you can't really generalize it. ICO is mostly luck and if the persons behind it are good at pumping their project or are new to this. but I agree that things are changing, it was the same with the premined coins too. at first they were good and people invested in them and prices went high just for the owner to dump the premined coins at high prices.
then people caught on to the scam and stopped investing in any of them.

now the same is going on with ICOs. they replaced premining with ICO and every time the ICO coin is listed n the exchange the price plummets as everyone starts dumping for profit.
and people are catching on to this new scam, and generally bad plan and they will slowly stop investing in any of them.

when it comes to storing your bitcoins it is not a matter of how some type of storage will typically last. it is the question of how good can YOU protect it. I have 2 USB disks (USB 2.0) that are about 11 years old and they both work fine and I have my wallet on one of them without any problems.

also on top of that there is always the option of taking a backup. many wallets these days are HD wallets meaning they have a seed phrase which you can simply write down on piece of paper and store in a safe place, a safety deposit box in a bank for instance, and recover your bitcoins in case of losing the wallet.

if only I could get 1 satoshi each time someone posts that picture I would have been 2 in a million already
take a look at these quick and dirty screenshots I took today: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1935374.0
each of these rises are exactly the same as the current rise and each time we had the same thing where there is a big panic and they start panic selling to cause the dump and each time it is only because it is easy to manipulate bitcoin market since it is small to get your hands on cheap coins otherwise impossible to acquire.

first of all you are posting in the wrong board, this belongs to services discussion not here.

and secondly, are you freaking kidding me with this?!! your transaction is not yet confirmed and you want a refund? how can they pay you back what they have not yet received! you are still in control of the funds and from my standpoint you deliberately paid an extremely low fee of 61 satoshi per byte to get it stuck and request a refund in the hopes of doubling your money. in which case "not gonna happen bro"

in case, with a small chance, it was an honest mistake, you need to either wait until the transaction is confirmed which is probably never and they pay you back or double spend the fund with a high fee of 350-370 satoshi/byte so it gets a fast confirmation and this transaction is dropped and forget about the refund and also next time make sure to pay an appropriate fee.

sometimes pictures speak better than a thousand words.
all these are with the same zoom level and all at 12h steps taken from bitcoinwisdom the bitstamp market. except the first picture which is 1 day steps because  bitcoinwisdom doesn't load that much!












and finally what we have today:

oh man, are we on this FUD wagon again. we had a pretty nice couple of months with the same rises and safe falls without anybody thinking it is China, now they are not even back yet and you have already started the FUD or possibly just repeating the duck here!

and if anything, China has caused a rise not a fall because the price gap between China and USD markets is now much smaller than it was before.

I am burnt badly, my ass is on fire! I don't know why but my profit meter shows a >900% profit to me while price has dropped. maybe I have to hit the profit meter a couple of times, maybe its hand thingy is stuck.

CEX.io is mostly working with credit cards and the fees may be a bit higher than other methods to deposit money and because of that price can be a little crazy sometimes.
bitfinex is lower because the deposits are disabled for some time now and with no deposit people ran out of money to buy bitcoin and price stays lower.
gemeni has a more logical price
I have no idea about livecoin! I don't hear about it much.
Huobi is mostly Chinese exchange and they still have problems with PBoC despite all the good news the deposits there is still not resumed.

- these are my assumptions mostly, it can have a lot of different reasons.

I am an old user from back in 2014 and I am buying bitcoin whenever I can, whenever I have some money to invest. I have bought bitcoin when it was about $400 then bought more when it dropped down to $200 and continued buying each $100 step up until $2xxx prices and will continue doing so...

and anybody else, no matter old or new if they know the real potential of bitcoin are buying bitcoin like this. it is not just about these small short term fluctuations of $400 up and down. the real rise is always in the long run.
have you seen the 1 in a million topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790863.0

if I saw this about 48 hours ago I would have said a little in bitcoin and the rest among a couple of altcoins. but today I will say all in bitcoin. the price took a dive and it is a very good chance to buy in if you have missed it before.
as I said in another topic you can buy in multiple steps.
for example you can deposit your $500 and then buy $200 now and wait a little to see which way it goes first. then if it dropped a little buy another $100 and another $100 if drop was little more. if the drop was big then buy the $300
or if price went up do the same. if it was a little rise buy another $100 and if it showed signs of another big rise then go in with the rest of $300 and enjoy the profit.

