people love to blame others for their own mistakes. they invest in shitcoins and scammy ICOs that were created to rip them off and when they lose money after the ICO dump came they want to find someone else to blame and who better than bounty participants that have a small share in the total tokens!

the reality is that the dumps are natural and they would have came either way as they have come to all the pumped altcoins.

you need to know two things.
first is that people only get in altcoins that can give them profit. then don't care about anything. they can be centralized, buggy, scammy, or they may not even exist in reality. for example i have seen people trade coins that are no longer generating new blocks, there literary is no more mining but they are being traded!
second is the fact that centralized coins like XRP and ETH have centralized funds to pump them and keep them alive. they are not like decentralized altcoins that solely depend on the community to keep them alive.  so they won't go away that easily.

the lack of understanding of some people on this forum is just surprising and the fact that they start topics like this "warning" others is even more surprising!
OP doen't even realize that addresses do not even exist in bitcoin. address (starting with 1 as OP insists on) is something that the end user who doesn't need to know what is going on in the background sees in his GUI and nothing else. an address is the hash of the public key and using a different version byte and a different formatting can give you a different address which bitcoin and the network don't care about at all.

as for LN he is just digging up and old bullshit spam by Fyookooliballz
right now there are thousands of LN nodes and millions of dollars have already been transacted using LN... now you keep on keeping your head in the sand and on /r/btc...

if you want to spread FUD, at least learn the basics and learn how FUD works.

i am starting to think that nobody gives a shit about SEC and ETF at all. at least all of real traders don't, maybe newbies are different. BUT the difference is that everyone also is afraid of how others (the market basically) is going to react to the news so they speculate about that reaction and then act on it.

for example with the rejection of an ETF that happened recently the speculation was a drop so they started selling. then with the postponing of the decision about the other ETF there was another speculation of drop so they panic sold again.

but there is a huge difference that you are forgetting about. today market is just recovering from a bubble and a bear market and lots of manipulative dumps.
but in 2014 all the things i just said were happening but also the market was recovering from two of the biggest incidents that damaged the market greatly. one was scam of Mt Gox, the biggest bitcoin exchange to date with 80% of the volume, and the other was silkroad and all that  crap closing down.
by that time money was just exiting the market with not much coming in but now money is coming it with not much exiting.

this is one of the main reasons why i don't think we can see a prolonged bear market and stay at this bottom for a very long time.

as far as i know bitcoin has never been considered a "security" by the US government to now want to change. it was considered a "commodity" and as for ETH they never defined it because they couldn't define a premined platform.
i also would love to see the link to where they made regulations regarding ICO because i have not seen any yet.

if you think it is possible in the future then you also must think it is possible to happen this year because there is nothing that can change things in the future that can not change now. not to mention that the more we stay above $6000 (the bottom that was reached and tested multiple times) the stronger the support at that level becomes and eventually it will become a psychological thing where people automatically buy at $6000 and don't let it fall below. which is why in long term it is impossible to go below.

most of these so called "cryptocurrencies" are created for pump and dump and profiting reasons so in the future we will continue seeing the same thing. just like the penny stocks but with the difference that anybody can create a new coin and enter the market with it so that they can earn money from pumps. i don't see this changing ever.

there is no altcoin that i never sell because all of them are either pure pump and dumps like the top 10 coins or they are being pumped and dumped which means if you are right in the head you wouldn't bag hold them.

as for believing in, there are rare cases that i find interesting. for example i am very interested in Byteball but i don't believe in it 100%, i just think it is a good coin with good features and more importantly a good developer behind it which is trying his best.

a coin doesn't just die for no reason. you said it yourself "they died for a good reason" then you contradict it by saying "world was not ready for them"!
basically if a coin was any good then it wouldn't have died in first place because there would at least be 1 person in the world that would have seen that "goodness" and kept the coin.
most of the coins that have died are poor copies of another coin so there is no reason for them to come back. also the problem that caused their death has not gone away. it still is there and eve if someone revives them, they would just die again.

