trying to come up with numbers is just silly, you are just throwing dart in total darkness and hope you hit the target!

all we know is that price will rise in long term and although right now we may be seeing some down time that will surely change in long term. additionally we will have the block reward halving by 2020 which will boost the price of bitcoin because of hype and then after it by actually decreasing the rate at which new supply is created so you may say it reduces the supply as in the number of coins being sold by miners.

but by how much is impossible to predict.

two people can look at the same exact thing and see different things!
just because price goes up and down it doesn't mean it is getting pumped and dumped!

right now it is pretty stable and there are longer periods of time where it is pretty stable. but if you want more stability, you have to wait for the mass adoption to come and also wait for exchanges to stop being shady so that more people start using them and fill the order books.

this is more of a conspiracy theory while wearing a tin foil hat in my opinion. Coinmarketcap.com is just a website that lists altcoins it can not influence the market the way the author of that article thinks.

although Coinmarketcap.com has done a great damage to us by using market capitalization (which is completely useless) as way to rank altcoins! and unfortunately this has become the only factor for people to assess an altcoin and compare them! this also has caused good projects to be pushed down just because they never had a huge supply or a premine like top altcoins such as ETH.

the only reason that i have seen people send dust to these famous addresses is the case to advertise something. but since there is no message here i am not sure this is the case.
but a while ago when you opened these addresses on blockchain.info there used to be a little message on top of them containing a small string. i have seen people advertise their website, beg for money, advertise Ponzi double the coins in 24 hours,... this way.
blockchain.info recently removed this from their platform. maybe there are still some scripts out there that are doing this type of spamvertising because the spammer is not aware of this change or maybe there are other explorers that has this option.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4707/what-method-does-my-wallet-use-to-encode-messages-in-the-blockchain/4709#4709

example of such messages:

https://blockchain.info/Resources/faq/public_notes1.png

edit: i actually found an article explaining how to increase page rank using this method (obviously this is obsolete now)

https://medium.com/@maciejolpinski/recreating-google-s-pagerank-on-the-bitcoin-blockchain-a9173b762605

a big company that is located in US is definitely going to share ALL the data of ALL its users with big 3 letter agencies such as NSA and CIA. they always pull some publicity stunts from time to time saying "we are resisting and won't give them anything" but they have been doing it all along.

that is why i am also always skeptical when i read things like this saying there was a "leak". i always think they are covering something up.

if you buy anything its price will go up as long as your buy volume is bigger than the sell order size that is available on the exchange.
in case of this coin a quick look at its market, orderbook and volume shows that it is a dead coin. the daily volume is barely reaching $50 and there is rather a big spread among the orders.

if you buy a big amount of it, the price of this dead coin will go up but you won't be able to sell it because there is nobody who is dumb  enough to pay that high a price to buy it from you. not to mention that because of its low volume if some dumb person decided to buy it, he will only buy a tiny amount!

imagine you needed open heart surgery, would you ask a celebrity to operate on you just because he/she is famous?

creating an altcoin as a celebrity is as ridiculous as the example i used here. and that is why the altcoin market is a complete mess these days! everyone who wants free money is joining this market, the lazy ones are just investing (ie throwing their money away by gambling it on altcoins) and less lazy ones are creating a new coin or token... everyone is doing it only to make more money.


no this particular one and the likes of it will only ruin everything for everyone as they fill the market with crap and has already took a dump on the name of cryptocurrencies.

a real trader does not need an always rising (bull) market to make profit. a real trader will find a way to make a profit in any kind of market by only adjusting his strategy to the market and the ongoing trend. so when you say "effects of these days dips" on a trader, it shows that you are only familiar with a tiny part of trading which is buying when price is low but is rising and selling after a while and have no clue what to do in any other scenario.

maybe not the single currency of the future, but anybody with half a brain can see the huge potential that bitcoin has in its future and they can see clearly that none of these short term dramas matter when you stop only thinking about price and start looking at the bigger picture. for example a year ago price was lower than $1000 and now it is more than 8 times higher.
in long term with the growing adoption and all the improvements we will see a much bigger bitcoin than today.

