it is now starting to turn into a common thing where they used to attack bitcoin and now they are singling bitcoin out and separating it from its technology then praise the technology while bashing bitcoin itself. after some time you figure out they have made their own shitcoin which is also centralized and useless. I am not sure if Warren Buffet is going to do that but he certainly has stakes in centralized coins such as that. he may even have some hands in the pockets of the banks he is supporting with his words.

that was somewhat my point. most of these people are advertising their own business whether they are for bitcoin or against it. so when that CEO is hyping bitcoin up, he is in fact advertising his own business so that he can earn more.
I have to also mention that in some rare cases this is not a bad thing. some people both believe in bitcoin and have a business. I am not familiar with Square CEO that you mentioned, so maybe he is of this later group.

not necessarily, sometimes less safe means less profit too.

I guess that is more of a preference than anything else but I can't help but think you are combining speculation (trading) with master node and if I were you I would focus on speculation and trading and make a lot more than just locking up my money and hope for the best.
in altcoin market moving money is earning a lot of profit if you jump from one pump coin to another during their pumps and leaving them as soon as their pumps are done.

I agree

but you are missing the biggest difference between running a lightning node and running a master node and that is the "coin" you need to store in order to run these successfully and profitably. when you run a master node of some altcoin, that altcoin is going down in the long term not to mention the big dumps that they always have which would guarantee a long term loss but in comparison bitcoin that you need for your LN node is gaining value. you may earn more in the beginning but there will be huge losses coming that would wipe it off.
so risk-wise, running an LN node is so much safer than anything else.

no it won't reduce spam around this forum because to run a lightning network node you have to make some effort to learn how it works and set it up whereas joining a signature campaign doesn't require that much work or even understanding of what you are doing, you just have to make posts.

and the earning is never going to be high, specially as lightning network grows because it is a competition to offer the lowest fee for rerouting transactions and if you ask for higher, others will outbid you.

I don't really agree with your second paragraph specially since there has never been any evidence to support that. I clearly remember people becoming bored with the market and newbies who wanted to become rich lost their hope but I don't remember seeing any hashrate drops (which you said miners selling their gear) specially since price was very stable during the $2xx time and mining profit was as stable as the price.

first of all the people you named are neither bulls nor bears. most of them are idiots and assholes on the internet trying to achieve their own goals by using bitcoin and its name. for example McAfee is just making money from the publicity he gains, Dimon is advertising his bank and their centralized shitcoin,...

secondly it is idiotic to be in one group and stick to it! the market doesn't stick to one trend forever. it changes trends, sometimes it is bull market (like 2017) sometimes it is bear market (like 2018) and sometimes it is in between whiled switches from bear to bull (like 2019 -current) and you need to change with it or be left behind.

another point that people are missing when it comes to internet speed is that it sometimes doesn't really matter how fast YOU can DOWNLOAD when you are being limited by the upload speed of the nodes that you are connecting to. they can either be limited by their internet speed or they can manually limit their upload speed to save on their monthly traffic cap and their costs.

bitcoin doesn't need such high speeds so at some point increasing the internet speed is not going to change that much. the bottleneck is mainly with hardware such as CPU speed for verification of blocks and transactions and hard disk space and speed of it for storing and reading them.

if you read my explanation above I briefly pointed this out that the depth chart only shows you the total sum of the volume that is placed on that particular price, you have no way of knowing whether that is placed by one person (the whale) or by hundreds of traders that chose that price and placed hundreds of orders there.

excellent points here but I wouldn't really call them "investors" because an investor usually has some minimal experience and some brain function that he uses to analyze and research the thing he is putting his money into. these people who keep investing in shitcoins and ICOs are more like a bunch of desperate people who want to make profit so bad but they have no idea how to do it. the result is of course disastrous. and the damage is not just to their own pocket but also they are damaging the whole market with them giving the scammers the boldness to continue doing their crap.

you understood wrong.

a "wall" does not always have to be placed by a whale. a "wall" is simply a large sum of orders at a certain price or a couple of prices that are  close together (for example at $4010.0 and $4010.5 and 4011.0,...). walls can be buy walls or sell walls and they are showing the support or resistance respectively at those price levels. for example there is some resistance currently around $4100 for bitcoin and some support around $3700.

now with that said sometimes manipulators who have a large amount money relative to the size of the market (which means most of the times it happens in altcoins)  can place big orders of their own to fake these support and resistances so that they can manipulate the market in the direction they want or prevent it from going in certain direction. for example back in 2018 ethereum foundation placed millions of dollars worth of buy orders on ETH market to prevent its catastrophic crash as people were dumping and ICOs were running away.

there are certain things in your poll that don't make much sense. for example KYC should not even be mentioned because it is one of those factors that if it exists then it means the exchange in question is "centralized" not "decentralized". or the other thing is about fees, fees should not depend on the DEX itself, they should be determined based on the blockchains that are being used meaning only "on-chain fees" for transactions that traders do should be the only fees that are involved in the decentralized exchange, IF there is some entity (the owner) that receives additional fees from traders because of using the  DEX then it is not decentralized in my opinion.

that would be complicated! there are way easier methods of selling your bitcoin off the exchange markets and still retain your anonymity. and nowadays there are lots of trades taking place outside of exchanges that the volume is enough for selling large amounts of bitcoin, that is how whales buy (accumulate) bitcoin during accumulation phases without letting the exchange prices be affected and without letting anybody find out.

actually the resistance at $4k is not that strong. the only reason that price couldn't do an actual "breakout" was because it was the first time that price level was being tested and as is the case with first attempts at reversals, it always fails without exceptions.
basically it is due to the day traders and their sell orders that suddenly spikes when there is a bigger than usual price rise for the first time. so when for a long time they were only seeing 4-5% rises and suddenly they saw a 30% rise, they obviously rush to sell and get their big unexpected profit out and that crashes the price. not because of lack of readiness or lack of fresh money coming in.

that, but also because it always takes time to change trend from the downtrend that lasted over 14 months to an uptrend that would be new and in opposite direction. and this accumulation phase with lots of bull trap looking drops is one of the most common trends that we have seen during each reversal in the past.

there is no truth to that actually.
you can easily verify this by looking at the growth of the number of merchants that have started accepting bitcoin over the past years and also the total amount of bitcoin that has changed hand among merchants and customers during that time. you can clearly see that there has been a big growth in both which shows that it is not "scaring anybody away" it is just happening slowly because bitcoin adoption is happening slowly.

I used your address in a couple of the bitcoin testnet faucets (some of them didn't work and one said it will pay manually later!) and one showed a successful claim. you should see the amount in your wallet. I think it sent you about 0.12 testnet coins.

you say "trading positions" but you claim that speculation is not good! that doesn't make any sense. if you are trading and have some "trading positions" then all you do is speculation all day long because a trader is active in the short term and makes profit from those small movements.
if you are waiting for some "dust to settle" then you are not a trader and you can't have "trading positions" to sell or buy. if you are doing anything other than that, then you are half-assing it and you will eventually end up losing a lot of money.

you always need to separate the market into two groups: bitcoin and altcoins. then analyzing it becomes very easy.

the altcoins are created to be pumped and dumped so no amount of adoption is ever going to change that. they are fulfilling their sole purpose and nothing can change that. and unless we see new altcoins be created with a different purpose (like being an actual currency) this situation won't change.

as for bitcoin, one of the reasons for its volatility is that it is still inside the adoption phase so if it reaches the mass adoption then there won't be as much new money coming in so the price can be more stable. additionally one of the reasons for volatility is the small size of the market and that will also grow with adoption so you can expect less wild rides as we move forward.