I don't know how to check whether subscribers are fake, but I believe that ICO rating sites like Cryptomiso can help you in coming to a right decision regarding the investing.

Try Cryptomiso + I am sure that some interesting groups can be fond on Telegram.

I second your opinion OP. I actually wrote about that.There is too much FUD over something that is not Bitcoin-specific.

Of course, the banks won't make you rich. they will only make themselves reach.
Your actual question is whether you can use saving interests in the banks to make some profits. You can use some special dedicated saving accounts, they usually offer a fair interest rate, but it's not that much. However, it's also almost without any risk. It's always like this - you can invest in more profitable assets, but you also have to succumb yourself to more risks.

This is an interesting view on things. A philosophical thing really.
Does water have its actual use, intrinsic value - well, yes, but it is valued much less then it's worth.
Does gold have its actual use? Yes, as an electrical conductor and for luxury.
Does paper money have its actual use? Yes as a legal tender for payments.
Does Bitcoin money have its actual use? Yes, as a store of value and sometimes as a payment instrument.

We could speculate that Bitcoin or any other money is different because they don't have a physical representation. Where.... they actually have... if you know how transistors function...

Hence, I actually agree with you, I think that in the 21st century we should really be way past the discussions whether we should value only the things that we can touch.

How could it be? China is a second strongest economy in the world. They will always have a say.
However, the question is whether the community will stop overreacting to FUD coming mostly from China. Probably not. However, they advanced the most in the sense of regulation and we can expect more of that news from other countries from in the future and hence the attention could shift a bit.

But again - regulation is a good thing. Regulation is not prohibition. I will repeat this another 100 times if I have to.

Although to me, those "mental barriers" are a funny thing... I cannot understand how someone can succumb to that, really - the situation yesterday was the same as it is today - it could drive the price a bit upwards. However, not substantially. I think people do already know Bitcoin is scarce and have made their minds up either way.

A good promotion for cryptos. Otherwise not a surprise. Why wouldn't they join the wagon? They are a hardware producer and they can profit plenty, especially since there is a shortage of mining rigs. I wouldn't be surprised even if they started producing graphic cards....

Well, you have an actual good example of problems with barter system in foreign exchange.
One country can always produce some things and has to import others. You will notice, however, that there are many examples of countries that need a good but have nothing but money to offer in return.

Gas is a nice example. In Eastern Europe, most of the natural gas is imported from Ukraine and Russia. You need it, and you have to buy it, however, although you can make some export to Ukraine and Russia, you simply cannot balance it out with your needs for natural gas as one exceeds the other by far.

I believe that the competition is always a good thing. Banking oligopolists don't believe that.

It is providing new benefits, but also new challenges. Torrent is an excellent example. Look at how easy it is to access music and movie databases. However, what's with the intellectual rights? I don't believe sharing should be forbidden, but a new way to compensate the artists must be made up. There are services like Bandcamp, iTunes, Netflix etc., but they are all, well, lacking...

Centralization always leads to abusing power, it's inevitable as it is bound to human nature which is burdened by greed (isn't the crypto world and a lot of things happening inside and around it an excellent example of human greed and vanity in action). A full decentralization and free market on the other hand inevitably lead back to the laws of nature - survival of the fittest, which is, again, not good, especially since in the human society the "survival of the fittest" usually means the "survival of the greediest".

What does he base his assumptions on? My experiences are different. One of the very rare development teams that are very active. They have their problems, but they keep it going on.

Everything clear here, all payments received. Thank you, Lauda.

I totally agree with you on the centralization problem, but I don't think that is how a lightning network works. I don't think that those hubs are centralized, they are rather like a temporary side chain, but I might be wrong though.

Regarding the next movement in price, scalability etc, I made an analysis, you can read it here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3386041.msg35475097#msg35475097

I made an analysis of the trend and strength and weakness, maybe it's an interesting read to you? I have probably forgotten many things, but I will be happy to add if there will be some discussion.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3386041.msg35475097#msg35475097

I expected at least one comment. Is the text too hard for reading, not articulate enough?

I agree with you. Profit is not a profit if you don't actually take it.

From where did you draw this conclusion? BCD development seems completely stopped. Trading volume can probably keep it going for another year or so, like what happened with Dogecoin, but a prospect for 2-5 years - how?

So, the bull market is back and we are all very optimistic again.
Here I will try to do a bit of a trend analysis.
Let me just mention that most of the graphs were not made by me, but rather collected from other sources.

First of all, the question is whether we are in a bull run, bull trap, or a period with a double bottom.

1st, a bull trap
Let's take a look at this graph:


A bull trap would require one of the followin two things:
1. A nonsignificant price move or a move with low volume.
If you look at where I have put a purple line, it is where the upward trend started. If we consider it is a run from 6.838 USD to 9.310 USD, which makes 27%, I would not say it is insignificant, especially if we take a look at the rise of the volume.

2. A trap inside a trend shape.
If we look at Bitcoin price chart it doesn't say much, but maybe a market capitalization chart (blue line) can help here. We shouldn't really look at market cap, but it is only mathematics (total number of coins multiplied with price), and since it makes it easier to notice certain movements, then why not? Look at around 19th of March. There was an obvious bull trap. An uphill movement that stopped abruptly, after which a previous downward trend continued. This time the line broke the previous bull trap resistance point, and with large volume. Also, there was something similar to a short-term W double bottom shape forming (black and red circles), but the upper resistance has been broken here to.

