No, I've switched to alts.

What tends to happen when a bull run starts and the markets turn green is that bitcoin leads the way. This is obviously true of new money coming into crypto, with bitcoin being effectively the fiat gateway (yes, you can buy a few top cap alts with fiat, but it's mainly BTC). So people see BTC going up from the new money, and they FOMO, sell their alts to buy more BTC, and BTC rises further.
Once BTC price increases start to slow down, a lot of people then look at alts - which now look undervalued against their historical BTC price. Plus you have the new money that came from fiat to BTC, has seen some profit, and now wants to branch out to other coins. So then alts take over the bull whilst BTC takes a back seat.
I'm not saying this always happens, but it has happened enough times in the past to become quite a good indicator of how the markets might play out.

One more point is that I'm not a fan of huge unbroken price rises. They tend to be unsustainable. I'm much happier with a rise that pauses for a while to establish a new support level before building up again. We all know what happened in 2017, and when the fall started no-one knew just how far it should drop, because the mega-rise had not built in any support.

My thoughts are that given the huge volatility of bitcoin and the fact that over a long period of time we have had orders-of-magnitude level changes, then a straight linear price chart will tend to just show the most recent price variations, with anything historic effectively smeared to a flat line. So if you want a better indicator of the trend, I'd say switch the chart to log view, as below.

My conclusion from that would be that we are moving upwards, and that price variations tend to be cyclic within that overall upwards trend. So good news, people, hold onto your bitcoin and buckle up for the ride ahead!

This is a good example of why it can be worthwhile having a few very low price orders in place. It works better on the smaller coins generally, but it's by no means unheard of for larger coins as well.

It's just for publicity. They send out a very small amount of coins per person to a large number of people. It doesn't cost them much to do it, and they're getting their coins into the hands of people who are already involved in crypto. The aim is to promote interest in their project. Whether it is effective or not, I don't know. Most airdrops are next to worthless for the recipient.

If an IEO is on a reputable exchange then it is very unlikely to be a scam.
We need to differentiate between those that fail because they don't hit soft cap (minimum amount for the project to be viable) and those that are just outright scams. There can be a world of difference between the two.

I expect over the next couple of decades companies will start mining asteroids for precious metals, so the once finite nature of gold will change - maybe not infinite, but a vastly increased potential supply.
It will be interesting to see how this then compares with bitcoin's fixed max supply.
Anything can become a store of value, so long as enough people agree it has value, so that this opinion becomes the established consensus.
I would contend that something with a guaranteed fixed supply is much more suitable than gold to fulfill this role.

Bitcoin and other cryptos don't have a 'real' value, and this is why prices are so volatile.

Look at the mainstream financial markets, and you see share prices for companies that have established products, properties (intellectual and physical), infrastructure, plus many other assets both tangible and intangible. Their prices are more stable partly because of all this 'stuff' that they can be measured against. This relative price stability is then self-perpetuating because it invites long-term investments from pension funds etc, so it comes down to a) having assets and b) being established because of 'a'.

Crypto by contrast is volatile largely because so much of the price is based on expectation of future utility. It is worth nothing now other than in a speculative sense. Partly in the sense of there being nothing 'real' to base the price on, and partly in the sense of the volatility inviting traders... so this volatility is also self-perpetuating. We get out of it once crypto becomes mainstream. That's when the markets start to mature, we get big institutional investment, and trading becomes less frenzied.

Absolutely definite it will repeat. Crypto is volatile largely because so much of the price is based on expectation of future utility - everyone is guessing what crypto will be worth at some indefinite point in the future once it is part of everyday life. Until that time comes of full integration of crypto into society, we will remain on the rollercoaster.

I started a thread in the Economy section, about where I think it is headed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5147740

My perspective is that FB are using crypto in order to suck up yet more personal data, this time in the valuable area of what we purchase, and then selling this on to advertisers. It's an example of the wider trend of surveillance capitalism, where anything that can be captured and digitised is captured and digitised in order to build up very detailed profiles on what our behaviour might be in the future.

It does depend on participation rates. Personally I've found social media bounty rewards to be low, but airdrop rewards to be very very low. But airdrops certainly involve less effort, so per hour spent on the task, you are probably correct that an hour's worth of signing up for airdrops is more profitable than an hour's social media bounty.

I think that prices will continue to rise for a while. When they come back down, as they always do, then I would expect them to remain above the lows that we had last time. Optimistically I'm saying above $8k, on the basis that the current rise isn't as dramatic as that seen in 2017, so I'd expect the drop to be less dramatic as well.

I do think it's likely that XRP will hit and maintain that price eventually, but I'd say there's about zero chance of that happening in the next few days, weeks or months.
XRP has spiked in the past but then fallen away. Even if it did hit those prices quickly, it wouldn't be sustainable without establishing a long period of support at high levels beforehand.

