it is easier to accumulate it through deposits they ran the promotion a couple of times already and it is specially good for those who were already investing in the site for the daily profit (in the EARN BTC tab) to increase their chance.
ps. the only reason why i which the bitcoin price to stay down is because the winning reward in bitcoin would be a lot higher ... ($200k/$8300=BTC24.09)

bitcoin dominance  is not rising it has always been high. the thing you are referring to has nothing to do with dominance and it was only a percentage that showed the level of bitcoin supply compared to the total supply of about 3000 shitcoins. as a lot of shitcoins died over the past year and the rest of them lost major percentage of their prices and remained that way, that percentage which you refer to as dominance grew.

all you know is that X amount of bitcoin has moved from address1 to address2. everything else (such as this being a whale and not being Bitstamp itself) is purely your imagination.

that is a bullshit website created to only get traffic by posting nonsense about large transactions.

altcoins can only keep up with bitcoin if and only if they start having real world usages, otherwise as long as they are purely for trading purposes they won't even survive in long run let alone keep up!

very good point.
the thing about Vitalik is that he created ethereum to make money nothing else. at that time (in early days) to get it pumped he had to make big claims like that. it is not just these simple statements like "world computer" it is about the fact that they even attacked bitcoin with sever criticism that it has high fees and claimed their coin will never have high fees. soon after they made this accusation ETH transaction fees went to $5 and more.
the problem is that even though there are many differences between ethereum and bitcoin, it is still a copy of bitcoin and because of that you can't make its blocks fast as 1 second and it will never have scalability. but when you ignore that and try it just for short term hype and dump you'll end up with 3 TB blockchain

you are confusing "hoping for a pump" with "believing in the project".
ethereum is one of the altcoins with the most number of naive bag holders. these bag holders are always hoping to see their massive losses be covered and maybe eventually even see some profit after a couple of years of brutal losses.
that is why they are currently so hopeful to see the pumps eventually start with the 2.0 nonsense. but if you actually check the project, the upgrade,... you can see that nothing is going to really change about ethereum. it is still the same centralized broken project with unlimited supply and no usage ever since ICO hype died.

i think it is mainly because of all the legal problems that Libra and Facebook have been facing lately and the fact that many countries have already banned Libra even before it is even launched. it seems like Facebook is still going ahead with the launch so i wouldn't say it is not going anywhere but it surely is a failed project before its launch simply because it is centralized!

nah, it is just the bounce back from the big drop that we had. it has nothing to do with Bakkt and its volume although it is still interesting to see how it is slowly but surely growing even though people tried to belittle it when it first started up.
for now there isn't any real resistances ahead of us. the problem in my opinion is that there isn't any buying power to bring the price up and test any resistance since investors are scared now and want to wait before jumping back in again.

how can there be any "analysis report" when by nature these types of purchases are done privately. for example some investor who directly goes to miners and makes a deal/contract to receive "fresh" coins is doing it to increase their privacy and unless them willingly announce it to the world we can not know anything about it.

if you define "successful" as creating a project that is used in real life and solving a problem in the real world then there has never been any "successful" ICO and they have all been scams since none of them has ever delivered anything.
but of course when you define "success" as being pumped a lot initially before they get dumped then 90% of ICOs were successful!

stop blaming bitcoin for the failure of shitcoins.

altcoins are down 80% to 99% because they are pump and dump schemes that have been pumped before and went into unrealistic prices and now that they have lost 99% of that ATH they are starting to get closer to their realistic prices.
it has nothing to do with bitcoin and it being volatile.

no, there is no cycle. you and OP are overthinking it.
the consensus rule is that every 210,000 blocks the block reward must be cut in half. the way implementations of bitcoin consensus rule turn that rule into code is up to them. here the decision is to do it with a shift because shifts are faster and also it uses a 64-bit integer because there is no point in using anything bigger!
this has nothing to do with code limitation, there just is no point in doing it any other way.

think of it this way. you have a small box containing your junk and you want to store it somewhere. you may add some junk to that box later but not for years. for storage you could use your garage, or you could rent a storage unit somewhere or you could rent a gigantic villa and store that tiny box alone there! obviously the choice is your garage until it become bigger that you need a bigger space but not sooner.

this is not a bug, this is more like a convenience. right now and until hundreds of years we are going to use fixed bit integers (such as 32 and 64 bit ints) to represent a lot of things. in programming we do this all the time. for example the year 2038 problem in time representation has been a thing for a long time as we were using 32 bit integers. now we are using 64 bit integers and that postpones it until we change it in a couple of hundred years!

the same is happening here, after a hundred years when we get close to this being a problem, by that time computers will surely support 256 bit numbers by default as their small integers that a CPU can handle in one call and we simply change int64_t to int256_t without needing any kind of hard fork or anything like that.

changing that line of code right now to anything bigger like 256-bit would require handling 192-bits of zero for no reason for 200+ years!

well first of all post the link to the lines of code that you think are doing this.

secondly even if there is such a thing in the code (which i seriously doubt it), it is a bug. and bugs don't define bitcoin. they will be fixed and removed. just like the inflation but that bitcoin experienced in early years. that didn't change anything about the supply even though the bug existed.

as far as i can tell there ha never been any "ban" on cryptocurrency "trading" in China. the only thing they have ever banned was ICOs because of obvious reasons (being scams and all that) and also they closed down the Chinese exchanges which were laundering money more than anything else.

lol. no it doesn't
is it April already?

they are trying so hard to save their failing project and every day the bloat on the blockchain becomes bigger and makes it more centralized as people can no longer even run a full node. the worst part is that there is no solution to solve something that has been broken before.
in my opinion, right now they are delaying any kind of upgrade because they want to benefit from its hype and pump their token hard. but if they do it now, since ethereum is still in dumping mode, their attempts at hyping and pumping in that order will fail miserably and that is their last shot.

people who are doing that are not using technical analysis. they are drawing random lines to create an illusion of them using TA so that their wishes look more like reality and in most cases they hope to get others to follow their wished direction.
for example nowadays even though there is no indication of a downtrend apart from the one time drop that we had more than 2 weeks ago, a lot of these so called TA posters are drawing lines aiming for lower prices such as $3k!

is a "pickpocket" an honest "legit" person?
it is the same with "pump and dump" groups. by nature they are scammers that are not manipulating the market but instead they are manipulating the people who visit their channels and read their content. you shouldn't confuse the pump and dump "group" with the "act" of pump and dumping. you can make profit if you find a pump on your own but you will definitely lose money by going to a group.

i don't like your categorization, i prefer to categorize them like this: physical versus digital money and also centralized versus decentralized currencies.

there has obviously been a transition going on for some time now from the physical form of money to more digital which includes credit cards, online payment processors, cryptocurrencies,... this transition won't complete in one day. it will take many years to complete as it is with any other transition. people didn't switch to paper money in one day to now want to switch to digital money. but eventually we stop seeing physical money to exist.
so to answer your "modified" question, no cash (the physical form) will cease to exist eventually.

the other category is different. i don't think we can ever see a replacement of centralization with full decentralization. as we can see already, bitcoin is used but it is not meant to replace fiat.
so to answer your "modified" question again, yes both centralized and decentralized currencies will coexist in the future.

i don't think we can ever make the entire world decentralized, i don't think that can even work. there are a lot of aspects in our lives that work a lot better if they are centralized. not to mention that it is always in human nature to follow a leader (aka the centralized power) and give up their own control. and in many aspects this works fine.
but in other things, for example a payment system, reaching full decentralization is possible. we have already done it with bitcoin and are increasing it every day too.