you should never have a fixed strategy that you stick to forever! the market doesn't stay fixed and the same all the time, it changes constantly so your strategy should also change with the market. whatever you are doing now, is a strategy for the time like this where price is mostly stable with sideways action. you can't use it for other trends so try figuring out which strategy goes with which market.

only newbies who have no idea what the market is and how profit is made are more inclined to bulls because of profit! otherwise you can make profit in both markets as long as you know how to ride the waves.

others are more inclined towards bulls because they know something like bitcoin is still in its early days and there is only growth in front of it so bull market is the over all trend that we will have for years to come. anything else looks like a bear market in short term.

i hope it covers the shitshow that is going on in the altcoin market and the newbishness of the people who have been trying desperately to get in something that is cheap thinking having a low value is equal to being cheap and having potential!
while a bunch of scammers rip them off by fooling them into thinking their altcoin is  the next big thing!

i strongly disagree. if "everyone" predicts the same thing in a market then you can be 100% sure that it will happen. the real question is whether "everyone" is actually predicting $1500 or is it just some people who have been trying to short bitcoin.

for example majority of people were predicting the same trend as 2014 should repeat and while there was no logical reason for it, but it happened!

if by "the future of ICOs" you mean death then yeah STOs are the future of ICOs because ICOs are dying and changing their name to something else but doing the exact same bullshit scam is not going to change that and they will still continue to die because this way of scammy fund raising has no future at all no matter how many big successful scams have happened in the past due to a lot of hype.

you are indeed confusing a lot of different definitions with each other!

first lets start with the market definitions:
bull market: is simply a market where you expect prices to go higher so in this market buying on each dip is recommended.
bear market: is simply a market where you expect prices to drop and continue to go down so in this market selling on each high is recommended.

similarly a bull is a trader that speculates the market is in "bull mode" so he acts accordingly (buys in dips) and a bear is the opposite meaning he sells.

the only trick to be successful is to speculate when it is a bull market and we are in a bear market so that you can act accordingly because if you act as a bull in a bear market or a bear in a bull market you will lose money because you are going against the current.

it is not confusing, if you read what everyone else was trying to tell you then you can realize that there is no such thing as number of confirmation in source code. your wallet can choose to make it easier for the user and show them some kind of easy graphical signal that their transaction is deeper than a certain threshold. so you hardcode some values like that.
the fact is, 6 is not even a fixed amount. it depends on network status. for example if we have a fork going on and there is a risk of split (like August 2017 with all the UASF, MASF, BCASH, SegWit,... going on) this number should go up.

it has nothing to do with "maturity" of a coin. it is about the PoW algorithm and the difficulty which would translate into how many blocks are being created in a certain time frame, how much is the risk of orphans, and how hard it is to double spend an already confirmed transaction with X number of confirmation.
with bitcoin's setting it is 6, with litecoin setting it is higher, with others can be different.

to buy 0.2 bitcoin at $3800 you pay:
(0.2 * 3800) + (0.2 * $3800 * 0.1%) = $760.76

to sell 0.2 bitcoin at price X to get $760.76 you should:
(0.2 * x) - (0.2 * x * 0.15%) = $760.76
0.2*x * (1 - 0.15%) = $760.76
x = $3,809.52

to make Y% profit (like 0.3% that you mentioned) just add the profit to the value on right side and calculate again:
0.2*x * (1 - 0.15%) = $760.76 + $760.76*0.3% = $763.05
=> x=3,820.99

you can now create an excel file with a couple of fixed cells for fee percentages, 1 for your desired profit and the buy price. then get the resulting X price.

that is not called "bear market irrationality", that my friend is a clear case of FUD from people who want to either short bitcoin right now or have some open low bid orders that they are getting desperate to fill. drawing some meaningless lines on a chart doesn't make it any better either. unfortunately they benefit from the fact that most people don't even know what TA is and when they see lines on a chart think that is it

besides this is 2015 all over again. back then people were calling for $50 and lower. we even had our very own duck who only sang the doomsday song for bitcoin.

well, what you are asking really depends on your own honesty! if you are an honest person and don't want to own stolen money then you would return the money that doesn't belong to you to the real owners and be done with it, but if you are not then just keep it and be happy about the luck that smiled upon you

actually you are the one who is misunderstandings things!

these so called "projects" are either purely scams who are set to make the most amount of money which means they will sell your identity on the dark market to make more money from you and call that "KYC" or they are created by newbie idiots who thought if they ask for KYC their shitty projects would look more legitimate so they can fool more people into giving them their money. and their databse is easily hacked and the KYC documents would still end up in dark market.

