Japan right now is one of the major forces behind Bitcoin adoption and I believe they are one of the reasons why we have this rally since the begging of this year. It's pretty common to think that any destabilization including war may boost Bitcoins price, because it's a hedge against fiat, but it has never been tested. I think it's important to distinguish different situations that lead to a crash of fiat - if it's purely economical, then sure, Bitcoin will go up, but during some horrible disaster people also might be selling Bitcoin, because it's purely digital and requires existing infrastructure like electricity and internet to be present.

I'm sure that most miners won't quit since it is very profitable now to mine. Bitcoin itself is not illegal, so there won't be any legal trouble for simply mining it. Some miners will find loopholes that will help them circumvent the closure of exchanges - for example, they might sell BTC on some foreign exchanges for USD or other currency or maybe they will have to visit other country to do so. They also might be able to just sell Bitcoin privately to other people. And of course there will be shadow exchanges.

If you'll read Satoshi's whitepaper - the origin of blockchain technology, you'll understand that it was created with a purpose of timestamping transactions to prevent their double spending. A lot of real world applications don't require timestamping, so they don't require blocks and miners. So when you look at some private blockchain project, you will quickly understand that it's very different from Bitcoin, it lacks all it's defining features and just don't bring anything new. In its core, private blockchain projects are just application of digital signatures via public key cryptography and databases distributed between some participants of the network. So, private blockchains can't really compete with Bitcoin.

This looks more like some piece of FUD that tries to tie Bitcoin and North Korea together to paint it in a bad light and justify banning it later. If you think about it, it doesn't make sense, because you need a huge amounts of money to sustain you economy, and it's impossible to move them secretly. The US would quickly find North Korean coins and warn exchanges about them. Next, Bitcoin is a payment system, but you need to sell something to get it, so NK has to produce something, but they can't because their economy is barely functioning. And the last point, NK is supported by China and Russia, everyone know that, so there is no need for Bitcoin to sustain NK.

Good question! I think it's easy to determine whether a casino pays taxes or no by simply looking at its house edge and profit share for investors. Technically, casino has just one source of income - its house edge, and it has to cover all the spendings - servers, maintenance, salary for employees and of course taxes (if there are any). This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin gambling sites have much smaller house edge than traditional casinos - they don't pay taxes, so they have more profit, so they can reduce their house edge to be more attractive than fiat casinos. Also, traditional casinos operate with a license, which is like a reassurance from the government that the casino won't cheat (pretty weak in my opinion, since you have to just trust both casino and the government). Bitcoin casinos just don't need this, because they can prove their fairness via cryptography. 

So far this "bear market" was only a few days long, as the price is now only $300-400 lower than before we started getting stronger rumors about possible ban. By definition, the real bear market is when some asset is decreasing in its price for a long period of time, which is not what really happened now. Of course time flows faster in Bitcoin world, because it's traded 24/7, but still we are very far from declaring bear market. The price has been increasing for more than 1.5 years and there's still a lot of momentum. And if you'll think about fundamentals, you'll notice that recently a lot of companies and governments were in fact embracing Bitcoin, so we are still in a bull market, and it may last really long.

Unlike with centralized systems, transactions in Bitcoin never go wrong for some technical reasons, there are no bugs that make people lose money, transactions always go exactly where they are supposed to. All unwanted transactions are caused by human mistakes and malicious actions, which can be solved through learning of Bitcoin software and net security. In fact, it's much more efficient to have some people lose their money due to their own mistakes, rather than installing systems that increases costs for all users universally, regardless whether they do mistakes or not. And if you read Satoshi's whitepaper, this is exactly one of his initial arguments for creating Bitcoin.

The price right now is $3,700, which is a giant swing from yesterdays bottom of $2,800. I'm sure there must be some hidden reason for that. Maybe we'll soon hear the announcement that Bitcoin exchanges will open again after getting licenses. I have this theory that the price always moves before the news hit the media, because professional traders have their own sources, so they react before the general public can. If you remember, Bitcoin started dropping right after hitting $5,000 and everyone though that it's just a correction, and after a few days we started hearing rumours about China ban.

$3,000 is just where we were a bit more than one month ago, so stop panicking like it's the end of the world. We may go lower if more people will decide to panic or if there will be some more real FUD, but keep in mind that selling can be as dangerous as buying - Bitcoin can reverse its direction at any moment and sellers will turn into losers. Now is a good time to start buying - maybe not everything in one time but continiously. Bitcoin will go up in the future, it's technology hasn't suffered any damages, it only keeps getting better.

It's a bit hard to tell who exactly is dumping Bitcoin, but whales and traders are usually the first to do so, and only after them come investors aka hodlers. So, maybe it's just some crazy speculation and manipulation and true hodlers haven't dumped yet. After all, there's no good reason to sell Bitcoin, it's pretty natural that some authoritarian government comes closer to banning Bitcoin, they are the same guys who banned Google and Wikipedia. The example of real panic and dumping would be if there was some bug in Bitcoin, or some developed countries like the U.S. or Germany has banned it.

