this is more like what a bitcoin enthusiast would do and it may not be to actually get people to buy bitcoin as it is the purpose of advertisements. and I think it is a good thing to "spread the word" in any way possible and show people that none of the FUD that they have been hearing for years havebeen true.

you are wrong about almost everything you said here staring with your title.
bitcoin is not some pump and dump scheme that can be "pumped". you are confusing it with some shitcoin in the altcoin market. and if you think bitcoin is a pump and dump then you are contradicting yourself because a pump and dump scheme can not pump forever, you eventually reach a state when you can no longer pump it any higher and it enters downward spiral and dies. as it is the obvious case with hundreds of altcoins every year.

you have been asleep because 2017 rise was mainly because of the explosive adoption that occurred in that year not just because people were waiting for the drop to end!

it is always going to be different for each person and it mostly depends on the reasons why they are here in first place. for example the questions that someone who is here purely for investment and making profit are very different from questions of someone who is here because of the technology and because he wants to use a decentralized currency and it is different from when someone is here because he wants to start a business with cryptocurrencies like offering a service since this market is still lacking a lot of them.

if we only focus on investors then we can limit the questions. for me the biggest question was why are so many altcoins exist while they are all the same and offer nothing in particular. and I was always confused about pump and dumps, although I never knew they were pump and dumps.

considering bitcoin implementations such as bitcoin core are not yet out of beta! LN will probably not come out of beta for many years either. but that doesn't mean much in this space though. all we need is a stable version with bugs solved and more importantly with a user friendly interface where regular people can use with least amount of hassle. then you'll see a big surge in its usage even if it still remains in beta.

there is always going to be bugs with any application but that is not the determining factor about being in beta stage or not! for example my Firefox is currently telling me I have to upgrade to 64.0.2 and they have fixed a bunch of bugs. that doesn't mean Firefox is in beta!
and lets not confuse implementations of bitcoin (bitcoin core) being in beta with bitcoin itself being in beta.

there is a better chance of Apple creating their own altcoin and then using that instead since they will be in full control of it while benefiting from the hype of blockchain technology and at the same time make a lot more money.

if they wanted to go the decentralized route then they would accept bitcoin not "crypto" so if anything it would affect "bitcoin" price no "cryptocurrency" prices in general.

a while ago I checked some of these books that are about trading in altcoin market because I was looking to find whether anybody mention anything useful about the pump and dumps and how you should deal with them but I found nothing and I realized most of them are poorly written and are not worth the time.

in my experience if you want to learn more about trading, you won't find anything about it in a book! you need to get your hands dirty and start participating in the market. the good news is that to start trading you don't need a ton of money, you can start with a small amount and then learn that way. and know that this market (specifically altcoins) is manipulation which is yet another reason why no book is going to be helpful to you.

are you seriously comparing ICOs with Bakkt?!!!!
ICOs are scam by nature, and most importantly they were never planning to have any product in first place! if you chose to believe their lies, it was your own fault.
Bakkt is a legitimate thing and unlike ICOs it is not created to raise money and run away with it. it is created to offer a service which I believe is very needed in this space.

I seriously doubt that SEC's decision about ETF can have any significant effects on the price of bitcoin if they reject it again. you can't have the same trend of a small rise before the decision then drop after, 50 times! there comes a time when people are going to not believe in the false hype anymore.
if they accept it then it would be a different story although I doubt that even more!

one thing is a possibility though. Japan can start a bitcoin ETF and then US can follow shortly afterwards just to not-fall behind! then we can see some hype and a rise which can be the initiation the upcoming rally needs.

in my opinion trading in general is best used as a secondary job not your main profession because of the risks of it and the risks that it also involves. when it comes to trading altcoins things become even worse because of the manipulation that is dominating the altcoin market. so it sure is best to have a real job and then trade on the size of that to make an extra buck!

in that way you can also be content with the fact that you have a safety net to fall unto in case things went wrong with your trading like if someone dumped the altcoin you had your money in and you lost 90% of it overnight.

their API documentations doesn't seem to have any mention of any API function that allows you to do that. considering this is a very unknown exchange I'd say their API is not used as much so it is not popular and they don't spend time on it.
https://docs.api.ooobtc.com/#2fa0945a-178b-45a1-bd5d-20c7fefd6298

you may want to contact their support team and request addition of any feature you think is missing.

just a thought, but I have seen some weird API designs that return your whole balance each time you make a private call. for example when you open an order it also returns a big result containing all your balances. have you checked that?

why wouldn't it be possible?

