help speed up or slow down the process respectively. they can not stop it. the adoption is happening and it is growing and with it the price goes up.

lol, the bubble is not the bubble you make in your bathtub
it is economical bubble, and it is not real for bitcoin. they are just spreading FUD.

and I have to say a bubble can not last long, it can not get bigger and bigger for a long time. the life time of a bubble is pretty short, the bubble shapes up then it bursts pretty soon. you see a bubble is an unstable price because it is not real. in other words if bitcoin price were a bubble it would have already burst a long time ago and price would have gone down.

which market are you talking about here? bitcoin or altcoins.
bitcoin market, no it is not "totally" manipulated. but manipulation exists like it exists in any other market
altcoin market, yes it is totally manipulated. but for most of them this is serious for the rest not so much.

you are talking about "manipulation" so 1 big order of a big size can simply be that "manipulation". maybe some whale is trying to push the orders higher than his order so he can slowly dump into these new orders.
if you watch the market there are a lot of bots that are set to place orders on top when there is a big order in place.

and also based on my experience the big orders (walls) are usually for show. they never are reached. if the market is in dumping mode that wall is always going to move lower and lower and never be reached.

haha, the bitcoin cash result is the funniest of all.
they hyped it all up and did all they could to fool some people into believing bitcoin cash is the real bitcoin, some of them still believe it too. they even manipulated mining with their difficulty adjustment crap and pumped the coin as much as they could. but it is now DEAD.
go take a look at last 1000 blocks, they are all EMPTY. nobody uses it anymore.

that is a possibility but I do not think price can be affected greatly by cases like this. even the bitcoin cash rise, I don't think the reason for that rise was completely related to that fork. there were other reasons that was mentioned above in a comment. but as I said it is possible that some new "demand" is created because of it.

besides bitcoin gold is not really a serious thing. it was first supposed to be an ICO! then they changed their mind and changed it in to a premined coin.

I see two things:

1. usability: that when it increases, like when more places start accepting bitcoin payment, the adoption grows and more people from different levels of society start knowing about bitcoin.

2. you can buy less than 1 whole bitcoin: some people still don't know this, surprisingly! so some of them might think twice before wanting to invest $4000, $5000 all at once. but the reality is that you can simply buy smaller amounts. like $100 worth of bitcoin.

you have invested about $19000.
investing in bitcoin alone is a good thing, last year 4.6 was worth less than $3000 and now it is $19k and the year before last it was worth about $1000
but whether 19k was a good decision or not depends on you. is it an amount you are willing to risk or afford to lose?

they should invest what you can afford to lose. based on their funds some buy 0.01BTC some 1BTC and some 21BTC and all other in the middle.

then invest what you can afford to lose, that is the "standard" of any investment!

this is exactly what most people forget when they are talking about "early adopters". they think everybody who were involved with bitcoin MUST be a multi millionaire by now.

but in fact things have not changed at all. right now you don't see bitcoin be worth $200,000 so when it goes up to $5000 you think it is a great deal to sell. what will people in 2020 tell about us who sold at $5000