i can't believe there are actual people still reading this guys all-over-the-place thoughts!
if you think bitcoin is volatile and swings up and down you have to check this dude's posts, they swing more than bitcoin does. HE is volatile

i remember in 2017 when he was spamming on bitcointalk, one day he said buy bitcoin it will go to the moon and the next day price dropped 5% so he deleted his previous posts and started posting about how you should sell your bitcoin because it is on a "downward spiral" and will drop a lot. then a couple days later when that obviously didn't happen and price went up instead he started his "clean up" again

good topic but needs a bit of  correction IMO!

it is not believed, it is mathematically so.

this is misleading or at least it is best to say it in a different way. saying it like that may lead some people into thinking bitcoin had some sort of premine which is obviously wrong.

the correct statement is that some people speculate that Satoshi owns somewhere around 1 million coins which he gained from mining a lot of the blocks in first months of bitcoin's release.

we don't know who else was mining, Hal Finney might have been someone who mined some blocks, there were others who might have been interested in the project and "test mined" some blocks,... which means so many of the first 20000+ blocks might have been mined by people other than Satoshi (1 mil / 50BTC reward = 20000 blocks)


this is very interesting. you are saying about 6 million bitcoins are in circulation while about 10.8 million are never moved!
do you have any reference for these numbers?

bitcoin had a lot of bubbles and it will have a lot more in the future, some huge ones and even small ones alike.

but right now i do not think we can call bitcoin a bubble anymore because its price has dropped A LOT. you can not have a 70% drop and still consider the asset a bubble and this is while bitcoin has a big intrinsic value which is a lot higher than current price.

if you take a look at the different markets you can see that has already happened. there are fiat markets such as USD and EUR,... for multiple altcoins. for example there are LTC/USD markets out there on a lot of major exchanges.
if you also check the volume of these markets they usually are lower than their counterparts (eg LTC/USD vol < LTC/BTC vol most of the times).

in short, this is not just "by chance" that there are not fiat markets for all altcoins. so what you are asking will never happen. and when it happens it has no effect on bitcoin. and the reason is simple, people who invest in altcoins are doing it to make more bitcoin. they didn't buy bitcoin to invest in altcoins, instead they bought bitcoin to have bitcoin now they want to invest that bitcoin and make profit on it. in other word the demand for bitcoin is not going anywhere even if exchanges made new pairs with fiat.

individually speaking it depends on how one uses bitcoin. some people are acting more rational and they use their brains. and because of that they can make a very good amount of profit and as a result they can improve their finances a lot.
but not everyone is like that. some people are not so rational, they make weird decisions even. for example i know people who waited whole year last year to buy bitcoin and only did it when price was nearly $20,000 and sold while cursing everyone else at <$10k. so obviously their are ruining their finances!

speaking of a whole country it depends on how they are going to treat bitcoin. if they go on and ban it like Bangladesh then there won't be any merchants there accepting bitcoin, there will only be investors who do it underground and hidden. so only individual improvement is possible.
but if like at least 30 other countries including Japan, Germany, Australia, Switzerland,... they adopt bitcoin and consider it as a legal currency there can be a lot of new jobs created in their country and new jobs can put a lot of people to work and as a final total result it can improve the economy of the whole country.

in my opinion Chinese investors have never had any kind of major effect on bitcoin price to begin with. it was always exaggerated so much that it caused panic. for example Chinese exchanges were reporting some ridiculously huge numbers as their daily trading volume which meant people started to believe they are big for real. but when PBoC started investigating them, they immediately cut the fake volume and it became clear that they were in fact no bigger than any other groups in the market.
but for some reason people still have the impression that Chinese are big for some reason and the FUDsters love this. they keep pushing for it because it is effective.

of course the effect is not "nothing". Chinese are a part of bitcoin market and anything that goes on in China will also affect bitcoin price.

well, online gambling is one of the many use cases of bitcoin, and any real use case for bitcoin that has some people interested in it will help bitcoin rise as its adoption grows.
but i don't think this is any major effect compared to everything else. the number of online gamblers who use bitcoin is not that big compared to every other use case.
and don't forget that people are not usually so excited about "spending" their precious bitcoins let alone wasting them on gambling.

it is pretty simple to know.
next time you made a withdrawal from an exchange or any kind of similar service, use the transaction ID they give you to check the transaction fee. you can simply do it by searching it on an online block explorer.
it usually is near the same amount they charge you because the transactions have more than one input and also they usually pay a little higher fee than normal.

no it won't work with Ethereum and most of the altcoins out there because they have not yet admitted they have scaling problem and CPFP is a way to ease the issue for users and miners have to be looking for these transactions, there are even some bitcoin miners have not yet implemented this.

in other words they are saying North Korea is making between 1428.6BTC and 19,047.6BTC or equivalant of that in altcoins they "create" and dumps that to get the money.
that raises a lot of questions!

first of all where do they dump these coins to get the money? so why even bother to do it since they still have to go back to good ol' USD?

second where is this hidden HUGE hashrate that generates them this much money (by create i am assuming they mean mine these coins)?

