more like bullshit guesses by random people filling the social media.

the fact is you can not predict the market at this point. and i seriously doubt that most altcoins can go back to their ATH any time soon. it may take them months or ever 1.5 years to get a big enough pump to go there.

it depends on what you are bagholding.
we all know bitcoin will reverse upwards and start a new rally and reach some new ridiculously high price at some point. what we don't know is that how much it will take before we get to start of that rally.
other altcoins are a lot of different ones. many of them will die by the year's end. many won't see another pump and will be on this downward spiral to their doom. some will rise, some will get pumped and so on. you have to analyze each and see if they can have the potential of rising and ask yourself if their rise is going to be bigger?

it is too soon to say anything in my opinion. even calling it stable may not be completely right. a stable price is something like what we had in early 2015 when it was stuck at $220. that ended with a big FUD dump to $150 and then shoot up to the moon.

right now we are after a big FUD dump and the aftermath of it is not yet long enough to show the followup trend.

it is funny how some people think bitcoin is a "stock on a US stock exchange"! it is as if they never even read a single line about what bitcoin is and have been trading it on exchanges with blind eyes to reality. of course OP is just an idiot who is trying so hard to short bitcoin these days and make a few bucks but the number of people like him is increasing these days... and they will get flushed out of the market by some whales pretty soon because they keep trying to go against the market.

manipulation is part and parcel of the cryptocurrency market. it has always been like this thanks to two things: the small size of the market + the unregulated nature of it.

and it is a lot of different levels of manipulation. for example you can see the manipulation even in bitcoin with all the media spread FUDs and all the sell pressure that comes on at times on major exchanges to push the price artificially lower than major supports such as 10k for instance.

then we have the altcoin market which is more like a circus than a market! and everything is just a P&D-fest and whales are enjoying the free money of the newbie masses.

well gambling has a clear definition. it is something that you can not predict at all. it is 100% pure chance. for example when you roll a dice or flip a coin there is no way to know what the result of it will be. meaning pure chance.

but when it comes to trading and prices, it is hard to predict but it is not 100% unclear. you can expect certain scenarios to happen with different levels of certainty based on the market situation. and that is a big difference that makes it distinguished from gambling.

i have not done it myself yet but i have done some research some time ago and here is what i know:
to run a masterNode you have to invest a lot of money, that much is obvious and already have been said. but you invest this amount of money in that coin. and this have two different risks:
1. the coin can tank hard or even a small drop and that means you lose a lot of money. imagine a 10% drop (the most common percentage) on a $500k investment. that is $50,000 lost.
knowing altcoins these kinds of dumps are pretty common and can be devastating.

2. you are storing this amount online (locking in your masterNode) granted you set passwords, ... but we all know the only way of securely storing large sums of funds is cold storage and if your setup is hacked, you will lose a lot of money.

whenever new companies enter mining, specially when these companies are in any other country than China, that is an excellent news for bitcoin mining scene because it has a lot of benefits:
1. it will create a competing environment among manufacturers which will then decreases the price of ASICs and also increases their efficiency as these companies try to compete with each other and do new innovations.
2. it will decentralize mining even more because the equipment is now cheaper and more accessible in other places of the world.


i seriously doubt that anybody is ever going to make an ethereum ASIC because of two things:
1. unlike bitcoin you are never sure about the future of ethereum. its price is too dependent on a lot of things such as ICOs which we saw getting banned!
2. unlike bitcoin the future of mining it is not certain either. they keep talking about switching to PoS and killing mining. so no manufacturer wants to waste their resources on that.

there was a time last year when anonymous cryptocurrencies had about one or two months of heated market where everyone was talking about them and their prices went up a lot because of it. ever since then, i have not seen anything major regarding these types of coins.
don't just invest in them because you "think" they are good deal right now.

that is true but you are forgetting about a very important thing, you are posting this on a bitcoin forum and trading extends to also altcoins. in these markets technical analysis, pattern studies, etc. are not working really. generally speaking these are not accurate to begin with and when you come in crypto market you see that their efficiency drops drastically to a point that all of it becomes useless in most case scenarios.

bitcoin price will rise this year too, specially because there was a huge drop of nearly -70% so far. but when will the rally start and what will the final price be is not something we can predict at this point. we may see $50k by the end of the year as much as we may see any other price from $20k to $100k.

like always, you shouldn't care! if you want to make a long term investment then buy right now and enjoy the long time rise thanks to the ongoing and increasing adoption.
if you want to day-trade then it is still irrelevant question to ask about end-of-the-year-price.

"experts" are usually biased and because of the they can not agree with each other. they always promote what gives them the most profit. if they want to sell, then they will say price will reach $100,000 and if they want to short they will say it will plunge to $6000.

and bitcoins volatility makes them both come true at some point. we already saw the $6k despite it being impossible after the strong buy support at $10k!!! and right now another dip again despite the same strong buy support at $10k! ....unpredictable....

this is not a correction anymore, i call it a manipulation dump.
a correction was when price reached $11k+ and came down to $10k levels. but breaking the major buy support at exactly $10k and going below it is not natural in my opinion. maybe i am wrong but this doesn't seem natural to me.

and yeah, it will be back sooner or later. after the manipulation was done and those doing it were satisfied with their shorts and profit they made.

another poorly researched and written article on your website "coinpedia" which you keep trying to get traffic for!
Bangladesh is one of 4 countries that have banned bitcoin and they did it a couple of years ago. and usage or trading of bitcoin has been illegal there. so there is nothing new about this which you made into "news".

the first rule of investment, in anything not just bitcoin, is to invest what you can afford to lose. if someone fails to grasp this simple guideline and starts acting reckless then they should also expect dire consequences.

but unfortunately it seems like some people think cryptocurrencies are exceptions to this rule so they invest recklessly. and we also have a lot of lets say younger people who have 0 experience in any kind of investment.

some random drops, some panic sells, and finally some FUD all lead to a drop. this will possibly be a good test of the buy support and after this state of dumping is over we can at least figure out what the strongest bottom based on the buy support we see now, is going to be.

go check out Poloniex api service. they have a public api call that will return the OHLC data for the markets they have. of course they don't have a fiat market but they have a tether market which is practically the same as far as value is concerned. it is the BTC_USDT market you want to look at and here is how the call would look like:

https://poloniex.com/public?command=returnChartData&currencyPair=BTC_USDT&start=0&end=9999999999&period=60

both of them sound to me like people who are hungry for that attention they are receiving for different reasons including pump and dump and personal gains as McAfee already proved this.
as a result no i don't take their predictions seriously, i was thinking about following them and seeing if they can actually have any kind of effect but i decided against it because i have a rule for not following anybody who is like this. the damage is always worse.

if you want to make a real long term investment then start buying bitcoin slowly and in small amounts. for example you can break your money into a couple of smaller parts and start investing that into bitcoin. trying buying in the dips. whenever you see a major drop, buy with one part.

another strategy is to buy little by little over long term if you want to invest with the money that you gain on intervals like 1-5% of your monthly salary. each month you put that money aside and buy in that month's dip.

the key is not to get too greedy and never wait for a bigger dip. if there is one then buy it.

you forgot the great Professor Bitcoin:

it is just different views and because of it, different strategies.
i believe in diversification but i diversify into other assets, the traditional ones. and i treat altcoins more like penny stocks: short term and high risk only for trading. but if you have any other strategy that works for you then stick to it.