and that is the main reason why everyone has been complaining about it. it has nothing to do with being an investor or not.

not at all, those "guys" are not the problem. the people who give them their money (aka invest in their shitcoin or participate in their ICO or advertise their shitty project to get paid) are the biggest problems that we are facing.
otherwise they are simply doing what all scammers do, they scam people. and if newbies started using their head then we wouldn't be in this mess where all the ICOs are purely scams. and what you call "startup" is equal to a fake website that only wants to raise money by targeting the most gullible people.

any fork (whether you call it soft, hard, upgrade, blah blah,...) has a risk of splitting the network into two different chains. when it is a hard fork that risk is higher, that is partly the reason why people were expecting a split. another reason is because many of them were newbies who have no idea what is going on and always associate the word "fork" with "split" and "upgrade" with "no-split" whereas they are not really different.

the only reason why no split happened was because this was NOT the PoS fork but only a small part of it. and they are doing this to prevent miners from preventing the fork. in other words they are forcing the PoS switch while reducing the risk of defiance.... classic centralized move

KYC should not have anything to do with the amount. in fact KYC is only enforced when fiat and banks are involved because that is why you need to know the identity of your customer otherwise there is no reason to ask for it. then some exchanges (since they are centralized) are being forced by the government to ask for KYC even if there is no fiat or banks involved like altcoins exchanges.

in any case if you are developing a decentralized exchange you CAN NOT have KYC involved and if you do then you are NOT developing a DECENTRALIZED exchange!

there is no other options left. price has to rise this year, unless you think bitcoin is dead you would agree that we have already had more than a year of drops and we have hit the bottom considering the massive size of the drop.
this year we must at least have a 2x rise (reach $7k at least) and the follow that up with bigger rallies next year to get to $20k and since there is also halving by that time we will see a  new ATH. by the way this has been the trend of past couple of similar bubble-burst-correction-rise roller-coaster.

as far as i can tell lightning network does not work on top of ethereum (at least no so far) so what you are explaining here doesn't make any sense and makes me wonder how they did it when there is no ETH LN  network to perform it on!!!

there is something else which you may be confusing with LN called Atomic Swap which doesn't need LN, it is a protocol that can run on LN or on chain too. it requires certain characteristics in the cryptocurrencies that you want to "swap" including time lock transactions and hashlock contracts which may be the way they used to swap that coin with bitcoin.

first of all going from $3200 to $4100 and then coming back to $3700 is NOT called "dramatically down" it is called correction instead.

secondly that is normal in any market. price needs time to get out of the bear mode and enter the bull mode. you can not expect it to suddenly start rising back up and shoot to the ATH. it happens slow at first with lots of corrections like that and then as the day traders are flushed out of the market the price starts rallying.

nothing about this is "hard". it only needs time.

no there has never been any similarities between bitcoin charts and altcoin charts. the only vague similarity that you may sometimes find between the two is the fact that without any exception each time bitcoin has dropped, altcoins got dumped hard. for example if bitcoin dropped 30% then altcoins got dumped 50% and more.

the other times, like when bitcoin rises, don't have any similarities with altcoins. for example when bitcoin rises 30%, altcoins can rise 5% or can even get dumped 20% and both has happened in the past. in fact the dump part is one of the most common ones since people cash out from altcoins to go back in bitcoin.

there is one exception and that is during reversals. for example when bitcoin drops 30%  (altcoins 50%) and then recovers 10%, altcoins in this only case can rise back up with bitcoin.

did they really add XRP or is it just one of the bullshit news articles that is only imagination of the author, i can't find it on their platform though and if it is rumor then we shouldn't even discuss it.

but if it is reality and they did add it then yes it is a violation of their own rules although it is their own rules and they can do whatever they like with them! and exchanges have always cared about money and nothing else. XRP team paying them is a good amount of money and also it is one of the big pump and dump shitcoins which means good trading volume during pumps and also dumps and it can give them more profit.

"expensive" compared to what? the true value of bitcoin is a lot higher than small numbers such as $160k specially when you consider the fact that there is only a limited amount of it available meaning unlike most other things including fiat and most of the altcoins bitcoin has a cap.
besides it seems like you have forgotten that less than 2 years ago people were saying $20k is too "expensive" and won't happen in 2017 but it did happen very easily.