No one knows how long would this bearish sentiment will continue to linger around the market. As of now, the momentum for bulls are absurdly weak to make any significant rises, and every time a small breakout happens, it is immediately shut down by the bears in order to not create any further momentum or openings for an uptrend. The bear market would likely continue for months, and a projected sudden boom in the end of 2018 is quite improbable seeing the market conditions as of this moment.

Usually, BITMAIN is maxing out their hashing power everytime a new batch of their miners are created and ready for shipping. They are just taking advantage of the time remaining to stress-test these miners before shipping it out, as was the case even in the previous years. Their hashrate would surely subside once the new batch is out for shipping and the hashrate is distributed again. They will not hit the 51% as they know it will affect their business model and the miners wouldn't be sold since everyone had already pulled out their assets through such a dumb move.

5 years is an ample amount of time for the people to lost interest at something they know they couldn't take advantage, but in those crucial 5 years, if the market continues to rise and institutional investors keep on coming, I guess we'll have more boom than storm clouds over the horizon. Seeing how institutional investors and the government are interested on cryptocurrencies, they will keep pushing the hype until such time that a huge percentage of people are involved and the price is constantly rising. As always, people will flock where there is money, and will just move to another fad that will create them even more money.

Price, for me, isn't the only indicator of success for a coin/project. I'd rather have a steady rise of people acknowledging and using my coin rather than a steady rise in price with a few user-base and a shaky and inconsistent market. Normally, price follows when the users are dedicated and keen on the success of the project, and that's not a pump and dump but rather the effect of having a large user-base trusting the system and the project. Waiting for profit tends to be a painstaking effort seeing that crashes and falls are almost around every corner. But with a proven history of bouncing back higher, it's not a dire effort to wait for bitcoin to boom once more.

I'd say the freedom of using your own money wherever and whenever you want it would be the top benefit of using bitcoin. Apart from that, due to bitcoin's flexibility, it can also act as an investment on the side for people who have the means to save and invest at the same time. There are a lot of benefits on simply holding bitcoin and most users already realized that, that's why they're still invested even if the prices aren't performing good or crashes happen everytime.

Since most altcoins are paired with BTC, the prices also follow what's the current price of bitcoin if the coin hasn't moved much. Although coins still move independently according to their current market conditions, the prices they follow still is in bitcoin. What I notice as well is that most altcoins, especially the big ones, always follow the trend of bitcoin no matter the season is, with some exceptions to a few breakouts happening when bitcoin is in a slump. If altcoins are paired to USD, see how the graphs change drastically and form a new picture.

This just goes to show that even the most prominent financial institution recognizes bitcoin as a currency. The IMF already foresees a future wherein digital transactions would be a huge part of our transactions and that the transition to such kind of future is already happening with the advent and rise of bitcoin, that's why I think the currency deserves a special mention in the front page of IMF's website since it is a forerunner of secure cashless transaction. It's actually great considering that it advertises the coin in some way and that it recognizes its potential as a currency.

Probably not the best time to sell since the price is down as of the moment. The ones who sell right now are probably those who have bought at a much lower price, expecting a further decline since the bear's control over the market seems to widen day by day. If you are an investor who recently got in the market and is disheartened by the fact that it goes down a lot every day, there's no point in selling at a loss in a short span of time. Best to do right now is hold and wait. It sounds repetitive but that's the only thing we can do as of now. The only ones gaining on this mess right now are the bears who short hard and the patient ones who buys your coins.

Scaling, for the mean time, is already solved with the advent of SegWit that reshapes how a block stores data and LN that's an alternative channel in which transactions can pass through. With these two, short and medium-term scaling is already secured, I'm pretty sure that the network can already handle significant weight in terms of transaction volume and whatnot, and only artificially created spam transactions can overload the network right now which, I think isn't really a problem since it rarely happens. We're already on our way to solve the scaling issue, and we just need to tweak it further in order to not get gamed due to loopholes.

Well it's actually the password you used when you encrypted your wallet file and that's pretty much it. It could be a random word/group of words/mnemonic and it entirely depends on you on what would that passphrase be. Your passphrase is like the 'master keys' needed in order to access the wallet and its contents, together with its balances and, well, totally full control of the wallet. It's a must to have such a strong passphrase in order to not get hacked by nefarious hackers around as it serves as another layer of protection for you and your money.

It will be a tough call, but seeing the markets right now, it seems that it will stay low and stay @ $6k for a few weeks/months. It's another double-bottom formation and the last time we had one, we managed to rebound back to $9700 before drifting back at $7000. It stayed for a a month and a half at the said price range before falling down to where we're at right now, and this marks yet another double-bottom formation which I think kinda resembles the one we had in Feb-Apr pattern. I wish I'm right on what I see but the selling pressure is on a streak lately.

