i am starting to really like all these bans that different countries put up for bitcoin. although most of them are empty talk and never end up in any actions.

whenever a ban happens, it just means that particular country is isolating themselves from the rest of the world. 1 out of 195 countries bans bitcoin, congrats
and also more importantly it shows that bitcoin CAN NOT be banned even if the government says it is banned! it is a decentralized cryptocurrency, people will continue using it. it would be like saying they want to ban Torrent network! you are just embarrassing yourself...

you are an idiot if you think bitcoin is not in a bubble but you are an even bigger idiot if you believe what FUDsters are saying when they are talking about a bubble.

it is not even half as bad as they are showing it to be! they are ignoring all the adoption of past year and all the new people and all the money that has been coming in and close their eyes and repeat certain keywords such as bubble and Tulips...

you transferred money between your own accounts, and yes it is free although i am not a ware of different banking systems in different countries but where i live it is free too.

try spending money, like using credit cards,... even if you don't see the fees directly the shops are taking fees into consideration when they are putting a price on their goods so you are paying fees.
try sending money oversees and see how much that will cost you when transferring $25K

i agree that the current fees are unacceptable, but fee is not the only thing a decentralized currency is offering. the privacy is one of the most important features in my opinion.

this is yet another publicity stunt to get bitcoin cash pumped some more and everyone is loving it, it is already $2200 approximately and the pump has given traders a lot of profit, the profit which is going out soon and into another pumping altcoin and then another after that and finally all of it is poured back into bitcoin, the real cryptocurrency that everyone including bitcoin.com goons own.

"a few cents" in this market? hmm.

if you look at how altcoins move up and down you can see it is really not a few cents that people are making while day trading. of course there are always newbies who have no idea what they are doing and and just "play around" in the market thinking they are traders but in reality those who know how to do it are making a lot more.

some people are even making a living from this market! and it is the most profitable way of trading. you can see the altcoins shoot up 100% in only 1 day!

each time someone calls bitcoin a bubble, it just goes higher and sets a new ATH! it is as if the market wants laugh at those who call bitcoin a bubble

but in all seriousness, to call bitcoin a bubble like OP with absolute certainty is just dumb and if you do it you are either  dumb or trying to spread FUD.

is it a bubble? maybe. we have had a lot of rise and it is hard to believe. but we have also had a lot of adoption, and that has brought a lot of new investors with a lot of money in. that has to lead to a price rise! you can't expect this much attention to bitcoin and have a tiny rise instead.

this is how bitcoin has always been. the rises are always as crazy as the falls. but as we go forward and bitcoin grows bigger all the craziness becomes smaller.
i see some people these days are exaggerating the situation quite a bit and they pretend that this is going to be the end of everything for bitcoin.

actually i would welcome a correction and i would be more than happy to see a massive dump because any drop means my buying power will be increasing. if i can buy 0.1 bitcoin now, any drop will help me buy a lot more!

no, that statement is not true. there is no way to "purge" a transaction from network.
when you send a bitcoin transaction it goes to the network and if a node accepts it as a valid transaction, later that node puts your transaction in its memory pool and continues to broadcast it.
network is full of nodes which are communicating with each other and they will keep broadcasting your transaction.

each node has its own mempool and each node has a setting for what they accept and how long they keep it.
there is a default time for how long they are going to keep a transaction which is 2 weeks (but this can be changed by the node operator). after that time is reached the node drops the transaction if it is still unconfirmed and still valid.
some misunderstand it as "cancelling" maybe "purge",...

but the thing about the 2 week period is that there is not just 1 node with its mempool, there are thousands and each have different settings. one may drop it and other don't.

i remember a year ago, maybe longer! there were a couple of games that were paying in satoshis. more like faucet payments but you actually played a game. it was a couple of Flash games in your browser full of bugs and slow but it was fun

there was also a MineCraft server that you could earn bitcoin to play there but i could never figure out how minecraft works so i was never a fan of that.

they may be considering some other cryptocurrency that they are making on their own. a new one not bitcoin.

