that is the whole point, these "partnerships" are using Ripple not XRP. and in other words many of them are in fact creating their own centralized cryptocurrency and never use the token that their foundation created.

XRP has always been in trouble and was doomed to fail because it was a useless token which was also centralized. everyone knew it from the start too so they only focused on making millions out of it before it dies.

you are mistaken. those days that people thought bitcoin is a "geek" coin are over. they have been over for years.
nowadays the only reason why people don't choose bitcoin is because of other reasons. reasons such as the huge amount of FUD that has been brainwashing them for years (example: JPMorgan attacking bitcoin on daily basis!), the volatile price which scares people away, the low adoption itself which means people don't see bitcoin be used that often so they don't feel the incentive and finally their own laziness for using something new and different.

one important thing that they tell you is that stable coins are not guaranteed to be stable. for example USDT (tether) which is the biggest one of them all has had big drops in the past which means if you tried to hold it to escape altcoin dumps you could have lost money holding these tokens instead.
not to mention that they are risky because they can drop to zero in an instant. the chances are low but they exist and you should not ignore them.

whatever it is and however it is going to be in the future we can be 100% sure about one thing: it will NOT be decentralized. so don't even think they are going to have even a small part of their project decentralized.

their whole campaign against bitcoin starting from 2016 was building up to this point where they basically say bitcoin (which is decentralized and out of their control) is bad and their shitcoin (which is in their full control) is good.
the reality is that they just created another centralized shitcoin but because they have a big name their coin will remain relevant for a while but the world is moving towards decentralization and their days are numbered.

crypto market is both bitcoin market and altcoin markets.
altcoins are unpredictable because their market is mostly manipulation and less speculation and logic. in some cases it even reaches 100% manipulation due to the nature of that altcoin and that is why they are unpredictable.
bitcoin on the other hand has grown enough to be predictable but not enough to be completely predictable. we still have manipulation here too and that introduces the unpredictability factor but only on smaller scales and in short term. otherwise i'd say more than 70% of the times we can predict bitcoin pretty easily.

obviously new generations are always more interested in new technologies compared to older generations but i don't think new generation is needed for bitcoin to grow big and have price surges. we only need the world to change. it may start with new generations but it will continue with the whole world. for example Amazaon (or similar big names like that) accepting bitcoin is an old service with old people but they have to accept the new things for it to grow.

the biggest problem in that front is that centralized exchanges are making money so they keep staying ahead of the game while decentralized exchanges won't make money. and everyone nowadays wants to make money that is why they develop in first place. the days of Satoshi are over where the developers created things to change the world not for financial gains.
and the worst part is that even if they are paid, they create some sort of shittoken in the name of decentralized exchange with ICO or something like that and don't deliver anything because they made the money they were looking for.

you post in altcoin board and ask about the "market" but your poll is only talking about bitcoin price!!! if you want to speculate about bitcoin then we already have a speculation board for it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=57.0

bitcoin will soon start rising up but it has nothing to do with "the market". the market as in the 2000+ altcoins are not going to rise just because bitcoin rose. a lot of them are going to continue their downward spiral and actually many of them are going to get dumped harder as bitcoin starts its rise since traders need to pull out their money to put it back in bitcoin that would be rising by that time.

well the blockchain is immutable so you can't change it, specially if a bug existed a while ago that caused something like this which doesn't exactly break anything serious. the only solution is to write a workaround at this point to ignore that bug.

and it is not a problem because at that point in time (block 72161) the consensus rules weren't enforcing timestamp differences to be within a certain range so those blocks are not breaking any consensus rules and are valid. if you introduce a rule at block 80000 then that rule should be valid from 80000 onward instead of being for all of them.

generally speaking it is a bad idea to hold (which means a long term investment where you buy and don't sell in hopes of a rise in long term) any coin that satisfies these conditions:
1. is useless
2. is hyped up with fake advertisement
3. has premine, ICO or any other magical way that devs create a lot of coins for themselves
4. has a bad distribution model
5. has a huge circulating supply
6. has a huge block reward or basically when a large amount of new coins are injected in circulation every day
7. is centralized

