But that's something natural. They don't really need to "fight" to preserve it at a higher price. It's just that the demand is high enough such that there is no way for bitcoin to go to a much lower price. If it drops enough people will start buying (thus increasing the price again), not because they feel the need to preserve the price of bitcoin, but because they believe bitcoin will be worth much more later.

Fight to preserve it? No need for that. If I saw the price drop to $100 I wouldn't even think of the possibility of it dropping to $50, I'd just buy as many bitcoins as I could (and I'm sure thousands of people would do the same), only because the price would certainly skyrocket in a few minutes. Actually, there is no need for $100, if I saw $1.1k I'd already start buying as many as I could without a doubt.

Believing a drop to $50 can happen just shows a lack of thinking. It's not even speculation anymore, it's worse than believing in a fairy tale. I'm just wishing I can see $1.6k, but I kinda doubt that...

I think you got me wrong. I'm not talking about BEFORE Aug 1. I'm talking about during Aug 1 (or, to be more precise, about the moment right after BIP148).

I strongly believe it won't go below $400 again unless it's the moment for it to die. Now, assuming it is not going to die:
- I strongly believe if it happens to fall bellow $900 again it will quickly rise to over $900 in no more than a few hours (probably less than an hour).
- I think it won't fall below $900 at any point, but I wouldn't bet on it. I even think it won't reach lower than $1.1k, but I'm seriously hoping it does so I can profit.
- Edit: btw, about the current drop, I will be very surprised if it reaches $1.4k.

I'm not a big fan of speculation, and even more against speculation without analyzing any data (like most users here seem to love to do). But that's exactly what this is about. I have made absolutely no analysis, and could be completely wrong.

People are being advised to avoid trading during Aug 1 and for a while after that. IF people who hold average (or higher) amounts of bitcoin follow this advice (and I believe most will do), those trying to buy bitcoin (and many may be unaware of BIP148) will be faced with low supplies during this period. I don't know how high will be the demand (and that's as important as knowing how low the supply will be), so I could be totally wrong here. But if the demand is high enough, we may see yet another bubble.

It shouldn't last very long, and I wouldn't trust this moment as a chance to make a huge profit because as soon as the price starts rising it's likely lots of people will try to sell, thus quickly lowering the price again. It's way too risky, and may actually cause the price of bitcoin to drop even further before it finally starts rising and stabilizing again, thus returning to its intrinsic value.

This may (or may not) be an unstable period for bitcoin. Again, I have no idea what I'm saying, so you would have to be really dumb to blindly take my word here.

I'm very skeptic that this kind of scalability I'm looking for has already been reached since January and yet it's not been announced everywhere, but I'll take a look later. If you have some time to spare, could you tell me (in few paragraphs) how does PascalLite achieve it? Or link me to a paper? Almost 19 hours since I woke up, so my brain is not in the mood to search for it right now.

You are right about everything, except for calling them "amateurs". I disagree on your use of the word here. Here goes my thought: if you really are a specialist, you should have predicted what happened. It was quite obvious bitcoin would not go from 1k USD to 50k USD in one go. There are people that actually make money from the market. They are not holding. They just keep buying and selling constantly and taking "small" profit from each buy-sell loop. They definitely make more money than those who are holding while complaining others aren't. I don't belong to either side right now. I don't own any bitcoins.

If everyone buying bitcoins believed it would go to $50k in one go, it definitely would. But it seems this time they didn't even believe it could reach $3k, since they started selling before that, making the price quickly drop again. That's how people are. Only a few intend to keep their bitcoins forever. Most of them just want to make some profit, buying and then selling them back at a higher price. I don't know which group you belong to, but if you are part of those who intend to sell it at some point (even if it's at the $100k/bitcoin point), then you fit into your own definition of "amateur". Those who actually believe in the technology shouldn't ever sell their bitcoins for fiat money (unless they are in desperate need of such money).

Btw, I once did believe in the technology. I don't anymore. There is absolutely no decentralization when only a few huge companies have enough power to process transactions. Blockchain just doesn't scale. I won't believe in any of those technologies until I see one that can either handle at least a million or so transactions per second (with much lower fees than we have today) OR can actually scale proportionally to the number of peers in the network. Having said that, I do believe bitcoin is an easy way to make lots of money, but the blockchain technology just can't handle all the transactions in the world, so it can't replace centralization yet.

They are not a scam, but the features and tools they provide allow people to easily scam newbies, and that's the warning.