and why would anyone want to revive a dead coin when there is an alternative option? you can simply start the same coin from scratch and fix the issues that it had to try again.

basically it is because some people think the market is magic and it goes up out of nowhere and for no reason. they think a useless token that is created out of thin air and does absolutely nothing should also magically rise up out of thin air!

you should ask them why they didn't buy that coin or token if they thought it is such an awesome project. most of these dudes have not even checked what the token they are buying is. they just looked at the website and thought the design of the website is good so the token must be good too.
then when the dump comes they are surprised!

i am not going to tell you what to do and what not to do. that part is on you.
if you want to be successful as a trader and make profit "consistently" instead of winning a couple of traders (bets) and then losing the rest, then you have to learn to make these decisions yourself. try watching the market and looking at historical charts and compare them with each other and with bitcoin to see how you should really work in altcoin market.

and why do you think it is "too much", what criteria is making a price "too much" and another "too low"?

bitcoin is extremely under-priced not just because it went to a certain price and came back but because of what it does and what it is and also the limited supply that it has. when price goes from $1000 to $20000 in one year it shows how much money has always been waiting to come in and how much demand there is for bitcoin. everyone plays it down specially the media to pretend it is not happening but it is.

this could have been a theory only if the idea of a blockchain technology such a what bitcoin uses wasn't already around and only if there hasn't been any previous systems like bitcoin. which there were!

there is absolutely nothing important about that field in field in coinmarketcap called "bitcoin dominance"! that number you see there can say 99.9999% or it can say 0.000001% and it still wouldn't change a damn thing. bitcoin is still going to be the dominant cryptocurrency and the altcoins are still going to remain the same pump and dumps schemes that nobody takes seriously apart from sad bag holders.

most of the things you mentioned here are either wrong, exaggerated or FUD!

China is not bigger than any other country. they just have more population. they have been in bitcoin from the start like many other countries. they have been bigger than some and smaller than others. this has not changed in the past 9 years. the only thing that has changed is the fact that their government closed down some exchanges that were laundering money and doing some other illegal activities, these exchanges happened to also report fake huge volumes to mask their illegal activities.
their closure meant the Chinese volume drop in stats but it came to reality it didn't exactly drop.
meanwhile the trading volume went elsewhere, meaning to other exchanges and to p2p trading.

you can say all these silly stuff about market cap and compare it with Apple and the rest of the world and suppress your rational fear of the altcoin market but in the end you will come to rue the day you did that when you started losing a substantial amount of money and ended up being bankrupt still dreaming of that $1 million that never came because you were bag holding useless shitcoins instead of trading them short term for the profit.

you do have point here about the gains and investors should have more realistic expectations but also lets not start comparing bitcoin with other assets because there is nothing like bitcoin. 50% for bitcoin is one of the most common gains. when you want to compare, you should only compare bitcoin to itself not something else because it has nothing in common with others.

as a matter of fact when you are investing in ETF it is less secure than when you are investing in bitcoin directly. because when you invest in ETF you don't buy bitcoin, you buy ETF which is basically a promise that the centralized company gives you that is equivalent of bitcoin amount. so you have to trust them. but when you buy bitcoin you buy bitcoin, you hold bitcoin and you secure it in your own wallet with the private keys that are unbreakable so no one can take them away from you and you don't need any third parties for storing and using those coins.
this also means the funds aren't coming in bitcoin, the funds are going in ETF which won't affect bitcoin price directly. the hype may get to the market and increase the price for a little while but that won't last.

in a way i think it is a positive news that they (Starbucks and Microsoft) are not accepting bitcoin in a much easier way (although Microsoft has been accepting bitcoin directly for a very long time). but also i am still skeptical about Bakkt. i don't know if it is completely a good thing or a bad thing disguised as good and has centralization coming in.