I used to believe in that up until last year. now what I believe in is basically the same thing but with an addendum! .... unless everyone in the market starts following the same trend!

there was no reason for the bear market to continue like this from the ATH. there was no reason for it to last this long or fall this much but it did following mostly the same trends as 2013 and 2014. and so far in 2019 we are following the 2015 patterns of stability and if we see a rise similar to that year then from now on I would expect the same nonsense to be repeated every 3 or 4 years!

because that was the first time price tried the reversal after reaching the bottom around $3100 and you can't expect price to just reverse that fast and easy. at that time basically everyone who has been participating in the market wanted their profit in short term when they bought around the bottom and wanted to sell at $4200 ish for at most 35% quick profit.
right now things are a little similar but not as big since many day traders are accumulating and have higher targets for their profit.

you should ask who not what!

because it is the people who are stopping this supposed "bitcoin 2.0" to take over bitcoin. people as in both developers and the investors. developers because they chose the rout that ends in the most amount of profit by creating shitcoins, copying bitcoin, scamming people through ICO/STO/... and all kinds of nonsense,... and the investors because they stopped thinking before giving their money to shitcoins. that effectively killed any kind of improvement of altcoins and they remained useless for the most part.

there is a famous quote that I always like to mention whenever people ask a question like this:
"If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stocks, not selling advice."
this has been posted many times before too but people rarely take it seriously, it seems. the thing is if you think about it, in a market that has  a fierce competition nobody is going to give you "signals" if they actually have it, they will use it themselves to make profit. what they sell you in these places is what they wish to happen after YOU buy from their sell orders.

"analyzing" market cap does NOT give you any information! and it is not even a part of Technical Analysis!

during the last bull run altcoin pumping spree, bitcoins market cap went to 40% of the total because bitcoin had 17 million coins in circulation while there were 2400 altcoins and tokens each with at least 1 billion tokens in circulation. I once calculated these ratios, it was about bitcoin having 40% of the market cap while only having about 0.001% of the total supply!

you should not exclude coins just because they have high supply, you should focus on removing the premine from them. for example if you remove the premine of the coins on top (ETH, XRP,...) then you can see their market cap comes closer to reality when it drops about 80%.

and why is that a bitcoin worthy discussion again?

the high fees actually make good sense if you stop comparing the fees with other methods such as buying on an exchange.
the bitcoin ATM machines are offering a unique and without competition service for people who want some sort of big privacy when they buy bitcoin which is why they can charge outrageous fees on each purchase and people pay them because they have no other options.

this may not be the worst thing out there but I personally have never liked relying on services like this that are controlled by someone else that much.  they have a high tendency of turning into a pump group if they already aren't and their data can not be trusted that much either.
I prefer to do it on my own by setting up a watcher like some sort of small and simple code that checks the prices and volumes periodically by taking them directly from the exchanges. an since I am behind my computer I can just leave it open in the background and it will alert me of anything "exciting" like a pump!

there is no "bullish market" there is only the same pump and dump schemes that have been happening for nearly as long as the altcoin market had existed. the pumpers are (every day) selecting some small altcoins to pump at least 100% and sometimes even up to 1000% in a day or two and then dump them hard to below their initial value.

how can you make profit from this?
first you have to realize that this is extremely hard because you want to make profit from manipulation then you have to look for the signs of these pumps which are usually increased volume out of nowhere and obviously a jump in the price.
the most important thing to do is to set a profit target and not get greedy. you have to be satisfied with making 30% profit in one day even if that shitcoin got pumped up to 100000% and you missed the rest.

technically we have only had 2 attempts to rise so far ever since price dropped below $6k since you can not count small rises like from $3200 to $3300 as an attempt to rise!!!
("pump" is not the correct term to use here since rise is not the same as pump).

traders have taken their profit out before we even fell below $6k!
the day traders are also taking profit daily so they are constantly doing it.

