people who were saying this in the past couple of days have the same level of understanding (or lack of understanding) of the market as the people who are saying bitcoin "plummeted" today.

as the real "experts and analysts" have been saying price is not moving in any directions and there is no signal whatsoever. all we have is a stable price. and stability for bitcoin means fluctuations that are smaller than a certain percentage and so far they are in that range.
this means there is nothing to be excited about when there is a tiny rise and there is nothing to be scared of when there is a tiny drop as long as we are still in the same price range. this range is starting from about $5900 and continues to $7200

there are a couple of things that need clarifying here in my opinion.
for instance it is all at the talking level and consideration stage. and it has been like this for months. this doesn't seem to be a new thing to me. Indian government has been considering cryptocurrencies for a while now.
additionally what i get from this is that they plan on regulating a handful of cryptocurrencies, or maybe only bitcoin and then ban everything else.
as for their own cryptocurrency, i believe it has been about a year into making. if i am not mistaken the name of this "gov coin" is Lakshmi!

as a rule everything that an altcoin uses the name of "bitcoin" in its name (for example in this case it is apparently called bitcoinus, other examples include bitcoin gold, bitcoin cash, bitcoin future,...) these coins have no future. they sometimes get some pump and dumps but that is about it. the most hyped up one is BCH which is not doing well at all despite all the pump attempts.

for some reason there is a lot of (fake) hype in the news media about bitcoin price and the rise that is apparently supposed to come. it is quite strange in my opinion that they keep posting this for a couple of days now and all of their analysis are hot air since it is based on nothing more than their guess.

what i see is a market that is pretty much similar to 2015 where price was stable at $220 and we never knew when the breakout is going to happen but we knew it is close and guaranteed.

that is not abuse, that is creating a new altcoin with a different sets of consensus rules and the coins it creates aren't "fake coins" they are real coins but they are different coins that belong to that altcoin and it has nothing to do with bitcoin or 51% attacking nor does it have anything to do with attacking nodes.

what you describe is like trying to broadcast a litecoin block to bitcoin full nodes! they will obviously reject it because it is invalid.

if you sort altcoins based on their market cap then XRP is already number one coin thanks to its 100 billion supply but that doesn't exactly make it "number one" since your sorting is flawed and XRP is still a centralized shitcoin with no usage and no real future in a world where decentralization is favored.

being decentralized, unregulated, open source,... doesn't mean it is ok to scam people! majority of ICOs are created to scam people and all of them don't have any reason to even exist apart from raising money. none of them do anything real in the real world!
and we don't need centralization to avoid them. in fact centralization and regulations are NOT going to eliminate these scams. they will continue to happen.
what we need is less greed from people trying desperately to make some profit in this market so they hang on to anything they can find.


nobody is creating "cryptocurrencies". what they are doing is creating tokens through ICOs or copying the code from some other project creating a copycat coin bloating the market and then pump and dumping it.

no there is no difference between a "pump" from x to 100x and y to 100y. they both are similar manipulation and same amount of money "pumps" them.

however bitcoin is not a pump and dump so this statement has nothing to do with bitcoin. the "rise" from x to 100x and y to 100y (y>x) are similar but the second one is a little harder because the market will be bigger and there will be more friction for both rises and falls so it happens slower, this however is not a big difference as long as the adoption rate is growing at the same pace but it will be harder if adoption rate drops and it will be easier if adoption rates grows.
for example if we see a wave of mass adoption (imagine a couple of big companies such as Amazon, eBay,... accept bitcoin as payment) this 100y rise will look super easy compared to the previous 100x rise.

i don't understand what does Bakkt has anything to do with ETF and why some people are saying "Bakkt ETF", they don't have any ETF as far as i know. Bakkt is more like a cryptocurrency exchange that will start in near future and some people are speculating that this new service/company because of the way it is can pave the way for ETF approvals such as CBOE and Winkle ETFs.

to answer your question if ETF is approved it can be as  the ignition of the rise to come but a lot of other things can also be that ignition. so in other words we  don't need ETF for reaching $10k and beyond.

the biggest challenge in my opinion has always been the large number of shitcoins that keep being created and all the scams that they are performing so that they can make more money by scamming the newcomers. this in general is making the whole market look worse.

