with the death of ICOs and the way people all around the social media are starting to realize the big mistakes they have made in the past year, ethereum doesn't have any chance of getting a big pump like it did last year.

on top of it expert analysts are expecting more dumps to come as the market wakes up and realizes the situation is dire with this token. and we also have all the competing projects shooting for ETH position and the fact that people are now making the switch to those tokens instead.

Stellar isn't solely designed for smart contracts and ICO scams like Ethereum is. so it can not be a competing project to this platform. not to mention that it is not the best platform for creating smart contracts either. and it doesn't matter if you found some bounties using it!
there are many better platforms like Waves for instance that are actually serious competing platforms in this area.

WRONG. bitcoin is worth the same as it has always been worth for the past 3 months: it is about $6500 +-$300.
don't look at its tether value. it is tether not fiat.

why should it? the market didn't rise up because of USDT to want to collapse with it.
of course there will always be stupid panic by  the newbie bag holders every time something like this happens but there is no logical reason for it if that's what you are asking.

when choosing an exchange you always first check the legitimacy of the exchange. for example Yobit has a lot of pairs listed. possibly the most among all exchanges even. but it is a shady exchange so you try to never use it.
but sometimes you need these pairs, even on shady exchanges so that you can participate in certain pumps that are too obvious and have a lot of profit.

if you look at the pr ice of bitcoin that will tell you everything you need to know about why they are doing this.
the price has risen so much and that creates panic among a lot of economists that see their position in the financial system threatened and some others  are doing it to try and create some panic to push the price a little lower so that they can buy bitcoin at cheaper prices and solidify their position in bitcoin while keeping others from coming in yet.

the sign you used in your post ($ sign) is called dollar sign and generally it is used for United States dollar. but the number you are reporting is not USD valued. it is Tether value!

in other words 1 bitcoin is worth 7200 Tether which is equal to about 6500 US dollar.

i seriously doubt that!
maybe bitcoin's growth can affect financial systems such as some banks, Paypal and services like that,... that fail to match the financial and technological revolution but otherwise the bitcoin growth can be a way to salvation for the already failing financial systems.

eventually i believe there will be bitcoin ETFs in US and other countries but they may not happen this soon because SEC is still trying to prevent them from happening and nothing has change about the market yet to make them want to change their opinion about approving ETFs. so they will continue denying them until that day comes that the market is less volatile, less manipulated and more regulated.

i remember last year that the ICO hype was heated i said that it is illegal in many countries to do this kind of fund raising and initial token offering by selling virtual tokens but some people didn't believe me and they were confused about the ICO bans that were happening!
this is what i meant. they have always been illegal but apparently people don't mind it yet.

the platform doesn't make a project (DAPPs) good or bad. it can make it more expensive or harder to implement and introduce some other issues in it (such as the congestion of ethereum network that is damaging everything built on top of it) but the project needs to be decent itself otherwise the platform doesn't change anything about it.

airdrop has turned into a method of advertisement which is why the projects doing it are so bad. with a single action you can get an army of shills advertising your shitcoin while you enjoy the profit you gain from the pumps they do and the dumps you perform from your premiened stash.
this opens up room for a lot of scam projects to just copy the code from some other coin and create a new useless token and dump it on the market.

because they can not hide their corrupt practices on the blockchain which is a distributed and open ledger for the whole world to see. at least not with bitcoin they can't and also it is the problem that they can not have any control over bitcoin whatsoever.
on top of it all there is the problem with volatility and volume. the corrupt government w ants to make huge transactions and have stability not small amounts while losing money because of price falls.

South Korea should get in line!
there are already a couple of other countries that are so much bigger than them in cryptocurrency front and there are even more  countries that are trying to get there and become bigger but they have already started the journey not like them trying to still make up their mind about what to do next.

why in the world would they want to buy back?!!!
they are in full control of the whole supply of XRP and they have only released a small portion of the 100 billion. each time they pump this token they release a new batch and dump that on the market!

there are a couple of things about this news and anything else like it:
1. they are posted by a news website so you should already know it is somewhat bullshit or at least exaggerated.

2. you don't know what is going on with other people and what they do when it  comes to their finances so don't judge what happened to them afterwards.

3. going all in is dumb no matter when and what. even when bitcoin was $0.0001 you shouldn't have gone all in.

4. regarding this guy for all you know, he sold one of his houses and bought bitcoin with it! or he sold his coins and bought 4 new houses after he got his profit. not to mention that this is not the end of the road for bitcoin. would you come back here and bump this topic when bitcoin is at $100k or $1 million in a couple of years?

ICOs are made to make profit fast and big. they are not meant to stay around for long. in other words they have already used ethereum platform for their goals and they don't need it anymore. if they fall down to zero today nothing in the world would change.
as for the platform itself the new ICOs can simply go to another one and use the better platforms to create their ICO crap!

Vitalik has never been on board with the future of Ethereum. he has only been in it for the profit just like everyone else. the made his millions, he also made a good resume which he has been using to get into better jobs with the banks and the government and from day one he has always been telling people that there is no future for ethereum and they should not invest in it. in fact in his tweets he has always told people to choose traditional assets such as stocks and gold,... instead of etehreum since he never saw a future for it.

the important thing to look at is the size of the rise not the numbers. of course when you say rise to six thousand and six hundred dollars it seems like a huge number and a huge rise but if you look at the size of it you can see that it was a tiny 4-5% rise.

usually people who are too concerned and afraid of the bitcoin price are those who want it to rise every day and are surprised when it doesn't but the reality is that bitcoin has been rising from day one. as some people like Franky would put it: we are in a 10 year bull market and price is constantly rising.

you mean the "bubble".
in other words what happened at the end of 2017 (mostly in 1 last month not the couple of last months) was the final stages of the big bull market that has been going on for a while. and it was mostly the bitcoin effect that had introduced a large number of people to cryptocurrencies and these people now wanted to earn profit so they looked to altcoins.
there is no reason for it to repeat this year too.