"account"?
are you using bitcoin or are you using some third party website with an account and made a withdrawal? there is a big difference between the two. when you send bitcoin yourself you are making a transaction and the minimum fees are getting confirmed in next block. but when you use a service and make a withdrawal and if they take a long time to pay you from their wallet that is their problem. if you are unhappy then stop using that "account"!
but it has nothing to do with bitcoin transactions and their speed...

it will help with more adoption, better increase in price and eventually higher one but don't expect something huge out of this. most part of the help is because of the low fees which had little to do with SegWit and mostly happened because the spam attack stopped. that can help because lower fees means less issues, less head aches and bitcoin being a real currency not just something that people invest in to make money

i don't know how this particular website works but technically speaking it is not a 100% thing but it can work. you can follow the signs of whales in other words the money moving around in the market. for example in altcoins before the pumps there is usually some rise in the volume then a huge rise while the pump is going on then it falls for a moment before it picks up during the dump.

although this site is only supporting BTC/USD so there is not much i can say about it. but it seems like it is using the trend mainly to say it is "bullish or bearish" then the volume!

long story short i wouldn't pay for something like that. and it seems like one of those things that is free for now so that they can advertise it before they start asking for money!

this should open some eyes up, hopefully!
JPMorgan is now like the symbol of FUD among bitcoiners and the more they spread FUD the more people will realize how dumb all of it is. and now that they are even admitting how they are scared of bitcoin everyone can become more sure about their evil motives when they were spreading FUD!
hopefully soon we won't see as big a effect as we saw in the past.

this is for the best if it really happened.
if some people are easily scared when the government says something negative about bitcoin or do something regarding taxes,... like the coinbase thing, then it is best if these type of people don't buy bitcoin because they clearly don't understand bitcoin.
in which case we will have a much stronger rise instead of a volatile shoot up with a lot of weak hands who will panic dump!

there are two forks happening today!
one of them was bitcoin dollar which i have no idea what it is but Yobit already gave the tokens to people holding bitcoin there a couple of hours ago and it was dumped at 0.03BTC
in 1.5 hours there is another one called bitcoin private which has not yet happened.

i disagree. people no longer care about these forks enough to buy bitcoin and cause any kind of rise.

going back to where bitcoin price should be, which was actually a small rise from previous price at $9500ish is not a "giant leap". a giant leap would have been if price went to $12k-$13k instead of this and kept on rising.

and i don't think this has anything to do with bitcoin core new version release!

the problem with people these days is that they think there should be a big red sign telling them that this is the bubble and this is the bubble burst where price fell to zero so that they can be satisfied with themselves. a 60-70% drop which bitcoin had runs right by them because that big red sign was not there telling them it is the bubble burst + panic dump.

these people will continue crying their whole lives about the opportunities they missed and will blame others for their idiocy.

this is the usual thing about the difference between blockchain technology and bitcoin. and while they are different, you can say bitcoin is the beginning of all this. and you can't adopt the technology without adopting bitcoin.
i believe what Putin means is more about adopting the technology itself and even possibly creating their own coin out of it.
but eventually they all turn to adopt bitcoin at some point. you can't fight the decentralization.

why would you make that assumption? based on what data?

even if we assume it is true, that still doesn't make "trading" like gambling. instead it makes "traders" as gamblers. and there is a big difference there.

first of all making theories doesn't mean these theories are correct. and when it comes to gambling such as flipping a coin you will never get more heads and tails. every flip has an equal chance of going either way no matter what happened before.
and that is one of the differences. for example in trading if there was a big rise (ie what happened before) then you can expect a drop or correction (you can predict heads or tails since one has a much higher chance of happening now)

secondly house edge means the house or the thingy you are betting against has a better chance of winning than you. there is no such thin in trading, and you are not trading against one entity. you are trading against a lot of others based on the market movements.
if you can go with the flow you win.