it has nothing to do with whales but with the whole market. there is less activity in the market so the whales can not earn as much profit as they wish to so they aren't active as much as they should be but they ARE still active and are accumulating which is clearly visible in the market from the volume and the actions that you can see are being taken there.
the accumulation of bitcoin at the bottom is not something you stop  just because it is holiday season!

no i don't think it is "inherently" centralized but it can become centralized a lot easier than PoW because it is a lot easier for a whale to buy a large portion of a specific coin (to have a large stake in it) and control the coin that way and then get out in a very fast way if he chooses to. but you can't get out of PoW because you need to sell equipment which is not as easy as dumping coins!

as for the hybrid, i have not yet seen anything that can stand out and be considered "better" in my opinion. they all have their own weaknesses, sometimes serious ones too.


Vitalik doesn't agree with anything, he doesn't even care. all the is trying to do is to earn more free money by advertising his upcoming enforced fork as a good thing and then sit around and earn profit on his huge stash of premined coins...

exactly, in fact that has been one of the main reasons why bitcoin has been growing more and more in India over the past 2 years despite all the roadblocks that the Indian government and the Indian reseve bank has been throwing in front of bitcoin adoption.
the news is out and people are adopting bitcoin already, and there is nothing they can do about it but try and slow it down. and that has been their goal so far but eventually as they see they can't prevent it, they start regulating it and most probably open up government owned exchanges to monitor everything more.

it depends on why you are doing the "marketing" in first place.

as you said if it is only for "value" gain or if we  want to use the correct term "PUMP" then it is a very different story. you need to be capable of pumping the shitcoin in first place then attempt spending money for marketing it.
the problem is that most of the times people try to market "shit" and then expect people to buy it too! well that doesn't work and you are bound to lose money.

people are always disappointed whenever their expectations aren't met and in a market the expectations are always one thing: profit.
however in altcoin market the expectations is always ridiculous amount of profit and the reality is ridiculous amount of loss because of the dumps. this means that majority of people around here buy shitcoins from top ranks to low ranks because they think they can make a lot of money from them but what really happens is that the whales and the real traders dump it on them and as they take profit the newbies lose and become disappointed.

is it really necessary to also post the link to your reddit sub (jex?) each time you open up a new topic in this board?

no they are not required because they will not be able to change anything. the whole market is unregulated and people want it to stay that way. both the scammers because they want to scam freely and the investors because they don't want the government snoop around in their financial matters and take taxes or worse.

not to mention that it is all about profit and sometimes the scammiest projects are most profitable if they have a good pumping team (pumping is illegal hence lack of regulations) and people tend to want pump and dumps for profit making otherwise the market is useless without them...

you forgot to say "why" you think that. for example i believe bitcoin is going to continue to grow and in about 2 years from now it will be worth more than $100k.
as for ETH i believe it will fail in next 2 years with a lot of fork wars, a big bloated blockchain, centralization of its nodes and a couple of exploited bugs leading to millions of dollars lost again.
i don't have any opinion about EOS.

nothing that exists today because unlike what newbies think, almost all the altcoins are copies of bitcoin. so if bitcoin were to fail they all will fail harder.

no, you are wrong and you don't have enough evidence to support your claims. all you have is only one case of both markets going down at the same time which looks more like a coincidence than any actual connections.
additionally your whole logic about "bitcoin never been inside of any recession period so it should fall in a recession" is wrong. all you can say is that since we don't have any prior case to compare it to anything is possible. price may rise to the moon in a recession or drop harder than everything else, both are equally possible.

lol, i didn't even know there was an ETF rejection yesterday. that is how the hype of ETFs are dead right now which is what i have been saying for a couple of months now. the hype was hot only about 6 months ago when people were still hopeful for their approval which is why it had negative effects but they all have given up that hope already.

in market times, 8-9 days is a very long time so you should no longer have any doubts about the results of the kind of fund transfer that OP was pointing out. it is now clear that it had absolutely no effects on anything whatsoever.