the scammers aren't lazy but they are also human and like any other human they always seek the easiest way possible to make money although their ways are dirty. so when other people are providing them with easy ways of scamming them because of their own idiocy then the scammers will obviously choose those easy ways.
for example about 2 years ago if you wanted to scam others in crypto-world you had to create a new altcoin and that is not as easy as today where you just create an ICO and reap the rewards. in other words we made it easy for them by creating easier methods like ICO scams with platforms like ethereum which was created for this type of scams while they enjoy the profit on their own token ether.

sorry to tell you this but this only means that you are a newbie who refuses to learn how the market works and instead you are trying to come up with superstitious ways of bag holding and then hoping for a rise. and eventually you will start  complaining why you are losing money while others (whom you call whales manipulating you) are making a lot of profit.

lesson?
stop fooling yourself with things like "patience" and start opening your eyes. for example in case of the first paragraph what you should do about that particular token is that you dump it immediately as the market opens so that you can get the most amount of profit out. as it continues to dump you enjoy your fast reaction to the market and the larger amount of money that you got out. THEN if you really speculate the rise and see the rise starting up you buy back. the difference now is that you are buying back at the bottom with a lot more money. so for instance if you sold 1000 tokens in the beginning you now can buy 5000 tokens and THEN you wait for the pump to slow down and get closer to the end so that you can dump the 5000 tokens and get an even bigger profit out.

these are 3 steps each more important than the last.
what happens in this strategy is that you are maximizing the profit while eliminating the loss altogether.

you may be right and price may not see any major rise this year but that still doesn't give it any legit reason for not rising. in fact i do believe that the only reason that bitcoin has not been rising for the past 2 or 3 months is manipulation and the fear of the manipulation that can come in case of a rise. otherwise price should have gone back up to at least $9k where bitcoin really belongs to not this underpriced level that it is currently stuck at while whales accumulate happily.

bitcoin is growing steadily with a solid support and solid use cases in real world. but the "market of cryptocurrencies" is falling because this market  does not only contain bitcoin but instead it contains thousands of altcoins most of which are pure shitcoins and copycoins without any usage in real world and that are created for pump and dumping purposes which means after they are pumped (like the pump of 2017) they eventually get dumped (like the whole year of 2018)

it is actually the exact opposite. bitcoin is first a currency and then people can choose to treat it like anything else they want. some treat it as a store of value, some as a short term investment to make profit from day trading, some for fun and gambling,... but from the start till the end bitcoin is a currency. you can also check out the bitcoin paper written by the creator of bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto) and see how he refers to bitcoin as a currency (a payment system,...).

i don't know why you are saying bitcoin AND ethereum together because a coin like ETH has its price solely dependent on ICOs, their existence and their hype and dumps whereas bitcoin is not even related to that world. some rare occasions you may find some people invest in ICOs using bitcoin but the connection stops there.
and because of that when ICOs die tokens like ethereum will take the biggest hit because their use case is dying with ICOs. not to mention that ETH has another big problem which is damaging its price and that is its unlimited supply.

this is not the first time they released such ranking. the first time i remember had no effect on anything. people got hyped up for half a day and one of two coins go a small pump because of it but eventually the hype vanished because at the end of the day people don't care about a government released ranking specially when it is Chinese government!

actually an explosive growth in price is one of the main signs of a bubble in existence. but the thing is that bubbles burst and the market corrects itself. it doesn't mean ALL the rise should go away just because it was explosive. for example if we have $100 rise that leads to a bubble the correction is $20 of that going away not the whole $100 rise. and that is the part that people confuse. they think the whole $100 should go away and price should go back to the initial value for the bubble to stop existing.

although you should not confuse a "bubble" in a real asset like bitcoin with a "bubble" in a pump and dump altcoins. the later is completely fake price so it needs to go back down to initial value. in other words it needs to lose the whole $100 rise to exit the bubble.

i believe there are about a dozen of stable coins currently in existence but majority of them are too small that aren't even worth talking about. that leaves only USDT which has a high volume.
by the way they are not the "best" way to preserve your value because they are risky coin and although coins like USDT rarely go down in price but they are still centralized and can crash hard if something were to happen to the company creating them.

not to mention that it is one of the biggest real use cases of Lightning Network which has actually been used a lot. i believe they have already received more than 2 whole bitcoins through their LN channel.

i won't because bitcoin is a currency and people shouldn't buy it because they want an investment or store of value in my opinion.