bitcoin does have an actual value it is just that this value is mostly measured with the price and the price is decided on exchanges which happen to be unregulated and small. and that means price can be manipulated by someone with a little bit more than average amount of money and willingness to manipulate it and the experience to do so.

I disagree, mostly because you are technically calling bitcoin a "pump and dump" in your second line whereas bitcoin is nothing like a pump and dump!
but also because your statement looks more emotional while you are telling everyone not to be emotional. the fact is that there is nothing wrong with selling. in fact you must sell bitcoin at some point. but the problem is when people have no plans when they buy bitcoin!
if you are buying it to trade then you must sell and then buy back in the dips. if you buy it as an investment, again you have to sell when in bubbles and buy back in the dips. if you buy it as a currency then you need to spend it constantly.
but what people do is they buy to become rich, and they usually do it in a bubble then panic sell when the bubble bursts and then cause the crash.

in short if you want to sell, never sell in the dip. sell BEFORE the dip. and if you can't then maybe you shouldn't look at the price at all.

although the logarithmic chart that has been around for a couple of years now has been accurate about predicting the price of the bitcoin but I still believe that we are on an S-like curve and all of this falls on the horizontal line of this curve even if it sometimes starts looking like a big vertical rise.
my main reason is the lack of adoption of bitcoin. so far a tiny portion of the world (possibly less than 1%) have adopted bitcoin and we are still being slowed down from all sides as they put speed bumps on the road towards mass adoption. and when that happens we can see how insignificant all of this has been so far when the true vertical line appears.

you need to remember that nothing has changed about bitcoin. it is only the stance of the media that is changed so those who are new to the market and have no experience about the history of bitcoin are confused thinking whether price can go back up again or not.

the fact is this is the same as always. price drops then everyone starts their doomsday propaganda against bitcoin mainly because they  want to buy more of it themselves. then the price rises and they all start saying "I told you bitcoin is great"!

otherwise if you shut down your internet and start thinking you can see that bitcoin is still the same as it was before if not better and more improved with all the additions that it has now.

I don't think so. in many countries banks are actually prohibited from investing in bitcoin so they legally can not do it and I don't think they are going to go through the pain and risk of doing it illegally and through different channels. so when price goes up you shouldn't expect "banks" to have large amounts of bitcoin.

as for "financial institutions", that is a maybe. because most of them don't want to invest in bitcoin but only they want to be involved with bitcoin in a way that they don't take risks while they make money. for example an exchange is a place where they make money while they don't risk anything when price drops. that is why there have been a lot of "fund mangers", "investment institution",... in the past year.

well in my opinion people define "survival" wrong when it comes to altcoins! as you can see there are currently more than 2000 altcoins in the market and they have "survived" in the long run. many of them were created years ago and now are so cheap that you can't even buy then with bitcoin. you have to pay something like 1 Dogecoin to buy 100 of it. that is how cheap they are!
well that is not survival. survival of a cryptocurrency is when the yare used as a crypto-"currency" which is not the case for 99% of them so 99% of them are already dead although having high ranks in market cap.

I sincerely believe that no actual money laundering have happened using bitcoin. maybe some small amounts by some unaware people but nothing real and major. not because bitcoin is not anonymous and traceable. and not because of its volatility, and not because of the public blockchain..... but only because there are a lot of ways that are more convenient and easy and cost a lot less than using bitcoin.

US justice department has no jurisdiction in bitcoin market to want to investigate shit about manipulation. not to mention that market manipulation in bitcoin is not something that you can investigate and prove, although it is obvious but there is nothing illegal going on.

the biggest players to smallest fish (from JP Morgan CEO to newbies on bitcointalk) are spreading FUD about bitcoin. nobody has ever arrested them for bullshitting since there is no tax on bullshits.
and on the market whales can sell a large amount of bitcoin to crash the market easily. you can not legally call that manipulation although it is. because they simply sold and you can not prosecute someone because of selling something.

don't read too much into this!
about less than a month ago CCN (the source of this crap) was constantly publishing crap about how bitcoin is rising up and then going to the moon. almost every day they were predicting "bull run" specially when price went from $6200 to $6220 LOL
now they are publishing the other type of crap talking about how bitcoin has dropped, dying, bubbly,....
and OP is just copy pasting that into his own site to get some click baits.

