in a way that is a good sign!
if you look at the history, specially the 2013-2015 history that everyone loves to quote these days and say adamantly that it is being repeated, then you can see that whenever bitcoin dies according to the FUDsters that is like the signal of the end of the drops. basically when everyone has lost faith and are so desperate about bitcoin (ie. $200 of 2014) the rises begin.

IF the issue with ETF and SEC was a new thing then you might have been right about it. but this is not new at all. how many times they have rejected ETFs? 50 times or so! maybe more. they either postpone it or reject them. in the end nothing has changed about the market (it is still unregulated and volatile) and they continue rejecting them..... and more importantly everyone already knows it. so it is not like it is news to them when they go nuts

you can't come back to something that you never left!

you are very wrong. bitcoin has only had a handful of forks (possibly 3), the fork somewhere in 2010 to fix an overflow bug, the fork later on to activate p2sh scripts, and the fork in 2017 to activate SegWit are the two off the top of my head. it had no other forks.

there were many who copied bitcoin code and blockchain. that is a form of fork but you can't call it "bitcoin forked or split". even litecoin is a fork of bitcoin! but bitcoin didn't split...

wrong. the network has been constantly getting stronger. the hashrate is on a constant rise which makes the network stronger. and also the number of nodes has been growing of course apart from a big drop a couple of years ago but mostly there has been growth which makes the network more decentralized.

as I said nobody left to come back. a small number of them (about 3 or 4%) shut down their miners after the price dropped because it became harder for them to mine bitcoin.

market capitalization of a cryptocurrency is NOT an indication of it being good and it is not the factor that is making bitcoin, as you like to call it, king.

bitcoin is on top, and will remain on top, not because of its market cap but because of its usefulness in real world. unlike all the other names in that list, bitcoin exists outside of exchanges too.
in other words when the only usage of others is for speculation and they exist on exchanges alone, bitcoin is also used as a currency in real world. and that makes it valuable and "king".

what has changed apart from the price not going up?
absolutely nothing!

bitcoin is still the same decentralized currency that works permissionless and boarderless. it still has the same cap which makes it scarce. it is still working fine and the adoption is ongoing. so why should I change my opinion about something that has not changed?
price isn't all bitcoin is about! price is only a small part of it. and the short term price is irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things.

people are always known to resist change. it is in all of our natures without an exception. why do you think they are resisting bitcoin's adoption if not for this little feature? everyone is used to Tether for years and they have been using it. it is also accepted by multiple exchanges which can be another reason why people haven't changed their ways. they want to transfer money between exchanges using Tether.

another reason can be because the alternatives such as USDC aren't really any better than USDT! they are all centralized and have their own shadiness and risks that comes with it.

my plans to buy bitcoin always means the same thing: I convert my extra fiat that I do not need into bitcoin. so the answer to "when" for me is whenever I have extra fiat to dump. and that is about at least once a month which is what I usually stick to unless there is a big discount week like this one in which case I try to speed up the process of buying bitcoin.
generally speaking I prefer to buy in the dips but it is not always possible to catch them since I am not a full time bitcoin trader.

no it won't. you know why? it is because everyone you see is only positive about bitcoin when it comes to "talks" but when it comes to taking action, they are all waiting for others to make a move first. in other words you say you are positive but you are not buying bitcoin because you want to first see the rise start then buy it.  that is why the price is not yet moving up despite the social media being filled with people talking about how this is good and how they are buying

obviously when you see bitcoin as something that can make you rich overnight, you will be disappointed in the price in short term when it doesn't make you rich. you must change your views about bitcoin and stop dreaming of riches overnight.

bitcoin is a decentralized currency that is designed to work that way not to always go up in price. but it happens that because there is a huge demand which is also increasing every day and also because the supply of bitcoin is limited, the price goes up. but that happens over the long haul not in short term.

the big question that nobody asked you is that what makes you think that these altcoins don't have problems?

your argument is basically saying that bitcoin has problems so it can become irrelevant because of some altcoin. but you are forgetting that this altcoins that you have in mind also have problems and actually that is why they have been irrelevant all these years despite all the huge trading volume that goes in to them to pump  and dump them.

