you keep saying "other person", but who is this other person? an average Joe or a government agent or someone with power to get court order? and what is this payment? for something illegal or grey or legal but you want to keep your privacy?

you see there are different levels of anonymity. for instance when "I" see your account here i can not know who you are, what your IP is,... and i will never know. but the owner of this forum knows all that information.

in other words you must first decide who you are trying to keep your anonymity from. an average Joe can not ask the exchange to reveal your identity to him without a court order so you shouldn't care about KYC of exchanges in that case.
the ultimate anonymity is when you buy with cash and mix coins and it costs a lot because off the market and buying with cash they will sell you at a higher price like 20% higher than the market for example.

SEC is United State Securities and Exchange Commission not Japan's or Korea's or elsewhere. them having regulations doesn't concern SEC and their decision about ETF.

this sounds interesting but do you have a reference for it, i don't really follow this stuff.

i don't have high hopes for its approval to be honest and even if it were approved i definitely don't see $60k in 5-6 months! and surely hope it doesn't happen because it would be the biggest bubble of our times.

your topic is all over the place!

no, bitcoin price didn't shoot up anywhere. it is just price on this platform alone that has shown this number. i do not know what the case was but it can be a bug, a simple jump in price due to low liquidity in that market or anything else like some bot going crazy...
i have seen weird things from BTC-e before, so i wouldn't think too much about it.

going from $6000 to $19000 is a bubble, you should never hope for a bubble. and it won't happen anyways even if you hope it or not...

why?
it was proven multiple times (i guess it is  4 times now) that $6000 is not going to be broken that easily and each time the minimum price that is reached goes higher. so why are you waiting for prices lower than that?

well the altcoin pumpers have always been using bitcoin to fool newbies into bag holding altcoins and lose money on them. they have been promising them big returns that never come. they even go as far as telling them that said shitcoins are replacing bitcoin. then when they dump on them these newbies open their eyes finally under that dump and see what was really going on.

most of the manipulation techniques do not require regulation or lack thereof. they instead require a small market with a thin orderbook so that they can have a big influence on it by having a smaller amount of money.

there is a big flaw in this argument in my opinion and that is the fact that you claim that you want to use cryptocurrency to benefit from that decentralization but then the only thing you care about is trading them... i find it contradictory with the main idea.

for example if you believe in decentralization of money through bitcoin for example, you don't even need to have an exchange account! exchanges are for traders who want to make profit (usually on their *surprise surprise* fiat). if you want bitcoin you don't even have to buy it, you can earn it like asking your boss to pay you in bitcoin, if you have a shop then sell your goods for bitcoin,... then you will be using bitcoin without even needing exchanges whether centralized or decentralized.

it is a nice tactic nonetheless. whenever you make a prediction there is only two possible outcomes and both of them are beneficial to you:
1. if your prediction doesn't come true, you will simply be forgotten since you are 1 in lots of people making silly predictions. the profit is that when you made that prediction you got that publicity, or "the moment of fame"! the extreme example is McAfee
2. if your prediction comes true then you suddenly gain a huge popularity and become a "future teller". and you can milk that popularity if you know how
it is a win-win situation either way...

one interesting thing about use cases and adoption is that they kind of go hand in hand with each other!
for example when more people adopt bitcoin then there will be more use cases for bitcoin because the merchants seeing more customer will have the incentive to accept bitcoin.
and also more merchants accepting bitcoin will show people there is use case and they adopt bitcoin more.

it is like a circle that comes back on itself.

it is all about the control. using a decentralized exchange you are mostly in control of your funds and the risks of losing them are minimal. also you do not have to trust a third party with your money since you give up that control using centralized exchanges.

the reason for the hype is that there has been many centralized exchange hacks in the past that has made people uneasy to work with any of them.

there is another hype that should be confused with the one i mentioned and that is the hype of the tokens like Wave,... that is for trading purposes and making profit from their pump and dumps.