not exactly. lack of interest doesn't mean individuals are betting! the individuals are still individuals with their own opinion. and those who have high individual interest invest in bitcoin with a strong force. but it is not yet a big percentage of the world.
and as for manipulation it is not because of lack of interest, it may be at its peak but as long as the exchanges are not big enough to be able to absorb manipulators dumps things will remain like this.

true, but the effects of it is not that significant to be considered a thing in my experience.

we actually know a lot and can predict a lot of things!
for example in 2011-2014 we knew bitcoin price is going to rise up and you could easily expect 4 digits price in 2017. I personally was expecting at least $2000 until mid 2017 and possibly $3000 by the end of it. but I couldn't factor in the adoption boom. as we get closer it became obvious that $9k-10k is then the real value.
so was the case with $20k, we could easily see it is a bubble. what we couldn't expect was the size of the panic drop afterwards that crashed the price to unrealistic lows at $3.5k!
right now is the same too. we can predict the rise in the future. I'd say by mid 2019 to end we will be back above $15k again. what I can't say is how long they are going to keep on manipulating the price in this range and how the FOMO buy is going to be afterwards.

the reason for manipulating price is to make money and if what you say is true and actual "money" has gone out of the market then there is no more reason to manipulate it anymore since they wouldn't be able to make any money from it.

although that is not the case, I am just pointing out the paradox in your statement. in reality in my opinion there is only uncertainty right now but if price were to drop more then there will be a lot of "jumping in" that the same people would start buying more.

that is true. but both of them can be considered "insiders" in case of this drop and since the "war" was planned to happen way before the bitcoin price drop and the drop was expected by them (specially CSW that was advertising for it too), I'd say it is safe to assume that if they sold bitcoin they did it prior to the drop to get the most amount of money out and lose nothing while price was stable so that they can fund their shitcoin fight and also have more money in case they wanted to buy back in the dip.
which means they did not actually "dump".

this is like 2017 all over again. when BCASH was created the first time, the coin got dumped hard and nobody touched it so the hashrate remained very low. they also intentionally kept it low because they wanted to manipulate the difficulty using EDA. then as things settled a little they started pumping it and with the help of difficulty manipulation they earned a lot of money in a short time.
now we have the same thing all over again. they pump and dump BSV so that they can manipulate both on the market and in the mining scene to make money on both fronts.

the current price is not going to move with some dude being positive or negative about bitcoin! no matter who that dude is, specially if it is SEC chairman which people stopped giving a shit about since they have already rejected A LOT of ETFs so far.
right now only if the manipulators run out of money and reach their desired accumulation targets we can see the reversal or if we see the price drop to a point where they can no longer do anything because of the reverse buying power. anything else is just small forces that won't change much.

it is funny how these days everyone seems to be so concerned about other people's money and is advising them to "sell"
we didn't have half as many suggestions about buying when price was going from $900 to $20,000 so that they could take the 2100%+ profit.

as for selling now, it is the silliest suggestion if you have a tiny bit of information about bitcoin market. it is true that price has gone down but it is not a natural drop like a correction or a bubble burst. it is manipulation. and if you know the potential of bitcoin and you are not a day trader you wouldn't risk entering this type of manipulated market at this point. you would wait.

well, I don't know. I can't remember seeing @tokeweed spreading FUD about bitcoin in the past so I don't think the intentions here was FUDing either. I still find the comparison pretty strange though.

pop over to the speculation board and open literary any bitcoin news site and read the last couple of days articles you will get the answers to all your question there! these topics are discussed already. and I still don't get what kind of "interview" is asking speculation questions...

what I don't get here is that why made you even compare stocks market of Japan with bitcoin?!!! it is like comparing apples and oranges. there is nothing comparable here. and even if you want to compare then start comparing them in ALL aspects not just take one part (the time taking for recovery) and compare that. you need to start comparing volume, price rise and drop (as in the size and time frame it takes), manipulations, regulation, investor trust, FUD, number of investors, potential... and a ton of other factors. and as you start doing that you can see how your statement starts falling apart.

what kind of interview and project is this that all the questions are basically about "price" and not much else? you do realize that bitcoin is not just an investment, right? it is a decentralized payment system that is boarderless, trustless and censorship resistant.

not to mention that most of the questions are opinion based. like the effects of "tweets" on bitcoin price! what is it exactly that you are trying to conclude?