2nd, a double bottom
Some people say we had could see a new bottom around June by looking at the charts from the previous years.
I totally agree with them that we should look at the previous charts. If anything is obvious with Bitcoin, it is that previous movements are repeating themselves.
Look at this graph:

The bottoms are repeating themselves with 2 months difference between them.

But look at the first graph again (Bitcoin graph from point 1).
We actually had a bottom after 5th of February. Then we had a top on 5th of March and straight downfall from there. We haven't reached a previous bottom, but we did find ourselves around there, and when? Around 5th of April. Hence 2 months difference. This is why I think we already had our double bottom and can expect the upward trend to continue from here.

Enough of techical analysis, let's go to fundamental.
Take a look at this interesting article, with which I totally agree by the way:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/bitcoin-ethereum-other-cryptocurrency-five-positive-factors-for-2018.html

1. Point 1 - problem with high fees and scalability will be solved with Lightning network. Maybe. I don't trade Bitcoin, so I cannot verify this, but with SegWit adoption Bitcoin transactions  already became really cheap: https://blockchain.info/tx/92785a57f6e9e9eb9d37a00e6e8be7f888376f65fa2b8f868db261cbf6cca7b0
That is move of 450 millions for 1.09$.
I borrowed this fact from stompix, thank you stompix.

2. & 3. Legitimate ICO's and regulation. Should we talk about regulation again? There is so much FUD over regulation and I will only repeat that the regulation is a good thing, especially as crypto world is really most of all lacking security. Regulation shouldn't be mistaken for prohibition.
Bolt Brownie has a nice topic about fighting the FUD with dividing news to actually bad and positive... Everything else is just noise.

Also most of the weak projects got shut down during the downward trend.

Regulation opens up space for point 5. and we could have already seen some news in this field too:

"Earlier this month, CCN reported that some of the largest institutional investors in the finance market including $8 billionaire George Soros, Rockefeller family’s venture capital fund VenRock, and the Rothschild have entered the cryptocurrency market.

The majority of investors were skeptical towards these investors entering the market when it has experienced one of the worst corrections in its history. But, historically, investors like Soros have tended to invest large sums of money in markets that are significantly down from their all-time highs, taking advantage of the downward trend."

Taken from this article: https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-price-breaks-8000-for-first-time-since-march-real-momentum/

If we think about the fact that those people are so highly infulential that some of the conspiracty theoreticists consider them a part of the secret group controling the world by controlling the world's finances, then it should be enough to notice an obvious importance of this news.

Point 5. paves the way for point 4 - adoption. I really think that with regulation, funding and improved scalability we will see more and more traders accepting Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies as well).

Let's go further. There are other interesting theories around, for example I borrowed this one from jaysabi.

According to a recent article on CNBC, Tom Lee is attributing the current price weakness to selling by American consumers and crypto exchanges to satisfy tax liabilities. At least this is an interesting theory, but keep in mind he's only speculating like everyone else.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/wall-streets-tom-lee-predicts-massive-outflow-from-cryptocurrencies-ahead-of-tax-day.html

Key (speculative) points from Lee:

    U.S. households likely owe $25 billion in capital gains taxes for their cryptocurrency holdings
    Additional selling pressure by crypto exchanges sitting on over a billion dollars in profit denominated in btc/eth and are converting to USD to satisfy tax obligations
    tax-related selling represents a massive outflow from crypto to USD and historical estimates are each $1 of USD outflow is $20-$25 impact on crypto market value
    Expects btc to find footing after April 17
    Expects btc to reach $20,000 by mid-year and $25,000 by year-end

This run is also over and supported by some facts.

Then you have signals like this one:

https://www.ccn.com/cryptocurrency-market-will-get-much-bigger-former-jpmorgan-banker/

Are you still afraid of those big institutions that could prevent a crypto revolution from happening? Maybe it is an isolated case, but if a person that "used to work" for such an important part of the system speaks like this about the cryptocurrency market right after he became free to speak....

Next one.
People were very discouraged by the 75% fall of the market.
Take a look at this fellow:

Should I say more?

Let's go further. People make an argument that it is not the same to fall 75% with a small market or big market. Might be true. But then let's just take absolute values into account, let's take a look where we were just one year ago:

At the moment of the lowest dip, Bitcoin was at around 6.800 USD. Altcoins were similarly ahead of past times.


What about the rest of the market?

Take a look at the global chart:

I think it looks fairly similar to that of Bitcoin.

We also have an (expected) announcement on more exchanges accepting fiat money, starting with Binance:
https://dailyhodl.com/2018/04/19/binance-announces-fiat-to-crypto-trading-pairs-in-a-move-that-could-shift-reliance-away-from-bitcoin/
This will obviously shift more attention towards Bitcoin. Most of the altcoins followed Bitcoin since everything was converted to Bitcoin, more or less.

What is the most negative thing about Bitcoin that can hurt it if compared to some other projects? The one it was created to fight against in the first place - centralization.
https://www.ccn.com/the-dangerous-threat-of-centralization-that-exists-in-the-blockchain-ecosystem/

A small % of the society holds most of the coins, just like with fiat money, it is easy for speculators to influence the price etc. It's not that other projects don't have similar problems. Look at the new story about master nodes. While the idea is great, it will only provide those with lots of money with more money (in order to earn you have to already hold an almost impossibly significant amount of coins/tokens).

This is very interesting indeed, well done.
Do you plan to do something similar for other services as well, or just for this one.
If there was something for tracking, say, only the official announcements in telegram groups, that would be amazing