one of the biggest problems with the altcoins and the investment you make in them is exactly this unpredictability of them which comes from all the manipulation that goes into them.

people think that just because whales bought some coin it can not drop. but the fact that whales bought it means it will drop because they will dump it just like the way they pumped it in first place. that is why coins like ethereum have been dropping without stop.

if you start thinking like that then everything else can be described the same way! we don't know what is going to happen in case of a lot of things, not just investments.

what we do is that we try our best to come up with the most accurate speculation and then constantly modify it as the market changes so that it remains the closest guess and so that we can be more successful.
at times the market becomes less predictable and sometimes more. and with it our guess becomes harder and easier receptively.

it is rarely about knowing if something is scam.
but it is always about the profit and greed for gaining that profit. for example you know gambling leads to losses specially when there is a house edge. and this saying is so popular that everyone knows it: the house always wins.
but you see people still gamble. why? because they are greedy.

there are a lot of  reasons for price not going any lower and mining and its hashrate is only one of them. for starters the fact that the demand for bitcoin has been rising all this time despite the drop and the fact that the current price is after a 70% drop. there is just nor more room left to go down. and when bottom is reached the reversal is on the way even if it takes a little while.

not really. this year was just as good a year as last year, the difference was that you think you can only make money if prices go up. but the rest of the participants in the market know that they can make a lot of money when altcoins are getting dumped too.

no, every single coin got dumped.

why did you have confidence in it?
- was it because you saw people talk positively about it online?
- or was it because you actually checked the project out, used it, tested smart contracts on ethereum platform, then tested them on other  competing platforms, checked the code, the network, distribution,.... and a dozen other factors and then came up with that confidence?

you see where the problem is? you got caught up in some hype!

i disagree. ethereum will be pumped again. a pump is not the same as a rise. a rise is a natural increase of price based on real adoption and that kind of increase is never followed by a big drop. but a pump is an increase in price but it is fake and based on hype and other factors and it will never last long. there is always a dumping follow up.

bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has already succeeded in performing in a way that was expected of it. which is as a decentralized global payment system without any restrictions or censorship for those who use it.

don't be disheartened just because you keep seeing a lot of useless altcoins that are getting pumped and dumped every day without any purpose. they are merely the side product of a successful project.

the only market capitalization that matters belongs to bitcoin. and since i believe bitcoin is going to reach $1 million dollar eventually you can calculate its market cap based on that.
basically i believe we will see $100k by 2020 and that is about $100k * ~18.2 millionBTC = $1.82 trillion
and in a couple of years after that possibly when supply reaches 20 mil it will reach $1 million and the market cap will be $21 trillion.

everything else in short term is just noise.

if your project is actually good then you won't need any advertising, people will eventually come. you can always take bitcoin as a good example of how things work. nobody advertised bitcoin to make people come and invest in it, they do that on their own.
you feel the need for advertisement on those platforms because what you are creating is not actually any good.

the biggest problem with gold as a currency is splitting it into smaller increments. for example you can't carry around gold dust with a weighing tool to give 1 gram of it when you  want to purchase something small! otherwise if we get over this problem it would be similar to fiat.

by blockchain they mean the technology and those who make these statements usually want to put bitcoin down and say bitcoin is of no significance while they use bitcoin's "technology" to create their own altcoin and then advertise that altcoin as the best thing that has ever existed! always for pump and dump purposes.

not at all. for example take a look at this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027920.0 (it will probably be deleted soon though). it is an obvious newbie who thinks he can become super rich by just buying cryptocurrencies. he is literary telling others that they can "earn $1000+ per day" just by entering. there are a lot of newbies who think this way or fall for these lies and lose their money and get rekt!

you can't just throw a number at us like this without explaining how you came up with it. to me it looks like an off the mark guess.

as for the adoption, it is obvious that every time we have a big increase in adoption (like last year) it will be accompanied by a big rise (like last year). but the question is how can we hasten the process? that would have been an article worth reading not stating the obvious!

this is one of the most common occurrences in the history of cryptocurrencies and things have always been like this. what that link you posted shows is only a tiny fraction of all this.

