Yes, alts can rise without bitcoin. What will trigger this? High confidence in crypto. That's all.

When confidence is low, we get a bear market.
When confidence is okay, we can get upwards BTC price movement, and maybe alts dragged along a bit as well.

When confidence is very high, people are willing to move out of BTC and into alts - and this is when we have an alt bull without BTC.

We could really do with some positive price movement about now. We keep dropping, and then each mini-recovery is only partial, so we are at a lower level than before. I still don't think that $5k for BTC would be a disaster, but a change in the general direction of travel would be welcome about now.

An alt season or alt run looks unlikely in the near future. At the moment it is all about holding support levels against the relentless downwards prcie pressure. everything depends on bitcoin at the moment. Where BTC leads, alts will follow. As far as I can see the current conditions are not at all conducive to a sudden surge in alt prices.

I would concur. To an extent these known changes will already be priced in, but it does seem logical to conclude that the market will become more bullish in general after BTC halving, and more bullish for ETH in particular once staking is live. And if you couple these to the huge BTC dominance at the moment, it does suggest ETH is set for a rise both against US$ and BTC.

No I don't think the market will fall as far as the levels stated by the OP. Prices are of course volatile, with a general cyclic pattern over the long term, with peaks and troughs but in general always rising.
We may see bitcoin around $5000 again, but I think longer-term that the ATH of $20k will very likely be breached.
I would not be concerned about recent drops.

The ones that will explode in price will tend to be the ultra-low caps ones. But this is of course offset by the huge risk - many of the very low-cap coins will stagnate and fail.
There is always risk in crypto, but there is less risk with the high-cap coins and particularly bitcoin.
If you aim for a huge reward with a low-cap coin, you have to understand there is more risk too.

I think bitcoin dominance is tied to market confidence. The markets are uncertain at present, and confidence is low. I think it would need a surge in confidence for alts - including ETH - to rally against BTC. It would be good if ETH price was higher, but don't think it will happen right now, we will likely be waiting some time yet.

It is certainly still possible, although I would say incredibly improbable. Coins that started years ago were cheap because all of crypto was cheap. If a new project launches today that looks promising, then there will be a lot of people and a lot of money wanting to buy in at ICO or even before if possible.

If you just pick a random small new coin, the chances are that it will fade slowly to $0. You really need to have a great understanding and vision to be able to see bargains that no-one else can see.

I think $5k would be okay, although a descent that far would start to be a bit of a cause for concern. We have to remember just how much the price can move in a historical context. $20k back down to below $4 in little more than a year. We have had similar movements before, but they are obscured on the normal linear-scale price charts because they happened at a much lower price point - but change the charts to log scale, and the cyclic nature of the price movement becomes more apparent.

$5k wouldn't be a disaster, but I think we need to stay above the bear lows of about a year ago.

The longer you've been here, the less you panic about these sort of drops. I've only been here since 2017, but the memory of the huge 2018 bear is a very strong one. The market is volatile, we all know this, we are told over and over again, and we can see it quite clearly in this price charts.

Remember BTC had a high of $20k, but it also dropped below $4k at the bottom of the bear. I know the current drops look dramatic, but there is no reason for concern just yet.

Stability in crypto is a relative concept. In general the bigger the coin, the more resistant it is to abrupt price fluctuations. You see many micro-cap alts with low volumes, and these often fluctuate a huge amount, 100% in a day is by no means unheard of. You won't get this with high cap alts, because they have more volume and are more stable - but the high cap alts still have lower volume relative to bitcoin - which is why ETH, XRP and so on fluctuate more than bitcoin does.

All relative, and related to trading volume. Crypto is still quite a niche market. As it matures, the volatility (for high cap stuff at least) will reduce.

When considering the security impact of quantum computers, we do need to make the distinction between post-quantum cryptography, which uses classical computers to provide quantum-resistant algorithms,  and quantum cryptography, which uses quantum computers to provide quantum-resistant algorithms.

If we consider quantum computers as a means of attack, we are generally thinking about the phenomenal factoring power which can swamp traditional security measures. As we have discussed, there has been a lot of work in post-quantum cryptography to establish robust classical defences, ranging across a number of different approaches using some quite sophisticated maths, be it lattice, Lamport/Merkle sig or (deep breath) supersingular-isogeny-graph-Diffie-Hellman-key-exchange.

Some of these approaches show a lot of promise. However quantum cryptography - building fundamentally unbreakable security measures by using the laws of quantum mechanics - is for me a hugely important strategy. I say fundamentally unbreakable because the act of observation (or eavesdropping, or hacking) is an integral component in any quantum mechanical system. The observer impacts the results, as in the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment (incidentally the theoretical cat is not both alive and dead at the same time, rather it is in a superposition of the states, a probability function that only resolves upon being observed).
Any attempt to observe/hack/eavesdrop on the quantum state alters the data, and it's impossible to pull the data out and copy it, either. This is demonstrated by the no-cloning theorem.

I've already mentioned Kak's 3-stage protocol, which is entirely quantum, unlike the more commonly used approach of Quantum Key Distribution... but I'd like to go into QKD a bit here, just to demystify it a bit.

