so far bitcoin is on a good trend upwards and i don't see this changing any time soon. and there is no reason for it to change. with SegWit 100% support from miners there is no reason for any drops.
looking at the charts the rise looks good so far with little resistance to go up.

it is also the effect of investors coming back slowly as they become sure of the future of bitcoin since all the split nonsense is over now.

it is not a fair comparison. it would like comparing bitcoin fees with Dogecoin fees. you know $0.5 versus $0.0022

fees can be readjusted and even if not through code, people will pay less amount. for example if bitcoin was at 10K nobody would have paid 0.001BTC fee or they'd stop using bitcoin at some point for buying "gum/candy"

all these options don't come in one package.

for example the biggest volume comes from poloniex and i suppose bitfinex next. but neither of them are reliable. poloniex services and specially their support suck. and bitfinex is the one that got hacked last year and people lost a lot of money, not to mention all their troubles with the banks and all the stuck money!

then comes the trust! how do you even trust these services? most of them don't respect their customers enough and change their rules without prior notice and like always there is the risk of their "hacks" /s

only time

bitcoin needs more real adoption, and for that we need more people to learn about bitcoin and want to use it as a currency. that means essentially a lot of people who ask all the Amazons and Ebays and ... to add bitcoin payment option on their own and forcing them to either do it or be put out of business by a competing counterpart such as OpenBazzar.

and as the adoption grows the price rises with it.

poloniex is just a platform that is offering some services, using those services only if you know how to you can earn some money (or more accurately earn bitcoin).

those services are trading, margin trading and lending.
each of these are different and probably lending is the easiest one.
but what is most popular is the trading part. for that you need to learn it. trading may seem easy and profitable from outside but trust me when i say it is not. it is hard if you have no experience and you will lose a lot of money if you jump in without knowledge.

start reading this board, tradingview website and investopedia. and then start watching the price movements for a while, you'll learn everything in no time.

price is calming down for now apparently
but it never lasts for bitcoin, the expectation was a drop after the activation because of timing which was after the rise and it already happened. now it is on the recovery from that drop. from now on, i would expect more rise for a while and then a big correction in a couple of weeks of bull market.

i don't think this "encouragement" was that big because as we have seen in the past days ever since the hard fork happened, the volume of dumps on exchanges from people who were holding their coins there has not been that big. and this shows not that many were actually keeping bitcoin on exchanges.

in fact as a trader you keep funds on exchanges but they are mostly in a trade like you having an altcoin and setting an open sell order and waiting for it to be filled.

let me update you after about a year of using cryptopia:
it has been a good experience. they are serious about their business and are not fooling around. what i also like about the owners is that they have a plan and stick to it. for example after ethereum forked they said we won't have it in our exchange and stuck to it despite the price rise and the big volume.

the platform is good, although i sometimes feel it loads a bit slow.
the charts aren't that good but most exchanges have bad charts anyways.
the API is good enough for me.
there are multiple markets apart from bitcoin as their base currency and that is awesome.
the volume is a bit low but the prices are always on par and the spread is not that big to cause any problems.
i had never had any issues with deposits and withdrawals either.

why, kwukduck let me show you where they are, and what happened:

• not knowing how to do it and confused
  
• scared about losing bitcoin if he tries to get the BCC airdrop
  
• not knowing how to do it with bitcoin-abc
  
• not knowing how to dump from paper wallet
  
• nobody here were able to dump it yet!
  
• electron cash doesn't even connect to network
  
• more people not being able to dump
  
• electron cash not only doesn't connect but also crashes, unable to dump
  
• electrum dev issued a warning about electron cash wallet!
  
• people are unable to broadcast their transactions to dump BCH
  
• another one not knowing how to do it!
  
