it is more nonsense to see people believe what they read on the click-bait news sites! in this case China never blocked or banned bitcoin. that is the bullshit that the news sites publish every now and then about China and as of recently about a couple of other countries like India.
Chinese government to this day remains mostly neutral to bitcoin. recently they changed that and considered bitcoin as legal property and protected by law.
what they have banned so far are these two: banned banks from investing in bitcoin. and closed exchanges that were laundering money.

people really need to research more about Proof of Stake before they start advertising it as a better alternative to Proof of Work that bitcoin works. stop being emotional about mining and the electricity and start really thinking about it. POS is a horrible algorithm for a decentralized network like bitcoin. the fact that some altcoins are using it doesn't mean it is a good thing. in fact it has a worse design, specially when it comes to distribution of new coins and also it has its own flaws and security risks.

things like this are never possible simply because "play a game and earn money" never works. who is going to pay you to play a game? what would they gain from it? and a lot of other questions that when you ask them you can see that it all falls apart.
so far I have seen people call things "game" that aren't actually games. mostly are waste of time that pay dust while abusing you to earn more themselves.

the only thing that this link shows is that there are addresses that contain a large amount of bitcoin. and also most of them had these large amounts for a long time now. so your title saying X amount moved in October is wrong on both cases since they are not moved and these are not individuals for instance most of these addresses belong to big businesses such as bitfinex (which is a big exchange service)!
and any new address among them is most probably the same services moving coins to a new address after upgrading their wallet,... that happens pretty commonly.

if you zoom in bitcoin price chart so much that you are seeing seconds, it can seem like price is shooting up whereas it really is stable!
I say this example because I wanted to say that this comparison is flawed because that is similar to zooming in and not seeing the bigger picture.

the question is not how much it costs to mine $1 worth of gold. the question is how much energy is used to mine gold! lets do a quick calculation.
last year 2500 ton of gold was mined. that is 219,178 ounce per day or 269,786,301 dollar per day. so you are not mining $1 gold per day to spend energy for $1. you are spending energy for $270 million gold per day.
how much bitcoin is being mined per day? that is about $11 million or in other words there is the gold being mined is 24x more and based on that chart it is equal to 6.5 times more energy

the amount doesn't matter when it comes to OTC trading, why you are doing it matters. for instance if you don't have any other way of buying bitcoin (like in India right now for example) then your option is to do OTC trading and it doesn't matter if you are a whale or a little fish!

there is only once case that I can think of which you will have no other option, and that is when you want to buy a very large amount of bitcoin or sell a very large amount of bitcoin. in this case you usually want to go away from the actual market for a better safety (exchanges aren't trusted and your money can be blocked in their banks,...).

the first time I heard about bitcoin ETF I believe was 1-2 years ago. SEC rejected it then and from that time until today nothing about bitcoin and the market has changed at all. and most of the reasons they used to reject that ETF are still applicable for any subsequent ETFs that came out and they kept rejecting them.

they will probably postpone it more if they have not yet reached the maximum deadline, otherwise rejection is guaranteed.

also I should mention that with or without ETF price would have fallen and then entered this same stable phase that we are currently in. the price levels might have been different but the overall trend and how the chart looks like now for the past year would have been the same.

both statements are very wrong.
- halving doesn't guarantee any kind of price rise at all. halving is only reducing the speed at which new coins are being created nothing more. the only reason why price rises in long run is increasing adoption (ie. demand) and in short term is because of hype and FOMO buy of speculators who think halving is magically increasing price.
- if price doesn't rise it has nothing to do with failure/death of bitcoin! you say this because you don't know what bitcoin is. you think it is only created to go up and give you profit but that is far from the reason why bitcoin, the decentralized electronic cash system, was created!

hehe...
that was actually my point. I am saying even those who think an ETF is going to create a bull run are no longer interested in it since throughout past couple of months they became more familiar with what ETFs are and how they work and also realized that a bull run may not happen even if SEC approved an ETF!

