investing in an ICO has always been a gamble because you have no idea what you are getting into. sometimes the team is good at pumping it and you can make a good profit and sometimes they are bad or even good at pumping but they fail to do it and you lose money. there is also a lot of scammers just waiting to take your money and run away in an obvious way not like the others who are sugar coating it.

currently with all the bans and the drops in the market ICOs aren't having the best time. there is failure all around the market and there is a lot of money exiting the market which makes it even less profitable because newbies are running away.

FUD and bad news are never the main reason for the drops, they can only intensify a drop. the reason for any drop is either normal correction (like the drop from $20k) or whale manipulation (like the drop from $10k till now). then the FUD is like the icing on the cake for that.

if you look at the news during rises you can see that the FUD still exists during the rises too. even when price was shooting up towards $20k without slowing down we had a shitload of FUD (like the Tether FUD) and lots of negative news (like Mt Gox selling their coins during that rise) but none of them could cause the drop because they are not the cause.

of course it is possible. bitcoin is not a trademark belonging to some company which can sue you for abusing its name! so you can abuse it anytime you want but the community is wiser than that. they realize it will be a shitcoin. and it has already happened multiple times because people don't realize that it is not the name, nor the supply that makes bitcoin good. but it is the whole system, being decentralized, having  limited supply, being safe, having no issues, being easy to use, ....

will a token have any advantage over bitcoin? the answer is LOL. a token is virtual thing that is relying on another platform to function! if that platform goes down or has bugs (which ETH has lots of them) that token will also be affected and there is nothing you (or the token owner/developer) can do about it! bitcoin is a stand alone currency that relies on nothing else but itself.

$200 change in $6700 is nothing. it is just 2% and when we are talking about bitcoin price changes anything that is below 10% is just normal market movements that sometimes is caused by a tiny sell or buy because the market is small and the order books are thin specially these days that the manipulation has scared many investors into holding their fiat and waiting outside of the market for it to end before the re-invest.

yes it is required and it is not increasing awareness it is increasing the number of advertisers who will then increase the number of victims of that ICO which can in turn increase its initial price and will surely increase the amount of money the ICO owners will earn out of thin air.
sometimes if you don't give the token away you won't be able to find anyone to even look at your useless token because it is useless!

there are a couple of things that you are getting wrong here.
first of all is the fact that you don't need prices to rise in order to make a profit from altcoins. you can always short them and make profit, you can also always make profit from their dead cat bounce during dumps.
secondly there is nearly 2000 altcoins out there don't just stick to a couple, try to look where the wise money is going and follow it to make profit. there are at least half a dozen altcoins every day that are getting pumped.

there has never been a certain date when pumps occur. they always happen.

this is also happening all year long every year. it is just more noticeable because the biggest coin like ETH are also getting dumped!

as i said there are no "cycles". it is just money moving around. the money was in the big coins and now it is in the small coins mostly. and if anything the "cycle" is known to start during summer not after it.

i disagree with this too. if you want to keep out of the market then go back to either bitcoin or fiat not an altcoin such as TUST, USDT,... they are centralized and risky even riskier than the altcoins themselves even if you see the price has been stable so far that doesn't mean it won't change a minute from now.

a couple of years ago nobody talked about market cap that much and all these silly rankings weren't important although they existed. ever since ETH started getting pumped they also used the market cap to advertise it as being good only because it is number 2  while it had nearly 90% of its supply in premine (72 million). and the only reason why it is being used by ICOs is the fact that it is hyped up and is in #2 place otherwise it is neither good to use nor easy nor cheap!


i hope it happens. because by then we may finally see people stop referring to market cap as "market dominance" and stop using it to rank coins.

the volume has not decreased that much and that little drop was mainly because people are not sure where this is all going, they mainly wait to see what will happen before jumping back in again. for now there is a large amount of money out of the market and watching which is why at times like this when price recovers we see a huge surge upwards that is too sharp

you can't call it "in the green" when they are having dead cat bounces. for example when the altcoins get dumped hard but recover a tiny bit after their hard drop that is not called a "gain" or "in the green" it is called "dead cat bounce" when the altcoin drops $100 but recovers $10 after it.

also if you want to see real rises (aka pumps) in the market then all you have to do is look. those coins that have been dumped hard enough to reach their bottoms fast are now rising easily but those coins that had slow dumps (like the top altcoins) are still looking forward to more dumps.

here are the pumps of the day:

the answer to these questions is always pretty easy because the data is available to everyone who cares enough to use it! you just have to NOT be lazy.

for example go to coinmarketcap.com open the page belonging to bitcoin and then choose a date in the past, preferably more than 1 year ago if you want to see the long term performance. for example you can start from 1-1-2017 for ease of use. now calculate the % of the profit from that date until today.
then choose any other altcoin and do the same with the same dates and compare the % with each other.

now for the fun of it only select the pumping period of the altcoin (for example the 1 month that XRP was getting pumped) and calculate the % profit of that.
the result is simple in long term bitcoin will have the biggest % profit easy and with minimal risk.
in short term shitcoins have the best profit. for example Mooncoin which is a deadcaoin had one of the biggest pumps that i can remember which was about 6500% in less than 2 weeks. then it died again.

