this doesn't seem like a pump to me. it looks more like the FOMO buy of the newbies that think they have missed the train and are trying to catch up. of course it started as a recovery so a big part of it is just that.

price of $100-$150 is far from being a pump.
it needs to get a real big rise above at least $200 to be considered as the start of a pump. not to mention that the faith of the newbies is not yet back. they are still wounded from the 90% dump on their heads. and without newbies you can't have a decent pump.

you only need to do a quick google search about bitcoin forks, there are about 50 of them, maybe more. check each and see how many chances they have made. we have all kinds of things, 1:1 airdrop, 1:1000 airdrop,... different algorithms, different block times,... in other words you can change literary anything that you like when you are forking a coin and create a new one out of it.

but the change has to be meaningful otherwise as aplistir said when you just "copy" some other project without putting much thought into it, you are creating a worthless coin even if it is traded for some value for a short time.

these days it seems like everyone (literary any idiot who has ever been in any market and then hears about bitcoin) is becoming an expert about bitcoin over night. and the worst part is that they all insist on the same thing, to impart their "wisdom" about the thing they found out about yesterday on the rest of us.

i am sure this situation will only get worse as bitcoin grows more since there will be more people hearing about it and they all would want to tell the rest of us about their sudden expertise in this market that we were in for years

it is not "locked up" in lightning network, LN is not a safe to lock anything
that is the capacity of it at the moment based on the money that people have put in their channels which is in 17 thousand range right now.

as for the effect on bitcoin price i think it won't have any significant effect for as long as it is not used by any major businesses. for example as long as exchanges have not yet set up their LN node. but as soon as that happens and we see some more real usages on a larger scale it can cause a big explosion in adoption and with it the price will rise fast and big.
there is also the problem that LN is not yet as safe as one might hope. it needs more work and it also needs more user friendly, easy to use applications so that regular people (like traders in case of exchanges) can easily and securely use it.

haha, it sounds more like a drama that the news sites are creating with a fake story but no it is not "demand" it is drama and it won't change anything about bitcoin or its price. these things are always around and the media starts putting then under magnifying glass from time to time.
and by the way a "hacker" would ask for Monero or a real anonymous coin not bitcoin.

it is just another pumping war between two of the biggest pump coins of our times and means nothing much except showing that whales are milking the newbies again to fill their pockets and unless you aren't careful during these pumps (like not taking out the profit at an appropriate time and letting them dump on you) you can lose a lot of money.

as you already figure out it stands for Proof of Stake which is another alternative algorithm that cryptocurrencies use. there is a lot of discussion about it which you can find online and there are many difference of opinions about it. what i believe is that it is an inferior algorithm compared to PoW (Proof of Work that it currently uses which is the same as bitcoin) and it has many disadvantages in comparison too. for example it is basically giving the power to anyone who has the most amount of money. so technically a whale (or worse the foundation that controls more than 70 million ether which they premined) can have the full control of the coin and its future and anything else including transactions and balances.
not to mention that the way it distributes rewards (paying more money to anyone who holds more) is a bad design by nature and will harm not just the fairness of distribution but also the price.

in short term however, we may see a lot of hype and consequently a lot of pumps but that is a different discussion which would belong to speculation board.

none of the things you just said have anything to do with the question that i asked. you just focused on one "word" and repeated everything  you have been saying again!

scaling was one of the things that SegWit did. and the scaling doesn't stop there either. it will continue with the additional technology implementation/additions in the future that the script versioning inside of it offers.
it offers things like the ability to reduce the transaction size, for example this tx that you loved last time (bb7f7a0988e96f9939d0a39effc969ff5c1c18be9fe667ddde65c290dd8ae2d0) would become something around 20 kB instead of the current 65 kB

i am still curious to know what your "better" solution for scaling bitcoin is though...

first of all these positions are arbitrary and fake because the market capitalization is a false characteristics and for certain coins (specially both XRP and ETH) the market capitalization is completely fake because their supplies that is used for calculation of it is fake. this means each of them should have a market cap that is 10 to 12 billion dollars less because of their "premine"

secondly being a pump and dump altcoin doesn't mean a good thing! i don't know why you are excited about these two coins being pumped and dumped and consider them "king" just because of that!

not all cultures/countries celebrate Christmas though. and not all whales are from those countries that do. but since many of them are and the markets are generally less active during this holiday season things grow duller around this time.

