they have been doing it for a long time and a couple of other banks have actually already released their own blockchain and their own centralized altcoin. suffice it to say that they have not been successful because nobody wants a centralized bank cryptocurrency at all.

bitcoin will always remain the first and biggest cryptocurrency because it is and also because it is decentralized. this will never change until something with same attributes (decentralization and fair distribution,...) and additional better attributes come along which has not yet happened.

if your private keys were imported in your wallet then you can NOT recover them using the 12 word recovery phrase which is also called Seed. seed only recovers the keys that were generated by your wallet not the ones you have imported.

for that you have to have the private keys separately and use them. or you can look around in your blockchain.info account to see if they allow you to get the private key of that particular address you have imported. it should be under your wallet section.

this is one of the funny scams that I have ever heard of!
0.5BTC every 18 hours is screaming scam, you'll have to be blind not to see that and on top of it they ask your recovery phrase to credit your account! what the hell is that. they are asking for your private keys instead of bitcoin address for payment. any newbie in bitcoin knows that is a clear scam.

I sometimes feel like scammers are also becoming lazy. they used to come up with good scam techniques which were hard to detect.

uh man, again with the bloodbath
drops happen, sometimes they are even big drops. this time it was a medium drop or more accurately I have to say it was "2 back to back small drops".

and we are talking about bitcoin here, a drop in bitcoin is not a "bloodbath" it is a celebration. you are getting bitcoin for a much cheaper price than its market value whenever there is a dip. if you choose to believe the FUD and be scared of them you will never succeed in bitcoin market. but if you see past the bullshit and see the real opportunity that is presenting itself to you, you can make a lot of money.

see this topic to see all the same "bloodbaths" so far: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1935374.0;all

bitcoin price is not really "uncertain" any more. it has actually been moving up and down pretty logically for at least 2 years and probably even more. the fact that you sometimes don't understand why it is moving in a direction or is volatile doesn't mean it has no reason and it certainly doesn't mean it was "uncertain".

and as long as it is predictable you can say volatility is good for traders because they can make the most profit out of a market like this. and bitcoin makes profit easier because you can be sure that even if you made a mistake and bought too late the price will recover and you will be in profit eventually.

yes bitcoin cash is the most damaging to bitcoin to this date and will continue to be. but bitcoin is not in trouble. the damages has been minimal and very short lived. and as you can see everything is back to normal, the damages they did to mining only lasted a couple of days and unless they pump it hard and reduce the difficulty a lot, it won't happen again.

sadly most of what people say publicly are childish attacks on each other. these different camps attack each other like this over control on bitcoin!

no it is not.
the mining power of bitcoin is the same as before now. the BCH hashrate was new and it still is coming from other sources not the bitcoin power.

no it has not.
if hashrate dropped down to 20% of current hashrate then what you said was true. but the drop was tiny and it didn't even last more than a couple of days!

this is off topic.

two things:
you fell for FUD and sold
you are in it for the profit despite talking about "bitcoin's core value" and "hashrate",... you probably don't even care about any of that!

bitcoin job was never to make you rich and always go up in price.
the bitcoin job was to be a decentralized currency and to this day it has done that perfectly despite most people seeing it as an investment and "get rich quick" thing.

the chances of that happening is close to zero.

pretty interesting because not so long ago I have actually seen a couple of different topics by different people talking about buying a house with bitcoin. there was actually one person who was thinking about putting up an ad even to find someone who accepts bitcoin for a house.

I still think it is too soon for bitcoin to be used for things this big. because if you buy something worth $100 for example and price fluctuates 20% you won't feel a thing and it won't matter but if you buy something worth $50,000 and price fluctuates 20% you will feel the change! it is $10,000 change.

ICO is always going to be a high risk investment. and at the present time because of all the rules that Chinese government is setting for ICOs and banning them in their country it may not be the wisest of ideas to start investing in them. you should really think twice these days.
don't let the discounts no matter how big play with your emotions and force you to make a decision that you regret later.

since the "China's decision" were to eliminate all the scams from the market you can be sure that the effects of it will be great on the market. because it is the first step of many towards having a much healthier altcoin market instead of hundreds after hundreds of scams which call themselves ICO and prey on the gullible.

I really don't see any "pattern" at all that looks remotely the same let alone for the pattern to be "strong".
your picture comparing the two doesn't make any sense either. you are comparing a short period of couple of weeks with a period of nearly 5 months!

back in 2013 there was only one exchange with complete control over the market that pumped the price over the course of 1 month and led to the big and prolonged decline. and back then nobody knew about bitcoin apart from those who were mining it with their PC and those in silkroad and other dark markets.

now in 2017 the growth has been ridiculous. compared to 2013 nobody could ever even dream of a country adopting bitcoin and announcing it as a "legal way of payment" now Japan started it and couple of others followed. it was bound to increase the adoption and with it the price and a rise like this was inevitable.
and again in comparison it took about 9 months to get a smaller price rise than 2013.

