those huge spikes are always a one time thing during their own cycle that is why people have started talking so much about these so called "cycles of bitcoin" lately. we keep seeing them repeated in a similar fashion with a big boom near the end like what we had in 2017 with $20k, in 2013 with $1200 and in ~2010 with $20 and so on.
if we keep the same cycles true we can see $100k this time in less than 1.5 year from now.

i don't know about Twitter by based on what i have seen in the past 5 years google trends is not something that affects bitcoin price but it is the other way around meaning when price rises more people find out about it so more people search and the "trend" grows.

as for twitter, like any other social media it can "spread the word" but i wouldn't go as far as saying it is affecting the price. bitcoin is not a small market to be affected by some spam on twitter. this "research" is making the common mistake of confusing cause and effect.

i didn't see any "Analysts" in that link. just a bunch of random thoughts by the author trying to bait some clicks to his website and earn some money from the impressions!
besides price is already $5600 and saying $6000 is not far is the most obvious statemet anybody can make not to mention that we are already in rising mode for a couple of months which means a small 7% rise is nothing.

and from a realistic perspective bitcoin produces 1.2 MB blocks while BCH produces 1 KB blocks and BSV 500 byte blocks so bitcoin does have bigger blocks


centralized coins always get pumped better and since ETH is not just a token people invest but also a platform that thousands of scammers create easy tokens on to sell to newbies, the price of it grows even more and as ICOs die it also dies with them.

you obviously can do that like many others who have been doing it and still do. but the question you should be asking yourself is whether it is worth spending (or wasting) your time like this? there are a lot of jobs that you can do in the real world that can give you a lot more "money" than bounty hunting can and on top of that they don't require as much time spent and there isn't that much scams in real world jobs.
then you can use that money to buy anything you like, for example invest it in bitcoin and increase your networth by doing that.

what you are hearing is the "hype" that new project start online when they want their coin to be pumped. there is no way of knowing whether the coin is going to get pumped, when it is going to get pumped and by how much.
all you can say is that they plan on an upcoming pump. usually they succeed.

so the only thing to do in cases like this is to watch the market closely if you did see a rise in the volume and the price of that token to start then buy right away otherwise stay away and don't become a bag holder.
then the next step is to continue watching that market to find the best time to dump it before the pump ends and you miss your chance of selling.

because those coins sometimes can get unbelievably huge pumps they won't die anytime soon although they are all technically dead and some of them don't even produce new blocks anymore for a very long time.
it has always been so much easier to pump these coins too and that is why they are pumpers' favorite. for example you can see one of these dead coins that is worth 0.001 saothi to go up to 0.1 satoshi and that is 100x pump which can give you a gigantic profit. imagine investing 0.01BTC in it and cashing out 1 bitcoin!

no, this alone is not the uptrend. the "uptrend" is all the rises that we had in the past 2 months and we will continue to have for the coming 2 years. there is no "bull traps" anymore because we are already in a bull market and any tracing back is only going to be a simple correction as it has been the case with all the small drops that we had ever since price started rising up from $3100.
the $5700 is no different either, we are testing the resistance close to $6k and that requires some small drops before it breaks out and goes to $6500

the thing about fees is that with the technologies that so far were created on top of blockchain technology there is no way to not have it, then the only thing to consider is how to keep it low while still keeping the decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency because that is the whole point of a cryptocurrency and if we make it centralized then there is no point in switching from the old centralized payment systems such as banks, credit cards, online wallets like paypal,... to a centralized cryptocurrency!

the only problem that is preventing mass adoption is the fact that people still don't see bitcoin as a currency but only see it as an investment and when it comes to cryptocurrencies (aka altcions) they can not see them as currencies because they are not designed to be currencies but they instead were designed to be investments to be pumped and dumped so that investors can make more bitcoin.
so although bitcoin adoption has been increasing but it is at a slower pace and because of that price remains volatile (also because market is small) and that in turn slows down adoption like "chain".

pretty much the same as before and i don't see any reason why it should change because people have not changed at all even though they have lost a lot of money. so we will continue seeing useless projects, most of which are purely scams, which come along and get pumped and dumped a lot to make certain people who know how to ride the pumps a lot richer while the majority of others in the market continue losing money.

