it is not possible to know these things so you are basically asking for a guess. I'd say all the people who were planning on selling in case of a price drop and also bought their coins above $10k have already sold their coins. at least 99% of them have done it already because of the FUD pressure that has been on them. specially since the $10k rise was a short time so only FOMO buyers bought in that range and then during fall from ATH very few new people bought in.

remember that losing money is not about selling or not selling. it is about when you sell, why you sell and what you do with the money after you sell.
someone can buy at $20k then sell at $15k to lose money but again buy back at $10k to make a good profit then sell at the recovery to $14k and then buy back at lower price to own a lot more bitcoin than before so that is a big profit even though at this moment it doesn't look like it because of the current price but in long run it will show itself. and not everyone is a trader to do things like this!

I think that is the strategy that most of the investors who have the minimal knowledge about bitcoin itself and its market history are doing these days. the regular traders (the small fishes) are buying the  dips on exchanges while the bigger traders (the whales) are buying off the market so that they can still keep the price low while they accumulate. which is why the P2P volumes have grown this much lately.

shorting is always riskier. a quick search about how many people lost millions of dollars because they idiotically tried shorting bitcoin shows you how bad a decision that is. in other words you are inviting newbies to lose money.
those who know how to successfully do it, are already doing it and crashing the market. newbies entering are not going to change anything about the price but will only empty their pockets!

and if anything you will make a lot more money shorting altcoins than shorting bitcoin since if for example bitcoin drops 10% the altcoins will drop 20% as it has been evident from the market so far in the past 10 years.

although I love to see what the result of it is but the lawsuit seems like pure bullshit. 90% of the things it mentions are not even illegal. for example the miners they own are theirs and they are free to do with them whatever they like. you can't sue someone for mining something they prefer. as for their pools, they weren't shady about what they are mining. it was clear what each of them support and if some miner wanted they could have left their pool and mined elsewhere.

the only thing that makes a little sense is the ticker thing which again is not exactly illegal according to the law since there is no standard for the tickers. calling some shitcoin BCH or BCHSV doesn't make a difference they are both still shitcoins that are abusing the name of a trusted cryptocurrency called "bitcoin". so if anything they are both criminals.

people always act the same both during rises and falls. it seems like everyone is trying to compete with other's predictions and come up with an outrageous number. for example when the price is rising we keep reading them predicting $20k, $30k, $50k, $100k,... and of course some of them come true by chance. then when it is dropping they do it again in the opposite direction.
the fact is when the ATH or ATL are not healthy you can not predict them. for me the bottom was $6k and anything below that is fake.

as for "past performance" you are right that is bad but enough people insist on its repetition that it actually was repeated!

the same way that bitcoin is valuable right now despite US government owning and printing US dollar which is a centralized form of money in physical form. if they change that form from physical to digital or to crypto that still doesn't change anything about bitcoin, bitcoin will still remain the same old decentralized cryptocurrency without inflation.

bitcoin is not deprecating, it is just the price that had a drop. and nothing will come out of this except a change in the size of the whales who have been super active in the past couple of weeks. they were big whales and soon they will become gigantic whales. after they continue the same thing a couple of more times they become Moby Dicks eventually since the market is letting them play with the price and make profit from it easily.

you can't generalize the whole market with one  sentence!

there are people buying, there are people selling and then there are people buying over the counter (outside of exchanges). the fact is this drop has been a good opportunity that was  created by the whales for the whales to make a huge amount of money in a short course of couple of months. it starts by dumping on exchanges to crash then continues by them buying back elsewhere that doesn't affect the price.

your mistake is focusing on one variable while ignoring all the rests including the costs of setting up such a farm. at this point it costs millions of dollars to send a team of astronauts into outer space and set something like a space station up. not to mention that a mining operation requires maintenance so it will cost more for upkeep. on top of all that you also have the communication delays where you have to receive transactions, mine a block then broadcast it back. and remember mining bitcoin is a competitive operation where someone else can find the same block sooner than you.

I do believe that the only reason for bitcoin drop below the major buy support at $6000 is BCHSV. be it their dump or only their FUD which led to a whale dump and then panic sell doesn't matter. what matters is that this shitcoin is the reason for the drop.

the subsequent drops however are because the market crashed and the bottom is not yet formed and the market is currently searching for that strong bottom and until it is found we may see the same weird thing happening.

as for the shitcoin itself they are pumping it by spending a lot of money and obviously when you open an exchange or coinmarketcap.com and see one green among the top coins that attracts some more investors (day traders) who want to join in this pump and make it bigger.
it is a good opportunity to make some money in short term like any other altcoin pump but people should be careful not to get caught in the dumping phase.

it is impossible to say because we are now in uncharted waters and the drops are not natural. in my opinion the drop is purely because of whale manipulation in addition to traders leaving the market which has made it even easier for them to manipulate the price because of lack of "resistance".
so the end of the drop will be either when they decide they can no longer make profit or if the rest decide they want to start buying back at a certain low price where the market decides is the bottom.

as for ETH, it is mainly following bitcoin down but also we are now in a stage where all those bag holders who have been saying it will go to the moon and replace bitcoin (flippening LOL) are now realizing their mistakes and panic selling. additionally the ICO owners are also trying to cash out their free money which is increasing the dumping pressure. so ETH can have a much harder crash pretty soon.