because they can not use bitcoin and the article doesn't seem to focus on bitcoin either.
they can't use bitcoin because of what you said about bitcoin not being anonymous but also because bitcoin is not that big yet! when we are talking about sanctions we are talking about import export for instance and that is a lot of money, it can not go through bitcoin because they should own a large amount of it already and that is not yet possible.

also when we are talking about sanctions we are talking about for example importing goods from another country or selling (exporting) to one. if that other country does have relations with your country, they don't mind what currency is being exchanged so you don't need bitcoin. and if they don't have any relations with your country then doesn't matter what currency you use they don't have any relations with you!

altcoin prices won't be affected by anything apart from their individual pump and dumps.

bitcoin price on the other hand may be affected for a short while, like in one or two months because of these new markets and mostly because people are having weird but wild expectations out of them. and whenever people expect these things they usually act on it. so if they expect a drop they may sell and cause some small but short term  drops.
in long term i am expecting much more popularity because of these and as a consequence price will rise a lot more.

haha, you just used bitcoin price as an excuse to talk about Dogecoin and how it was pumped!

and it is not new. Doge and hundreds of other altcoins get pumped from time to time exactly like this. it doesn't have to mean anything and it will never last.

and when bitcoin rises, people pay attention to bitcoin not altcoins. they google the word bitcoin not altcoins! and finally if they buy, they will buy bitcoin not altcoins. some of them may try investing in altcoins but will soon regret it right after they got dumped on.

i always say we damage bitcoin ourselves not anyone from outside. all they do is spread FUD about bitcoin but we inflict the most damage on our own.
the current high fees is one of those damages we are doing to bitcoin. people are not going to use bitcoin that has a ridiculously high fees. and so far bitcoin was rising and staying up because it is a currency and if that changes it may rise but it will never stay up because it will be replaced.

until a real altcoin is created that is something apart from being a pump and dump, the answer to your question is the same:
bitcoin for both short and long term.
and altcoins for short term only.

in fact in short term, specifically in a couple of days to a week (mostly day trading) altcoins can be much better than bitcoin because they get pumped and rise >100% in a day or so. and you can make profit only if you catch the pump.

and at the end of the day, it depends on you. for most people are not traders, so they choose a safe option and go with bitcoin instead.

the thing about trading is that there is no single way that always works. it is all true and false at the same time. some people even call Technical Analysis as false science!

it all helps. so watch the videos, read the articles online and take it all in. but don't count on any of them 100%
for example the thing about "price action and volume" is what i like best, specially about altcoins. but it is only because it has worked best for me personally. others prefer using technical analysis and maybe other things. and it works best for them.

that is the weirdest definition that anybody has ever given for blockchain.info!!!

they are actually one of the worst wallets of all times. there have been bugs that led to money losses (for example usage of random.org for their random generator when creating a new private key!) and they have had lots of bugs, also they had the worst fee estimations which usually gave 100 sat/byte no matter what!

and they have not yet implemented SegWit after all this time!

you can clearly see that from the time that this topic was created bitcoin price has gone up a lot more! which means if OP invested even a little money into bitcoin, he would already be in a big profit!

but i should also mention that you should never fall for the hype. as someone who believes in bitcoin i will always say buy and forget about it for years and come back to see how it had done. but also because i understand bitcoin (more or less) i tell you be careful about how much you invest. it is still risky.

despite the fact that these days most people who own any amount of bitcoin are in it for the profit that it gives them, there are still others that do believe in the technology too and that is why they bought it in the first place.

and in my opinion that potential you are talking about, comes from the technology and what bitcoin offers. if you see how it works you can see that a decentralized money has a lot of people interested in it. and this is exactly what helps the growth.

1. price is already on the rise, currently at $18,580 so there is obviously nothing i can add to tell you this was not correct.

2. if price of bitcoin changes more than 7% they will shut down the market. so you can not short big time. so again this point can not be correct either.

99% of the time when i read "bitcoin experts" are talking about bitcoin future, they aren't really talking about anything worth reading and they are not really experts either.
most of them are either too hyped up by bitcoin who are seeing good times all around and predicting unbelievably happy days! or they have their heads in the sand and they are trying to spread FUD so they are predicting death and end of bitcoin very soon. always very soon!