"cryptocurrency" has not become anything. it is still the same thing as it always was, a TOOL. the fact that some people choose to use that tool in an unsafe or wrong way is their own choice. for example when they trust shady exchanges that are obviously going to scam them or when some of these exchange owners are newbies who are handling large sums of money in an unsafe way it is obvious that disasters like these would happen.

the rush that some people has is mainly the product of 2017 which created unrealistic expectations among certain people (which mostly consist of newcomers). they think a rise or a bull market is the same as seeing a gigantic rise in a short time and if anything other than that happens then it must mean bitcoin is dead and should continue dropping more!
those expectations will die off as we slowly rise up though.

that is only one of the many problems with Tether but the main problem will always remain the same thing: the fact that Bitfinex has never been capable of proving that USDT was actually backed by real USDs and that creates a certain level of shadiness both about this coin and the company.
besides at the end of the day Tether is still centralized and that means it has a huge risk since if something happens to that company the value of the coin drops to zero immediately.

well it is not a "balance" per se. for example when you have a bank account, a PayPal account, Visa,... there is a database which is like this:
so to know how much money someone has you just have to look up the username.

with bitcoin (the blockchain technology) that "database" looks like this:
and if we say "username" is 1BitcoinAddressThatIUsedTOReceive then i have to loop through all blocks from height 1 to last one and check every single transaction to see which one has paid to my address and which one spent those payments to come up with the final "balance".

i am not a fan of short explanations because they only create more and more questions the shorter they get. a good definition is the one mentioned above with terms such as immutable and decentralized in it but that only creates more questions as what it means to be immutable and how.

also a big distinction that i feel like OP messed up in first line is that blockchain does not contain balances. it only contains transactions that occurred and you have to calculate your balance based on that history.

to add to what NeuroticFish said, i say it depends on the amount that you have received. you didn't mention how much Doge is "a decent " amount that you have received. if it is a couple of bucks then holding it is not a bad idea, you can use it to tip others on many different platforms, you can gamble with it in a lot of gambling sites, there are also some rare cases of some online websites selling (small) stuff for cryptocurrency and accept Doge as payment. but don't do it as an investment of if you hope it can gain value over time because it won't thanks to its unlimited supply and the joke nature of it.

2 things: demand better security from exchanges, or stop using centralized exchanges that control your coins and lose them.

a big percentage of these "frauds" are from exchange hacks (or so called hacks where the exchange fakes it).  so people have to start demanding the exchange to give them some sort of guarantee that can be pursued legally if they lost their coins. so that this can force them into coming up with stronger security instead of their silly methods that can be hacked this easily.
additionally we all have to eventually move on to decentralized exchanges. we are in a decentralized system after all and we have to have everything decentralized specially altcoin exchanges that don't require fiat nonsense and enforced centralization. it will also provide us with a much better privacy.

it has always been a "do or die" scenario for XRP since it is a useless pump and dump coin and if the owners (the pumpers behind it) forget to keep it hyped and have pumps scheduled it can simply die and be forgotten that easily because it has no other usages to rely on for living.
and so far the team behind it has been doing a good job at scamming people with their 100% premine where they pump their shitcoin then dump their premined coins on the newbies on the market who will then become bag holders of a token that keeps losing its value.

but these "whalecumulators" can't keep up accumulating indefinitely! at some point they run out of money and would want to let the price go back up, not to mention that you can't really manipulate the market forever. the market retaliates against you. and that is why the recent rises occurred anyways.
so at this point i would say most of them are leaning towards a rise. there are always some who resist but they would be going against the market.