I think you are giving whales more credit than they deserve, they are not as powerful as you make them to be. of course they have been influencing the market for a long time and most of the rises and falls (like the drop below $6k) is the result of their manipulation but it is not like they have "full control" over the market! the market has grown enough for them to not be able to do it anymore. and the more they push the market in the opposite direction the harder it is going to get as the rest of the market resists.

to be fair we can not deny the fact that a lot of illegal activities have been happening specially ever since altcoin market started growing bigger and a lot of shady stuff have been going on in  exchanges. we all already know that. for example 2017 was a great example of how much scams can easily happen in altcoin market as billions of dollars changed hand in the name of ICO and a big percentage of them were laundering money while disguising it as raising funds for a crypto project!!!

most people didn't used to have any bank account, any credit card, or even computers and most people didn't know how to use any of these. that didn't mean we needed a third party to help them use banks, credit cards or computers! they eventually learned how to do it when the need was created.

it is the same with bitcoin. when the "need" to use the decentralized currency arises they will learn. as many of us have already done that. they will have wallets, run nodes,... and use bitcoin the way it is supposed to be used (meaning without needing third parties).

what you described could have easily been avoided if he used bitcoin correctly meaning used the feature that was introduced about 7 years ago called "multi signature" as other exchanges do!
not to mention that the alternative has more issues like the bank closing their account if they think they don't like what they are doing. for example if someday that bank decided bitcoin is killing their business the first thing they do is to close down all the accounts of their customers with some excuse like money laundering.

that is only happening right now that price has not yet started rising.
I have seen the same thing back in 2015. when price was actually at the bottom and was staying there at a stable rate with low volume and little movement, people were only talking about how price is going to drop and how we should see another year of nothingness.
then as price went back up again and we were already 30% higher than that bottom all of them started rushing back in knowing they have missed their opportunities.

some people around the forum tend to confuse bull market with setting a new ATH which are not at all the same thing. there will not be a new ATH in 2019 because simply bitcoin is not a pump and dump that can be pumped that much in such a short time!
but there will be a bull market because it is the only possible healthy market movement that we can have this year after 85% drop over the course of 15+ months. continuing down this path is just as unhealthy as if we continued down the path of rise to $20k and beyond in 2017.

I think it is still possible to see the market test $4k or $4.2k resistance a couple of more times before we actually see a breakout happen and the shoot up to above $6k occurs. although there has also been a rather big increase in trading volume recently I still think there are short term traders who are going to prevent this rise this time too by their sales as they think this is the profit they should take out!

did the "bitcoin investors" go anywhere to come back now? I don't think so. those who are "investors" have never gone anywhere they have been accumulating bitcoin specially with the huge discounts that we are getting these days since bitcoin is undervalued by a lot.

those who went away are the "gamblers" and these type of people are not going to come back anytime soon. they don't know what bitcoin is, they only see the hype and fall for the hype. so they will only come back when it is already too late and price is already high, possibly when it is around $12000 to $15000

I have seen most people who got in bitcoin during the bubble times like in 2013 have the same story where they gave up on bitcoin just because its price was going down and then come back a little later when the price was already shooting up. we already produced hundreds of them in 2017 as we set a new bubble and they have already lost hope and gone away to come back in a year from now to see $20k was a bargain just like $1200 is today

it is simply because some people refuse to see the warnings no matter how many of them are and sometimes even when they are too obvious. the biggest and most obvious case of this is the recent ICO mania where lots of people even old members who have been around, despite knowing how scam and Ponzi like they are, they still invested in them.
compared to ICOs that have no product, investing in a cloud mining scam makes perfect sense!!!

unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it because bitcoin transactions are irreversible.

the wallet installer that you have downloaded here is a fake Electrum and is using version number "4.0" to fool people into downloading it. otherwise the "real" electrum does not have that version yet.

just cut your losses and next time try to only install legitimate bitcoin related software from legitimate sources and always demand a digital signature if they don't have it already and then verify those signatures before installing the applications.