people usually trade altcoins with bitcoin, which means the altcoin fiat values is meaningless to these people. in other words you will be losing bitcoin if you invest in an altcoin that keeps its USD value but goes down against BTC.

but if you are investing fiat and the bitcoin was just a medium you used because there was no other way for you to buy that particular altcoin with fiat and also if you want to keep the fiat in the end, then i guess it would be OK to look at its fiat value only.

but as i said it is best to keep the bitcoin and go back in that altcoin when it stopped dropping against BTC and started rising.

they are apples and oranges!
mining is using your computer's power to mine cryptocurrencies and get paid the reward for finding a block.
trading is buying and selling altcoins. buying low and selling high!

for mining you obviously need equipment, either specific mining equipment like ASICs or a good and expensive GPU. and it will cost you, because of electricity cost,...

for trading you just need to find a way to buy and sell them. usually people do it on an exchange site like bitfinex, poloniex, bittrex, kraken,...

transactions with fees as low as 20 satoshi/Byte are being confirmed actually.
as a matter of fact i was going to say the same thing but checked a couple of last blocks that were mined (mostly the BitFury blocks though) had many transactions with such low fees.
they surely will take a longer time though since the mempool is filled with transactions with much higher fees according to bitcoinfees.21.co

here is the data in OHLC chart form, although monthly is not really detailed enough. (i drew it using Microsoft Excel).



i still can't say i agree with the rise and falls of the last two months though.

what you said is true, but are you really making transactions every day? by make transaction i mean spend your funds not receive, obviously receiving doesn't need anything on your part!

also even if you spend bitcoin every day, it is not a large amount. you can have 2 wallets. a cold storage to keep the large amount (eg 21BTC in cold storage!) and a hot wallet on your desktop or phone if you want to have access to funds for spending (eg. 0.11BTC=~$500)

you are rushing to make a decision about something that is far away from us.
the UASF drama and all the other crap regarding August 1st didn't affect bitcoin price in January! they did it in July instead where the FUD was at its highest and price was struggling with that 2 big dips once to $1800ish and the other i forgot

the only explanation that i can come up with is that blockchain.info started to "reject" certain transactions.
there is another topic here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2132636.0 which says blockchain.info nodes were restarted but that doesn't sound correct to me because the time frame and numbers don't add up.

the drop is (click on show data points and then zoom in) at 14:06 to 14:07 then 14:08 no node crash takes 2 minutes to restart.
but if they decided to reject certain transactions like those with 1-30 satoshi/byte things could look like this because according to  http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ they will be rejecting 33281 transactions

and the drop was down to 163,941 Bytes not zero. that is another reason i say it is not crash.

p.s. blockchain.info is known for rejecting transactions with low fees! although they are a block explorer and are supposed to show all transactions out there!

"digital" currency has already replaced traditional money in most places, people no longer carry cash around. it is all cards, phones, internet, online banking, and what my government calls "electronic government" (rough translation). and that is only growing and becoming better in the future. in fact that is why the banking system and the government has been paying so much attention to the blockchain technology in the past few years.

but it will always remain centralized.

things like bitcoin will remain as an additional decentralized option which people will adopt as a global currency which they can use any place in the world without needing to convert it to local currency.

this is only true if the price rises and corrects not when it rises and drops hard.
for example if price goes from 0.01 to 0.02 and drops to 0.018 and after a while rises again, that is a correction and then a rise.
but what happens in reality is that price rises from 0.01 to 0.02 and then drops down to 0.018, newbs rush to buy, then it drops lower to 0.015 and more news rush to buy and it drops lower to 0.012 and eventually 0.01 and 0.009 and lower.

this is a pump and dump. the pump only takes a short time while the dump is longer because of the newbs and short term traders taking advantage.

because it is true in 99% of the altcoins

no, the drop (as i explained above) is always slower. i can show it to you on charts if you like but i think you can see easily it if you look yourself too.

dude just put this on a chart, it is easier to read that way and understand

i also don't quite agree with this part though.
the month of October will most probably be a wild month of huge swings when the SegWit2x drama starts and reaches its highest intensity. although a lot of things may change but if they don't we will see another month very similar to July where there is some rise then a huge drop of panic sellers and lots of FUD and then the future will be determined in the next month. although exact dates are not clear right now.

actually it has not. i don't know what the numbers were by the time that article was written but currently the number of unconfirmed transactions is about 25K and that is not the normal level. the normal level is around 2K-3K.

despite that, transaction fees have come down a little which shows most of this is a spam with very low fee that is residing in the mempool for longer time.

unless you have any reliable source other than shitty news sites such as cointelegraph, cryptocoinnews,... that proves that "Russian government" made this statement, i would say it is complete nonsense like always.

they and any other government can never control bitcoin. the governments and banks can and have been attacking bitcoin, trying to infiltrate it and push it out of its way but has not been successful so far and hopefully the community stays alert and cuts their hands in the future also.

ok, i am going to say it because apparently nobody else will.
Satoshi Nakamoto is an anonymous entity and will always remain that because this identity was created for that purpose. whoever we think is Satoshi Nalamoto is most probably isn't because the person(s) creating that identity wanted to stay anonymous not to be famous as some public figures such as the list above. and whoever claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto is diffidently not SN.

the "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" saying that everyone has been repeating in he past 4 pages, one way or another, is true. but you should not just force yourself on choosing "other baskets". when it comes to altcoins all the "baskets" have holes in them and are risky the same way. spreading among multiple ones will just give you false sense of security just because you would think you have "diversified"!!!

but in fact you have only made things complicated for yourself. at least in most cases this is true.

diversification is good but when it comes to altcoins you should think twice before doing it.

i admire the persistent of the duck although i find it stupid.
as they say, the Jig Is Up, but he keeps on repeating the same thing without hesitation. in earlier times you never saw everyone bashing his topics but these days every time he opens his mouth, he is confronted with ridicule.

- i gathered aluminum containers from the side of the road to sell and earn money
- i was mugged and the thief stole all my money,
- i invested my dollars in a shady business with fake promises and lost money,

do you think any of the things i said means dollar has failed or it is as you put it "dark side of dollar" or do you think i was naive?

Russia was never "anti-Bitcoin". they have always looked at it wrong and wanted to make it illegal but never did. until this year when Japan legalized bitcoin, they changed their stance and officially said we have no issue with bitcoin.
i believe it was their head of central bank who said "...bitcoin can be traced..." and put all their concerns about illegal activity to rest.

but there is still a huge difference!
services like coinbase are not just wallets, they are like banks. you give up control over your funds and they can use it as they like. for example they can use the bitcoin you deposit to trade themselves on other markets (just like a bank).

also they offer other stuff such as trading these altcoins which they make money from the fees.

blockchain.info doesn't do any of these!
they don't control the private keys so they don't have access to the funds you deposit.
they don't get any fees either for the services they provide.

this rises the question: what is the foothold they are trying to gain?

well sometimes these altcoins are a pain in the ass, specially when their wallets are designed horribly like ETH wallet and are full of bugs. and that takes a long time to sort out and secure.
but that still doesn't mean they are hacked or scams!
i am not defending novaexchange here though, i am just saying jumping to conclusions like this is not right!

hashrate doesn't affect cloudmining's profitability. the different fees they take and the price and the difficulty and them being scam or not affects the profitability instead!

i used to do some mining in cex.io and by that time you could easily earn something even with the small GHS and even sell that GHS when its price went higher.