This is all very similar to what happened in 2014 - Bitcoin started skyrocketing and then China issued some regulation and rumors that Bitcoin will be banned, and the price has crashed. Sounds familiar, isn't it? But I think this time Bitcoin is much stronger, as it has already 8 years of history, growing mainstream attention and technological improvements. Also, China shouldn't be viewed as important economic player - they hate freedom and ban many good things, so banning of Bitcoin should be viewed as a sign that big governments and Banks recognize and are scared by it, because it works.

I wouldn't be surprised if it will turn out that Bitmain Cash is in fact subsidized and controlled by the Chinese government, and they aim to replace Bitcoin with their fake counterfeit shitcoin. Not the first time China steals new technologies. But this time they won't succeed, because Bitcoin users clearly see through the FUD, lies and manipulation and keep hodling the real Bitcoin. Meanwhile, this Chinese clone has no future, because it's just a worthless copypaste - anyone could have done that.

It's quite possible that many journalists are bribed by market speculators and manipulators, so they pump with positive articles and make FUD when their masters want to dump Bitcoin. Bitcoin markets are extremely wild and unregulated and some people would do anything to get an edge in trading to get more profit. This only reassures that hodling is the better strategy for most people, because you can't compete with manipulators. This also makes all price analysis and predictions pretty useless, you can't know exactly when they will start making their move. But in the long run it doesn't matter - Bitcoin is revolutionary tech and its still early days.

I think you don't understand the basics of Bitcoin, transactions are confirmed (confirmed means included in a block)  by a third party - miners, to avoid double spending. This is the reason why transactions are trusted - someone has put a lot of electricity and other resources into them. If there was some other way to prevent double spending, we wouldn't need miners, blocks and we might have had zero fees, but so far no one had solved this problem yet.

Bitcoin is a new disruptive tech, that has proven that it can deliver all its promises - decentralization, security, resistance to attacks, etc. After the release of Lightning Network there will be one less reason to not adopt it, so I would say, no price is too high. You may think that even $2,000 is a good growth comparing to the price 1 or 2 years ago, but by the time Bitcoin will reach mass adoption, the price will be growing at even faster rates. The current price drop happened because banksters and governments started getting scared, but they will not stop Bitcoin.

You have posted here a whole bunch of misconception, I hope newbies won't read it and think that it's all true.

There's absolutely no need for i7 and 16 GB RAM, Bitcoin Core takes only 300 MB RAM on average.

You absolutely don't need SSD, any HDD would work. Disc space is pretty cheap nowadays.

A few Mbps is enough.

You don't need to install any encryption software, it's all done by your wallet when you are setting up a password.

Cold storage is entirely different thing, don't mix it up with backups.

Monitoring your PC with TeamViewer or whatever is useless and paranoid, if your security has been breached, your coins will be gone forever in a seconds.

When the price grows very quickly with very few dips, everyone start expecting a correction - some people though that $4,000 would be a local top, then $4,500, but as we reached $5,000 the Chinese FUD started emerging, and since that price was very high and unstable, the pullback was pretty big. The timing of this FUD also seems suspicious, perhaps the Chinese didn't want Bitcoin to rise so fast, and want some more time to buy cheaper coins. Anyway, the bulls are still strong as market makers fight for $4,000 zone, which is already a very high value if you'll compare it with what we had just few months ago. So, the macro trend is still very bullish. After all, we had a 2 year long price suppression, so there's probably still a lot of steam to keep going for at least 0.5-2 years.

I think Dimon is pretty irrelevant here, he didn't present any new arguments why Bitcoin is a fraud, he simply stated his baseless and personal opinion, and similar opinions have been voiced since the beginning of Bitcoin. Chinese FUD was the real price-driver recently, but as it is usually is with Bitcoin, you can expect that it all gets priced in before the information hits the news sites, since traders have their own sources. But the fact that Bitcoin is in $3,900 zone now, despite all the FUD during recent days shows that it becomes stronger and stronger, in the past the price swings were way bigger.

This is a contradiction - if all money is artificial and have no real value, then that's just a universal property of money and there's nothing wrong with it. Jamie Dimon either doesn't understand Bitcoin or sees its potential to disrupt bankers like him. People shouldn't blindly trust opinions of other people, even if they are quite successful - it's always better to try and do your own research to develop a deeper understanding, and only then start listening to see what others think, since you will be able to immediately discard obviously wrong arguments.

The market is driven by speculators. If there are some bad news, even if they are very small and unreliable, speculators expect to see some price drop, so they start selling, because they see it as earning opportunity. This selling amplifies the price drop far beyond what would have happened initially - then the noobs start to panic and sell too. In the end, some people profit from buying in the dip or just buying back lower than they have sold, while others loss their money when they sell at the bottom. This is how it always was, so it's better to just hodl if you aren't an expert trader.