this "industry" is very new and because of that it is raw and full of opportunities. it needs lots of things from services to different businesses to start offering up what people need. and so far anybody who has moved first is not a big player in the field. you can see services like Coinbase, BitPay,... exchanges such as Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Kraken, Poloniex,... gambling sites like PrimeDice, Bitsler,... mixers like Chipmixer,... and a lot more. these are all first moves which are now big and we still need a lot more.

in my opinion it is best to have more decentralized services and they will be the biggest in the near future for sure. i have high hopes for projects like OpenBazaar for instance.

it is not a "low" supply. it is more like a reasonable amount than low or high.

but the important thing about bitcoin's supply is that it is limited. which means there can not be more than 21 million coins no matter what. unlike the traditional money and a lot of altcoins such as ethereum which print unlimited amount of it.

i am sorry to disappoint you but if you can not decide for yourself already then maybe it is best for you not to trade at all. at least until you can make decisions and learn more about trading.

and if you want to start then invest in bitcoin because that is the main cryptocurrency and the rest are all alternatives to bitcoin.

i doubt that we are going to see an ATH this soon because the ATH is so far away (that is twice the current price). and there are no hypes going on to bring that many new investors to bitcoin like there were back in December that actually causes the huge rise.

but we are headed that way and you are correct that the bearish trend for bitcoin is now over.
we may see some big hype if LN does something, like being adopted by an exchange for example.

like always it is impossible to say for sure.

all i know is that if bitcoin was supposed to enter a very long bear market (like what some people were speculating) then it wouldn't have come back up to $10k+ price. a bear market meant staying at below $9000 and dropping more.

but this recovery proved that the bear market of bitcoin lasted a very short time and now is over.

at the end of the day we all go back to fiat because we all use fiat in our lives even if we prefer using bitcoin so our profit is also going to fiat. but considering the fact that bitcoin is an excellent long term investment with a good future ahead of it, you can see the potential of profit if you own more of it in the future when the price is a lot higher than this.

in other words if you store your profit in bitcoin now your profit will increase with bitcoin price rise.
but this is still risky as bitcoin price is still risky despite me believing in its future. so a better strategy would be taking some out to fiat and storing some in bitcoin.

you need a fast moving market for a fast trading strategy and a market that is moving fast is not such a predictable market anymore so you will end up fast 'gambling' instead of fast 'trading' at some point and as gambling goes you will end up losing money in the long run.

not to mention during fast market moves the exchanges usually go offline!

like everything else in speculation, the result of it happens as soon as the news comes out. this means a month ago when everyone was talking about how New Lunar Year is going to drop the price, that is when the price dropped.
as another example for opposite behavior you can look at halving. there has been 2 of them and each time price rise started 1-2 months before the actual block height where halving took place.

what you say is true and people need to know bitcoin as a currency more than they know it as an investment but you can't blame them for it because it appreciates a lot and will continue to do so for a long time and that will make people want to think of it more as an investment.

also i want to mention that things weren't so different in 2012 either. maybe in 2009 and early months of bitcoin release what you said was true but ever since it was listed on an exchange and trading started and price went from $0.01 to $1 people have been asking "should i invest in bitcoin".

in a chart like this, being "below" or "above" is a matter of scale that the chart uses. i can simply change the Y axis and get a different "below and above" lines.
the only thing you can compare on a chart like this is the way the change occurs. meaning price against USD goes up as price against BTC goes up and vice versa.

this is what i mean, a chart with same values but different Y scaling:



it does but you can not make the conclusion based on previous statement.


you can say that, but what is really happening is that the ETH/BTC market is more active so when bitcoin price is rising in order for ETH to keep its price the same it has to drop against BTC but people usually don't care about USD value of an altcoin, they do care about its BTC value so if it goes down against bitcoin they start buying it hence creating some sort of resistance. and if it drops slower against BTC it means its USD value is rising too.

i voted for "1-2 years" because i really feel that the market needs decentralized exchanges a lot more these days with the growth that bitcoin had and the way it also grew the altcoin market with itself.

and also i say it won't take long because i do believe that the second layer solutions such as lightning network and cross chain transactions such as atomic swap are going to change the game and speed things up a lot.

"accounts" that are with a third party website/service has never been anonymous! they keep track of everything, from your IP address to things that you do. on top of it when you are talking about "trading accounts" and get fiat involved they also ask for your identification which eliminates anonymity completely.

this has nothing to do with bitcoin and it does not mean they are managed by the government! it just means you are using a service that has certain rules. if you don't like those rules then don't use that service which is a centralized exchange in this case!

only 2 forks of bitcoin were worth even bothering to claim. bitcoin cash and bitcoin gold. and they both are shitcoins but have high enough price to make the incentive for buying bitcoin so that you get them and then claim them.

the rest of them are too low. for example bitcoin Z is 92 satoshi. bitcoin silver is 61 satoshi! there are others as high as 0.005BTC but that doesn't even cover the fees of buying bitcoin and selling fork and withdrawing it.

upload them to imgur.com i find it much easier to use and it always shows up easier than other photo sharing sites.


i also think $10k may be "weird" with some ups and downs like always. as if bitcoin is playing jump rope with the price.
but above that i don't think it will go around $11k,... it may go up so much faster because of how FOMO always works with bitcoin.

use decentralized exchanges to trade.
but know that trading is not the only method of making money from cryptocurrecnies! if you pay attention to the name it is called cryptocurrency. it is money. well at least bitcoin is like money and you do a job and get paid in bitcoin. it can even be a business that you run on your own.
these: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=84.0 are all businesses that are making money off crypotocurrencies, mostly bitcoin.

the thing about making profit from bitcoin is timing and knowing when to do what. and those who are making profit are doing it silently without anybody noticing.
you just have to know the trend and go with it not against it. but what usually happens is that people buy too late and sell too late creating a chaos in the market.

the fall has been over for a couple of days now, we are now in a consolidation phase most likely and all the small rises and falls that you see are normal market fluctuations that has nothing to worry about. as long as bitcoin stays between $9500 and $7500 nothing will change. if it breaks $9.5k with good strength it will rise up to break new records soon.

so keep your eyes open for these targets and the next ones that come after them.

What would bitcoin be worth without Tether? the same place it is right now.

the rise would have happened anyways in the same exact way because it has never been tether that increased the price. and even if it did, the effects of it has been too small to be worth paying any attention to.

in fact without tether we might have had a bigger rise or at the very least a smaller drop because a big source of FUD would have been eliminated and without FUD the panic would have been less and the panic dump would have been also smaller.

maybe they were waiting for SegWit to be ready before they implement it!
i see a lot of things not yet ready for example there is not yet a universal way of showing the private keys belonging to a SegWit address!
Electrum guys had to invent something for themselves to implement it. it contains an extra version which tells the wallet it belongs to a Bech32 address but you can not find it anywhere else. if you wanted to import this private key in another wallet you would have to take extra scary steps.
just my guess about these businesses though.

https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/961720708542812160?s=17

so yeah, where is everybody who was saying exchanges are not going to adopt Lightning Network because such and such...
they were saying the same thing and even more about Segregated Witness too...