If I were you, I wouldn't eagerly drop bombs on an exchange and expect a free profit for the next couple of weeks. A very strong bearish sentiment is lingering around the market right now and it appears to be crashing any bullish momentum forming so far. Also, in light of the recent India bans, I'd expect the bears to capitalize on this news and make more people sell their lovely coins. I'd rather observe a week or two whether the price will break down to sub-$6k before making a decision, because from there it could only lead us to lower figures or another confirmed bottom. Tread carefully, the waters are kind of turbulent right now.

Tbh it seems that this market crash would go on continuously for a few days unless the bulls successfully repel such selling pressure. It is possible that we might dip to another sub-$5k for the time being and form another double-bottom pattern and rebound back to possibly $8k-$9k after a few weeks. There's a lot of possibilities, that's for sure, but one thing that I know in mind is that the ongoing crash would likely hurt the miners and surely, they wouldn't let such a thing to happen with their investments. It will be another push-and-pull scenario for the coming weeks and this time, it's a massive shakeout yet again.

The number 3 is, I think, the easiest thing to spot on determining whether an ICO is a scam or not. There are many times that I have considered buying into an ICO only to look at the dev team and being disappointed by the results. Normally, if the team behind the coin is transparent and really want to get their brand known, they might as well get themselves known by the public. Oftentimes, dummy accounts and fake credentials are being used in such ICOs that it's easy to question the authenticity of their project and whether or not they're lying. From this simple point alone I base my decision while the others you mentioned remain in the process albeit only getting a minor role.

Things like this happen all the time, especially since it involves money in the process. There's no real way to combat hacks, just upgrade the systems responsible on keeping an exchange/service safe. It will keep on happening as long as bitcoin has value and because it's easier to get away with it compared to when you hack a bank. The money can be tossed around and moved around without anyone noticing. Bad times for Bithumb, though they manage to keep their heads up and reimburse what's lost with their clients, so all in all not a Mt. Gox 2.0 looming and possibly causing a negative impression towards bitcoin in general.

That's big and deep words being used on bitcoin lol. It's been almost a day since the hack was done and so far, there are no major movements toward the negative side of the spectrum, so how would that be a struggle and how would BTC be exhausted at a price range it's been sitting at for nearly 2 weeks? Such reports were also made in February where BTC could face tremendous losses and sink down to $2.5k yet nothing happened, and $5900+ was the bottom of the pit and a rebound to $9.7k happened afterwards. Honestly though, fear-mongering and FUDding won't do too much damage right now as most people are now smart enough to not be swept away by emotions and negative news.

1 or 2% +ve changes shouldn't be called recoveries and not be celebrated at all, except if it's a continuous rise over the course of a few months/weeks. Just a quick look at the charts say that there are no recoveries happening along the way, seeing that the bearish sentiment over the market is still strong and selling pressures are still present. The market is going sideways and one big sell order could change the course of the next few weeks. Right now, we haven't been into sub-$6k despite the continuous selling pressure the market has seen for the past few weeks so it's still good in my book.

You're right, the market needs to constantly pump in billions of dollars every year just so the market could stay afloat within $50k ranges, however, there are no definite sum of money that needs to go in the market in order for the price to maintain its throne. There are times wherein a huge selling pressure is present and there are also times that the market seems calm and all are in the green. Methinks that $50k is definitely reachable, though the word sustainable isn't.

As for the block reward being halved, always remember that machine prices adjust according to what's the current bitcoin price, so again, there's no general way of getting the average expenses mining operators might face in the next ~2 years.

Maybe I'm not reading too much but this is just one of the few times I encountered a complaint against Coinbase. I still remember reading about their 10 BTC raffle back in 2015 wherein a 16-year old dude won, and back then, Coinbase was the most prominent BTC/USD exchange among others. Personally, I never used Coinbase or anything, but my colleagues in the US who used the said exchange conveyed that their (Coinbase) customer support takes an awfully long time to respond to their clients' queries, and that's already a bad thing. As for deposits being lost in the wind, this is the first time I encountered such. I don't think regulation is to blame for non-professional practices by a certain service but perhaps the management itself. After all, regulations are created to ensure that no illegal things or wrongdoings are done by the service to its peers.



You're not alone. It's easier to use Circle than any other established exchanges present nowadays.

During the inception of bitcoin, it literally has no value whatsoever. People just chose to give it some value and so history begins. Others thought that it could be a great speculative asset and so trading of bitcoin starts, with exchanges being set up and enthusiasts putting some real money onto it. The value of 1 bitcoin became something significant that enthusiasts started to think that they could 'farm' it on a large scale via mining, so dedicated miners, called ASICs are created just for mining bitcoins. From then on, people are buying and selling bitcoin up to the point that it reached such heights that people back then never thought would be possible. Right now, the cost of mining 1 bitcoin + supply and demand are the main factors on determining bitcoin prices.