being able to withdraw or sell to fiat is not a utility. these coins don't have to have that to be considered useful. for example TRON, ETH,... are providing smart contract capabilities on their platform and that is their usage. now IF they were used to create a smart contract in real world that were actually used to solve something and not just useless ICO tokens then we can call that utility, otherwise they remain useless no matter what their market capitalization size were.

addition to a gambling site can be considered a usage but it is such a small thing in big picture that you can't really list it under their utililties.

sorry to disappoint you but if you missed the chance to buy bitcoin many years ago when it was $100, you have missed that chance for good. if you missed the chance to buy bitcoin below $8k in this year's dip then you have missed that chance for good too. price will not go down specially that low unless bitcoin were dead. in other words if price fell to $100 ten it would also fell to zero and die. there won't be any recovery so don't be greedy


stop inventing words

no, but the problem with your question is that usually these questions focus on two ends of the things you can buy, it is either coffee or a Lamborghini! the thing is, there is a ton of other things in between. so no i won't use Lightning Network to pay for coffee ever. but i will use it for high frequency payments where i need to make a payment fast and safe and also receive it just as fast. for example when i trade specially in altcoin market that it is crypto versus crypto exchange, LN can be a fantastic tool if it gets adopted more.

don't bother.
for 10 years there has been more than 10000 coins with as many names created and none of them had a name nearly as good as bitcoin. it just says it all! there are some altcoin names that come close like Dogecoin but only because they describe the purpose of the coin well enough (joke coin).

but XRP lets you do all those things like having a wallet and storing your private keys on your own because they want to pretend that they are decentralized. if you check out their statements it is always in the same manner. you can also run its wallet and stake it. it is proof of stake afterall.

but Libra is not like that, they are not hiding their centralization and they won't let anybody near the "blockchain". it will be a private ledger for them which means you won't be able to actually have a "wallet" and if you store your private keys it would be like storing your facebook password on your own! which is why i consider it similar to PayPal.

McAfee is NOT an expert in anything let alone about bitcoin. he is just a weasel that is taking the opportunity to gain some fame and then make money from his misleading advertisements where he pumps shitcoins or gets paid to advertise scam projects.

no it is not. US is putting pressure on Facebook and their coin Libra which has nothing to do with bitcoin.
not to mention that this price action is normal and is the same pattern that we always have after the initial rise after the bubble burst ends.

that is an obvious statement!
anything that is decentralized like bitcoin can not be controlled by any centralized body such as the government. so they have no power in it.

bullshit. there is no way anybody could predict when this sideways market and accumulation would end.

it depends on the type of wallet you are using!
if it is a full node then using VPNs and TOR are good options for increasing your privacy but if it is an SPV wallet, a web wallet or worse of all a custodial wallet then your privacy is reduced in order of the types i listed here. hiding your IP doesn't do you much.

they have to be able to link the "coins" to the person. as long as you are not advertising your identity online and not linking it to your address you could be fine.

sell on exchanges, and if you have large amounts split it among multiple addresses (like 10BTC per address).
if you decided to sell face to face then make sure to do it in a public place and bring someone with you as "bodyguard"!

not so much. they are hacked all the time and some of them are shady enough to sell your information online! specially the big altcoin exchanges.

any project that copies bitcoin technology can never be better than bitcoin. that can never change no matter what changes they make in the protocol. and the fact is that even though ethereum may look different and new but it is a copy of bitcoin! it uses the same proof of work algorithm but with a different hash function!!! it uses the same blockchain architecture with a different difficulty setting. it uses the same script settings with slight differences.
the fact is that Vitalik was pushing bitcoin towards having all these features back in the days (you can even find his arguments online) and it was rejected since bitcoin is a currency not a platform for silly things. so he copied bitcoin and created ethereum.

that article has some points in it but in my opinion it is exaggerating a lot of things. for instance bitcoin may not be the fastest option or the most efficient thing but it is far from being slow and inefficient.

nowadays it is becoming extremely hard for countries to outright ban bitcoin because the adoption has been happening for 10 years and although it is not yet that big but it exists. and also the rest of the world has somewhat accepted bitcoin so if one country like this bans bitcoin they will only make themselves as an "exception" in the whole world. i don't think people would like it or even pay attention to such bans specially when it comes to something fully decentralized like bitcoin which they can not really control.

i don't think we can call that "adoption", the only thing that can happen is a new group of speculators that would want to earn some free money which they could dump and make profit. in short term the price can get pumped due to this surge but as we move forwards the sheer amount of "free money" they get and the unlimited supply will start to show its pressure on the market and start reducing the price again.
as a result of that large and prolonged dumping the same speculators sell and get out while taking a lot of other investors out too as they also lose a lot of money. so the price will see bigger crashes.

