key factor for what?

you should first clarify your goals in this market and then seek to fulfill those goals. in this way you will be a lot more successful.
for instance here why do you care about "product" of a project?
are you going to actually be using that product and use that ICO token for something in real life? if yes then you are correct to ask this question.

but are you looking for these things because you want profit? as in investing in an ICO that says it has a product so that you can have a better chance at profit?
in which case you are asking wrong questions because profit in altcoin market and among tokens is not ensured that way. the pumps ensure profit and nothing else. the group with the most pumping experience and more money to spare will give you the most amount of profit. that is sad but true.

i don't see any difference between Tether and TUSD to be honest. they are both centralized altcoins that promise to be backed by real dollars and the difference is that TUSD is new so they may still be backed by real USD while Tether is old and in the beginning it was the same as TUSD.
not to mention that TUSD  is based in US and is focused in Bittrex and i don't trust either of them.

if you ask me, they are both equally bad and at the same time convenient to use at times for certain use cases while trading. however the KYC of TUSD may also be considered one of the biggest flaws in it.

the money is there waiting to come in which is why i think many of these speculators who are talking about high prices like $50k,... by the end of the year, have in mind.
we had the bear market and the profit of last year alone was huge. not to mention all the fresh money that comes in or is waiting for the sideways movement to end to come in afterwards.

so in other words we need the money waiting to come back. and for that we need to see why that money is waiting. i think one of the reasons is the fear that exists because of ETF another reason is the FUD and when these are lifted we may see a jump. maybe not to $20k by Dec. but a decent rally.

it is because you can not paint manure yellow and sell it as gold. when the paint fumes wear off the smell of manure starts coming out and show the true nature of what lies under that yellow paint.

one of the methods that was used to test gold was to bite down on it. you can bite down on that manure to find out the real taste of it too. and that is what happens when you start using these other cryptocurrencies that you call "better specs"

nobody is really using Opera browser these days with Google Chrome and Firefox being the best browsers used everywhere specially when Firefox comes preinstalled on most linux distributions.
and this type of wallets are not safe to use because they are not stored in a secure environment.

unfortunately when it comes to trading, specially altcoin trading these channels are always littered with traces of pump and dump groups. it doesn't matter how good they look at first, in the end the experienced traders are't going to waste their time educating the others (effectively the competition). instead they do it because there is something in it for them.

also did you really need to create 3 topics advertising this "channel"?

what do you mean by "crypto"? you have to know that there are over 2000 different cryptocurrencies in the market and not all of them are moving at the same pace and they don't follow the same trends.

for most of them like the big top 10 coins with their huge bubbles, it is not yet the good time to buy them because there is a very good chance that they will continue getting dumped the same way they have been for the past months.

but there are still some coins that have gotten dumped as much as they could and have reached the bottom. these coins have been getting pumped already if you check the market you can see them daily that come on top with big "green %%"

it is a possible guess that i would have probably disagreed with a couple of days ago because although i knew the ETF hype was real but i didn't think it is this big but we are being proven otherwise as the panic sellers strike again

first of all, all the things you listed are only speculation or in other words opinion of some people. if you chose to blindly believe and follow it and fail then it is your fault because nobody forced you to believe in them!

secondly as i said these are speculation. for example the Chinese thing, some people were saying because people are selling to go to Chinese holidays bitcoin price is falling. if you look at my post history i said it doesn't make any sense and it did not. which is why price didn't go down that much during that time and also it didn't recover afterwards.

same with ETF. right now one group is saying bitcoin will go to the moon with ETF that SEC is going to approve. another group is saying it won't be approved and price will fall and some ... it is up to you to believe in which speculation and see which the market is following.

these days it seems like these big companies like Samsung are "quoted" to say all kinds of crazy things. and that is mainly because the journalism is dead when it comes to cryptocurrency space thanks to hundreds of shitty news sites creating articles out of their asses and others copying them to post the same exact thing with different wording.

here is what happened.
you entered a market that you had no prior information or experience in and then started making random bets based on false information. the gambles that you did paid off for a while and you made some money which you called profit. then you gained some false sense of expertise.
then reality hit and your bets were no longer winning. instead you started losing in your gamble and now here you are in a big loss.

you do need to sell everything in my opinion. start from scratch and start making a real investment instead of gambling. a real investment means you buy something because you KNOW it is going up not because you FEEL like it or because someone on the internet was advertising it.

this is already a month old topic. and it has already received its answer if not by the first comments, it got it by seeing the market for 1 month already!
as for your statement you seem to be confused what we are talking about in this board. we are discussing bitcoin not some altcoin that can get "pumped and dumped".

i will continue doing what i always do during dips or down times like these. i try choosing the bottom of the dip and start buying bitcoin there at a discount. for example right now $7000 is a good buy price for me but also i have placed buy orders at lower prices such as $6800 and $6500 although i have no faith in them being filled ever.

and also at the same time i am trading shitcoins with small prices that get pumped from time to time.

whenever you see someone advertise an altcoin like this on bitcointalk be sure that there is a good chance they have been bag holding that altcoin and have been losing a lot of money on it. and since ETH has been dropping hard for more than half a year now there is a good chance that OP is in a huge loss right now.

i am right there with you on cheaper altcoins. not necessarily these two but the cheap altcoins in general get pumped a lot easier.

they may be hoping for it but i think majority of the investors don't have any faith in SEC approving ETF this time either which is pretty obvious from the market and bitcoin price. if they had a small hope for its approval then price should have shoot up to the moon by now. i think they are waiting for the rejection and the drop so that they can start buying fast and big during that time.

i still don't think this is a 'bear cycle" as OP thinks. in fact this hasn't been like that for a long time now.

however the reason why we aren't seeing a rise start is the fact that despite all the good news, bullish reports and all the money waiting to buy bitcoin we still have a lot of drama which can cause problems for the rise.
i think it is possible that investors are waiting for ETF news to come out before they start buying back.

there has been lots of good news in the media regarding bitcoin in the past 2 days and the volume has been great so far and i think it is one of the reasons why price is this low. some with insider information has been dumping to break the $8k and keep the price down so that they could accumulate more cheap bitcoins.

there is a good chance that we are about to see a big rise start happening soon.
although i am still worried about altcoins. they showed that they have a tendency to get dumped when bitcoin rises.

i can't make sense of this statement:


so are you trying to say investors pulled out of bitcoin to go into other riskier investments? or is it saying they pulled out of bitcoin because it is risky?
if it is the first then it makes no sense at all! people are never going to do that. bitcoin is risky enough with a good reward for that risk.
if it is the second then it makes even less sense because at this point the risk is minimal and even if they pulled out of bitcoin because of its risk then price should have fallen a lot more.

have you contacted Zebpay yet?

they have access to their own database and can help you out. for example they can give you the list of IP addresses that logged into your account. if you have the time of the withdrawal (which is another thing stored in their database) then you can find the hacker's IP address. although it is possible that they used VPN or TOR but that is at least one step closer to find out who did it.

the trend that we have these days may not be exactly a bull market trend but it definitely is not a bear market anymore. it stopped being that a couple of months ago that price hit the bottom and started its reversal.
and you can not call this a bearish trend unless price drops below that bottom (go to $5k) and stays there which is not possible anymore.