as for coins in circulation you can calculate them easily by multiplying the number of blocks by their reward (it starts from 50 and halves every 210000 block) and then reduce about 100 of it for truly lost coins like burnt coins and miner mess ups to get the real value of circulating coins. the other type of "lost coins" like people losing their private keys, satoshi's coins,... are not lost and there is no way of measuring them.

in my opinion people confuse two things. i believe we need stable coins but we do not need THESE stable coins.
the need is obvious since we need some sort of cryptocurrency that matches the things were trading with it which is cryptocurrencies. so that it can replace fiat and all the troubles that fiat has, specially the bank involvement in it and the troubles They cause!
but the problem is that the current existing stable coins are not only not-stable but also they are centralized so the only thing we were avoiding (the middle mad aka banks) is being re-introduced into the system through stable coins! which doesn't make any sense at all...

first of all the altcoin market will never be stable. that is its nature, if it becomes stable then it means it is dead and will no longer even exist. the altcoin market gives profit with its instability!

secondly not being listed and not succeeding for ICOs has nothing to do with the market status right now. it has to do with the fact that ICOs are dead and people no longer trust any of them to put their money in any ICO. on top of that the market is void of newbies who were the primary target of these scammers. that is why they are failing.

if by "worth something" you are not talking about price and profit then the number of coins that are actually "worth something" is about a handful, 10 coins tops based on what i have seen. majority of altcoins are mere copycats where the creator has simply forked another coin sometimes with no change and sometimes with trivial changes. and the remaining little that have unique ideas are very limited in numbers and those that implement that unique idea in a good way are even less in numbers leaving us with a handful of them.

whenever i look at bitcoin charts the term "undervalued" comes to my mind. in other words i don't believe bitcoin is close to a bottom, but it has crossed the bottom and is now below it, value-wise. otherwise considering the price and how low can it go, there is no possible way of knowing that because we are in uncharted waters without any logical reason for being here other than manipulation.

bitcoin is not a person with arms and legs, nor is it a company with a CEO and all that to have a "business plan"!!!

bitcoin is just a decentralized currency that was created for liberation and people can choose to use it if they want the benefits of what it is offering or choose not to use it if they don't find it beneficial.
everything else like mass adoption, price to the moon,... are our goals not bitcoin's. bitcoin goal is only to be a decentralized payment system that nobody can restrict and it has achieved that from day one.

there are always mineable altcoins out there, from the old coins that have been around for years to brand new coins that spring out like mushrooms. the real question that you should be asking is how to make profit from them. it is a hard thing to do specially in a dumping season but it is still possible, specially with low electricity costs. you sometimes have to be quick in switching from one shitcoin to another.

it is so funny to see how the topics change in long term regarding altcoins. not so long ago the same question was being asked here but with price target being $2000 and the responses being positive how ETH is going to rise up to $10k even

i think that illusion is not gone after people got dumped on enough to see the reality of a pump and dump coin.

the market doesn't rest nor does the whales making money from it. also it really doesn't have to be a big deal, this small rise was simply due to the fact that you can't keep dumping bitcoin forever. at some point the market retaliates!
and this has been a gigantic drop, most of which has been manipulation not an actual correction which makes it unnatural hence unstable. just like how a bubble is unstable and price bursts to come down.

yeah but the difference is that if a thief wants to physically steal your gold they can search your home and technically find all the gold  you are holding/storing. but you can store bitcoin in a lot of different ways and the thief has no way of knowing how much bitcoin you own.
for instance one cool method Electrum uses is extending your seed words with a password. you can generate a seed, deposit some bitcoin in the address that it gives you, then extend the seed with pass1 and deposit bitcoin in the address this new seed gives you. the thief has no way of knowing which keys are the real deal. you give up your seed (not the extended seed) and there surely is bitcoin there which will be robbed. but your main stash remains safe