If you google for "yobit reliable", "yobit trustworthy", "yobit scam", "yobit reviews" and so on (that's what I do) you will find a lot of people that use and recommend it, but will also find people that are against it. I first found yobit in a list: TOP 40+ BITCOIN EXCHANGE LIST. But the problem is: doesn't matter which exchange service you google for, you will find lots of both positive and negative reviews. There seems to be no decent service so far...

While I agree 110% with you, this only happens because Yobit allows anyone to add new coins. They can't expect that everyone trying to get into this "world" will have enough experience/knowledge to understand what is going on there. Many users fall for it and end up losing money. That's really bad for bitcoin, it gives them the wrong picture about cryptocurrencies in general. If you want people to like and join the community you shouldn't allow this kind of behavior on your website, and yobit doesn't care at all. What it looks to me is as long as it gives them a little bit more profit, they are totally okay with it. Not good. I didn't come here to tell people yobit is a scam (otherwise it would be in the title), but instead to just tell people to avoid it due to how it does business. I strongly believe we shouldn't promote this kind of behavior. They should take responsibility for what is happening on their own platform.

I wouldn't fall for this kind of scam because I did already fall for scams a lot when I was 11 - 13 . Playing mmorpgs really teach you a lot about trust and easy money (or at least it did to me). I'm still sad there are so many people like this though...

So far, not a good year. Loved Beauty and the Beast (probably because the animation is one of my fav childhood movies). Other than that, I only enjoyed: Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Before I Fall (was glad to see a new Groundhog Day movie :p, I like the concept).

Unnecessary reading
I got 0.18 BTC in 2015 for $60 in LocalBitcoins, used almost half of it and had about 0.95 remaining. I decided to exchange them for ETH in Kraken since I believe ETH has a bit more potential for growth compared to XBT at the moment. Then I wanted to find the best way to buy bitcoins and/or ether today, but every single existing website seems to be extremely bad. All of them have scam complaints, lots of problems and horrible customer support. Some of them are okay to BUY bitcoins, but not to SELL, due to scammers. I do want to do both, so after realizing I can't safely sell, I decided to just observe how the market is right now before putting any more USD into it (my thoughts: ~if I can't safely trade it for USD, maybe I can trade it for other cryptocurrencies~). For that I decided to try Yobit. Yes, I googled a lot and I've read a lot of topics here in bitcointalk before making my decision. Poloniex has no customer support at all (well, 2 months for a reply is very close to no support) and ShapeShift has so many negative reviews (compared to the amount of positive reviews) that I must question why the hell are they still online. Other than those two, I found a few more, but all with just one or two people recommending them, so I decided to go for the only remaining "big" one: Yobit. A lot of negative reviews but also a lot of "positive" reviews, so seemed the better from the three.

Important part
I sent my 1.07 ETH to Yobit and started observing the market. First thoughts: ~This site lags SO f**king hard in my i7!~ ~Why so many altcoins?~ ~Oh, you can add your own altcoin to it... okay... not a big problem~. Oh well, so far the worst website I've ever used, but okay, as long as I could safely trade I could live with that. Then I noticed one altcoin going from about +50% increase to +600%, and then drop to -50% or so. I was curious as to what had happened. Did I lose a chance to at least double my coins? But then it happened again, with another altcoin. I was excited ~I really can make a huge profit here, no need to wait for months to get some decent ROI~. I went out for dinner, and when I returned another coin had its value raised, and this time +1800%. I started reading the chat to understand what was happening and try to predict which coin was going to rise. That's when I realized the scam that site is right now. People create altcoins, add to the website, mine them a little bit, then start spreading in the chat that they read elsewhere (including here at bitcointalk) that people were saying a certain coin was going to get huge! They then start sending lots of SELL orders (supposedly with a bot) for that coin to increase the value; so other users seeing the value increase fall for it and buy a lot using bitcoins, and then just see the value quickly drop to almost zero in a few minutes.

So, my conclusion is: DO NOT use yobit. If you just want to trade altcoins there MUST be a better service (please tell me your preference and why, I'm tired of googling already...). The only website I trust enough right now is localbitcoins (XBT <-> USD), and just because my XBT were still there after almost 2 years, but I do know it's full of scammers.

More unnecessary reading
I'm glad I'm very very cautious and didn't invest a single cent in these scams (even though it's indeed possible to get on the train with the scammers and make some quick $$, however risky and unethical). My ETH is now in a JAXX wallet (which I also don't trust, but that's just temporary, and I saved the keys elsewhere just in case).