Two of my closest friends who lived and worked together had a similar story with some differences. they started mining around 2012 and started mining on GPUs to build out an amazing gaming rig and just kept upgrading the rigs. they just kept getting more, GPUs and their home started looking like a server.

Even got one of the first Butterfly ASICs. slowly they stopped mining as their GPUs stopped getting a profit and their overclocked gpus slowly burnt themselves out. Then they just HODL. Just didn't pay attention, checked out, and said they wouldn't do anything until it changed their life. At 2018 they said that would sell at $10,000 to pay off their students loans and etc. this is amazing, they sold not even 30 percent of their holdings and they are now debt free and it changed their life forever.

People realize that there is no use case for alts other than speculation. Even ETH, what have all the ICO's accomplished, literally nothing. I don't see one world dominating Crypto and agree there is room for other projects for specific use cases. However right now it's all speculation, ETH hasn't had one killer app, other than bilking investors for money via ridiculous ICO's. People thought projects like Augur would change everything, but it's not even relevant. Once BTC hits $100,000 and enters the realm of sound money and store of value, then we will see other projects emerge successfully.

I am a big fan of the 80/20 rule and i see scale-ability by diversity. more small blockchain rather than one giant blockchain. So Bitcoin dominance may become 80% but it will only be used from 20% of users. Bitcoin could take on the role of lead currency and store of value, then serious Alts might have a future in the long run.

As long as BCH and ABC still have value, BTC's price will remain manipulated and artificially low. Those two projects are doing everything they can to claw from the grave and overthrow the legit bitcoin. We won't see real growth in the market again until those shit coins implode. Until then, stock up and wait for the run.

My most optimistic outlook has Bitcoin bottoming in March 2020. A slow bull market taking hold in May 2020. This bull will continue bouncing off the $20,000 resistance in February 2021. The resistance will result in a shallow retreat before the largest bull run in Bitcoin history takes place winter 2021. I'd still say alts do better at a certain timeframe until 2021, we can say that without making generalizations.

Check out AION. I believe they are the first to have produced a financial report in this space. Very transparent project with allot of connections. Check their videos on youtube, DeVcon etc. Makes you excited for the the potential of blockchain. percent down from ATH isn't indicative of the projects potential. But I wont shill you on it, just look deeper into it and judge for yourself.

Also check out Factom, it is the only one of its kind and has multiple large companies building on the protocol. The protocol is very much live and decentralized and what does the factom protocol do better than any other blockchain is "it stores data extremely cheap, and at the same cost always". This data is immutable and can be used for accounting, auditing and verification. But basically anything that involves data, which is everything nowadays.

1) I highly recommend sign up for Yobit and get the chance to win a lot of free direct tokens in exchange for free and still participate in Yobit's post pay campaign along with Cryptotalk.org, that's 1000 satoshis per post, 30,000 satoshis a day.

2) Binance is a good platform for spot market and bot trading. If you are just swing or day trading, you can probably get everything done here. The prices in BTC terms for most coins is also higher than other exchanges, might be because of the volumes on Binance. The tech is stable and the support is good.

3) For a first time buyer, I would recommend Coinbase. It has the easiest UI to use and you can get your Crypto instantly if you want. Every exchange has some horror stories but Coinbase is the most widely used.

4) Bittrex works fine for me but some people have had problems with their verification system, even getting locked out of their account until they verify. I would just set up the enhanced verification from the start and there shouldn't be any problems. Other exchanges have different options, layouts, and liquidity for pairs, so it depends on what you want.

Libra is an alternative to the Fiat system. You could argue that it could be better than the Fiat-System. However there is just one true decentralized currency that you should hold. Libra either succeeds and introduces a billion people to Crypto Or it fails and proves the need for truly decentralised Crypto.

I have the vision that in the future, governments have their currency to play with but the people will keep their wealth in secure currencies that aren't played with. Bitcoin is already changing the way we think about money. For me it's not anymore about how much money did you make with BTC, it turned into how much should I put in Bitcoin in order to protect myself for a financial collapse.

It seems to me that the difference between bitcoin and gold is that gold has more inherit value. Multiple industries rely on is use. So even if it is not used and most people speculate on it, in the future it is still usable. Even if the economy didn't exist people would still covet it as a useful metal. It has a promise of usability. It seems Bitcoin's use is in its power as a decentralized currency. If it doesn't have that then there's no promise of future usability, unlike gold.