90% of those who are talking about "death of bitcoin" are the same people who are trying so hard to buy bitcoin when it drops a small 5% so that they can accumulate a tiny bit more.

the rest (10%) are the newbies who fall for the 90% FUD and are scared of the situation.

day trading can always be a good source of income if you know how to do it and not end up bag holding by overdoing it. for example you can always find some potential altcoin in this big market and then invest in it for half a day while it gets pumped and earn at least 30% profit for that day alone. but holding that same altcoin can simply mean not only losing the opportunity to sell on top but also losing money when the dump crashes its price.

it is a way of advertising their useless token and get an army of paid shills advertise their useless token for them while paying them in that useless token. then the army has to hype up that crap in order to be able to dump it and receive a higher reward.

if their don't infect all these people, then there won't be as much hype for their useless project and it may not even survive long enough for them to make any money from it.

LOL, why exaggerate this much?!!
first of all this is bitcoin ETF not every altcoin out there ETF and if anything it will be affecting bitcoin.
besides ETF is just some hyped up bullshit that people are clinging to so that they have some false hope about the price rise because they couldn't find any other type of hope!

i'd say why even look for hope and silly things like ETF, bitcoin didn't have any nonsense like ETF for the past 9 years and it went from $0 to $20000 and will continue this way without them too.
...and even if ETF is approved money won't pour into bitcoin, it will pour into that ETF!

i refuse to click shortened links.

well the problem is that "crypto" also includes altcoins and majority of them are actually shit so you can't blame people for making such statements. they are correct in their own way.
but that has nothing to do with bitcoin. although bitcoin price is affected by their dump but it is still separate and is working on its own.

i don't think any real trader has lost faith. only newbies that had their dreams of getting rich in one day shattered have lost faith. others are waiting for a signal.

what the hell does market cap has to do with anything here
why is it that some people run to market cap whenever there is talk of numbers? i am genuinely curious...

this is how they are headed to that profit: $1 billion profit in a year is $83.333 million per month. considering their fees which is (IIRC) 0.2% that makes their monthly volume $41,666 million or about $1,388 million daily volume. checking coinmarketcap.com their daily volume now is $1,049 million so the calculations makes sense.

good point when you also take a look at the time when the article was published. by that time we were guessing this but now we are sure. it is obvious that the media and all those behind this "talk of manipulation" wanted to manipulate the price themselves. that was mostly an attempt to increase the drama at that time because of the drop.

so far the main concern that i have seen the governments have towards bitcoin is that they have a hard time taxing it. they they cover it up with things like saying it is used for money laundering,.... but in reality they don't care at all about that. they only care about taxation. and the solution to that is pretty simple and it is to ask exchanges, merchants,... to comply with AML KYC and tax people that way.

you can't really compare bitcoin businesses with banks and their CEOs. those CEOs are too big and influential in their country with all the money that they have and all their corruptions.
in comparison a bitcoin business owner like a CEO of an exchange is like a tiny user in their banking system.

obviously yes but there are sometimes restrictions for using bitcoin as a currency. for example i may want to buy groceries with bitcoin next time i go grocery shopping but the store doesn't accept bitcoin so what other choice do i have but to use fiat and use bitcoin as my investment?

and bitcoin is still young and it will be some time before it is mass adopted, has a huge price and becomes stable. by that time people will automatically shift towards using it more as a currency.

well it doesn't really have to do anything with bitcoin to cause a panic sell. we have seen many cases of things like this when for example Facebook banned the ICO scamfest on their platform and people panic sold bitcoin!!!

although there is another connection that is just a speculation mostly that i also agree with that says whenever people are dumping altcoins they do it to go back to fiat and they do it on altcoin exchanges that don't have any fiat market so they sell their altcoin (eg ETH) for bitcoin then transfer it to their bitcoin exchange and sell it for fiat and that pushed bitcoin price down.