i think the ICO hype is still going to exist for a while longer before it dwindles and dies off but it won't be replaced by any alternative but similar methods! i think pretty soon we are going to see the coins that focus on payment systems (being a currency) can become the new hyped up topic. coins such as IOTA might be among those that get pumped up a lot or possible new coins similar to those.

it is not ineffective though. what we do is good and it is one step closer to educating everyone. the problem is that we are fighting millions of dollars worth of advertisement that has already brainwashed a lot of people and are still in full force so you can't really expect a small attempt like this to be able to break this mentality overnight.

price never goes down because of "lack of fresh money" which is also known as demand. it goes down when there is more supply or in other words when there is more sells happening.
and that is what has been happening so far, a huge amount of bitcoin has been getting sold on exchanges which has been the reason for this "implosion" or "reverse bubble".

you can not because most of the times these ICOs don't even write their own whitepaper. instead they pay someone with quite a lot of experience in the field to write something without even knowing what their project is about. they have experience in creating a good advertisement for that shitcoin.

also ICOs are always using a cool looking idea to fool you into thinking they are actually implementing that idea. and their paper is filled with that while in reality they don't do anything remotely close to that.

they didn't mine $X amount of bitcoin once. they are constantly mining $XXXX worth of bitcoin every single day and will continue to do so.
and what they do with that amount is not changing whether they are selling it, holding it, burning it,... it is still the same and will be the same

you must be really naive to think that people put higher value on gold compared to bitcoin on a bitcoin forum that you start such discussions and then tell others that you are buying gold instead of bitcoin

steem and steemit have been flawed from the beginning. it was doomed to fail anyways. in the beginning they started paying a lot of money to anyone who spammed on their platform so that attracted a lot of people but slowly it dropped down and the place was filled with spam and eventually considered a bad place for reading anything as a source. i personally prefer this forum a lot more and medium.com a lot better.

with that said it is not out of ordinary for them to shrink their staff to reduce their cost so that they can survive a little bit longer.
i wonder if they also have any plans on pumping the coin?

first of all 10 minutes is not the default time for every coin. it is the average time between blocks of bitcoin and by extension all the coins that copied it without changing difficulty.

secondly if there is no new blocks being generated then the coin is dead but it can be revived as soon as someone picks it up. for example it can die for a whole day and then someone can start mining it the next day and build new blocks. but such network is not healthy and the coin is considered  dead even if its blockchain is growing.

buy in the dip! isn't it obvious?

the dip has always been the best time to buy anything, including bitcoin. and now we are in mother of all dips so it is the best time to buy bitcoin.
additionally we have this old expert suggestion that you should always buy when others are selling or advising to sell and sell when others are buying and advising you to buy.

you mean buying coins outside of exchanges then sell them on exchanges?

that is something that is always happening but there is always a balance. because there is also others who buy on exchanges and sell away from exchanges (off the market).

besides if you want to crash price of  an altcoin you don't need to do these things. a whale simply selling his coins on exchanges will crash 90% of them since they have small markets.

you can't stop people from copying an open source code and create their own version of it. and also this is a free market and it must remain like that which means anybody is free to create a new coin and release it to the public.

the only thing you can do is to start educating others (the newbies) so that they can understand the difference between a real project and a real coin like bitcoin and a shitcoin copy like bitcoincash. if you do that, then you automatically and eventually stop "forks shit".

considering that "saving the market" has nothing to do with the price you should know that the only thing  wrong with bitcoin market is manipulation that is occurring in it and the only way to save the market is to remove that manipulation or at least reduce the effects of it. again it has nothing to do with the price, price will still go up and down nearly the same way but we no longer would see unpredictable and irrational movements.

that can only happen if the market grows bigger so that the whales can not easily manipulate it with their funds. and this can only happen if exchanges become more trusted and also bitcoin is more adopted.

exactly! this is the first thing that i always think whenever i read somewhere about how some scammer claims he is Satoshi! why would he come out when he intentionally disappeared on his own?!

this kind of negativity about bitcoin is nothing new. it has been happening every time that price drops. even when there is a small drop, now the drop is the biggest so it is understandable to see so much negativity from newbies and those who spread FUD about bitcoin on the internet. it will pass as soon as the price starts its reversal. don't worry too much.

it will come down to their usages.

for example bitcoin is a global currency which is supposed to be able to be used by everyone around the globe as a currency so having 21 million (don't forget the decimals) seemed a good number.

a lot of altcoins have no use cases and are only used for pump and dumps so even having 1000 coins is too much if you ask me.

also we have tokens such as ethereum which are supposed to be used as a fuel for smart contracts so there shouldn't really be any supply limitations. hence the unlimited supply of ETH.

don't forget that when you are talking about price, then it is a different discussion. for example if you are planning on creating a new coin it may be best to limit the supply to a much smaller number so that you can get a better price and make more profit.

first of all the volume is still highest in bitcoin and that has never changed and will not change any time soon because every person in this market has bitcoin but only a small percentage of them go for altcoins also.

also the volume among altcoins only go up when that altcoin is either rising or falling. so when you see the higher volume in a coin next time check its price movement. for example when it is getting pumped 500% in that day, it obviously is attracting a lot of volume. that doesn't mean "the community is spreading beyond bitcoin"! it just means that particular day the pumpers went to that particular coin and the next day that coin will be dead as it always is!
you can't judge a coin based on its one day performance after all.

considering a hardware wallet is only useful for someone who plans on having large amounts of cryptocurrencies and also wants to have access to them at all times to send and receive fast and easy in a secure way, you can say that it is worth it.

these people are always traders. and as an altcoin trader they want to have their coins at the ready in an instant so that they can dump it fast while they don't want to keep it on exchanges since they can run away. so hardware wallet is good for them and the price doesn't matter since a good altcoin trader makes a lot of profit from shitcoins that get pumped and dumped.

people have been trying to connect bitcoin and its price to a lot of things, including tether for a long time because these people can not analyze the market as it really is so they start using weird things to justify what they can not explain.

and when it comes to altcoins the market manipulation is so huge that you can't even deny it. but you can to explain it either. all you can do is either stay away or learn to take advantage and make some money from it.

only small coins that can have huge pumps such as 1000% in less than a week are going to be  the hot coins of the day for the upcoming months and this will probably last at least another 6 months while the bigger altcoins such as ethereum and ripple continue getting dumped and have small dead cat bounces.
and that is because the traders have moved to where the real profit is.

it is possible that last year due to the Futures market announcement and the fact that they could go against the market and make profit, a surge of wallstreet wolves entered the market and pushed it up a little but most of the rise was a FOMO buy from the same newbies in the market who have been wishing for a drop below $9k to buy bitcoin but since that didn't happen they bought at $10k+ to $20k and caused the bubble.