things are the way they are and have always been normal, Chinese new year, Christmas, whatever other new years we have in the world has no effect on bitcoin "directly".
when you see a sudden rise and when you see a sudden drop back, it is all normal as it is normal now that price is stable, and stuck at 910ish dollar. these are different phases that we can see in any market, maybe in smaller scale there but they exist.

and the current volume of Chinese exchanges is now normal.

whether or not an exchange has been hacked alone is not important. the details are important. for example btc-e the oldest exchange has been also hacked but it is working fine still.

you should see what the reason of the hack was, was it really a hack or were they scamming. and did they come back from the hack or did they disappear. for example Cryptsy was hacked (claimed it was a hack) but they disappeared. bitfinex was hacked but they are still active and i think they are paying their customers back.

and remember hacks happen everywhere. Yahoo was hacked and they found out a couple of months ago sending everyone Email that "we leaked all your personal information! change your password now!".

since an investment in a casino bankroll is a little bit different than other types of investment, it needs a different approach in my opinion. for example the first thing you need to check is their history and if they have been profitable.
then if they were profitable then to make a profit you need to accept the risks and leave the investment be there at least a couple of weeks to a month to see what will happen.
and this is what i did, with mostly taking help from that investment topic in this board by gamblingreviews guy.

when a service becomes big and popular, and then people see the volume is high there, they will choose that as their first choice of service before even looking at anything else. and this goes for majority of users.

and then it is the services they offer, they have all the relevant altcoins people want to trade and their website looks good, they have a very powerful API with so many options, and the volume is high meaning the orderbooks are filled and are not thin or empty like other places, also they offer lending (and i think margin trading but not sure since i am not using poloniex myself). and they have been around for a long time.

also i don't remember any hack, can you give me some references?

p.s. i myself prefer bittrex

just go check the services discussion board here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=85.0). there are a lot of topics the same as yours there asking the same thing and the answer is always the same. there is no good cloud mining website that you can find and invest in.
and when i say good i am just including the real ones if there is any, they are never profitable.

paying higher fees is not the solution, it is like an escape temporarily for users to compete with each others and the spam attacks to get a faster confirmation. and things may not be as bad as it seems these days but soon there will come a time that real transactions will be stuck waiting for confirmation no matter how much higher fees they pay because simply there is not enough room in a block to include all of them.

it has always been both. but mostly spam attacks.

obviously bitcoin has grown bigger in the past few years and now we have much more users sending lots more transaction. but there is no way the number of transactions are 70K as it was in most of the clogs. sometimes the number grows naturally because it is a time people are making more transactions such as when price is going up and down crazily! or when there are a couple of empty blocks but these will never lead to that big number of unconfirmed transactions.

besides blockchain being public, you can always find the spam attacks if you look for them: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1764209.0

if we have learned one thing about bitcoin in the past years is that price is not going to "leap" so high too fast. take the recent $1150 rise, price went up fast and it encountered a correction. so that is why i say the $2000 is not going to be a "leap" it will be the same slow rise that we have been seeing so far. and withing one year it is possible because a 2x rise is the norm of this rise so far.

it depends on how much you take and if you are promising them to give it back. yeah if you take a $5 and never give it back nobody is going to care much about it but if you take a thousand dollar loan from someone and promise to give it back or even give some collateral then it is foolish. because it is gambling and full of risks and any loss means losing money two times. you lose 1000 USD first on the bet then you lose another 1000 USD from your pocket when you give it back.

that chance is still big enough (it is 7.7% change) and it is enough to make a profit if you are a trader. in fact traders in forex market are dealing with much smaller amount of change and they are making profit.
but yeah altcoins are much more profitable but also at the same time this profit comes at a bigger risk, since they are less predictable too.

you will never get any suggestion that you can fully trust.

almost all of them.
this is a pump and dump game, as long as you get in before the pump you can be a winner to make your big profit.

if you want a sure thin then invest in bitcoin and never look back, but for altcoins look for accumulation, and mostly news in altcoin markets because hype is the only thing driving the prices up.

since we are on an altcoin boars i assume you want altcoin exchange and my suggestion is poloniex or bittrex (i prefer bittrex)

yes if you buy before the fast % growth.

the altcoin era in sense of trading, pump and dump and lots of profit is never going to be over. there is too much money there that will keep it alive, it may become slow from time to time but never die.

but the development era has never been good and it is mostly dead nowadays as altcoin developers are only thinking about making more money with premine, ICO and many different scams they pull. they rarely have anything interesting and they stick to features that look interesting to get more hype.

what is there not to like about bitcoin?
the first thing that most people will notice these days is the price and it has been going up for a very long time. anyone who has been wise and invested when it was cheap now has 5 times profit on his investment.

then there are all the currency aspects of bitcoin which makes it double interesting. the technology it offers is brilliant, while everything is publicly available on blockchain you are anonymous and on top of that it is decentralized which means nobody can control you.

I am satoshi, and I have proof, i promise to move my coins soon in the future.

if you believed "Craig Wright" you must believe me too. because me and him are providing the same amount of proof to you that are currently reading this comment.

that is correct about dice games being based on luck but that doesn't mean you can not use analysis or thinking about a strategy in these games.
in fact you should analyze the game and based on things that can happen in the game such as dice for example based on the house edge and your variables such as multiplier and amount to increase on loss, you analyze and come up with a strategy to better your chances at winning.

that is true but at the same time i don't see what can a casino gain from lying about getting hacked unless they run away afterwards (which i don't know of any examples that said they were hacked and ran away) but so far when an exchange service says they were hacked, they run away with the money and never show their faces again which proves something!

because it is not an easy way despite what you are trying to show it to be!
it is a complicated process and needs an experienced trader to take advantage of these opportunities, and it is best to have a tool like a bot do it, to make it happen as fast as possible. and a bot doesn't need to check a website to take the prices with delay!

for beginners it is the worst idea ever.


you are just listing prices! nothing special here. and besides it is not live price updating every second. if i want all prices in one place i either use my bot or use bitcoinwisdom.com
also you have poloniex in bitcoin/usd but polo doesn't have fiat market.
and also c-cex fiat deposit/withdrawals are crazy high that is why prices are a bit higher.

you don't know how the marketcap works and it actually because of this huge marketcap will die slowly over time. just the same way Dogecoin is dying right now. these coins with a huge supply and an increasing supply have always been getting dumped as fast too.

but the same as Dogecoin or other coins that doesn't mean they won't get pumped and ethereum has a big pump overdue.

many of these coins move together only because they are pump and dumps and they get dumped when bitcoin price is hot again. and also another big thing that affects them is the fact that they are being traded against USD and when bitcoin price goes up their price in BTC goes down, so it creates some sort of panic and people start dumping and pushing the price lower.

but if i want to pick i pick litecoin and monero for long term and ethereum for short term right now.

100% bitcoin for long term
but the amount i dedicate for trading goes like this:

70% for longer term investments for example coins that i believe in or i am expecting to have a big rise.
for instance litecoin and monero are always in my list. and right now i am also investing in ETH and FTC.

and the rest of 30% goes to day trading when i see some hot altcoin that is being traded/pumped, and if i have the time to join in and make the best of the situation.