- have we reached mass adoption? no
- has bitcoin stopped being adopted? no
- has bitcoin stopped being developed and being improved? no
- are there more merchants accepting bitcoin as a payment method every day? yes

you said it yourself, they are "shiny" projects
in other words they are mostly hot air and when you look under the hood you can see that they are either exactly the same as bitcoin (like the bitcoin copies) or they are weaker versions of bitcoin (like the copies that introduced some weakness into their copy by foolishly changing things they shouldn't have) or they are different versions that have different and in most cases serious flaws.

in any case I am also very interested to hear what altcoin you think is "outperforming" bitcoin?

the only thing that is dominant and has the "upper hand" is the current lack of confidence in short term performance of bitcoin. in other words since a large portion of the investors have not yet seen the rise (positive performance) so they are still unsure about whether they should start investing back their money at this point or wait for a "better greedier" opportunity.

otherwise the bear market has been over for a very long time now and the last sharp drop still doesn't make it a "bear movement".
at this point the market is ready for a sharp rise. all it needs is a catalyst that can put a spark in the market and bring back a little bit of that confidence and removes some greediness and then we will be on our way upwards again.

actually when it comes to cryptocurrencies, even bitcoin, when price goes lower it doesn't mean that it was natural and that new price is the new low. in this case I still call $6k the extremely low price and $9k the bottom of the correction which the drop should have ended there and worst case scenario at $8k. but we are involved in a very small market filled with manipulators that have more money than the size of the order books so they can be very effective in deciding what the "bottom" is.
in this case dropping below $6k was due to their manipulation combined with the bcash drama that caused the drop and then the price was kept down but suppressing any momentums. that doesn't make $3k a natural bottom in my opinion.

it is actually a pretty good time to sell your altcoins specially those people who own a lot of different types of shitcoins in their bags because this for many of them is the final dead cat bounce before the final downward death spiral kicks off since the whales are done with them and want to move on to newer and fresher altcoins that they can pump more and make more money from.

generally speaking you want to take your money and put it where it has the best potential with lowest risks, in my opinion that still is bitcoin. then you also want to make more money and that can be done by "short term" involvement with altcoins aka trading them.

one thing about certain centralized altcoins (for example XRP that you happen to mention here) is that  they have a big company behind them that has powerful connections. that doesn't change the fact that they are still shitcoins but it changes things about their livelihood. these types of shitcoins can not die that easily because the "company" always has more money to throw at it and keep it alive. not to mention the manipulation they do to change the public view such as their fake market capitalization!

you need to do 2 things for a 0 fee transaction to work:
1. convince the bitcoin nodes on this decentralized network to change their rules so that they accept 0 fee transactions which is not going to happen since nearly all of them run bitcoin core and the default setting doesn't allow that.
2. convince the miners to include 0 fee transactions in blocks that they find which I don't think they would mind since most of the times blocks have extra free space and they don't have to do anything but they too are running nodes with settings that rejects 0 fee transactions.

very simplistic way of looking things.
the fact is bitcoincash was increasing the "max" limit of block size while having near empty blocks because of lack of its usability. in other words a pointless change.
meanwhile bitcoin was increasing the max limit of block size with a soft fork which increased the capacity of blocks and helped with scaling and a little with decreasing the fees. LN is not even in the picture yet, it is more like a futuristic plan since it is being worked on and the bugs are being fixed.

it is too soon to say but so far it has been growing well enough.

anything that can help adoption is also going to help with the price rise. and LN can help with adoption a lot.

no they are as low as 2017 before the spam attack started and then they came down again near the end of 2017 and whole 2018 (90% or more of it at least) they were low.

if you are looking for a big bang and a new ATH beyond your expectation, in short something like what happened in 2017 or in multiple occasions in previous years, then the answer is no. I don't think that kind of big ass rise is possible this year but that doesn't mean there will be no rise at all. there will be rises and market will turn bullish soon enough because the bear market had its course and then some. so it is time to finish it and move on to the next chapter of this roller coaster.

there are big miners in China mainly because of the lower electricity cost in certain places and also easier access to ASIC miners that come out of China from Bitmain but there is no way of telling if they are really the biggest specially now that the competition has grown a lot in the past couple of years.
most of those news media outlets are making a guess (mainly a mistake) by looking at the mining pool stats. for example they look at antpool and think because it has a high percentage then it must be all in China!!!

2019 will not be any different from any other year!

the adoption is still ongoing and the base line of it can not be changed. all that can change is the speed of it which I think this year will increase compared to 2018 but won't be the same as 2017 unless something new happens.
in any case price will continue to rise because of it specially since the manipulators have already nearly out of tricks in their sleeves to crash the market. and after a year of hard work they are going to start to reap the rewards by accumulating now at the bottom.