you shouldn't confuse a bearish market with a dumping market though.
a dumping market is unique to cryptocurrencies while bear market is not. in a bear market the price is going down and we know that because of the analysis of the market. for example after a bubble burst and a correction of sorts we see a bear market. but a dumping market is when there is a pump and dump going on and they are dumping an altcoin. in such market which is 100% manipulation, everything you know goes out of the window because none of it is valid anymore.

everyone who owned bitcoin lost some money! that is not limited to you and it doesn't matter when you bought, even if you bought at $1 you still lost money as price went lower than before. but the real question that will make a difference is what do you want out of bitcoin?

if you want a decentralized currency that you can use globally with a tiny fee and no middle man controlling you then you don't have to worry about the price!
if it is an investment you want out of bitcoin then you have to ask yourself whether you see any potential in bitcoin or not. if you don't then you shouldn't have bought it in first place and if you do then starting this topic is a bit silly since nothing has changed about bitcoin and its true potential and it won't change with some short term price fluctuation.
and if it is  a short term money machine you want, then again your topic is silly since the volatility is what a day trader wants and it doesn't matter which way the price goes as long as you see the direction and know how to make profit!!!

imagine you are sitting in a room and the room temperature starts rising up to the roof, when you look outside the room you can see another adjacent but separate room that has air conditioning and is cool. obviously what you do is to move your money to the other room.

that is what always happens with markets that are NOT connected to each other. bitcoin and stocks market have always been like this. when an investor who has stakes in both markets sees one dropping, pulls his money out of that and puts it in another market that is not dropping. that is the whole idea behind "diversification"!!! that you buy things that are NOT connected.

besides as it was pointed out there are a lot of reasons for this bitcoin price drop already...

it has always been about investing what you can afford to lose. this has been said millions of times and only those who listen are winners. it is not just about the monetary gain/loss either. it is about having your mind at ease because you haven't invested your whole life in something to vanish overnight.

then you can think about things that really matter like the true potential of bitcoin. there still is 21 million coins max and owning 21BTC means being 1 in a million! that is ridiculous. I will soon bump my 1 in a million topic since this is a milestone for those who want to be 1 in a million, now is the opportunity to catch up.

to be fair there was no drop in bitcoin hashrate when the fork occurred so you can not say it was because of the fork. then the bitcoin price went down and that always makes mining less profitable and obviously SOME small time miners shut down and that decreases the hashrate. so again you can't attribute that to this altcoin fork either!

the thing about price was only due to panic. people always do this with bitcoin, they start some sort of fear and then speculate about how that fear can drop the price and then stop selling at that arbitrary number!

the volume that exchanges report is not the same as trading volume of a country! mainly because most exchanges are accepting traders from foreign countries. for example if I that don't live in US, use a US exchange such as Coinbase, the volume that I add to the total shouldn't be counted as US volume!
not to mention that most of these stats are not accurate because most of them inflate their numbers for competition. not to mention that methods that people use are not the same. for example Chinese are currently OTC trading or trading on Japanese and other foreign exchanges which is why you think it is lower.

if it was so easy to track what people are doing with their bitcoins that even a shitty news site like the one you quoted could have an statistic like this, then the governments wouldn't have resisted bitcoin's adoption so much as they are doing now
there simply isn't any way of knowing who is doing what with their bitcoins and when they bought and when they sold their coins. anything they claim is simply their imagination.

the funny part of it is that not so long ago CCN was constantly publishing bullish news because price went from $6330 to $6350 and they were seeing moon!

meh, there is always ups and downs in the market and there is also always manipulation in the market, there doesn't have to be more than that with some hidden agenda behind the scenes. everyone is trying to make more money and/or accumulate more bitcoin sometimes some of them have more power to push the market in their own desired direction which usually are called whales. it doesn't have to be conspiracy theory though

I thought ETH is worth at least $50 by now. I am surprised that it is still overvalued by that much. it really needs to go a lot lower than this to be considered at a healthy value since this year it has lost all of its market as ICOs continued to die with all the scams and all the bans that occurred in different countries.
I am wondering what they plan on doing with their fork coming. there will be another big dump by then as people panic because of its splitting into two coins with that fork.

I don't think this has anything to do with newbies (more precisely weak hands) in bitcoin market anymore because they have been flushed out a while back when price was actually dropping to reach the bottom at $6k.
right now it is only whales pushing the price down by offloading coins on the order books to artificially get a lower price so that they can accumulate more coins there.