throughout history (which is about 9 years long) there has always been periods of time when altcoins were pumped massively and that meant huge rises of their prices and since market cap is price*supply they grew a lot more and bitcoin's "dominance" shrank down until the altcoins started getting dumped.
2017 was the extreme example of this process but the principle has been the same.

as a person who has been participating in this campaign for a long time let me tell you that the late payments have happened before but they will always come. so don't worry. usually it is due to being busy or escrow address not being filled in time.

as for your post count just go back in your own post history and see how much you have made within the 2 week period which starts on Mondays. for instance if you have started 4 weeks ago (2 rounds) you have already made 81 posts between 13-8 and 10-9. the minimum is 40 per round
if it was 3 rounds then start from 30-7 and count. the posts have numbers so you just have to figure out how much is from that date till now then deduct the posts you made from 10-9 to today. assuming none of your posts are excluded.

^^ this.

right now the market is not at all healthy. it is empty of real traders and is only filled with the manipulators and the bots running short term strategy scripts to make 0.5%-1% profit.
this will go on unless we go below or over a major price that  can trigger come back of real traders. in my opinion these two prices are $5900 and $8000 respectively.

unfortunately this is not a developed or not developed problem. it is more of a fundamental problem of ethereum network that is simply not capable of handling higher TPS and it fails under the load. specially since running nodes relaying transactions takes up a lot of resources it is becoming increasingly difficult to even have a network since nodes are running out of RAM and CPU usage is through the roof processing all these transactions.

as ETH price is falling down hard, everyone starts making new transactions sending their coins from their wallets to exchanges and exchanges receiving these transactions immediately and automatically move the coins so there are 2 tx per each sell off.
the result is that ETH network becomes congested again since it is incapable of handling a medium number of transactions per day. and the effects is that you need to either pay a much higher fee than suggested if you want confirmation or you will be stuck for days unable to sell your ETH and continue losing money.

the dump is serious and it is only growing bigger.

right now the ICO devs are starting to liquidate their bags of free money that they received when they created their tokens and that is another big sell pressure on a market that can not handle it well because of lack of buy support.

then there is a huge community of newbie bag holders who were thinking ETH is the new bitcoin and is going to replace it so they bought and kept it this long. but now that price has entered $100 level they are starting to panic and dumping their bags which is yet another sell pressure.

if you check the ETH network you can see the network is starting to clog up again as people are sending their tokens to exchanges to sell.

i wouldn't really expect the "best things" to happen this soon. there is still a lot of dumps to happen.

no it  doesn't, the only use case is for smart contracts and the usage of that has been in ICOs and ICOs are basically useless speculation tools and nothing more. so in conclusion you can say the only usage of ethereum is for speculation and that is the main reason why its price is falling like this.

- Decentralized exchanges: is not usage of ethereum it is just an application that was built using its blockchain as it could have been built (and is already) on any other blockchain.
- virtual asset exchange: is the same thing, not a different case
- autonomous investment funds: same
- blockchain games are the same smart contract which are being used as ICOs to make money
- cloud computing, this is the only one that i have no idea what it is since i have never heard of any cases.

not to mention that all of these cases have much better examples built on top of other platforms including bitcoin. even smart contracts are so much better on bitcoin!

it is dropping because it was pumped and now the dump is what you see not the panic. the panic has not yet started because people still believe in it. let price stay in $100 range and show signs of going back to 2 digits and you see what real panic looks like.

would you mind naming half a dozen of those legitimate ICOs that are at least 1 year old and have delivered something?

i am also watching ETH price closely and will eventually get some money ready to invest because i do believe that the ethereum foundation will eventually start pumping it again but i don't think the dump is going to stop at 0.025BTC which is $150ish. i think there is still room to be dumped down to 2 digits.

there is no "even if"! the coin works. you send coins and the other party receives them, the obfuscation in the middle doesn't mean the other party doesn't receive the coins and the blockchain doesn't know about it. it just is impossible to back de-anonymize it.

your arguments are about something entirely different and it has nothing to do with the transactions and whether or not you can prove it is yours! you are arguing that if the government bans usage of XMR you will face problems. which is true about anything else!

and none of it has anything to do with its price in my opinion and the ridiculous speculation that that other user made