there is nothing to destroy, the concept is flawed to begin with. raising funds by issuing some token that has no usage and only bloats the market and clogs the platform it is using is pointless. and Initial Coin Offering is basically the same thing as premining an altcoin and then airdropping a small portion of it to newbies while you are the biggest shareholder who only dumps on each pump to get a lot of free money out. this is the whole concept but it is prettified by calling it a company raising funds to do something or create some product!

i think that statement is instead 90%  wrong because of the way that majority of altcoins work like. for instance out of the thousands of new tokens that were created lat year alone almost all of them were useless tokens that only used some [n]buzzwords[/b] in their advertisement like "energy, healthcare, AI,..." and only received some temporary attention as they raised funds, got pumped and lost that attention as they were done making profit and dumped the coin down again.

you are wrong and right at the same time!

what you say about miners and their profitability is very wrong because that is not how bitcoin works. difficulty is not something that rises on its own out of nowhere. it is a variable that is adjusted based on how many miners are mining bitcoin or more accurately how much hashrate is mining bitcoin. and different miners have different costs, in other words for some mining bitcoin is more profitable than others which makes it easier for them to have a bigger wiggle room! in case of price drop, nothing will change apart from difficulty being adjusted if miners leave.

but you are right because many investors believe in this false statement which means THEY make up a nice resistance near $6k. of course there are a lot of other reasons why there is a big resistance around $6k not just mining and costs. for example the smallest reason is the fact that it is 70% below the ATH!

what you say is more like being on the ground floor which was 2009 and price of practically $0. and now we are still early adopters because bitcoin is not yet at that final mass adopted stage where we can say the adoption rate will now slow down drastically and with it the price rises. we are far from that actually which makes us still early adopters.

another thing that i would like to point out here is the risk of being an early adopter. people nowadays only focus on the profit they have made without looking at the risk. someone who spent time mining bitcoin in 2009 or bought bitcoin with real money later one when it was worth something like $0.01 was taking a huge risk compared to someone who is buying bitcoin now that it is an established currency at $6000

well if you define success has having been pumped and also having been hosting hundreds of scams then you are correct ethereum is very successful in both of these things since there are hundreds of scam ICOs that have used this platform and were the only reason why it got pumped.
but when you define success as creating a decentralized and without bugs platform for smart contracts then you can see that ethereum is a big failure.

what fall?

are you imagining things or are you actually in some place that is offering bitcoin at lower prices? because on all of the bitcoin exchanges that are legit and popular the  bitcoin price is the same as it was for the past 2 or 3 months. stable.

and that can only mean price is getting ready for a big rise.

nobody can know for sure why these companies made those decisions really. we can only speculate. and with the things we have seen from these ads on Facebook and other platforms like it, they have been very scammy so far which can be the reason why they banned these ads which were mostly ICO scam ads. but there may be a lot of other hidden reasons too.

neither one in my opinion because none of them are having any major pumps. i have not been following the news and the market lately but if what you said about litecoin is true and if you see some rise build up then it is a good option to start buying some LTC before the pump climaxes so that you can make a good profit in short term.

if they manage to sell "it" to the banks they are going to sell Ripple to the banks not XRP. in other words the banks are not interested at all in XRP the token that the ripple labs controls, they are interested in the technology called Ripple and want to adopt that for themselves.

price of XRP may get some pumps like it always does in case of news like this because of the hype but in the end XRP is still a centralized shitcoin with a huge supply which can not go up in the long term.

when it comes to altcoins people have always been "bending the definitions" to match their own need so that they can explain the altcoin situation and come up with a better result. for instance one of the definitions that has been bent is definition of a good coin and a coin that survives. people define it as a coin that has a high market cap and gets pumped a lot without paying attention to underlying project and whether it is good or not!

there is no logical reason for burning tokens in this large scale for any project. in fact when some token is doing this it only shows that they had bad plans and had no idea what to set the supply at so now they are left with a huge amount which they don't know what to do with, so they burn some of it.

