Seems like this bottom last for only a few hours, as the price currently above $6,000 again. There's still plenty of support, so I think some extreme lows like $3-4k would be very unlikely in this bear market. We might see sub $6k again in this year, maybe it will even stay there for longer, but I think we're close to the bottom already. I do think though that we'll stay here for long, the rally in this year seems unlikely to me, it will probably start in Q1 2019 or even Q2, the market needs to cool down for some time, having a new ATH right after a major crash would be crazy.

People need to learn to have patience, it's very naive to expect a new rally just a few months we've crashed from ATH and currently sit in a bear market. Sure, a new rally might begin at any moment now, but realistically it would take 6-12 months, judging from previous patterns. Bitcoin should be treated more as a long-term investment, so it's better to plan for years rather than weeks, because the volatility is still very high in shorter time frames.

Economy is strengthened when more goods and services are produced, if someone gets investments it doesn't mean that they will succeed, their project may fail for many reasons and there will be no benefit for the economy. Also, I think that fact that villages and other unrelated entities are jumping on the ICO bandwagon only shows how immature and irrational the crypto sphere is, it's absurd that everyone and their grandma wants to have their own token or coin.

Why would they do that? Governments don't need cryptocurrency, they don't want "electronic cash", they want to one central ledger that can be changed as they want to manipulate people's accounts and create more money out of thin air. All these things are impossible with Bitcoin clones, and it would require huge amounts of work to change Bitcoin's code into centralized system, it's easier to pickup the codebase of some centralized network like EOS to issue a state-backed coin.

I think there's some vicious cycle when people don't want to use Bitcoin as currency because it's volatile, and it stays volatile because it's being adopted so slowly. But there are more obstacles that prevent mass adoption than just volatility, and more causes of volatility than simple lack of adoption, so we shouldn't necessarily force adoption at any cost. Adoption should happen naturally, it should be driven by some strong advantages over existing payment methods for average users, only then adoption will be sustainable.

Because there's a lot of people who are afraid to invest in Bitcoin, because they think that they've missed the train, and altcoin/ICO marketers are playing on this feeling by telling them that their coin is going to distupt Bitcoin or Ethereum. They also use the fact that Bitcoin and other networks had problems with transaction capacity to tell newbies that their coin will be better. So, there's nothing personal here, they might not actually want Bitcoin to fail (it would sink the whole market), and they might be actually hodling it themselves, their FUD is just a part of their selling strategy. Keep in mind that almost any coin other than Bitcoin has huge teams of marketers, and they spend more resources on promoting than on development, because most likely they are never going to release and support the full product.

LN will be used as your daily payment method so you'd only have to keep smaller amounts there, in some distant future it might be quite expensive to open your first channel, because on-chain fees will get very high due to high demand, but the beauty of LN is that you don't really need to close your channel, you can keep it open for years and refill it when needed. So, it might look bad that you have to pay a huge entry price, when compared with banks, but in the long run it will be cheaper due to lower fees and no counterparty risks.

I usually hate blaming the victims, but when people lose money in exchange hacks, it's an indicator that they have no understanding of fundamentals of Bitcoin, they take something that was meant to be decentralized and 100% personal and use it as if it were their bank account. So, every time an exchange gets hacked, we should use this as an opportunity to teach newbies how to properly use Bitcoin - don't trust anyone with private keys and online wallets, and instead learn how to properly store coins by themselves, preferably in cold storage.

Yeah, maybe what he is proposing would actually be better for everyone - if alts were traded against USD or at least Tether, they would have much lower price and less chances of getting pumped, so there would be less hype and reckless investing, especially in ICO's, so the whole market would be more stable. I wonder why exactly most exchanges don't create fiat/alt pairs?

If protectionism will cause a severe economic crisis, the prices of cryptocurrencies might experience some increase, as people would be using them as a hedge against their crumbling national economy. But is not as simple as "Trump announced new tariffs - Bitcoin to the moon", it would have to take a long time to notice this effect, and some other effects like the usual volatility and market cycles can easily dwarf any boosts gained from protectionism.

I remember how CNBC was super bullish on crypto during the last rally, but now they are just as bearish. I won't be surprised if they are just working for market manipulators and help them fooling noobs with coordinated FUD/FOMO. Taking investment advice from media is a good way to lose money, because you can't get any decent advice for free, you either have to be a professional or hire one.