you can change the numbers to what you feel is safer. but the important part is the price you decide to buy at.

the thing is, at that moment nobody even knew bitcoin can be worth >$2000!
you may have said bitcoin is awesome and can rise up a lot but it certainly didn't look possible when price was practically nothing.
after some point when the little adoption occurred and the community grew, the number of nodes and miners (with their PC) grew then it became clear that bitcoin has a real potential. I think somewhere around $100 it was certain. I wasn't around back then but I certainly know it now and I will never repeat the mistake of selling my coins cheap at $3000 that would be throwing it away. nothing below 10K for me.

there are only 16.5+ million coins currently available that are mined so far and half of that means 8.25 million not 12 and it is not a question of "when" it is the question of "if you are even able to reach that point". even the richest whales from early years don't have anything above 500,000 and the speculation about how much Satoshi owns is something less than 1 million.
if someone could have that big a share of bitcoin market, the price would never rise this much.

if you are a long term holder and want to be in bitcoin for the long haul then don't even double think it, just buy right now. even if you are reading this comment tomorrow, 10 days or 2 years from now. price will rise in long term, always.

another option is buying with a portion of your money right now and then wait a little to see what happens, you may get lucky and be able to get cheaper coins in which case buy with other portion, or you may get unlucky and price goes up in which case again buy with the other portion at higher price.
this way you buy something first so you don't miss out on anything and lower the risk.

you can't blame them, many don't yet accept bitcoin because it is not regulated and they are running a legit business and going towards adopting bitcoin is a lot of work and paperwork for their legal department. and they have not yet seen enough demand from their users.
but when bitcoin becomes regulated, like what we are witnessing in Japan, many more businesses start accepting bitcoin and also regular people also start buying bitcoin because it is less scary now.

your post makes zero sense.

Chinese exchanges had a lower price than the rest of the world. the news of a possible opening for next month causes a big spike in their trading volume and the price and people are currently are buying bitcoin on Chinese exchanges. and these exchanges opening means they will start working again and that means people will deposit more to continue trading not cash out after the exchange opened, that doesn't make any sense.

I am not surprised that this is coming from a Chinese. they don't care about anything apart from fiat. you give them literary anything that they can trade or better say gamble with, and they do it. they are known as traders and gamblers in the world. and that leads to this mindset of seeing only the investment part of bitcoin.

but it is idiotic to think that bitcoin rise is only because it is an investment. if bitcoin never had the currency part or loses that part someday it is the end of it. the rise so far from 0 to current price and all the future rises is only because bitcoin is a decentralized peer to peer digital cash.

for bitcoin I would have said that price is nothing but your timing I off by a couple of months. since I was expecting $2000 by the end of the year or at least after something bigger happened but it seems like the big thing already happened with Japan and Russia.

for ethereum I would have said their pumping team is strong but not this strong. and now it seems like I was underestimating the power the ETH PUMP TEAM has

wait a minute!
didn't you say goodbyte to bitcoin and go away like 3 months ago because you said bitcoin is over?! and then you said I have to leave the bitcoin community after many years, yadda yadda!

oh wait here is the topic: Goodbye Bitcoin

* just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in

when the Chinese exchanges closed down the deposits they also closed the withdrawals and that means anybody who had any money in the exchange had it stuck their in their accounts. and they practically gave up on trading there and the volume and also price fell and stayed down.

when the news came that they are opening up again in next month, everybody came back and started trading bitcoin again and that caused the spike in both volume and price together.

everywhere people are the same, but to be fair in the past year or so I have noticed a lot more bitcoin awareness around me. for example I was visiting a forum in my language when I saw there is a big topic about analyzing bitcoin price and it already had a lot of pages of people discussing it.
with all this news about Japan, then ransomware, ... bitcoin is all over the media and with the price rising to the moon a lot of attention is focused on it.