this misunderstanding about Chinese and their control over bitcoin has been around for a very long time and when you write a long essay about it, that still doesn't make it true. it is still the same flawed discussion that has been discussed a million times here.

block reward halving has only been a small push towards the ATHs in the history and all the rises that were happening because of it have always lasted for a short time before bitcoin goes back on the same rising track as always.

let me try and make it simpler for you:
if the money you are going to invest (which is nearly $4000) is the money that you can afford to lose then go ahead and buy bitcoin now and consider it as a long term investment. come back in a year or so and see the huge profit you have gained.
if it is not the money you can afford to lose then invest a smaller amount of money like $2000 and buy 0.5 bitcoin with it.

the same reason why some altcoins get pumped and some other altcoins get dumped!
for example a couple of days ago a shitcoin called OCC got pumped about 300% while ETH was getting dumped. then OCC was getting dumped while CLAM was getting pumped and the trend goes on...

Tom Lee is just sticking to what he said before and doesn't want to change it. otherwise i think even he knows that $15k is not a possibility anymore. IF the whales didn't manipulate and crash the market then we could start rising from the real bottom at $6k and enter the $10k range easily which would be the real value of bitcoin at this point but now everything is postponed because of this reverse bubble that has formed up which needs bursting and price to go back up before it is healthy again.

i generally dislike comparing market capitalization of cryptocurrencies (including bitcoin) with market capitalization of companies. it is just wrong specially when it comes to altcoins.

all i need to know is that bitcoin has a lot of "untapped potential" as the other user pointed out. and we still have a lot of way to go before we even reach a small portion of it.
we aren't at 50% adoption, nor 40% nor 10%,... we are in less than 1% adoption right now. and that is one of the biggest reasons for continuation of these huge ups and retraces.

i actually don't know any exchange that has multiple fiat currencies! all the ones that i have seen only have one fiat like only having US dollar, EURO, Japanese Yen,... so they don't need a fiat-fiat market.

Yobit is an exception since it is a fake place and having  a fiat-fiat market won't help them in anything! they want a market where they can manipulate and fake pump things.

remember that this is temporary and i am not talking about price although that too is temporary in my opinion. but this mining situation is temporary because like always bitcoin is designed well enough to adapt and that is called "difficulty adjustment". by the time manipulators run out of steam and market stabilizes difficulty will also be adjusted and mining bitcoin will be like always...

nothing is new in the current market. it is same as it has always been. bitcoin is being manipulated and is dropping lower, altcoins follow it down. and like always there are certain people who realize the trend of the market and go with the flow to make more money and some others who try resisting it and lose money.

in any case this can be both an opportunity and a way to burn your money. if you buy bitcoin in the dips while everyone else is worrying about the price you win.

that is a lot of words talking about a shitcoin!

it really isn't that complicated to begin with. there are shitcoins, they are getting pumped and dumped. meanwhile some people make a lot of money and some newbies get burned.
everything else is just noise from different sides of this process each trying to make money in their own ways.

with that last statement you are confirming that we are actually NOT in a predictable state. otherwise you could have said $3400ish was the bottom and the trend has indeed reversed. but you can not say that and that means unpredictability.
the same manipulators who dumped the price so far can decide to dump more and keep it down for a longer time or they may run out of power and the price can reverse upwards towards real bottom at $6k...

calling bitcoin outdated is like calling the next new iPhone outdated the same day it is released
dude bitcoin is THE new cryptocurrency with THE new technology that is making a breakthrough in history and setting the standard. others look like broken things in comparison even with all the downsides of bitcoin.
as coins like XRB, they are not perfect either. in fact they have lots of problems of their own. some of them are already found and you can find them online if you search and some issues are hidden and will be seen as soon as they become used more.

good altcoin traders are always making money, and they are making a lot of it not because of green in some top coin but because of the coins that you don't see on top but are getting real pumps! these coins are getting pumped at least 100% in a very short time and the traders take their money out right away back to their cold storages.

they are not killing anything, least of bitcoin! since bitcoin is not even linked to ICOs as much as you would think. if anything ICOs are killing the platforms such as ethereum because ethereum's livelihood depends on ICOs since it has not other usages and without them it becomes completely useless.

but i agree that ICOs because of being scams, have done a lot of damage to the whole market. but if it wasn't ICO then it was something else scamming people!
to solve it we need to educate others to stop being greedy and stop throwing their money away.

that may be the case but usually in cases like this i ask myself this question:
why did the price went down in first place? and then whether that reason is still valid.

in this case the reason in my opinion was manipulation and panic because of FUD. and when that happens there no longer is any bottom. we are in an unpredictable state!

it is mostly because the market participants are mostly newbies who panic sell in face of a little manipulation and also some of them even love the drops. you can see from the troll accounts that became active in the past couple of days (the example is the second post here) that have been wishing for the dumps so that they could make some quick buck from the volatility.

TA,... won't work either because this is not a natural drop. it is manipulation.

lets say an iPhone that is sold for more than $600 is being sold at $200. wouldn't you call that cheap? the value of it has gone up because of supply and demand anyways. in other words if people stopped buying iPhones the price would drop down to $1 but the demand is keeping it up.

now imagine something that is up and coming in the market and growing. a new technology as it is with bitcoin. obviously the demand for that technology will grow and with it the price of it will also grow. there will be times when the market gets excited and does a bigger sell off to crash the price below real value. that is when it is considered "cheap". and that is this time.

Ripple foundation controls the transactions and coins, they can easily track you and also take your money (spend it instead of you to their own address) if they wanted to.
but lets pretend XRP is not centralized and broken like this.

i think there is a very good chance that we end up seeing 2 coins in the end. probably ETH and ETHPoS coins. i say this because unlike other forks this fork is eliminating miners altogether and miners aren't known to go away that easily specially now that ETH ASIC miners are starting to grow. they will resist this fork and prevent it from happening.

it has to be bitcoin. although i say this because you asked about the most profitable "investment" and bitcoin has always been the most profitable one and will remain that way.

if you want the most profitable trade then it is a different question because a trade is not an investment exactly and i have done a lot of them this year to make a lot of profit. for example there were shitcoins that i traded for 100% in a week. they are mostly dead by now.