Dumps are sometimes good, it shows the market which projects are not worth their salt, and prevents further investors from boarding the ship. Dumps don't usually happen to the truly stellar projects, so we really don't have that much to worry about if we have our holdings in super strong projects. It's very simple, don't invest in trash projects then the dumps wont affect you!

I personally like bit panic, gives you all the most relevant news about cryptocurrency in a very simplified layout, quite similar to IRC. If you're somebody who ends up getting all their news from a variety of different sources, then cryptopanic will probably help you out. Google it!

Right now the altcoins are definitely taking a beating against bitcoin, people are moving their holdings away from altcoins into bitcoin because of how much strength it has demonstrated relative to the alts. This further made the problem worse be exascerbating the dump, making it spiral further and further out of control. I mean look at NEO, it's now at damn 1/8th of its value

I personally don't believe that many airdrops today are worth the time, they are too saturated and very few projects that actually offer an airdrop turn out to be highly successful, hence making the airdrop actually worth anything. I have heard some success stories of people earning $1,000+ from an airdrop, but that was likely just an exception.

Well, as you said the market is absolutely terrible. The projects that are succeeding are the ones with EXTREMELY strong teams and development credentials. Now it is not enough to simply have a big hype train behind you, you also need to have a working product, great advisors and a proven revenue model otherwise you won't get a second look from the big investors. Typically, platform coins and new consensus coins tend to do the best, though if they're having a hard time now.

People who get hold of these tokens don't consider them to be precious, otherwise they wouldn't dump them at such a ridiculous rate. You can typically see that the majority of the idiots that dump below ICO price are bounty hunters from third world countries, even at ridiculousloy low rates they're happy with the return they're getting so dump their tokens the moment they appear on an exchange for whatever the highest buy order is, even if that's 1/10 ICO price as is often the case.

I don't think that the block size is much of a problem for scalability. Many new coins are looking to implement a dynamic block size in the future upgrades, and several ICOs are offering coins with dynamically scaled blockchains. Personally, I believe that the scaling solution will come from an off-chain solution via offline payment channels, so we can even stay at the same block size we're at now without much detriment.

There have actually been a few attempts to do something similar, I wouldn't call it a bitcoin mastercard or bitcoin VISA etc. But there are numerous bitcoin credit cards available which allow you to pay for things in store and online just like a debit or credit card, by using some automated exchange feature. However, these tend to be banned or shut down quite soon after launching so they are still quite risky to try out.

But you can find of these online by searching for bitcoin debit cards.

I agree.

Education is one of the major things that is missing right now with regards to cryptocurrency. But I think that the problem behind this stems from a lack of funding on the subject. I mean we can all agree that there needs to be more funding in cryptocurrency education, but the real question is who is going to pay for it and what benefit are they going to get in return? Very few people are willing to make such a sacrifice for the greater good as most people are just looking to do what benefits them in the immediate future unfortunately.

I personally think that all privacy coins, well, not all of them. but most privacy coins such as Bitcoin Private, Monero, Zcash and DeepOnion are great choices for a long term hold. People are starting to have their privacy stripped away from them with the neural networks behind facebook, twitter etc compiling as much information on people as possible. i think that privacy will become a commodity in future, and people will start to look for options that provide this as standard.

I find it hard to believe that an authoritarian (draconian?) government such as Russia's could ever be on friendly terms with a cryptocurrency they don't have full control over. I personally think that most countries will launch a national cryptocurrency at some point in the future, such as a digital version of the dollar, or digital euro for example. That way they can still control the emission and blockchain without missing out on its tech.

Bull runs can't be predicted with any long term certainty, anybody claiming to have insider information or proven signals is likely lying unless they somehow have access to significant FUD or FOMO information before other people. and if that was the case, why would they share it, rather than buying up BTC or shorting the hell out of it? Use your brain people.

The right time to buy ETH is any value under $1000. Not that long ago ETH was over the 1k mark, and now it's down to almost $250, I would say thats a bargain in comparison. All ETH needs to do is regain its all time high in order to generate you a nice return on your investment. In fact if you went and invested now, and ETH goes into a solid bull run then you can easily stand to make 3-4x your investment, I don't think there's many other speculative investment options available that have the chance to do that, so grab it while you can.

Most ICOs are beginning to realize just how hostile the market conditions are towards ICOs right now.ICOs that would have completely smashed their hard caps last year are now struggling to even make a modest soft cap.I think the majority reason behind this is the increase in the number of scam and faiing ICOs, as well as the reduction in support from the institutional investors and corporations. It will take some time for this to recovery and the bounty system to regain its strength and purpose.

This is a common scenario in the world of cryptocurrencies. When BTC is strong, altcoins tend to weaken. Though when the market is extremely strong, both altcoins and BTC will grow in value. Right now, we're in a market that is really favoring BTC dominance. Therefore if you're holding altcoins you should be wary, always making sure to set stop losses for any of your trades and holdings, as only the strongest are thriving right now.

A lot of ICOs just pay random idiots on websites like fiverrr.com and freelancer to write their whitepaper, these people don't understand the depths and intricacies of the project, leading them to search for this information online. Unfortuntately there isn't much information available online, meaning the less creative writers will start to plagiarize the little material they have.

Here's a lesson guys, write your own damn whitepaper, or actually take the time to fully brief the guys on the project.

Do you really think bounty hunters care about what the ICO price was? They know that if they don't sell out quick, some other bounty hunter will come along and sell their tokens for less. This mentality leads to hundreds of bounty hunters dumping their tokens lower than the previous guy. If there isn't enough market demand to soak those tokens up, this lead to the market crashing.

The best way to fix this is to lock bounty payments for 6 months to a year, or release them gradually so there's a consistent flow to exchanges.

I think the biggest misconception right now is that cryptocurrency facilitates tax evasion, fraud and money laundering. The truth is, traditional cash currencies are far more anonymous and easily moved around than cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of tax evasion and money laundering uses traditional currency, NOT cryptocurrency. I feel like the luddite officials keep pinning this on cryptocurrency in an attempt to discredit it, annoying!

Came in this thread expecting to hear horror stories of how much money people have lost. I am surprised that most people have only lost less than $500, which in the grand scheme of things really isn't that much. Remember to know when to stop, sometimes you have to accept a loss rather than risk putting yourself further into the red. It's definitely a hard skill to learn, but it will save you big time on the long run.

Looks like the common consensus is that Bitcoin is going to drop to around $6850-6750 before recovering to push past the $7000 mark. Personally, I think that we will stabilize around the $7,000 mark unless for some reason or another we enter another extensive bull run like last year.

However, I don't believe that cryptocurrency follows predictable markets, so I doubt that will be happening. There's a good chance that we will see $10,000 by the end of the year however, but I don't expect we will ever see the bad side of $5,000 again.