The standard terrestrial approach to QKD is essentially to send photons one-by-one down a normal fibre-optic cable. If someone tries to read (hack) the communication, then this act of observation alters the polarity of the photon, and so the recipient becomes aware of the hacker's presence. This is simple QM, it's a basic physical law that can't be bypassed. Of course you wouldn't send a whole message in this way, but it is a perfect method for establishing a shared key.

There is also a satellite approach to QKD that China is developing, which relies on quantum entanglement so that two photons both have the same physical state. Again, anyone eavesdropping disrupts the communication.

... so whilst understandably a lot of focus is on the dangers posed by attacks that exploit the properties of quantum mechanics, it is (in mainstream opinion) sometimes overlooked that those same properties can provide a phenomenal (and as we understand QM, perfect) defence.



[image sourced from this article: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/china-s-quantum-satellite-achieves-spooky-action-record-distance ]

It's been like this forever though, hasn't it? At least since I got into crypto in mid-2017. Tether has always been right in the middle of some scandal or other. Not saying there is not something to all this, just that it seems to have been going on forever with no real resolution.

ETH has probably the strongest use-case in all of crypto. When we talk about crypto having the potential to change the world, smart contracts is a key part of that transformation. I know plenty of people are waiting for ETH to transition to PoS, but for me the implementation of 5G is very important as well, as this should lead to a huge increase in IoT devices, which can talk to each other using ETH as the medium of exchange.

For those who might not be aware, Vitalik announced ETH on this very forum - here's the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589
He's not been active on here for a few years now, he stopped posting before my time. Kind of weird that he's technically only a 'senior' member though. It kind of feels like he should have a special rank, somewhere above 'legendary' !

ETH is moving with the market, that's all that's happening now. The drop in ETH price has nothing to do with ETH itself, and more to do with the overall market sentiment. Confidence is low, particularly after the China stuff. When confidence is already low it can only take a little thing to start a small sell-off, which leads to a bigger sell-off, which leads to widespread panic-selling, which leads to significant price drops.

Don't be concerned about ETH itself - the project is still great and it has a bright future.

I think it is too harsh to say all of cyrpto is a scam.
Certainly there are plenty of scams out there, and equally there are plenty of legitimate projects that have no real use case and don't offer anything new.

But it is also the case that there is some good stuff out there. Bitcoin for a start. Similarly it would be difficult to argue that Ethereum is a scam - there is a lot of interesting functionality there which is not present in BTC - smart contracts have a real solid use-case. Same for XRP, definite use-case in international banking, which can't be filled by BTC.

So some are scams, a lot are pointless, and a smaller amount are genuinely great projects with talented developers, well-thought-out road-maps, rock-solid real-world use-cases.

(That may be my personal record for consecutive hyphens.)

I would advise against buying right now, as we just don't know where the bottom is. Certainly it is better to buy today than yesterday when prices were higher - but by the same logic tomorrow could be better for buying than today.
If you are confident on where the support levels are and whether they will hold, then by all means go for it - I would say it has to be an informed decision though, not just buying because everything is red.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to count how many members the forum had at six month intervals over the ten years, starting from Satoshi's account (#3). Here you go...
Bitcoin price history is also on there, along with images of important or notable events.

Bitcoin address: 18EkKoT6smDHMF9z9FUrSgsye6DFmKpu8F





If for some reason you want the dates, numbers and names, here they are.
"We didn't ask for this" I hear you cry...

Date_______________________________	Number_________	Name_____________________
November 19, 2009, 07:12:39 PM	3	Satoshi
May 19, 2010, 04:56:47 PM	206	teppy
November 19, 2010, 03:23:01 PM	2291	Cryptoman
May 19, 2011, 07:09:38 PM	13751	flug
November 19, 2011, 07:09:40 PM	46377	bdcomp
May 19, 2012, 06:57:03 PM	58264	qwertyq
November 19, 2012, 07:11:54 PM	72897	jhlu87
May 19, 2013, 07:06:03 PM	120490	Dangles
November 19, 2013, 07:09:48 PM	164307	jamestown
May 19, 2014, 07:01:38 PM	333074	Team0NE
November 19, 2014, 07:07:08 PM	396363	blaket01
May 19, 2015, 07:09:52 PM	514907	LoadedButUnloading
November 19, 2015, 07:10:46 PM	657474	ROSE CHEN
May 19, 2016, 07:07:21 PM	844217	exmali
November 19, 2016, 07:07:44 PM	921313	mxaddict
May 11, 2017, 09:12:46 AM	1000000	Squad_A
May 19, 2017, 07:08:26 PM	1006469	Mehrabi
November 19, 2017, 07:12:37 PM	1328476	Chuipek
April 03, 2018, 10:30:32 AM	2000000	allahabadialt
May 19, 2018, 07:12:33 PM	2136490	gig9_staff
November 19, 2018, 07:10:02 PM	2477822	trymon
May 19, 2019, 07:08:47 PM	2605613	emilien270
November 19, 2019, 07:11:39 PM	2717747	7gabriellac323yM9

Here we go, BTC down 3% in the last hour, alts falling too. The support level is being broken right now. Not sure where we will land, hope the fall is not too hard.