I wouldn't call this exactly a click bait, it is mostly a mistake and it is a common one. and this mistake is looking at bitcoin only in its short term instead of looking at the big picture. that "zoomed in" analysis may work with other markets like stocks market but it never works with bitcoin.
what everyone needs to realize is that bitcoin market is unique like bitcoin itself and it follows its own rules and trends,... which means it shouldn't be compared with others.

greed means people wait for the best price to sell but that doesn't mean they don't sell on top or near it. if they didn't sell or as "figment" said only "a very few" people sold then price wouldn't have crashed at all. it is the sells of "many people" that crashes the bubble otherwise the price would continue rising.

note that things are a lot more complicated that this. the market dynamics is always changing and traders react to that.

first of all people consider bitcoin as a great invention NOT because of its price rise or some people becoming millionaire!!! but instead it is because of the technology itself. and the fact that bitcoin is the only decentralized currency and is one of a kind with a very interesting technology.

as for your main question, you should know that just because you see the current price is higher than the initial price doesn't mean people who know about bitcoin before are now rich! in fact many of those who know about bitcoin when it was like $1 are poorer because of the mistakes they made. for instance all those who buy bitcoin but then panic sell it at a lower price (buy at $1 then sell at $0.5 to lose half your money).
the same thing is happening today, many bought bitcoin when it had a little rise to $7500 out of panic and then panic sold it at $6000 to lose a lot of money.

only those who are wise enough to use their own head are going to be successful. like those who are accumulating these days instead of thinking about day trading bitcoin or selling it.

I also think it depends mostly on what you are trying to advertise!

but generally a forum like bitcointalk is the best place because it has a board for everything so you have a place to post what you want in that appropriate category and also most importantly the audience is focused on correct people. for instance if you post on Facebook as others suggested you will get random people who may not know or care about cryptocurrencies but if someone is on bitcointalk then they are already familiar with them.

is there anybody left that still cares about SEC and ETFs they are going to "reject" anymore?
I think it is now an old news like China that people still hear from time to time in the news but they pass it by since it is now repeated stuff without any change...
it was an interesting short history though. before people were saying fuck regulations, then with ETF they started wishing for regulations then as SEC kept rejecting ETFs they are again back on fuck regulations bandwagon

that is what I don't understand too. my first assumption was that there is some sort of "translation" problem where they translated "crypto" as "private" or something like that. and the source of the news (the link OP posted) is not reliable either so we can not be sure. and this is so out of context, the "council" might have been talking about "anonymous" cryptocurrencies which is translated to "private" which is a whole different discussion!

first of all there is a difference between using the blockchain technology and using bitcoin. the former is the technology and when using that they will be creating a centralized altcoin which has nothing to do with bitcoin and its future. the later is using bitcoin directly and although I have not yet seen any banks actually do it but they will do it some day which will be the point two:

secondly banks are only services providing some services that people use. it is not something to be worried about or think can change the course of bitcoin decentralization. we already have some bank like services such as Coinbase and Bitpay and there is nothing wrong with that.

all you need to do is to check the volume on different exchanges with different pairs and you can get your answer. it is of course a matter of preference when it comes to different people but when you want to start a new platform you have to see the collective opinion and the best way to do that is to check the volumes in the long run not the temporary volume bumps that happen from time to time.
and what you can see is that any altcoin paired with bitcoin is having the highest volume because majority of people want to trade with their bitcoin and increase that. but also having additional altcoin pairs is a good idea because people would also like to trade altcoins with other coins like USDT, LTC, DOGE and ETH.

use this mistake as a lesson. cut your losses now and make sure that you don't make the same mistake again in the future. the one rule that you should follow is that you should never buy random tokens just because you think they can give you profit but you should buy them if your analysis told you it is. also make sure NEVER to follow what others tell you or you will end up losing money.

by the way you can't lose -200%! maximum you can lose is -100% when you lose everything!

actually none of the altcoins really follow bitcoin even the top ones. the thing is, when bitcoin falls all of them fall harder which has created this illusion that they may be following bitcoin. but if you compare charts together you can see  that there are enough exceptions to make this untrue.

as for what altcoin to choose, you don't choose a coin that has dropped. you choose a coin that is about to rise or is getting pumped. otherwise there are coins that have dropped and if you buy them you will end up buying something that either never rises or will take a very long time to have any kind of pump.

looking at the charts. the size of what you are calling "dump" has been pretty small. it was a small price drop and also the volume of it has been small. which means you can't exactly call this a "dump". I suppose a dump in a sense that you have in mind which has (in the past) led to a follow up rise, is bigger and will bring the price below the buy support line to test the readiness of the market while getting some low bid orders of the whales filled up with the newbie panic seller's bitcoins at cheaper prices.