Also, Gold was used as a basis for currency for thousands of years. It was money. Its current value is mainly a reflection of it's past role as money. Bitcoin needs to become widely used as money. But don't get me wrong. I HODL most of my coins. I also want to see bitcoin function as digital gold and i do only see bitcoin become digital gold once it is used through 2nd layer as the backing for a payment system. Then bitcoin will become money, like gold was. 

Bitcoin will have to become a store of value first, before it can become a currency. Meaning, it will have to defeat gold first. Remember, value should only be determined by utility. Gold was money, but it has industrial uses as well. But to have the perfect money, you rather that your money not have alternative uses. Because the economics of the alternative uses can influence the money functions. That's why bitcoin is better in this aspect, because it was created to only be money.

Bitcoin's power is not as a currency yet. It's power is that a transaction cannot be censored. Censored transactions exist only on the outskirts of society. There aren't that many of them (though the censored party would view this otherwise). It's enough for bitcoin to help them in order to have value. if bitcoin manages to get a monopoly on being a store of value and being the go to currency for censored transactions, it will only be a matter of time before it will expand to other markets. Specifically, the currency market.

I think what governments are trying to do is what is their job, ensure that people are not scammed, deal with criminal activities, etc. Bitcoin is sometimes used in illegal transactions. It is also a way that sanctioned Russian/Iranian billionaires can move money from Rubles/Rials into Dollars. The banks/governments don't want to deal with those investigations. They don't want to have to watch your tiny little consumer account for signs of international money laundering just because they know you deal with bitcoins. Honestly, they'll do the same to you if you come in with bags of cash every week unless you can give them a legal reason for your earnings. In my opinion, governments do not treat bitcoin as a threat to survival but as a duty.

1M$ is meaningless if bitcoin will be ban in all countries, but bitcoin can be exchange directly for goods and services, no need to convert back to fiat. You can earn bitcoin from labor, no need to earn fiat. Governments don't have control over Bitcoin, they can ban by creating some laws that have to be "adopted" by people. Exchanges can be close, Bisq (a decentralized exchange) can't be closed unless they completely close and ban normal wire transfers. Banning and blocking are two very different concepts. They can "ban" but not "block", some people fail to understand this difference. The only way to block Bitcoin would be to destroy and close the internet itself.

What exactly do you mean by going extinct? When will people stop investing into it or when will people stop using it? This is really important because it's not the same thing.

Bitcoin has proven itself as useful payment system and tech. It does exactly what it was designed to do and has withstood countless attacks and still survives. It has momentum and a growing user base and is getting easier and easier to acquire and use with time. It is the Beatles of the Crypto world while all others are imitations or variations that are like one hit wonders at best.

I am pretty sure governments will never support any Cryptocurrency which hasn't been created by themselves and being controlled by themselves. But anyway, bitcoin got where it is today without any support from governments. So why shouldn't it be able to stay? Bitcoin has come to stay and this is inevitable.

Bitcoin is the face of cryptocurrency. It is king and all altcoins without fiat pairings are paired to BTC. When BTC is very bullish, traders see no need to buy alts because by buying alts with BTC you are by default shorting BTC, greatly increasing your chance of loss. They see no need to risk altcoins just for slightly better returns.

When BTC is bearish, it most likely means the entire Cryptocurrency market is bearish. Bitcoin has the best risk adjusted return and is the safe haven in the event of the crash - people are sure it will be a coin that will survive and so many convert their alts to minimize their risk exposure. Many traders may cash out to fiat too, causing them to panic sell alts to BTC and then cashing out, causing a bigger slump in altcoins/BTC prices. For these reasons Bitcoin is the only winner at long-term!

Very bad days and i'm not touching alts at the moment for 3 reasons:

1) we don't know how much longer the bear market will last, and even if BTC keeps moving sideways, alts will likely continue to bleed.
2) if the ETF isn't approved, then BTC will dip, causing alts to dip even further, and the bear market is extended. if ETF is approved, and bitcoin moons, then alts will dip again as everyone will want to ride the BTC pump. And this likely won't be a normal pump, where alt season follows in a few months, it'll be a massive rise in price, and alts won't be able to compete
3) no clear signs of trend reversal, most alts have networks that aren't even being used, and most of their price is speculation. There isn't really anything holding up a lot of their current value  so you could still be catching a falling knife

One thing I learned from the last bull run is that even the most crazy price prediction, that you thought was way out of the realm of possibility, was not just reached, but smashed. In my opinion, all existing "rules" will be broken in the next bull run. It is rather safe to assume Crypto peak between $5 trillions and $10 trillions. You cannot predict each Crypto separately. Look at crowd behavior when trying to guess the peak.

