Stellar is in the same basket with ripple but it's a bit better. The creators of stellar were less greedy and actually made a better coin. The only reason why it's still priced lower than XRP is that it came later and is less known. Of course if XRP were to die at some point it would be the closest thing to take over as the new king of centralized bank coins

This is showing how stupid the system is and how it is unable to understand the Internet. An Internet business is available to anyone. If a country has a problem with it it should block the website or make their citizens aware that it's against the law to use that service.

The host can't watch and check every single person who enters the site and can't register in every single country in the world. What next? If you make a website you have to make sure the authorities in some shithole on the other side of the world give you a permit?

99% of the world has a neutral or positive stance towards Bitcoin. You are in a very small group of people that not only can't formally use Bitcoin but can also get arrested for doing it. There are some crazy places like Venezuela where police steals mining equipment and arrests people for mining but it can't be treated like something normal.

Most people aren't doing anything because they aren't paid to do so. Are we to take a day off and walk around town persuading merchants to use Bitcoin?

Pray that your friend doesn't ever get in trouble or in serious debt like gambling debts with some violent people. He'll choose his own life and well-being over friendship, you'll see. Friendship is nice but given a serious life threatening choice he'll prefer to steal from you than lose a limb or get beaten up.
Don't trust anyone with money!

2015 was the only year with lower yearly lows than a year before. Are we going to repeat that? I hope not.
Many people are watching the charts and thinking that we'll repeat this and capitulate at 2500 or very close to that level, but that really doesn't make much sense since such a long bear market happened only once in history and it was following the fall of Mt. Gox and the shutdown of Chinese exchanges.

Welcome to the FUD year. It's 2015 once again. Do you remember how there were rumors that China is banning BTC they denied everything and a month later somebody else came up with a story that insides are telling him that it's going to be banned and then again nothing happened. Later there was FUD about South Korea banning Bitcoin and now we had rumors of Russia buying and this. Don't believe the media!

If you  limit yourself and don't chase lost coins you will be fine. I won a bit this year on one day and took a break for a few weeks. When I came back I lost all my previous winnings and at that point I stopped again. In the end I didn't win big and I didn't lose. I learnt my lesson that is: easy come, easy go. I don't regret gambling. I regret not having more money to invest in Bitcoin.

You're talking like one of those crazy preachers.

Don't hold to become rich and don't hope on becoming rich! Don't get fooled by people telling you to buy and hold and you'll make money out of thin air. If you believe in Bitcoin or any other coin, buy it, but don't have high hopes. The higher your hopes the greater the disappointment.

And that's not all. From what I understand he lost money on his investment first and then tried to make it up by gambling and lost 50k there. It could be a 100k total loss from investment and gambling. I could only dream of such money and if I had it I'd probably be too scared to invest or gamble with it. That would be like my lifeline that I'd be afraid to cut. I hope he will find a way to earn it back.

It's very probable that there will be no such coins this year. If we finally enter the sideways recovery pattern there will be no big gains. You can expect a 5000 dollar Bitcoin and the rest will stay relatively flat as well.
6000 was supposed to be that level from which we would recover and it sure acted like one for months but there was this shitstorm with Bitmain selling Bitcoins to finance their BCH campaign and we fell.

Haha ccn are you sure of that? Now I know why people were buying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in December when they were all pumped to the limit. Last year CCN experts were saying that Bitcoin is going to 25000 dollars and during the crash they were saying that it will go down to 10000 and go back up to form a new high. We all know how this ended.

I honestly don't know why people are beginning to talk about shorting when we are 80% down from ATH. It's the same stupidity that leads people to buy coins that went up by 300% in the recent month. There's always a small chance your short will play out but if we aren't at the bottom yet we will soon be. Don't get too greedy people!

This issue happened because devs value quantity over quality. All they want is facebook likes, tweets, youtube videos and bitcointalk posts. They don't care what those will be and if they even are written in proper English. There's many people who want to post shit and people willing to pay for it. As a result you have a lot of bad projects and a lot of worthless spam advertising and you expect to be paid for it

Investing after the ICO is much safer but also can bring less profits. Some coins launch with a very high price because the excitement and expectations are high and gradually lose this value over time. If you invest after the ICO in one of those coins you will never get your money back or you will have to wait a year for another pump.

There's no best solution that always works.

I try to be positive and as long as we don't fall to some ridiculous levels like below 2500 dollars I'll be all fine and happy. I also see this year as a year of slow recovery and even the 6-7 thousand mentioned by OP would be completely fine for me. I'm not looking for huge gains in crypto. I could do with a very slow and stable rise of 5% a year because I'm looking for something better than fiat that will not get devalued by inflation.

Because it's much easier to buy coins than to set up a mining operation. To have a vote in a POS coin all you have to do is come in with a lot of money and buy it out. Then you can decide for all other users what path it will take. I like both POW and POS because they have their pros and cons but we can't simply call one better.

I don't see anything wrong in power consumption. Banks and their servers have been doing it for decades and nobody cares.

There's a lot of companies who work in the crypto space like crypto payment processors and exchanges and these companies are often giving people a choice if they want all their money in fiat or some of them in cryptocurrencies. It's not common thing but it's always a start.

You aren't getting the point which is that:
1. The important part in there is 16th and it can no longer even be there because this changes very fast. Just like high market cap doesn't prove anything.
2. Adding new code to a shitcoin doesn't stop it from being a shitcoin.

This is so true. Most altcoins end up in flames because they are centralized. They depend on some dev team and have frontmen who make mistakes and make fools of themselves like Craig Wright and Roger Ver did in their time. Who says Garlinghouse or Hoskinson aren't going to do it? LTC went down like a rock when Charlie Lee sold his coins. Bitcoin is the best and you need the experience of losing money with some shitcoins to realize that.

If you are using cryptos for laundering you aren't planning to hold. The goal here is to get fiat exchanged into crypto and dump crypto back into fiat ASAP preferably in a different country.

Launderers are selling all the time but to do that they have to buy. If you regulate and add strict KYC laws that mostly already exist in the EU you end up with launderers unable to buy to sell later which can't negatively influence the price.
 
One of the exchanges that didn't subdue and got its CEO launderer arrested in Greece