performing a 51% attack is possible with more than 50% hashrate but succeeding at it is not that easy. because you need to make the longest chain and make others follow you. the more hashrate you have the easier it becomes because you can find more blocks and make the chain longer.

also a 51% attack is usually performed to gain something like double spending a very large amount and for that people always want more confirmation which makes performing a 51% attack that much harder.

although i should say altcoins are very different from each other. what i said is mostly bitcoin based and by extension covers many altcoins but not all.

i am afraid there can be at least 1 more drop before the $5000 is really reached. another drop in the same manner of the last drop meaning price will go up again to $49xx and then in a flash it drops down again. probably to $48xx this time and then go back up again.

if you can put some automation here, there can be some short term small profits to be made from the rise and the follow up dip.

yes, if you buy the coins before the fork happens and you transfer them to your Trezor wallet and they confirm in any block before the target block for fork.

but be careful when claiming the coins though. you need to import your private keys in their wallet and that is a risky move if you still have bitcoin in those keys after the fork.

there is this thing called "temporary email" which you can use. google it and you find a lot of good information about it. such as temp-mail.org you can use these "disposable" emails to sign up for stuff like this.

i also remember that some of famous email provides such as Yahoo mail offered something like this.
for example imagine your Email is sweetdesirez[at]yahoo.com, what you could do was to create something temporary such as sweetdesirez_forAirDrop[at]yahoo.com inside the same account/same inbox, and dispose it as soon as you were done with it.

i think you can't really generalize it like this. it may have different results for different people. some may believe it and the first thing (the negative one) that they hear about bitcoin becomes what they will always remember from it. and no matter what happens in the future, they may never change their mind.
believe it or not some people are actually like that!

or some others may be affected by it, specially if it is someone big saying it but change their mind when they find out more about bitcoin and what it really is.

so far the result of all these FUDs which have been taking place for years, was never big enough to cause any permanent damage. it at least seems like it. and bitcoin is growing stronger every day despite all that!

first of all you are making stuff up, nowhere anyone is talking about bitcoin cap of 21 million. stop spreading FUD.

secondly any service is free to choose any strategy they wish to choose as long as they are transparent about it, i don't see any problems with that.
you can read their stance and understand what they offer and if you don't like it, then don't use it. the third party services don't define bitcoin.

let me quote some parts:
https://blog.xapo.com/about-the-bitcoin-segwit2x-update/

you have my sympathy because you missed buying bitcoin when it was in the dip and was a lot cheaper. next time don't wait for too long and try not to fall for the false information you get from this forum like those who were saying bitcoin will fall to $2000 and made you wait longer instead of buying at $3000

and i feel aliens will attack soon and kill anybody who holds bitcoin and spare those who don't.

the news coming from Russia has never been any better from news coming from China. there is too many contradiction between what we read on the news and what really is happening and also people like OP always mistake the news by assuming the worse. he calls it "banning BTC".

in reality what is happening is that Russia has closed down exchanges because of the ICO scams that has been happening and all the money that goes into those.

dogecoin never lived to die now
it has always been a joke coin that some people took too seriously. it is mostly a coin to play around with. i happen to know dogecoin as a tipping coin on reddit where you tip and tip back!

the huge supply and the latest big change they did to remove the cap and sustain the mining reward was the last blow in my opinion. a coin can not function like this.

and finally the Chinese exchanges closing and the huge dump that one of them did on poloniex and bittrex from their cold storage crashed the price.

be careful, there is no ICO for bitcoin gold according to the legit sources which are related to this project. what they are calling ICO is the premine set of blocks.

the link posted above by @taseerali99 has nothing to do with bitcoin gold. it is most probably a scam website. i suggest staying away from it.

here are the official links and as you can see there is no talk of that website above in any of them yet:
Official site: http://btcgpu.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/btcgpu
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/btcgpu
Github: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU

here are your options when reality kicks in:

bitcoin, is the only investment that matters. if you hold it, in long term it will go up no matter if now it is on the rise or now it is on the way down.

altcoins: if bitcoin drops will drop hard too! so you have no other choice to either hold bitcoin or convert back to fiat.

in the end, you should choose these options only if you are a trader. if you have experience in it you would know what to do, otherwise don't bother. just hold bitcoin and close down social media to have your mind at ease.

it is perfectly possible that a big rise happen in bitcoin cash's price during all the drama that bitcoin experiences. but the reason for it will not be what you said.
safe haven? pffft...

it will simply be a pump! do you remember what happened to altcoins earlier this year? Dash, ETH, XRP,... all those claiming to replace bitcoin while it was $1200 and saying bitcoin will die because $1200 is bubble and we will replace it.
the same thing can happen again
hyping some altcoins and pump them while bitcoin takes some time off before the moon launch.

it doesn't matter what we expect. bitcoin IS climbing. it is even possible that we see bitcoin price breaks the ATH and goes to the $5000 range in a week from now.

if it happens, it will be because of bitcoin gold fork. because everyone knows it is the closest and it is the free airdrop that everyone agrees about. free money makes people want to invest in bitcoin more.

well, nobody dislikes earning money from doing what they do. specially when it is related to your own project.
but it is not all about the "money" it is also building him a nice résumé! he is already talking to banks and big financial corporations for his future and will most probably start working with them pretty soon and get paid real money with a nice job with government/banks.

it is funny to see this topic here today because earlier today i learned that there has been 667 forks of bitcoin to this day 3 of which has been in this month!

about 300 or so of these have been forked from Litecoin project.

i also checked and only 5 have been forked from Ripple.

what this means is that at some point people figured out that forking an open source project is a piece of cake so they started doing that. out of these 667 forks, most of them are below 100 satoshi and many are even dead now.
the names never mattered, the functionality and devs behind the project matter.

i agree with parts of what you said not all of it. for instance you are correct that exchanges have a lot of power but this power has been diminishing as the total trade volume spreads among multiple exchanges instead of all of it being in one place.

and as other comment said above me, miners don't send their coins to exchanges. they do it off the market if they are big mining farms and smaller miners get paid small amounts that doesn't matter where they sell.

and finally bitcoin is decentralized not bitcoin price. it is a free market, the price will eventually be set based on supply and demand even if the short term is looking weird.

big companies like Amazon (specially if they are located in USA) won't add bitcoin until two things become clear for them:

1. there will be customers using bitcoin.
and this is the most important of all. if they come to believe that there is going to be enough demand for it, they will add bitcoin without hesitation.

2. bitcoin is regulated
this is less important because we can see other big companies like Valve already accepted bitcoin without any problem and it has been a year. but being regulated (like Japan) speeds up their decision making process by a lot.

in some countries like China, it is illegal for banks to invest in bitcoin. (this was a law set in motion back in 2011ish). possibly in other places too.

additionally things that are considered manipulation of any market is considered highly illegal in almost all countries. and this is a serious financial crime.

with these said, it is not easy for banks which are heavily regulated and watched to enter bitcoin market and try to manipulate it. and banks' money is borrowed money. it is not their own which makes it worse!

my avatar is finally updated, i don't know what was wrong with it yesterday. i kept checking it multiple times but it was stuck!

BTW my starting post is 2231 (with this 2232) but i guess it doesn't matter if you count by timestamp of the posts

Btctalk name: BTCLovingDude
Rank:  Hero Member
Current post count: 2234
BTC Address: 172Q2AC7qR8NPXCT5eixfdHMxYcegW4YwB
Wear appropriate signature: ok (Avatar doesn't seem to be updating, but i did change it)