Ethereum potentially has a strong future model, decreasing inflation post POS, increasing tx, and projects like Particl, MakerDAO and a handful of well designed others will allow us to decide if cryptocurrency has any fundamental value beyond SoV and Speculative instrument. I think Ethereum 2.0 and some killer dapps will push the price way past the old ATH.

Huge price spikes are not the only indicators of bull markets. Several years of smaller, but consistent annual growth is a bull market too. It may not be as exciting, but these bubbles aren't benefiting anyone except for those lucky enough to time the top and those manipulating the price in the first place.

In my opinion, the cycle repeats with larger and larger populations. There were people saying this exact same thing in 2013/2014/2015 that was a huge crash, it's all over. but I started buying around then, and so I still feel good about today's prices. I guarantee there are still people out there who haven't heard of Bitcoin or Cryptos, or at least don't know what the word refers to. thereby, There will be another bubble. even without a bubble the fact that the price is in anything other than freefall means that people are buying more and more Cryptos every day.

I recommend Holochain. Their vision is to make the internet a more distributed ecosystem. it is a naturally fully scalable platform for distributed applications. Instead of relying on global consensus, it allows for p2p consensus. This framework for fully scalable dapps is already able to be built on, so the mainnet if you wanted to look at it in comparison to blockhains is in its mainnet state.

Even further, Holo the hosting app, allows for everyone to profit off of their pre-existing spare computing power, in a similar fashion to how people can make money with extra rooms in their houses via Airbnb. This application will exponentially increase the price of Holofuel in the near and long term. this project will absolutely change the world, and it has the writing on the wall to go on a parabolic run similar to what we saw with Ethereum

Bitcoin is the face of cryptocurrency. It is king and all altcoins without fiat pairings are paired to BTC. When BTC is bearish, it most likely means the entire Cryptocurrency market is bearish. Bitcoin has the best risk adjusted return and is the safe haven in the event of the crash - people are sure it will be a coin that will survive and so many convert their alts to minimize their risk exposure. Many traders may cash out to fiat too, causing them to panic sell alts to BTC and then cashing out, causing a bigger slump in altcoins/BTC prices.

On the other hand when BTC is very bullish, traders see no need to buy alts because by buying alts with BTC you are by default shorting BTC, greatly increasing your chance of loss. They see no need to risk altcoins just for slightly better returns.

If you don't have any BTC i would recommend, you choose the big father of crypto BTC. Sell Doges to buy BTC and then hold BTC. If you sell your Doges at 50% loss, and get into a rising BTC while the Doges are still dropping, you can buy back your Doges later at an even lower price.

The next year is all about the BTC halving hype and alts will get desecrated in Satoshi value. when i look at some coins in my portfolio and the changes in the past such as BTC vs Alts, then i have to say, i lost at this moment 30-60% depending on the coins in compare, i never changed my Alts for BTC.

I would say to remember that the relationship between BTC and altcoins is not always symbiotic. There are time where money is flooding into BTC and the alts are bleeding because the money is being taken out of alts to go into BTC. I just see an influx of money to both sides which is causing everything to be positive.

But i don't think cryptocurrency is mature enough to decouple itself from Bitcoin. When the price of BTC goes down people get scared, they start selling their altcoins too. It's a combination of fear plus people trying to be a step ahead and sell high and rebuy at the bottom. Unlike oil most of these coins have don't have a real world necessity so their price won't behave like oil.

I entered the market October 2017 because of an article about Ripple by Android Authority on Facebook, read it and my first thought literally was: Maybe I have Found the ticket to my financial freedom. Rode the bull run, pretty crazy one. I didn't sell any XRP and as the price was going down. I was deep down researching XRP/Ripple, Cross border payments, liquidity, counter party risks and of course buying more XRP.

During the bear market my knowledge kept increasing not only about XRP, but for many other projects and Cryptocurrency in General, there are some other great project out there, but non of them has a scenario in which the price is going to increase based on utility, none. 2018 has been a very bad year for the price, but an excellent year for Cryptocurrency in general and XRP in particular. Once regulations and liquidity are there, then all these partnerships are going to blow up.

If someone would say me that I would buy cryptocurrency and be knowledgeable about it in 2017, i would have said that you are crazy, but here we are today. there is an opportunity that comes once in life and for me it's get rich or hold till Zero, literally. god bless you all in this community with so much hatred for XRP who are doing something that could be life changing.

Utility will rule!