I disagree with both reasons.
the first one because buyers have not gone anywhere and it has nothing to do with bravery. it is about the fact that a large sell off from certain parties in the market was capable of decreasing the price even though the market was filled with buyers!
as for regulations, they have always been around and not much has changed about them. if anything it has become better considering the changes.

unless it is some weird country with a weird dictatorship oriented government, the exchanges aren't going to be shut down for no reason!!! and as long as they don't do anything illegal like money laundering they will never be shut down.

it is not possible simply because trading bitcoin requires fiat (don't confuse it with trading altcoins which is crypto versus crypto trade and can easily be decentralized). and since fiat requires banks and similar methods and all of them are easy to be faked it becomes impossible to have a decentralized market where people trade bitcoin-fiat.

for example you can not prevent credit card thieves from using it to buy bitcoin unless the market is a centralized exchange.

another "disadvantage" which may not be a disadvantage forever is the fact that there are no laws about such systems so prosecuting criminal activities is harder. for example if you attack a website (like DDoSing a website) that would be an actual illegal act and you may face prison time. but if you attack a decentralized network like bitcoin's (which had lots of attacks in the past in different forms such as spam attack, DDoS attacks, FUD attacks,...) there is not YET any laws that can prevent these crimes.

for example if JP Morgan CEO went on TV and said Microsoft is a fraudulent company then Microsoft would sue their ass and most probably receive a couple of million dollars from them because of this attack compensating for the damages they caused to their brand and company. but when they did that to bitcoin there was nobody to sue them and they got away with it...

it is not possible to know for sure but you can always make a good guess. in this case since none of those funds have moved you can be certain that the receiving addresses do not belong to exchanges since the exchange systems are automatic and they move any funds that are deposited in your exchange wallet address.

not to mention that whales never sell on exchanges!

WRONG.
last time a whale (Mt Gox) moved their coins to sell you didn't even find out about it. instead when about 4-6 months past and the price drop started the news sites started publishing the false information and that made you think it was Mt Gox that caused the crash.

it is impossible to predict it now and in my opinion it is unlikely for bitcoin to reach a new ATH at this point because when the market was healthier and the manipulative dump had not happened yet, the confidence was still low despite the ongoing accumulation. but when the dump came and crashed the market, it took the confidence away with it. right now only whales are filling their pockets and for the confidence to come back, it will take a long time hence making a new ATH (which should be $20k+) not possible in 2019.

we will surely see rises soon because it is also impossible to keep the price  down for long but I don't expect big rallies for a long time.

there is a big difference between being bullish while price is falling from $20k down towards 4 digits numbers and being bullish when price fall is over, 9 months is past 2-3 of which is basically stable and above a solid buy support while accumulation is taking place!

so you can't say the predictions that were around when price was above $6k were wrong. expecting a reversal and talking about a new ATH at that point makes perfect sense. this drop that we have now is unnatural that invalidated every previous plans and predictions.

what surprises me the most is the fact that nothing about any of these nonsenses (bitcoin is dead, etc) are new! we have had the same strategy used multiple times in the past on the same large scale as today to push the price lower and lower so that they can buy at cheaper prices. but people still pay it a lot of attention for some reason!

my theory is that everyone at some point started loving FUD and use it to their own advantage for shorting bitcoin or buying it in the dip which is why we keep on seeing the same bullshit have the same effect over and over again!

has anyone considered the possibility of this being a new attempt at spam attacking the network?

last time I saw someone create this many new transaction outputs they were trying to start a large scale spam attack which lasted for months. maybe this time they are trying to do it using SegWit transactions. it could work nearly the same way since spam attack is basically filling blocks with junk transactions.

what I want or don't want is none of your concern. I have to know what I want, and I do and that is enough for me to plan for my future and make plans about what I want to do with my fiat.

your comment says otherwise!

then what the hell are you doing on a "BITCOIN" forum?

just because hundreds of worthless "news" sites are copying the same news and posting it, that  doesn't mean it is a "hot news".
the fact is, in the past year or so because of the abuse of Satoshi Nakamoto name, people have become skeptical of anyone who comes out. I am sure even if today the real Satoshi came out with concrete proof people still wouldn't pay him much attention because of the large number of scammers that have attempted to impersonate him recently specifically Craig.

nobody is forcing you to use anything that you don't like. if "anonymity" is your concern then go ahead and use a cryptocurrency that you think can provide you that option. if you think bitcoin is bad then stop buying it!!!

