this looks to me like the modern pump and dump groups which only has a better design and some additional features!
entering the cryptocurrency trading market doesn't require any intermediary! if you want to make profit then just start it yourself and if you can't then using these scam services is not going to make it any better for you.

there is nothing "virtual" about bitcoin so you can't call it "virtual money". the correct term is "crypto currency".

where does this versioning even come from?!

anyways, bitcoin is growing and will continue doing that because of the need that exists for a decentralized currency form that nobody can control.

the ONLY reason why they started asking for KYC was because ICOs started failing at some point and started falling apart. so they had to do something to keep it alive a little longer while add an additional method of making some extra money.
so they added KYC to look legit while they continue scamming people and then on top of it they sold all the KYC data on black market and make extra money from it.

when somebody starts a new service like a betting platform for these games it does NOT mean these games are coming to blockchain! it only means some dude thought he could be the pioneer^* and run a business to make money. it can even fail if nobody plays these betting games on his platform! so no there is no mass adoption

* the funny thing is  that it is not even the first one. there has been about 50 other gambling platforms with exact same design and same games so far. many of which have already gone under.

well the real question is whether you think bitcoin has stopped growing or being adopted.
if yes then you can conclude that there will be no more rises this year and we will continue seeing price going sideways or even drop more.
but if you think it is still growing and the adoption is happening then you can't say there is no rise this year. we have already had the drop which purged the market from that "hopium" dudes and all traces of the bubble and then some. so there is no other option left but to rise after this accumulation phase ended. and this phase can't take much longer.

it is very important when the person who is claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto is a big scammer who is fooling people and performing identity fraud which is illegal all over the world!
it is even more important when he starts creating a shitcoin fork and starts attacking bitcoin whether with hashrate stealing or with social media drama misleading newcomers.

if you define banks as a place where you store your cryptocurrencies and then spend them through them which means 100% relying on third party centralized services then the answer is NO we don't need them and there should never be a bitcoin bank.

but if you define banks as some sort of service that offers things such as loans, exchange service like when people want to dump their worthless fiat to get bitcoin instead,... then they may be needed for now.

otherwise banks belong to fiat system and it should remain that way.

mass adoption is not something that can happen overnight. it is a slow process and all the small steps that have been taken in the past 10 years have been part of the mass adoption so it IS already happening.
besides rise only depends on adoption and adoption has been growing so far so should the price.

it doesn't matte what they are called. in the end when someone is asking you for money in name of investing in their project, raising fund for their crap,... they can easily scam you specially when people who are giving them money don't bother asking for results! and it is only unique to cryptocurrency world for some reason not the real world. in real world when people invest in something like a company for example, they will demand results and product from that company otherwise they will not give them their money in first place.

it is too late to ask what to do, you should now start asking what you should have done so that you can learn about the mistakes that you made here and then in the future don't repeat them. that is the only way you get better at trading and start earning real profit.

mistakes:
- buying an altcoin that has been obviously useless.
- bigger mistake: bag holding that garbage instead of dumping it when it was the right time during its pump.
- continuing to bag hold that garbage even when the market died which was obvious from the decreasing price and non-existent volume
- continuing to bag hold that garbage even when the exchange warned you about them delisting it.

the halving and its hype is such a bizarre and unpredictable event because it is "hype" so before halving either we are already close to ATH which means we can see a new ATH or we are far from it which means we only see a small bubble which will burst right after the halving and then we pick up rising from there like last time.

but things like this aren't something you can fake! cryptocurrencies are not like fiat that can't be tracked. i am sure the addresses that hold the funds are already known so if some day the funds move they will be held responsible because it is too obvious and they have claimed they don't have access and doing otherwise would be fraud.

if you want accurate price and want it for trading purposes (in other words to make decisions) then you should NOT look at any of the coin-ranking websites no matter if they are accurate or not. instead look at the same exchange where you are trading in.

no, they have no connection to each other. BCD is a poor copy of bitcoin.

that should not be  the criteria you look in an "exchange" instead you first have to ask for security and trustworthiness. so far none of them offer a good level of security, i'd say Binance is currently better among bad exchanges! (in other words it is bad not the worst).