TLDR
2013 rise was 500% in about 1 month
2017 rise was 308% in 9 months.

there are multiple ways to answer this POLL! the results won't be the same if you consider different people with different strategies regarding bitcoin!

as a long term holder you buy whenever you have money. the price does not matter. it would be like asking me whether I would have bought bitcoin at $320 or $220! the answer is at all both and all the prices in between and I did buy and I am still buying and I will continue to buy at $5000, $5500 and so on too.

as a day trader I'm not much of a day trader but I guess today was the best time to short bitcoin. and in order to buy back I would wait a while before doing it. a better opportunity may arise but I will place some orders at least at $4000 if I never had bought anything in this dip because it would be a shame to lose all this opportunity.

to be frank I can not see the relationship between Bitcoin (a completely transparent cryptocurrnecy which China never had any issues with and never will have) and ICOs (which is a clear scam and at best a fake way of taking money out of the hands of gullible).

in fact many countries are against ICO (initial distribution stuff like it). it is actually illegal to do it in many countries.

it is a free market and nobody can or should be able to do anything about who does what.

China never influenced anything ever!
it was all the market manipulation using the news of China as subject. and we all saw that when the China news ceased to exist during the months when PBoC was inspecting, bitcoin market still performed the same way as before with the exact same drops and rises!

here is the palpable example of the dump that happened because of bitcoin price going down.
you can clearly see that altcoins have been dropping hard today. and both against bitcoin and USD.

here is their stats against bitcoin:



and here is the stats against USD. and here you can see how the drop of altcoins is much bigger than drop of bitcoin.

it depends. as an end user you shouldn't worry about these things much. just make sure to choose a good wallet that is known to suggest appropriate fees based on the ongoing situation. bitcoin Core (which is a full node) and Electrum (which is a light wallet or SPV) are two examples.

if you want to know more then check out this website: http://bitcoinfees.21.co/
it is not the most accurate estimation sometimes but it has good information on it that you can use.

no there is nothing complicated about using bitcoin. it may be complicated for many of the altcoins since they don't have decent wallets, no services such as Coinbase for example, ...
but for bitcoin it is all easy and they want it is user friendly too. if you get to technical (which is not at all required for end users) then it becomes complicated.

no, the transaction fees of bitcoin are low. you can transfer $10,000,000 in the safest way possible in an instant and only pay $4 (worse case scenario) or pay $0.05 in most cases.

for ethereum yes, because it is not a currency. it is a token that you have invested in and you will have to sell it to get fiat in order to do anything with it.
but with bitcoin it is a currency, you can use it as such if the other party accepts it. so there is no need for any complications here either. you just point, click and pay.

something like that will have additional costs (fees) not less fees.
it is not possible to trust a third party like that.
and also we are using bitcoin because we want the option of not needing any third parties which means such businesses won't be so popular.

well, services like Coinbase do exist and people use them. but they are only newcomers or those who want to purchase or trade bitcoin and a couple of altcoins that they offer. not someone who wants to use bitcoin.

since we are still in rally mode and so far there is nothing to prove otherwise, I say about a week.
looking at the charts it usually takes as much too.

usually when bitcoin goes down altcoins go down with it too. if a dump happens ETH gets dumped even more.

but with the fork of ETH on the way things may be different. I don't yet speculate which way but there will be a drastic change in price it can be a big drop because they are killing mining or it can be a big pump because temporarily people think they can make more profit out of it.

in any case don't try to plan just base on how bitcoin moves.

1 satoshi is the smallest unit in bitcoin and since there are 8 decimal points in bitcoin, 1 satoshi = 0.00000001 bitcoin.
or you can say 1 bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshi. and at code level this is the real unit not bitcoin.

I think services such as Amazon and eBay will be a lot more effective any all these other ones. because Uber and things like that are very limited to one country but Amazon is more global that anything else and also it has a lot more usages. it almost has everything you can buy online and easy. and adding bitcoin would change a lot of things and helps it forward 100 times than anything else can.

that is a concern that you will always have. I think that every investor has it. and you have to live with it.
think about it this way, there is chance of price going up and there is a chance of it going down. speculate which one is higher and lean towards that. if you speculate the chances of drop is higher then sell more and if you think chances of rising is higher then sell less.

either way if you need the money and can't really do anything else to get that kind of money then you'll have to sell.

in fact I sold some coins myself recently because I am about to buy an apartment. and yes I have already missed on $500 rise but I can live with that because I still have bitcoin and I am still buying/earning more if I see an opportunity or if I get some additional cash.

buying an apartment just to rent and make money of it is oftentimes not the most profitable investment, specially if the price of apartments doesn't go up in your country/area that you buy it.
also make sure to find out about all the costs that doing something like that will have. sometimes the "profit" is not as much as you think.

investing in a real business that you own is a lot more profitable, if you haven't yet made up your mind I suggest thinking about this a little.