but based on your comment "anonymity" is not your concern. profit is! you are saying why "monero is not number 1". why do you care which rank it has? if you think it is good and satisfies your need for anonymity then go ahead and start using it. someone who is concerned with making money only is caring about ranking of an altcoin!

you can never stop bitcoin adoption. it will always grow. all they can do is to slow it down sometimes but it will continue to happen and this is only one of many indications of the growth of adoption all around the world. but let's not forget that the recent price drop has made a lot of newbie traders ultra active recently which you can also see on this forum, they make lots of accounts on every social media platform such as bitcointalk and reddit,... then start spreading nonsense about bitcoin thinking they are spreading "FUD" because they hope to make profit but they can't trade like everyone else.

actually many of the bigger investors buy bitcoin off the market for many reasons such as not wanting to push the price up while they accumulate at a good discount, or some may be even trying to not leave a trace behind for the government to track as they dump their fiat for bitcoin silently.
and the whales that are on exchanges aka the market makers are not letting the price go up by dumping bitcoin as it tries to rise. so they buy at a fixed and low price.

no, this is what you think and you are wrong. bitcoin doesn't have "most" of the hashrate to be doing "most" of mining. they have a small percentage of it.

a mining pool is a way for miners from different places around the world to "pool" the work and share the block reward the pool itself only gets a fee to cover their costs.

you are again only saying your personal opinion here.

first prove the first statement then ask a question about it!

considering your post history and this topic I think you are new to creating FUD and think topics like this can be categorized as an FUD. if you like I can explain what a good and effective FUD looks like...

I wouldn't call this a panic sell anymore. it is way beyond panic and newbies selling, this has been purely the works of whales trying to get their hands on as low a price as they can for their accumulation phase and mainly because they weren't satisfied with the bottom at $6k where the actual accumulation was happening by everyone and people were content about it.
in any case I don't see any reason for $100k and above not to happen since nothing about bitcoin and its growing adoption has changed yet.

if you go to a supermarket and pay with stocks, it doesn't turn stocks into a currency. it just means YOU chose to use stocks as a medium of exchange. the same thing is with bitcoin. if some people think of bitcoin as stocks that  doesn't make bitcoin a "stock", it is only their perspective of it. not to mention that it is still your perspective thinking people do that! the fact is bitcoin, like any other currency, is being traded. in other words the same way US dollar is being traded on Forex market, bitcoin is being traded in cryptocurrency market. would you call USD a stock because of that?

the main problem with most people who are worried these days is that they have invested in bitcoin without educating themselves first about what bitcoin is and what it does. for most of the newbies with weak hands bitcoin is a virtual number on their computer which they paid money for which magically makes them profit. that is why they are so scared these days and this is the main reason for 90% of the panic sells.

but those who actually do some research about bitcoin and educate themselves about what it really is are never worried like this about the future of it. the potential of bitcoin is not something hard to see!

the same way you give them a receipt if they bought something from you using fiat! it is usually a piece of paper that has dates, payment amounts and the object that was purchased. you can add a new field to that piece of paper and include payment method in it. in front of that you mention bitcoin and then the transaction ID that was used to make the payment.


this can not work because you need to change your address for any new payment. in other words every customer receives a new address to make the payment to. and you can't head over to blockchain.com and sign a message for every one of them. not to mention that this website is centralized and you should avoid introducing any kind of centralization when accepting bitcoin payments as much as possible.

that is not Satoshi bro. that is a scammer, most probably Craig Wright himself, trying to abuse Satoshi's name for his own purposes. and it is so silly that it is not going to affect the market in any sense whatsoever. despite that the scammers like Craig are milking the opportunity as much as they can, they have always loved chaos because they could make more money from it.

in the real world you can see opportunities are out there for anyone to grab them but we only see one Steve Jobs instead of millions. the same thing is true here too. those newbies who busy themselves with FUDs from other newbies and whale accumulators are always left behind. we have had the same discussions against bitcoin for years and bitcoin has been rising ever since. I remember people saying the same nonsense when price was $200 and I still continued to buy it.

now guess which one of us has more money?
someone who bought bitcoin in that dip when everyone else was saying bitcoin is dead or someone who listened to the FUD and sold at a loss and didn't buy back...

you should have asked "why NOT now" instead!
this is the perfect time for things like this. that is a hacked account, there is currently the BSV aka Bitcoin Shitty Version fork struggling to survive and CSW is starting to get desperate to pump it more so that it can survive for a longer time but he is having a hard time doing it. so they need anything they can get their hands on to create some sort of fake hype to pump it a little more.