you seem to have been caught up in some FUD drama that you have been reading online. the fact is there has always been FUD and some people who spread nonsense about bitcoin and basically everything else, maybe not as much since bitcoin has value and is involved with money making! it has no effects on the future of bitcoin though.

bitcoin will continue on the same trend while increasing the speed of it in the next 5 years too. with things such as Lightning Network for instance we will see the whole process speed up significantly.

i haven't really checked Casascius coins but apparently there are different versions, some contain bitcoin (mini private keys that hold bitcoin).
so they ARE dated, in fact their dates are the strongest and the most decentralized dating mechanism that you can hope for. how? it is linked to coins (a transaction output) on the bitcoin blockchain. the transaction that is included in a block that has a timestamp

i am always curious to why people bother using ATMs to buy and sell bitcoin. is it really the anonymity of them that attracts them?
if this is the case then the high fees they charge may be justifiable. but at the same time why would the government allow ATMs to grow like this if they are truly anonymous and safe ways of going in and out of bitcoin?!

bitcoin is a currency, where you use it is not restricted by any means. and so far it is being used both online and offline.

the difference however is that other currencies have actual usage and are real but other cryptocurrencies are not real and have no usage. and in some cases have lots of issues and bugs and as the cherry on top they are insecure.

no need to fight them, they die on their own

very true and i completely agree but also you should know that in the world there isn't just Apple and Samsung. there is also Applo and Sumsang and other weird names. for example you can google about Chinese copy products you can see they have nearly produced anything in the world with a similar name and similar looking logo (an apple logo with 2 bites taken out of it ) and they are like the shitcoins of cryptocurrency world and real Apple and Samsung are the bitcoin of cryptocurrency world.

what candidate? what presidency? what election?

the next US presentational election is in 2020, there are no candidates now! and candidates don't start 2 years prior to the election for their campaign. that is nonsense and the person doing it is trying to scam you.

edit: US is weird! apparently he is a candidate for 2020 election! why this soon?!! and why ask for donations from now! i still say it is a scam. possibly he is bag holding some coins and wants the price of them to go up.

be careful to not get carried away with these coins.

technically investing in an altcoin should be performed during their rises, preferably when the rise is just starting. if you start buying an altcoin that is not rising and showing no signs of rise whatsoever you risk losing a lot of money.
when you choose these low price altcoins the risk is higher since they have  no future and mostly they have dropped due to lack of interest. and their pumps are rare.
but you are right about the size of it, when the pump comes (if it comes) it will be huge.

because altcoins or alternative cryptocurrencies weren't initially created to be shitcoins. at some point in the past the greed became dominant in the market enough to push them towards being shitcoins. otherwise if you look at the early coins in 2010ish you can see the coins were actually trying to do something instead of just being hot air.

they stopped creating new shitcoins a while ago and on rare occasions that one came out ever since early 2018, they weren't worth enough to cover the withdrawal fees from exchanges.
also i think i read somewhere that there is a way to claim them, but i have never been interested enough to investigate more.


what are the disadvantages of SegWit?

i don't think so.
bitcoin is obviously not wasting energy as they have been saying in the media for the past 10 months.
but also bitcoin is not the most energy efficient system either. it is right in the middle.

people are focusing on things such as whitepaper because they have nothing else to rely on! an ICO has not much else for you to check out. it is a bunch of unknown people releasing something unknown and completely useless and with absolutely no real potential. so you are making a bet and as bets go you have no way of knowing what the result will be and as a gambler you cling to anything meaningless like a whitepaper as you can. to just give you some satisfaction...

it is not the law of supply! it is called the supply AND demand. which means having scarce supply doesn't change anything. a coin may have only 1000 total coins and still be worth nothing!
it is the demand along with supply that can change things. with a limited supply and increasing demand (like bitcoin) the price goes up. in other words that increasing demand is important.

also the type of demand is important. if it is pure speculative demand by traders then it won't have any future but if it is real demand like bitcoin as a currency in real world then the rise will be strong and it can last.

probably the worst blockchain technology usage is by ethereum. they have ruined a lot of things for this technology! starting with the decentralization which they advertise as but in reality it is very centralized. then they also killed the immutability of the blockchain technology by performing a roll back...

in any case that was the answer to your comment but to address your title question i believe one of the most interesting technologies based on blockchain is DAG. there are currently a dozen of them around and this way of using it seems to have quite a lot of potential for faster speed and cheaper transactions. although they lack decentralization.

Verge is one of those altcoins that has no real potential, it has a lot of problems too. but this coin is also one of the favorites of pumpers. which means every now and then they pick it up, pump it hard to the moon and then it is down the hill from there.
if you can catch one of these pumps which don't last that long either, then you can make a good profit.  other than that, don't waste your time.

if you are talking about that initial spike in the price which is visible on charts as the first candle on the candle chart then it is not the real price of the token and it is not representing real buys either. so you can not call it "price increase".

what happens is that when the market starts, the first order is usually set by the owners themselves. and since there has been no history, no order book and no orders, you can set the first order anywhere you like. you can even set it at $10000000 or at $0.00000001 and when that order is filled, the first candle shows this weird spike in price.

if you look at the volume of that first candle spike you can see that it is tiny proving my point here.

one of the interesting things that i noticed recently was that eventually it seems like investors have figured out that the potential is elsewhere in the altcoin market and have been recently shifting their funds to other smaller altcoins.
before this, only the experienced traders did that and moved to other altcoins to make profit while the big coins continue getting dumped. but now it seems like more people are following their footsteps.

ETH has always been the hot topic because of the same two reasons. first is the fact that they have a lot of money and have dedicated it to advertising their coin so that it increases its hype and its price as a result. by "they" i mean the centralized entity behind ETH that has full control over the network.
and the other reason is the hundreds of bag holder newbies who are bag holding a lot of tokens and some dust in ethereum that they want to increase in price.

first of all when you create a topic with 3 lines at least spend 10 seconds more to have less spelling mistakes in it!

secondly when it comes to investing your money you should not even ask random people's opinions let alone making decisions based on it. whether i tell you buy or not buy bitcoin should not make any difference in the decision you make. i am always going to be biased. and it is your money and you need to worry about it.

in that case the bubble has already popped or have you missed the 8 months bear market and the 70% drop of bitcoin price?

i don't really think so. 2 years is not enough time for this market to get its shit together and start having real things in it instead of shit. by 2 years we may be buried under shitcoins. in fact i expect the number of shitcoins picks up again pretty soon and we can surpass 5000 shitcoins eventually in a short time. of course they will all die but the rate of new shitcoin creation is faster than their death rate.

and this can last until 2020 and beyond until people involved in these markets start demanding something more than pump and dumps.

no matter what happens after a thousands years BCH will still remain the coin that split from bitcoin to create a useless altcoin. it is copy of bitcoin without the additional benefits. so it is a shorter copy of it.

it doesn't have any future, it is a centralized altcoin with no usage and nothing to offer. when it comes to altcoins your competition becomes much harder because you are not competing with nearly 2000 different competitors and some of them are very strong even though they may have lower prices right now.