• another warning for not using bitcoin cash wallets
  
• another one scared about security and losing his bitcoin if he claims bitcoin cash
  
• sent bitcoin cash to bitcoin address and is waiting to get them back to dump
  
• Bitcoin Cash transaction FAILED
  

there are a lot more problems with multi signature keys and a lot more of these people on reddit, but i leave finding more of them to you

as a matter of fact people are desperate to dump bitcoin cash as soon as possible, they are just not able to do it. or not able to do it safely at least!

this is a bull run that is just getting started. this is the warm up before the activation of SegWit and before the weak hands which were flushed out start realizing their mistakes and start FOMOing to buy faster because they are soon going to start feeling left out.

that's when the real party starts

i always buy bitcoin whenever i have the money. if the price is all you care about then i can assure you that the price will be a lot more than this current price which will make you laugh some day. (same as $20 does today).

but know that there is more to bitcoin than just its price. like the financial freedom that you get from it, being decentralized and secure without needing any third man in the middle

when you encrypt a private key with BIP38 the result starts with a 6.
using the bitaddress.org you can simply decrypt these.

go to the last tab saying "wallet details" and type in your encrypted private key in the first field "Enter Private Key" and your password in the second "Enter BIP38 passphrase" (you may have to check the box for it to appear) and click Decrypt BIP38

here is some dummy data you can test it with:

Encrypted: 6PYSiFbYbcuk7WTexSxDc3msW5Wzu8J9LdksiG6qELpvft2jgKo5fqwCD4
passphrase: brew

you should see:
address: 1Mbqc6KXkkCuVp3nbBhNcQWYExJKjKHTSN
compressed private key: Kzfoo5ymAipAA6zJieDSKWJYNBHQkvxvkLpzarnWSqSaSWVZXJNa

---

if the dummy data worked but your data didn't then you are entering some chars wrong. double check things like (I <> l) or (O <> o <> 0)

you look at the charts for the market that you are trading at. if you are trading with USD then you look at USD/BTC and if altcoins with bitcoin then alt/btc. you can always take a look at the other charts but they behave all the same.


they won't be that different.
for example charts for bitcoin from bitfinex, bitstamp, coinbase, gemeni are all the same for 90% of the times.
but for example charts for litecoin on poloniex and bittres are very different from charts from cryptopia for instance. (because the later has low volume and small market)

i am not yet convinced about $100,000 yet. not just because it is a big number but because it means a lot. in the whole world for something to be worth that much and this fast. i don't think so.

but we have certainly been on the rise. the route is towards $10,000 for starters probably somewhere between $4000-$5000 by the end of this year.
and it won't be very far either because the rise speeds up as we move forwards.

the factor that could play out the price was the support for SegWit which was about 25%-35% before and as the UASF gained traction and the threat of a split because of it became higher, price bottomed out.

now all of that is gone and ancient history. the SegWit support has gone up to 100% and that is literary everyone. and there is no reason for any more drop apart from corrections. and this will continue for at least 2 whole months.

the only thing that you need to do is this:
stop thinking 1 bitcoin and start thinking 100000000 satoshi and you'll get the point.
right now 1 satoshi is worth $0.000034 and that is too low. price needs to go up a lot more for that to matter and it is headed that way
when 1 satoshi is 1 dollar that is when we have started being serious about the price...

this is mostly US's problems though. with all the taxes and limitations and all that, merchants think twice before going near bitcoin. and on top of it i hear they are not happy about things like bitliscence.

in other countries things are much better. i think everyone knows about Japan and no tax on bitcoin now! i hear European countries are also doing some good stuff. Switzerland has been bitcoin friendly for a long time now...

stop right there.
you say you are noob with charts and trading then this simply means you should stay away from any automation, bot, analysis tool, analysis bot, .... these will only complicate things for you and turn you into someone who will only rely on them for trading and have no understanding of what he really is doing!
and that is a terrible habit which will lead to massive losses.

if you really want to start doing some serious trading and make profit not just play around and lose money, then start really learning the charts, trading and analysis first.
you can find courses online pretty easily.

i don't really see anything significant about $4k. it is just another number along the way upwards and we will pass it some day and look back at it the way we are looking back at $560 (price of bitcoin exactly 1 year ago today).

and bitcoin is still scarce and limited to the 21 million cap and the billions of population are being introduced to this scarce currency.

if you decided to go the direct route of exchanging your one altcoin (eth here) for another altcoin (ltc) then make sure to check if there is not a big spread in the market price and also check to see if the ETH-LTC market really has any volume or not.

i have never checked this on bittrex, but usually these markets lack liquidity. and that means you may find it difficult to sell your ETH coins for LTC or be forced to sell them at a loss.