Bitstamp is a website, or a business, a centralized one at that. if you don't like their rules then don't use them. but that is going to be the same in any other exchange that is using fiat currencies sooner or later because that is how the world works. these businesses that handle fiat transactions have to comply with AML/KYC rules sooner or later.
the fact that they have not been doing it  so far means they have been postponing it.

the range of $1.1 to $2.2 may seem small at first sight but if you look closer you can see that this range is actually HUGE because from $1.1 to $2.2 is a 100% rise and that is not something that can happen in any normal market and besides you are trying so hard to do a technical analysis and to this day i have never seen anyone choose such a huge price range and analyze it!!!

big companies like Valve don't like having lots of payment options on their platform since it only causes confusion and lots of headache for their support staff. and when people don't use that option they won't continue to have it on their platform.

for years people asked Valve to add bitcoin support so more than a year ago they did and lots of gamers used that option to purchase lots of things from Steam Store. but for a couple of months last year fees went up to ridiculous amounts, amounts that were 10 times higher than value of most games on their platform so nobody used bitcoin payment option anymore so they dropped it.


why does this link look weird (starts with google.com instead of directly to the site)? just curious

if any coin does that, it means they have already failed in the first step.
cryptocurrencies are supposed to be decentralized or peer to peer not big centralized overlord to big centralized overlord.
besides they should already improve their coin to be working properly enough so that enough "peers" adopt them and they wouldn't even need any "big time group"s approval in first place.

if you look at each of the previous major dumps from the ATH you can see each of them are getting smaller and smaller and all of them without exception started with a huge FUD.
right now there is no reason for a drop but only reason for a rise. and unless a fresh FUD starts up i don't see any major drops either.

just because $9500 is not the price we are seeing doesn't mean there will be a drop. it is more like a retracement before testing it again from where i am standing.

since the current price is already more than half below the ATH and we have had a couple of drops already which were bigger than this one, i'd say we are somewhere around E where we may have some more drops but only small ones and generally there won't be a big rise only smaller ones and a slow rise instead.

that is only fooling yourself into believing you have diversified where in fact you just made things complicated for yourself and increased the amount of money you lose. two main complications are keeping track of 100 different coins, their prices, news, fluctuations, dumps,... and also storage which is impossible to do safely and keeping on exchanges is just dumb.

diversification means you invest for example $1000 in bitcoin, $100 in altcoins, $1000 in Gold, $1000 in stocks and bonds.

this is already 12 days old. and it was created at that time to spread FUD and create panic so that price falls more. now it is over.

and i have only 1 thought about this and it is an interesting one:
bitcoin is a decentralized currency, which as you may know it is called as censorship resistance. what i am trying to point out is that bitcoin is not something that anybody can shut down. so saying "we need to shut it down" only shows that the person saying it has no understanding of what bitcoin is.

bitcoin has been moving sideways for a long time now. these $400 rises and falls that you are talking about are just small percentages (~4% in this case) which aren't really anything worth talking about.
and i don't think this small drop had anything to do with Japan or anything else, it is just because the rise was not strong enough to break some resistances and head to $10k so price dropped down.

your title tells me the article is going to help me learn how to choose a coin to invest in, so lets break it down.
the first two paragraphs are just explaining the problem not the solution. and contain some obvious yet not so helpful pointers in them!
so far the question in the title is not answered.

then the article suddenly moves on to a totally different subject. while it is an important subject but it is irrelevant to the subject and the problem at hand (which is not yet answered). it explains how to buy and introduces exchanges (completely off topic).

then it moves to another important but completely irrelevant subject: cold storage! so as a reader who saw the title and wanted that question answered now i am reading another irrelevant content here

finally it moves to something that is move relevant: Fundamental Analysis but i still say it is all over the place and too vague.
then to make things even worse it brings in TA but leaves the explanation half ass by only showing 2 charts!

sorry but i still didn't get what the title of your link to your website promised me

in 2018 that is not a good excuse anymore and i have actually tested this!

have people in your country heard about bitcoin? has anyone from your country invested in bitcoin?
if the answer to the two above questions is YES, which most probably it is, then there is a good chance that next time you go to a shop and ask them whether they are willing to accept bitcoin for your purchase they will accept it.

and i have tested this last month! i went to buy a motherboard and while i was waiting i though let's have some fun, i asked the guy and he was more than excited to accept bitcoin payment because he was already investing in bitcoin and didn't mind having some more directly from me...