The purpose is behavioural analytics used to predict and influence future purchasing. It's an incredibly lucrative field. Say someone wants to sell a sports drink. Instead of wasting money by blanket targeting everyone through say a TV advert, they can get an ad to pop-up on your phone when you've just left the gym. They know there's a shop just around the corner that sells their drink, they know you're thirsty because you've been exercising, they know you have a history of buying other drinks from that shop at that particular time of day. Their model indicates that you are attending the gym more often than you used to. You're trying to engage in a healthier lifestyle. They then sell this information on again to a client company who produces juicers and smoothie-makers, and another company that sells bicycles, perhaps they'll offer you 10% off a new bike, but only for a limited time - and they'll send this offer to you at 8pm becuase they know this is when you're tired and more likely to make impulse purchases.

That's the point of it. Companies pay a lot of money for this sort of advantage.

Yes, I agree 100%. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid them. Every company can see the huge income that FB and Google can generate on the back of the personal information that we hand over freely, and unsurprisingly they all want in. Particularly if you have a smart phone - it's not just the Android operating system, it seems like every app wants to grab your location data, access your photos, contacts etc. And if you delve into the permissions that most websites now want, it's like entering an infinite labyrinth, they sell your data on to a huge number of companies, who in turn sell it on further. It's an onslaught.

This is the thing that concerns me about the FB coin. It will absolutely be used to track purchases and potential purchases and whatever else it can track; this is how FB makes its money. It's essentially a behavioural futures market.

So given that all these companies are chasing after our personal information, and that surveillance possibilities are ever-increasing with the introduction of new tech like facial recognition becoming more widespread, this comes back to crypto again in the form of IoT devices managed by smart contracts. It's a small step from KYC on exchanges to full surveillance everywhere, and the worst thing is that there's money in it to act as an incentive.

There's some good, insightful literature on this stuff. I'd recommend 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' by Shoshana Zuboff. Probably best not to get it from Amazon though

Tin foil hats on, people, I'm going in...

Big news recently has been Facebook's announcement that it will be launching its own cryptocurrency, 'GlobalCoin'. I think this has implications for the direction of travel of crypto as a whole.

Facebook, along with other major internet companies such as Google, offers its services 'for free'. Obviously 'free' is not really free, as these companies harvest all of the personal data that you provide and use increasingly sophisticated behavioural analytics programs to predict your future behaviour, and sell this on for big profit.

So the Facebook coin - they can harvest data on your personality, age, gender, politics and preferences, but the ultimate aim is to acquire everything, all data, including the most valuable one, which is what you buy and when (and under what circumstances) you buy it. This is surely the real purpose of Facebook's move into crypto. All of your purchase activity with this Facebook coin will be tracked and incorporated into the 'digital you' that Facebook sell on.

Is the rest of crypto heading the same way? I know there are privacy coins, but the overall trend is towards KYC - including on exchanges, and this will doubtless increase as mainstream adoption draws closer and governments become more hands-on in devising legislation. And then couple this with the privacy trade-offs that we are likely to concede in order to make use of the convenience of IoT and connected devices.

Are we heading inevitably into a future where crypto is used as a means for big companies to harvest your data for profit?

I would advise ETH. But for any coin, look at its price chart vs BTC, and you can see whether it is at a low point in the cycle.
ETH was much higher during the bear market when BTC fell to $8k.

$4 is perfectly achievable for XRP, as it has got close in the past, and has a history of sudden immense price rises. The difficulty will be in sustaining that price and not just quickly dropping back to under $1 again.
XRP does offer a lot, but it is more prone to speculation that most other top coins. I would imagine a lot of people who bought in at the previous ATH will be very reluctant to buy in again as they must be sitting on big losses.

If Satoshi wanted for some reason to prove his identity to us in this forum, he could just log back in to his bitcointalk account
But really it doesn't matter. Bitcoin is strong enough to survive and prosper without it being driven by a personality.
We can be grateful to Satoshi for what he started and respect personal privacy at the same time.
Some people like to be in the spotlight, some people don't. IMHO the most interesting people are the introverts who don't live their lives through a loudspeaker.

I disagree. It is true that there is much in crypto that is uncertain, and prices for specific coins and the whole market cap are highly volatile... but it is also true that in any open market, whatever is the most efficient solution to any problem will become dominant. And crypto is far better than existing solutions for a whole range of markets, plus the creation of new markets that don't yet exist but will be coming in the next few years as technology advances and IoT and AI become more widespread. Look at XRP as an example - so much better, faster and cheaper than existing international money transfer standards.

Crypto will survive and prosper and become mainstream - simply because it is so much better than what we have at present. It only needs a few companies or countries to start using crypto, then everyone who doesn't will be at a competitive disadvantage, and face the choice of either using crypto or being left behind to stagnate and fail.

So much within crypto is uncertain, but the march towards crypto dominance over fiat seems inevitable.

ETH did look very underpriced vs BTC when it was $84. It still looks low vs BTC now, so I think there is more room for growth before selling. The difficult point if you're wanting to trade it for a third coin (TRON) is obviously the other coin also has its various highs and lows in the cycle vs BTC. So it is a case of looking at how both ETH and TRON vary against BTC and then picking your best moment to do the trade.
Although personally I prefer ETH, and would just stick with ETH at least until it has reached a much higher point vs BTC.