that is two entirely different and independent questions.
lets start withe the second one: altcoins that don't get dumped each time bitcoin rises or falls?
there are no such altcoins unfortunately. all of them are affected by bitcoin price because the investors treat all of them as tools to increase their bitcoin wealth so logically they all move to bitcoin market each time bitcoin is making a move either up or  down.

the first question: altcoins that are standalone and don't depend on bitcoin or other altcoins?
it is easier to categorize them instead of giving you a list since there are nearly 3000 of them. basically for bitcoin any coin that is using the Omni layer is depending on bitcoin network and can technically be considered not-standalone. there are others like litecoin, bitcoin-cash, .... that copy literary everything from bitcoin and they can also be considered not-standalone.
as for altcoins, usually any coin that is considered a "token" and is created on a "smart contract platform" such as ethereum, waves,... are not-standalone.
everything else can be considered standalone.

you are a newcomer otherwise you wouldn't have made such ridiculous claims.
hashrate rises when new miners enter the space, it requires them to either already have ASICs and turn them on or go buy some and start using them to mine bitcoin. that takes time so you can't expect hashrate to just jump each time bitcoin price jumps! it will slowly rise right after the price rise. and if you look at the hashrate charts versus the price you could clearly see that!

it is interesting that everyone is disapproving your whole speculation and yet you are hostile towards everyone and at the same time want to sell your services!!!

i think you are very confused about the "purpose" of bitcoin!
it has never been anonymity and nobody has ever made such claims specially the creator (Satoshi Nakamoto). in fact bitcoin is the most transparent currency in existence. all it provides is privacy.
and the "reason" for creation of bitcoin was to cut the middle man aka the centralization.

i thought this was some tiny bank which wasn't even located in China as news such as these usually are! but with some search it seems like it IS a state-owned bank and it is one of the biggest ones. in fact it was the fourth largest bank in the world in terms of assets! and it is located in the heart of China
http://www.boc.cn/en/aboutboc/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_China
and that makes this whole news even stranger

i am not sure how that El. Cost column is calculated, it says 1 day and the cost is $0.52! how much is your electric cost in KW/h? if that is low enough then you can make good profit but if it is medium and high then you will have a hard time at the moment.

so your only option is to wait for the altcoin pumping season to begin so that you can make  big profit from the pumps not from mining itself. meaning you mine some shitcoin for small profit but don't sell, wait for when it gets pumped hard and then dump it to get the bigger profit that way.
it is a risky move but it can be more profitable too.

it is not a "token" either. it is not even a coin. it might as well not even have a blockchain because simply Libra is PayPal. so if you can call those numbers in  your PayPal account as "coins" or "tokens" so could you do that for Libra.
all they are doing is that they saw the hype that cryptocurrencies had and wanted a share of the market to make billions out of it.

as much as i hate Libra but that is a load of nonsense coming out of this guy! the biggest problem with Libra is its centralization and i honestly don't see why the US government is currently going ape shit about something they can fully control. i think the only reason for it is because they don't want to let this company (Facebook) to gain any more power than it currently has. otherwise this is yet another payment processor like PayPal where it prints money and pegs it to USD and then get paid for letting people use their online services.

you are wrong.
bitcoin is a currency and nothing else. and because this currency is new and is still growing and being adopted, its price rises which means it attracts speculators who invest in this currency. that doesn't change the nature of bitcoin though.

you are very wrong about this.
and history has proven many times that price can and will fall below the creation cost (aka mining cost) of bitcoin as it has always fallen big time after its bubbles while the mining cost remains much higher.
in other words creation cost has nothing to do with how low price can go or how much it should be.

you are wrong again.
and it is a very common mistake among newcomers. the thing is you are looking at it upside down. price doesn't change based on cost, the cost changes based on price!
meaning if price is $10 then the cost will be a little less than $10
if price went up to $20 then the cost adjusts and will be a little less than $20
and if price fell down to $5 then the cost again readjusts and will be a little less than $5

bitcoin has always been legal in Iran it has just not been regulated. so was mining. in fact people in Iran have been mining bitcoin for many years, mostly in early years that the difficulty was low. as for regulation of bitcoin itself, it is going to happen in about 3 months.

first of all you should never compare exchanges asking you for KYC documents with some random ICO project asking you for your KYC documents. they are very different. the exchanges are legitimate businesses with real business going on! they may not all have to be forcing KYC but when they do, you are still giving your documents to a place that is legit. in comparison an ICO project that requires KYC is just scamming you because there is no business, no company, no known person,... there is some random dude on the internet that you are handing your personal information to!!! and they ALL sell it on the dark market without exception.

secondly safety is another matter. assuming you gave it to a legit place, it still can never be 100% safe. many of these exchange databases were hacked. many even leaked it or sold it themselves. for example Bittrex sold their user's KYC documents online and pretended it was a leak/hack.