Grin satisfies 4, 5 and 6 and a little bit of 2. and that is more than enough for it to be a bad long term investment in my opinion.

the fact that you start a topic with this kind of title proves that you have no understanding of what bitcoin is. all you have always cared about up to this point has been profit and now that it is no longer coming to you, it makes you feel confused.

my suggestion is that you take this time that price is not moving and spend it on educating yourself more about what bitcoin is. try to learn what this digital currency that you own and have been buying/selling for a while now is doing, what it offers, what do the features such as decentralized and censorship resistance mean,... then you will get the answer to your question.

a while back i said Coinbase is a bitcoin bank to one of those silly topics asking whether banks will ever adopt bitcoin. now you can see how they are turning more and more into a bank every day. basically you are giving up control over your money and no longer use bitcoin, instead you use a bank called Coinbase and pay them fees to use your own money. then they not only report your ass to IRS and NSA for every single transaction but also can block your money if they decided to have some fun with you!

if you want to "store" your bitcoins in some wallet and not touch it for some time then you should choose a safer option such as an offline wallet (cold storage) or at least keep a wallet on your PC instead of your phone since a cell phone can easily be lost or stolen since you carry it around while your PC is less in danger.

as for Mycelium, it is an open source wallet that has been around for quite some time now so it should be safer.
and for the 0 balance thing read this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5091798.msg0#new

actually they are being used but the thing is the only usage so far in the past couple of years that they have been introduced has been only 1 thing: to create ICO tokens.
and that means they are all useless shitcoins and the only way anybody uses these tokens is to and from exchanges so that they can participate in the trading "game" and test their luck in this game so that maybe they can make some profit. otherwise there is no usage for any of them.

and you must not realize that there is no difference between the two ranks because they are both fake and based on market capitalization of these tokens and both of them have huge percentage of premined supply which is helping to bloat up their market cap value and keep their rank up.
if you only consider their real circulating supply and exclude the premine then their "rank" falls down to about 20+.

no, it doesn't work that way.

the only thing that is hurting the market is the altcoin market itself. more precisely, it is about the fact that 99% of the altcoins are completely useless. which is why they don't have any future and that is exactly why the only hope for them is to be pumped and dumped and nothing more.
so the result that you see in the market is a constant decline of the values of all these coins with some temporary uprise (aka pump) and eventually death and replacement by new shitcoins.

whether there are 50 altcoins or 2500 altcoins doesn't make a difference as long as they are useless. but if they begin creating valuable coins then even if there were 10000 of them, they will all be valuable and keep rising.

yes your "guess" came true. just like how you can possibly close your eyes and throw a dart at a dartboard and hit the bulls eye right in the middle of the board. that doesn't make you skillful though.
in this case $6k was the bottom and we had no reason to believe otherwise, and your $4000 guess as you can see was an incident because of unpredictable events.

the only reason why people like Craig Wright exist and continue their shenanigans online is because WE are giving them the attention they seek and them being attention whores and wanting to scam people love this attention and succeed in their mission.
so i say it is time that we stop starting new topics and discussing anything that is remotely related to these types of people. that is the easiest way you can fight them. otherwise you will be blue in the face before you can debunk half their bullshit.

the key point is in the second paragraph.
people always forget that regulations are not the same everywhere. it is not black and white either. as a result they always fall off the roof with their opinions about regulation. it doesn't have to be bad or good. it can be either or even both! there are times that we see regulations that actually help the growth but sometimes they even prevent it to the point that some license laws and tax laws has forced companies to move headquarters.

there are two kinds of bitcoin news sites. the first kind they usually see the popular high traffic sites like Coindesk and then want in on the profit so they attempt at creating one. the other type are the sites that are being "farmed". there are people who create shitty sites, write shitty articles then spam the links everywhere and do other things to rank up and then they sell it to highest bidder newbie who thinks he can make money from them.