I don't agree that it is mature, since it's still rarely used as a currency or as store of value, especially by companies and institutional investors - its main use case is still "getting rich quick" by retail investors. It's definitely more mature than before, but we can only call it truly mature when it will be less of a speculative asset and more of a money.
But I agree that volatility is decreasing, the recent ATH was just part of the cycle and we shouldn't see something like that anytime soon.

I can imagine how in the future criminals would be mugging Bitcoin users and robbing stores that accept Bitcoin, because it would be better for them than bank, since Bitcoin will always have some degree of anonymity and will always be irreversible, unlike banks. There will be some complications when compared to cash, like the need to scan QR and the possibility of double-spend of unconfirmed transactions, but violent Bitcoin and crypto robberies are already happening, there were many reports about people getting robbed at gunpoint in their homes or on the streets. So, Bitcoin will save some lives due to digitalization and making practices like armored trucks obsolete, but security wise it will always like gold or cash.

Writing secure and complex software is very hard, so every piece of nontrivial software in the world has some vulnerabilities. But finding those vulnerabilities is also hard, so often times they remain undiscovered, but with exchanges and some other systems there's a big incentive to find them because it allows hackers to steal money. And with crypto this incentive is the strongest, because it's very convenient to immediately get cryptocurrency that can't be rolled back or even traced, unlike fiat. So, I think most exchanges have pretty good security measures, but they are not perfect, and its often enough to have just one vulnerability to compromise the system.

I don't see any meaning in 21e800, because I don't see any clear connection between Bitcoin and E8 theory, so this all seems like quite a stretch to me. Also this sequence is quite short, so it is very likely that it is just a coincidence. To me this looks like crypto analogue of people seeing holy signs in ordinary objects or those crazy conspiracy theorists seeing marks of Illuminati. If someone wanted to leave a message through this method, they would have chosen something more obvious than this.

This is not true, in reality everyone becomes richer, the world poverty is getting lower and lower with every year, and in the last 100 year the wealth of average citizen improved dramatically. Also the definition of "rich" can be quite misguiding, because a lot of people from western countries actually belong to the top 1%, even they themselves don't consider themselves rich, this is simply because there are countries like Venezuela where people literally earn pennies. The world is not perfect, its full of corruption and other problems, but its not getting worse, in fact it slowly gets better, and problems like disease, hunger and wars are not as big as they were used to be in the last century.

I tried to sync Ethereum full node and it was too slow for me to handle, I then tried to sync pruned node and it was also too slow. I can't even imagine how bad it is now, and how horrible it will be in the future. And it's not like I have slow internet, other people reported the same problems, even some experts. I think coins with this model of scaling should stop being called cryptocurrencies at some point when their network of nodes run by community will turn into small network of datacenters, which would heavily resemble some networks that we have today, like Visa and Mastercard.

I think the root of this misconception lies in sites like coinmarketcap and exchanges which have both coins and tokens under one roof and don't distinguish them in any way. Coinmarketcap now has filters for coins only / tokens only, but by default it shows the list of both. Also journalists, especially the mainstream ones use the word "cryptocurrency" when they talk about tokens, or use both words interchangeably, creating even more confusion. Good to see that someone tries to sort these things out.

This question is nearly useless without any dates, since there's only 2 possibilities - either Bitcoin goes lower and lower and then dies or stays very low, or it will eventually break past $10,000 and way higher than that. There's almost no chance that it will stay in current price range for the rest of the time, and since nearly all people who aren't Bitcoin haters agree that eventually it will be worth a lot, $10,000 is only a matter of time. It might take only some months or maybe a few years, at this point I haven't seen any good arguments for any price predictions, all these experts are just looking at the recent rally and think that it will happen again soon, but they don't explain exactly why.

1. Because we had huge rally and ATH just half a year ago, so people who entered this market during that time are probably in a loss now and are anxiously waiting for recovery.

2. Because people got used to quick price surges in crypto world, a lot of investors have this "get rich quick" mentality, especially if they came to this market after their friends told them how they got rich or they've read some of those articles about people suddenly becoming millionaires with BTC.

3. Previously mentioned people are more likely to be vocal than calm investors who have some clear strategy or understand the market, such investors might only occasionally read and participate in discussions, while most of their time is devoted to something productive.