it is called Crypto-"Currency" for a reason. it is not meant to be used to only convert fiat to it back and forth. and what ICOs are doing has nothing to do with any of this. they are only raising funds to become rich. that is all. it is not even related to cryptocurrencies nor the blockchain technology

we need to see how this actually works. in my experience there is always some workaround for these things that will render them useless in practice. not to mention that this will only be able to work with those ICOs that are obviously scam but it can not do anything else about the rest of them so it will be abused to hell by the rest as they will scam people in another non-obvious way!

the reason why ICOs stopped being as successful as before is that people simply stopped gambling with them because they got scammed enough times and also saw the eventuality that awaits all of the ICO tokens that they no longer want to be involved with them. and that was bound to happen anyways and the 2018 dumps only made it happen faster.
things like Minimum Viable Product may help them a little bit but it is not the fool proof guarantee for making the ICO succeed like before. people don't have any faith in them.

the thing they need to understand is that claiming to be fast is not what traders are looking for! all other exchanges are fast too and of course that "fastness" only last until they are actually tested with a surge of requests like last year and/or some DDoS attacks and then we can assess how fast they really are!

what traders are looking for is security, reliability and favorable rules. for example an exchange that is secure and doesn't require KYC and is transparent about it their plans on changing it in the future, then that is what makes them worthy of second look.

of course it is a guessing game but it is an educated guess not a random guess based on nothing. at least that is the point of speculation anyways. that you analyze the market and the trends and then after considering everything you try to come up with the best "guess" possible.

and actually this topic was a good way of seeing what people really think! when money is involved and they want to win it, they start putting an effort into their "guesses" rather than talking out of their asses like the many of the other topics in this board!

you can play with words all you like but that will never change any facts about bitcoin.
bitcoin matches the definition of a currency, a medium of exchange and a payment system perfectly well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency and it has been designed to do that in a decentralized manner and has been doing exactly that in the past 10 years.

lol first of all if your whole plan is based on whether some shitcoin goes from $200 to $25000 to make you rich overnight then you shouldn't really bother with entering this market ever because all you will be left with is misery and a huge loss.

secondly you should never invest money you can not afford to lose specially money that doesn't even belong to you (aka loan). and when you are investing in a highly volatile and highly manipulated market you should be even more careful!

in the end no matter what you say, litecoin is still a copy of bitcoin and copy coins are never known to be that successful. in my opinion the only reason why litecoin has this success so far is because other coins are terrible coins and a copy coin like LTC which has a good developer can survive and gain popularity. otherwise if we start seeing good altcoins there is no chance for it to survive the competition.

there has been an increase in the number of exchanges but it is not as much as you claim it to be. and it is a good thing in my opinion because it creates a bigger competition among exchanges and prevents them from getting too cocky with themselves because they become big since there aren't that many alternatives. but when there are many alternatives the exchanges have to always stay on their toes and improve their services or be replaced. and that is good for the users.

$5900 is nothing, we may see it without any kind of drama. it only needs one whale doing a small manipulation for price to drop to that price because first of all that is not a low price but a a small difference from current price and second it is the bottom that was tested and is the strong support there.
a drama and a slide down would mean going to lower levels such as $5500 or $5000 which is not possible.

bitcoin will eventually become stable but it will never be a stable coin. stable coin has a different meaning and is called to coins such as Tether that are tied to another currency and are supposed to be worth the same as them for instance 1 Tether is supposed to be worth 1 USD. and that will never happen with bitcoin. but its price will be stable eventually and that takes years because first we need to reach mass adoption and with it price will continue going up.

4 of the biggest reasons in my opinion are:
- decentralization
which means there is no need for third parties and their fees. also there wounld't be any kind of restrictions in your usage.
- privacy
you don't have to provide your identity to the vendor just to buy a small item!
- global
obvious
- no charge back
this is great for merchant protection against all the frauds that take place with traditional payment systems.

no your first problem is actually having that many tokens! even if they were all good and never turned into shit and even if they were ALL giving your profit, it would still be a big mistake to have that many. for example if you go in stocks market, there are a lot of different stocks (even more than there is altcoins) but you will never see anybody having hundreds of them!!! that is insane.

what you do is that you study different assets (different stocks/companies) then you only buy the best. or you buy what you believe in. and that way you have only a handful of assets to manage.

your best solution is to dump everything you have and then start again fresh and this time don't repeat the same mistakes. sometimes it is best that we burn everything and start from scratch rather than trying to fix the already broken thing.

am i the only one who finds it really strange to see you talk about liquidating assets to "take care of needs"? it is like saying you will sell your stocks because it is the end of the year and you need to buy presents for the family members!
that doesn't make any sense to me. you either use the money you already have, the savings or the end of the year bonus or you take out the profit not the investment.

blockchain is not for "data storage"! it is used for transactions in decentralized monetary system such as bitcoin and it stores transaction history. there are projects that focus on data storage but they are not focusing on privacy of it because blockchain is something you share so the "data storage" aspect of it in those projects should also be based on sharing so there is no privacy.

if you want privacy when storing your data then don't share it with others! store it locally.
and stop reading the nonsense that ICOs are advertising these days without thinking about what it really is.

unfortunately some people do actually need this type of warnings before they make any decisions because they are dumb enough to fall for the pretty front that the ICOs create for them to take their money. sometimes warnings like this can make then think twice before jumping in.

there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
- anything that adds to real world usage, it will add to popularity and as a result price rise.
- but you first have to consider whether that thing they add is actually secure or not. for instance many altcoins are not safe enough to be used as payments! these companies will lose a lot more in the long run if they actually try it.
- another important fact is demand. for instance there is far more bitcoin users than there are any altcoin users. so obviously adding bitcoin will get a larger audience than adding an altcoin. additionally a bigger percentage of bitcoin users see it as a currency while the majority of altcoin users see them as an investment and that simple distinction means they are more willing in using bitcoin for payment than an altcoin.
- the same argument goes for "creating their own token". nobody will use it because you will first have to deposit your money in their platform and exchange it for that token then use that token to buy stuff. so why bother? deposit your fiat in their platform and buy directly with fiat!

ps. i don't know about Sony but Microsoft have been accepting bitcoin for many years now

to my knowledge it has never affected this market, specifically the altcoin market in any ways. the altcoin market is 99% pump and dump and it is only moving based on that. for instance right now we are still in the dumping part for about 60% of the market and there is absolutely nothing that can change that.

if anything a stock market collapse should lead to a bitcoin price rise, although as i said i don't think it has any meaningful effects since bitcoin is a global market not restricted to one country!

actually what you said, this mentality, is the reason why we have bubbles. people like you who think bitcoin is like a pump and dump altcoin that only rises because it is "pumped by whales" are always waiting for that "pump" to come and when it is already too late (eg. price over 10k last year) they start buying with FOMO and cause the bubble.
but as this mentality goes away we can see how the cycles become shorter and the bubbles less severe. like the current bear market being much shorter compared to the last one.

this has never been about blame, nor about energy and definitely not about its greenness!

from the first time this discussion began it has always been a new form of attack on bitcoin trying to undermine its value. if you read between the lines of all the previous discussions all of them are basically saying bitcoin is worthless so it is wasting energy.