but realistically burning tokens is done for publicity and to make people think the scarcity of the token is increasing so the price should rise. sometimes it works too and a pump takes place as they pull this shenanigan. another reason why they do it is because they are left with a huge amount of token which they can not do anything with. they can't sell because the market will be annihilated, they can't use because it is useless so they burn some so that they can get something out of it at least.

some conspiracy theories are too dumb to be true. for example like the government controlling the market and pump and dumping altcoins doesn't make any sense. or like Tether being the reason why bitcoin price went up, so it can never be true and it is the weird thoughts of a weirder mind.
but some of them make sense and are based on facts so they can't be conspiracy theory at all. for example like pumpers pumping altcoins, whale pumpers being in altcoin market,....

in the end the theory itself doesn't matter. what matters is that how much you use the facts in that theory to your own advantage. for example we know pump and dumps are happening every day in the market, but who cares who is doing it as long as you can detect them and make your profit!

i can't tell if you are trolling or if you are actually naive enough to think this is a possibility!
i will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it is the later. in which case you should know that the price of everything will always come down to "supply and demand". in a market filled with thousands of altcoins there is no demand for a coin like XRP which happens to be centralized too. and on top of it XRP is not one of those coins with low supply. its supply is actually among the top 10 huge supplies (100 billion). it means huge supply + no demand = low price (current $0.5 is even considered overpriced).

if in some alternate universe XRP reached $10k then bitcoin should be worth $1*10¹⁵

it seems like you are paraphrasing another reply but if not, you should know that having a lot of altcoins is not a problem. we technically can have a lot of good altcoins (but we don't). the problem is when everyone tries to create a copy-coin shitcoin so that they can make money as fast as possible while putting in the least amount of effort.
otherwise if developers stop wanting to make money and start actually innovating there will easily be a much better coin than bitcoin.

this year already looks pretty similar to 2015 with the flat line of the price that has been lasting for months without being capable of going either below that bottom line or above the resistance. on top of it we have the same attitude from people like you expecting a long bear market which is always a good sign for the end of it.

i don't really know of anyone who actually thinks this way! i have read random comments on bitcointalk from newbies mostly trolling but everyone with half a brain can see existence of 2000 altcoins that 90% of them have absolutely no reason to exist doesn't mean "acceptance"!

this type of propaganda existed for as long as i know and will exist in the future, many shitcoins is only one of the excuses. it there were 0 shitcoins they would have used another excuse to bash  bitcoin.

it is simply because there is nothing stopping you from copying the code of some altcoin and create money out of thin air with near 0 effort and that attracts thousands of people that are trying this every day. the number is a lot more than 1600 but most of them die in infancy since they are so shit! and nowadays with ICOs and the easiness of creating a token the problems have doubled.

in my opinion, users are responsible!

the scammers scam. that is their nature. you can't change that. but when the community and the users are giving them the chance to scam them that means they are responsible for their existence. otherwise if people stopped giving their money to obvious scammers such as these ICOs that came out every day last year then they wouldn't have become this big.

bitcoin is not yet on the "verge" of a bull run but it is moving towards the bull run. in other words we are currently taking the first steps towards the series of rallies which will end up with a new set of all time highs and will eventually end up with a new ATH and a new bubble.

in any market it has always been like this after a bubble. specially when the asset is still growing and being adopted. after the correction we need a stable phase like this for the market to recover and then begin the rises slowly and then eventually end up with big cash flow in.

actually coinmarketcap.com is the least reliable source for checking prices if you want accuracy and more importantly at times like this when the market is in chaos mode and prices are all over the place just because they use Tether to report USD value of coins!
sites like bitcoinwisdom or better yet the exchanges themselves are more reliable.

as for the $8000, you don't know that for certain. it may or may not happen. but one thing is for sure he downside is not going to last long so don't wait for years