OP seems to be one of those people who immediately believes what he hears/reads from the news. worst part is that any bitcoin-related news sources have always been so shitty with what they publish.
JPM never changed their stance about bitcoin, they continue bashing it BECAUSE they created the centralized shitcoin called JPCoin and the more they advertise that, they more they will continue bashing anything that doesn't belong to them or controlled by them which includes most other cryptocurrencies too.

that doesn't make sense to do because this technology is currently very new so obviously it needs to first be perfected over time so the the "bugs" like side effects of implanting it inside your body (under you skin) is removed and then people to start doing it. but it will happen eventually. for the time being using other things is best unless you are one of those people who always seek out the latest technologies and wants to get on board.

this is not new!

ever since fully centralized coins started showing up we have been seeing a lot of cases exactly like this where they pay to be advertised with false information all over the internet so that they can pump their useless centralized token and make millions from such pumps, usually they have premined coins to ensure their profit too.
XRP is only one of many that are doing it and it may not even be the biggest. ETH and DASH are the biggest that have been doing this for the past 3 years at least.

then that means it is not an "asset". even the name is saying it is a "currency".

it is not the "best" way but it is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to make the most amount of profit in the shortest amount of time that is why pump and dumps are the dominant reason why any altcoin exists specially the top ones.

i hope that too but i gave up on altcoins a while ago and i am only focusing on bitcoin and use altcoins to increase my bitcoin wealth because in my experience bitcoin is the only thing that matters.

when you decide to start mining a cryptocurrency it either has to be a solid coin with a future that you can be sure you won't lose money to its pump and dumps, in which case your only option is bitcoin and nothing else. or you have to rely on the pumps that the said altcoin has because the profitability of mining an altcoin only depends on whether it is going to get pumped so that you can make good profit or will it remain the same or get dumped instead and you lose money. so it requires a lot of speculation too.

at least now his predictions are starting to make more sense compared to what he kept insisting on last year with new ATH and stuff like that!
the biggest problem that bitcoin is currently facing for its rise is the damage that was inflicted on the investors' confidence because the latest drop that we had (going below $6k) was considered purely manipulative and due to BCash FUD and other kind of attacks on the market value. and to get out of this kind of lack of confidence we first need to see some rises and some time for accumulation. and that is what has been happening these days. if it is kept up we can see $6k within 1-2 months.

manipulation is a matter of degrees. it can go from full control of the market and the price down to only having slight influence over a short period of time. with that said manipulation exists in every market in the whole world without an exception. so saying it doesn't exist in bitcoin is a naive statement.

first of all bitcoin went up about 22x during the 2017 bull run.
secondly it has never been about the size of the rise but the quality of it. there are shitcoins that have risen more than 1 million percentage in less than a week but that doesn't make them any good and there have been shitcoins that have gotten pumped for about 50% but their dump has been even harder.
you see the only thing that matters is whether a rise is a pump or an actual rise. what bitcoin had was a rise due to its adoption so it doesn't matter how big it is, it will be solid even if we drop way below that level (in which case it will be considered under value) but for altcoins it was pump so it was fake and it needed to get dumped harder.

first of all the number of unconfirmed transactions is not a good unit to look at when you are deciding how much fee you should pay. instead you should look at how much fees they are paying and also how big is the total size of the total number of transactions (10 transactions can fill up a block while 3000 may not even fill it up).

secondly it is Bech not Bench and you are already saving up on a lot of fees by using it because your transaction size is not a lot smaller than if you used the legacy form

it won't be fixed until people start changing their attitude towards altcoins.
so far everyone who has ever entered the altcoin world wants one thing and one thing only and that is to make a quick profit and exit.
the same thing is true in bitcoin too but at least in bitcoin these people are not everyone. there are still a great number of people who get into bitcoin because of what it offers as a decentralized currency.

so until people stop wanting pump and dump shitcoins that can give them 1000% profit in a couple of days, we won't see developers improve their skills because they are making a lot of money and that makes them lazy.

the big companies with big names (like IBM,...) are never going to do an ICO ever. for starters because they want to keep their name big, and ICOs being associated with scams automatically will defeat that. but also the more important reason is because they don't need to!
ICO is a way to raise funds for a project which so far has been useless projects that people want to get paid for and become rich overnight. a big company like IBM doesn't need that kind of money to start a project. and they don't have plans on scamming people so they don't need it at all.

after last month when thousands of users closed their accounts with Coinbase because of their shady behavior which nobody accepted, this exchange has been struggling to keep their position in this competitive market. so it is understandable as they keep on adding new coins with moderately high volume, but it is surprising that they have chosen centralized coins.

well so far the last year and a half has proved that most people specially the newcomers don't do panic selling until it is too late. the dominant behavior in altcoins has been bag holding instead of anything else. of course bag holding always ends with a panic sell but sometimes it is a good idea to do a panic sell when you see an altcoin is getting dumped hard on you instead of becoming a bag holder who continues losing money because he thinks if he sells he becomes a panic seller since he read it somewhere!

number of transactions may not be a very good indicator without fault but it is showing a lot if you truly start analyzing things on the network. for example an increased in number of on-chain transactions alongside a volume increase on exchanges or off exchanges like for OTC trading is showing an increased interest of the investors and if it is accompanied by a price rise it can show the beginning of a rally.

if you look at the whole price chart you can see that there were "over excited" phases but if you ignore the over-excited state you can clearly see price has only been rising.

no it does not.

the only hard fork that bitcoin has ever had was from many years ago and price wasn't affected that much

both are shitcoins that are having tiny pumps these days, the real profit is in the smaller shitcoins that are getting huge pumps these days that bitcoin is stable. those small coins are seeing rises such as 100% and 500% in one day or two which are the real "winners" if you ask me. the others like these two that are big are only profitable for their centralized owners and the rest are only wasting their time with tiny 1-2% profits.

wrong.
it was because of two things combined: 1. dumps 2. the shitcoins having huge supplies.
when a shitcoin has 1 million coin and gets dumped $1 it loses $1 million market cap but when that shitcoin has 100 billion coins and loses $1 it is losing $1 billion market cap. that is why the total market cap went up to a fake value in first place during the shitcoin pump of 2017.

because people are NOT coming in altcoins anymore. in fact they have been existing as the altcoins started dumping on them hard.

the challenge is having good projects that are real and are created to work as an actual cryptocurrency not just some pump and dump that rises for a short time before it gets dumped on anybody bag holding it.

yeah, unfortunately this rise to $4000 which keeps playing with it, has not been that strong so there is no rising signal which is partly why the investors are still not making a move to jump in and are instead waiting on the sidelines. this can be both a good and a bad thing because as the  rise starts they will start FOMO buying and that can cause a big spike.

lol. maybe next time try doing some research before writing a nonsense article like this

if you bothered looking at the bitcoin-cash blocks you could have seen that this altcoin's blocks are empty which means it is not even used let alone be used as a "currency"! not to mention that nobody apart from bitcoin.com (aka Roger Ver) and the creators of this shitcoin accepts it anywhere.

unfortunately most of the things you just mentioned are not even "technologies". for example "stable coins" are not a technology, they are actually taking steps back and undoing what we have been doing in the past 10 years with bitcoin and decentralization because they are fully centralized and not even stable at all times!
or for example "security tokens" and all their alternatives are purely scam methods of raising funds in a ponzi like scheme which people think are the great deal of our time. although more and more people are catching up to this disease called ICO.