unfortunately no.
there are general information about trading that you can gain online from sites such as investopedia.com and some other places but they won't help you much in altcoin trading because altcoins are 90% manipulation (pump and dumps) and 10% having the experience to know how to make profit from them.

any time is a good time to make a long term investment BUT ONLY IF the asset you invest in is worth investing in and has some real long term potential.

but when you are talking about altcoins and consider the fact that nearly all of them are 100% pump and dump then "long term" goes out of the window because it is meaningless. the only viable option for such assets is short term involvement where you buy them while they are still pumping and sell fast before the dumping begins.

true but all your list is a bunch of "abstract" ideas! basically you are telling others to succeed if you want to succeed! and that doesn't make any sense.

besides things you are listing here are not easy and are not something you just learn by "chatting". they are learned as experience. in other words you have to actually start trading and analyze the market with a small amount to gain that experience otherwise talking about something like "risk management" and "emotions" is not going to do anybody any good.

these are all nonsense guesses because you can't predict the exact price at an exact time in long term. all you can predict about bitcoin is that it will rise up and reach a new ATH pretty soon but when and how big that ATH is going to be is impossible to say. for example in the beginning of 2017 nobody could ever predict the ATH is going to be at $20k, if you asked anybody they would have said $5k tops and some newbies would have thrown big numbers like $10k, $50k,... all possible but unpredictable.

right now the ATH in 2019 depends on when we start the rise. for instance if we start the rise this month we can expect price between $10k and $15k by the end of the year easily and a the ATH broken in 2020 and before halving price can be $30k.

i would categorize investors into three categories:
1. those who are in bitcoin because of the technology and what it offers as a decentralized currency and that can not be found anywhere else.

2. those who are in it for the money
2.1. the first group are real investors who know what they are doing and have been making a ton of money doing this because they are aware of where they should put their money and don't waste it on dumping altcoins.
2.2. the newbies that are hoping for the money but have no idea what they are doing. they usually get caught up in some altcoin and lost all their money by bag holding a bunch of them and call that a "portfolio" and go bankrupt sooner or later.

note that you don't have to only belong to one category. for example i am here because i like the technology and what bitcoin offers but also i love making a lot of money!

i strongly disagree because it is no longer a guess since  we have had some history of them!

the fact is things like ICO, STO, and DApps in general have been keeping the whole blockchain technology back with all of their scams and pump and dumps. in fact the biggest damage has been inflicted on this whole system by them so you can't say they are going to "propel" the technology while they have been doing the exact opposite of it so far.

death of alt(shit)coins is inevitable.

it may take time, it may resist death, you may still see new ones pop up (like the ICOs these days) but the death is inevitable. what you see on both bitcointalk and coinmarketcap is the death of altcoins and mainly ICO scams.

throughout last year people slowly started catching up with reality and stopped handing over their money to ICO scams, so they started dying with their death the platforms hosting them (such as ethereum) also started their death. the effect is dumps, then investors leaving and then after a while in a slow process that took over a year the altcoin bag holders started dumping and going out. that means there is no newbie bag holder checking CMC to see how much he lost this day! all that death means they also visit bitcointalk less and on top of that the nonsense such as "bounty hunting" which is  a fancy word for "a newbie who spam-advertises for a scam ICO to get paid pennies" ended and so did the waves of newbies and alt accounts on bitcointalk.

that is no the "fact", because you are missing the point.

THIS is the point:
imagine two different times. 2008 to 2010ish and 2016 and forward.
in the first era bitcoin is virtual and a bunch of numbers on a computer that has no meaning although it has value, you can't call it currency because it is not used as a currency. on top of that near the end of the era bitcoin's usage in dark net grows and mainly it is used for illegal activities.

now fast forward to the second era. bitcoin is used as a currency, the usage in dark net is so small that it is negligible (specially with real anon coins) and it has not gained real meaning as a currency and is actually being used as one.
in this era that there are still newbies who are caught up in the first era's mentality and when there is a lot of FUD which is spreading misinformation, we get big franchises accepting bitcoin as payment. that is great even if nobody uses it because it simply is removing all that FUD in one swoop.