my holiday comes in spring with the new year being in spring but even i took some time off

in anyways happy new year everyone. hope you all enjoy your vacations and come back to a bitcoin rally.

in 99% of the cases, this means you are looking at some random useless altcoin's advertisement who is using fooling techniques to get pumps. there has been at least a couple of hundreds of them that have made claims about partnering with lots of E-Commerce platforms and none of them are even used as a currency to succeed in any ways.

it is a great move and it will happen all around the world eventually but cryptocurrencies first have to be considered and used as currencies and then take the "next step". for bitcoin it makes sense because it has been designed to work as a currency and despite what some people claim its usage as a currency has been growing

by "this sudden dump" you mean a drop that happened more than 1 and a half month ago!

that is not a "correction point" in my opinion. an "artificial bottom" is a more appropriate term that also explains it better be cause it is a bottom and it is not natural since it was reached by manipulation and dumps not natural corrections and sell offs.

that is the whole point of an "artificial bottom" that you can not predict it. which is why i think it is a better term. a bottom can be predicted better since it would be natural and analysis works for it but when it is "fake" and manipulated then it becomes impossible to predict.

all you can do is to predict the "bottom" then buy there and ignore the "artificial" one.

i am wondering what YOU think the method for scaling bitcoin should be? so far all i have seen is you over criticizing the scaling solutions that have been adopted both on-chain and as second layer, even to a point where it becomes wrong.

in other words you are saying that the only way to help a useless token to survive a "little longer" is to force people to not sell their tokens at gunpoint or by programmatically making the tokens unspendable for a period of time.
well that is not going to work. and what would you do when the time is up or when the token bag holder satisfies all the conditions required for the tokens to become spendable?

you see you should never force people to bag hold shitcoins. the coin/token should not be shitty in first place so people WANT to hold it on their own not be forced to do so.

since this is a hard fork and will most probably end up splitting ETH into two chains then we can assume there can be a pump although there has been some small signs in it but it hasn't been that much to be enough for me to make a commitment to this pump.
what i did so far was to only take advantage of the small pumps that last a very short time because of lack of interest and only make the quick profit on my bitcoins that i put in ETH and pull out right after the mini pump was over.

no and no.
bitcoin was not created to give you money, or solve any poverty issues! it is only created to act as a global payment system that is censorship resistant because it is decentralized.
the fact that bitcoin is a profitable investment is only a byproduct of that.

it can be. but that doesn't change the true reason for its creation in first place. unfortunately right now the altcoins are plagued with the pump and dump shitcoins disease which is newbies copy pasting other coins to their own project to make money and also big corporations (even banks) creating big centralized altcoins (like ETH and XRP) to make more money from gullible people.

it IS separated from eth or any other altcoin! it was never connected anyways!

true but as long as there is profit (or in this case hope of making a profit even if it is mostly loss) they won't stop their fraudulent activities because people will continue to fall for it with that hope.

you can not dictate what other people do with their money. it is a free market and they invest their money in anything they want, in most cases they throw it away but it is still their choice. not to mention that pump and dump altcoins such as ETH are always super profitable during their pumps and super destructive during their dumps.
so i guess a better suggestion would be to be wise and only trade them to make the profit.

why? SEC has given no indication of changing their mind. and why would you even care about it?!!

the volatility won't last forever. i believe that it is only because bitcoin is brand new and is very young in a world that is owned by the centralization of powerful players so it takes time for it to mature and can compete with them.
but you have a good point here too. both fiat and bitcoin will continue to exist, it is not correct to say one will replace the other. and i don't think bitcoin ever had that intention.

any company wants to increase their revenue and Facebook is not an exception. but it is strange to see that they want to get in cryptocurrencies and basically start becoming a "payment processor" because that is what they would do, they create a useless centralized token then sell it to gullible users of their platform and then process their transactions and take fees from doing so!

in my opinion this design is always doomed to fail no matter what company no matter how big is behind it because people will either stick to the known ways of centralized payments through banks and others or they want decentralization of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

don't bag hold them, instead try trading them!

i think that should already be obvious to everyone based on what they have seen in the market! if it is not, you should take a look. any coin even the worst of them are getting pumped at some point. so the conclusion is that if you want profit then only get involved with altcoins during their pumps and stay out of them during their dumps unless you are familiar with or willing to short.