Proof of Work algorithm, SHA256 hashing, Elliptic Curve Cryptography and the curve that bitcoin is using for it, and a lot more are not going to become bad or weak just because you spammed about them hundred times in the past month.
your posts are only proving that you lack understanding of how things work or possibly don't want to understand them and are more interested in spamming long walls of text about each of these topics!

bitcoin is and has always been a medium of exchange or a currency. being volatile only means it is a bad currency at this point it doesn't mean it is not a currency anymore!
and the funny thing is that bitcoin has never been a "store of value". I personally have only started seeing the term become popular about 1.5 year ago. in fact if you read the bitcoin paper by Satoshi Nakamoto you can see that nowhere in there he uses this term but all over the paper bitcoin is called as a payment system or a currency.

the problem with bitcoin is not with bitcoin itself but with exchanges which are the only thing that deciding the price and these exchanges are extremely flawed. because they are risky, shady and untrusted. so people don't trust using them or if they do they never leave money on them. what happens is that there are less traders on exchanges and a small number of orders. so a small dump by a small whale can crash the market as we can see these days.
and THIS needs to change.

it depends on why you bought bitcoin in first place.
if you bought it because it is a decentralized currency or if you bought it because you wanted a long term investment in this scarce currency with a bright future and a lot of potential then selling is the dumbest idea ever since you are not a day trader!

but if you are a day trader and have bitcoin as a tool to make money then it is true, it is a bad idea to hold bitcoin. you must have sold it yesterday and then started buying it back today by placing multiple buy orders at different price levels to make profit.

anything else apart from the above two does not work.

if we want long term growth then we need to do something about exchanges! they are too small and it has always been so easy to manipulate the price on them. and as long as a simple dump can crash the market like this while everyone just watch and tell everyone else to hold instead of buying the cheap coins it will continue like this while whales only buy cheap coins and dump it again to crash some more and make more money.
and all this volatility prevents real adoption.

lunar year had never have anything to do with bitcoin ever!

the manipulation can never continue until eternity. at some point it will stop and they won't be able to do it anymore and that is when the recovery will start and with it all those who are staying out until it ends will come back and make will become healthy again.

but unfortunately since people let them manipulate the market, they become bigger whales in this process and we will see the same manipulation again in a year or two. unless either the market grows too big to make them smaller whales in comparison or people stop giving their bitcoin's cheap to whales while letting them dump the market.

it is manipulation not "control" of the price!

and it is so much more complicated than just spreading FUD or selling large amounts of bitcoin as OP says. for example last year we had a period when bitcoin was stuck around $2k price and could not go up. some whales were trying to push it back down to $1000 and $900 which were previous support level. they started an FUD campaign and also sold a lot of bitcoin on exchanges. long story short they lost a lot of money because the market didn't agree with them.

an example of successful manipulation is the recent drop. the FUD about BCH and CSW selling 1 million bitcoin has been around for a while. as BCH forked and some hashrate went out of bitcoin to keep it alive the manipulators took advantage of this situation and dumped and that crashed the already ready market!

by the way profit is in both drops and rises. they just have to know which way market is leaning so that they can give it a little nudge and enjoy the big profit.

you lost money because you didn't make a trading decision on your own. instead you listened to others and bought shitcoins that they were telling you to buy. so to answer your question, most probably all of those people who told you to buy those shitcoins have made a profit because those people dumped on you after you bought and you continued to bag hold useless coins that were getting dumped. that is why they suggested them in first place, because THEY wanted to sell those coins so they fooled others into buying it from them.

bitcoin doesn't need any "technical improvement" to soar. it is already the most technically advanced currency that exists.
what it needs is adoption and as adoption grows the price of it soars. similar to last year when we had some major adoption cases happen with Japan and a couple of other countries and then we had another major adoption as the scaling solution was implemented after about 3 years.

this seems to me like more of a drama and a political move rather than being an actual thing. and the reason for it is most probably due to the fact that usage of bitcoin has been growing in Iran despite this country being under heavy sanctions.
I seriously doubt that US government is dumb enough to think listing 2 bitcoin addresses as "sanctioned" can change anything or even prevent these 2 users from continuing their usage of bitcoin.