you can not have any feeling of the market whenever there is manipulation in it. you can make random guesses like when you roll a  dice and maybe you get lucky and your guess comes true but there is absolutely no way that you can make a proper educated guess or speculation about the market at this point. we are all in the dark and as it can be seen from the decrease in the volume, majority of traders are waiting to see what is going to happen which leads me to believe we are reaching the end of this manipulative trend.

you know what, sometimes you don't even need to know the reason for it! you just have to know that when bitcoin goes down, altcoins get dumped right afterwards. this can create a lot of good trading strategies for you. for example you place a watcher on bitcoin price and as soon as you see the drop (within seconds) you short altcoins and wait for them to reach the bottom and have a dead cat bounce to make another quick profit.

the article is mostly exaggeration and it has zero proof of anything. it is the follow up of the drama that stirred up by the paper by John Griffin which is mostly an academic paper exploring the theories about manipulation rather than having that many facts and proofs.

in the end we all know there is manipulation in bitcoin market. specially these days that they are artificially pushing the price down but when the media starts picking up on it and makes it bigger than it is, then it turns into another bullshit to use to FUD bitcoin.

will it rise again? absolutely.
when? as soon as the dumps are done and there were no bubbles any more.

you can look at the somewhat unknown altcoins. those that are outside of the first 20-50 altcoins out there. these coins were pumped. then they got dumped and their bubbles no longer remain. what happens is that they are ready to be pumped and many of them are already getting pumped. but if you look at the top 20-50 coins like ethereum, they got pumped but their dumps has been slow so they are still in bubbles and nowhere near ready for the next pump. which is why they are not yet rising.

that is where you are  wrong and it is in my opinion the main reason why we have so many pump and dumps these days and that is why the whales are becoming bigger and bigger thanks to you!

the fact is crypto is not supposed to give you that much profit. the way it does is through pumps. if you can catch the pumps then good. you will be able to make 300% profit each couple of days (1 week worst case scenario). but only if you know how to benefit from pumps and also more importantly if you remember to dump the coins before their pump is over not continue holding them even after they were done pumping!!!

the idea of a "portfolio" has been twisted when it comes to cryptocurrencies.
in reality a "portfolio" is used to fill your basket with different assets that are not connected to each other and also to reduce the risk by diversifying and  diversification on its own means investing in different assets that are not related to each other. otherwise if you are simply buying different things that are connected you are just fooling yourself.

in this case when you buy altcoins and call that a "portfolio" or "diversification" you are doing everything wrong. as others pointed out your profit is going to be minimal if you are lucky and if not you will be in a big loss.
 altcoins are not known to perform well in the long run.

just FYI
mining pool: is basically a server without any hashrate. people from different locations with actual mining hardware and real hashing power connect to that pool so that they can meet with others and share/pool the work.
mining farm: is a place owned by someone (like a storage space, a factory, your backyard,...) which has multiple ASICs that are producing the hashrate and mine bitcoin.

so which one do you want to have?
if it is a mining pool then there are two problems. people in your city have to have ASIC to connect and mine bitcoin and why would then connect to your pool? there are other pools out there.
if it is a mining farm then why do you need people to connect to you? and what is that part about "smartphones"? do you want to have some sort of hashrate-lending-service like the cloudmining services? in which case it is a terrible idea.

for the past 3 years that ethereum existed the only usage that it had was smart contracts (something that bitcoin and at least 50 other altcoins also do and some of them do it a lot better). in these 3 years there has been thousands of smart contracts created each more useless than the last. people only buy ETH for speculation or to buy ICOs and gamble.
people also buy bitcoin for speculation but they also buy it because it is a decentralized money and also a secure store of value.
that is usability and adoption for you.

as for security, with the speed that ETH blockchain is growing the nodes will centralize to only a handful of nodes that can handle 1, 2, 10 TB  and growing fast. and that opens ups easy attack surfaces.
there has been a lot of hacks of the main client that the developing team releases and millions have been lost multiple times. latest of them have been the multisignature feature being buggy and $110 million was lost!
as for smart contracts (the only usage of ETH) it is easily exploitable. DAO is the biggest example which was not fixed but instead "rolled back" which also proved that ETH is not Immutable. the worst part is issues similar to DAO happened multiple times after that but there was no "roll back" for them and they were swept under the rug because the foundation never invested in those but they have invested in DAO! immutability may not mean anything to you but it is one of the fundamentals of blockchain technology and without it this technology means nothing.
that's security for you.

as for innovation and technology, all of the ideas that Vitalik used have been either proposed or discussed by bitcoin developers and put down because of the problems they imposed. there is nothing new about ethereum, there is just an interesting idea to allow such a platform for smart contracts, i admit that but with side chains on bitcoin this idea will exist for bitcoin in a much better, efficient and cheaper way!


not it had never have anything to do with being "first mover". and bitcoin is not at all the first mover. there have been other projects (altcoins if you will) before bitcoin was even created. they do not exist today but bitcoin does.

in my theory there are 3 different groups of people investing
1. the solid investors who analyzed everything and then brought their money in. these people invest in bitcoin not because it is #1 but because because they see the reality of it. for example if you go to Microsoft website, or Dell or previously Steam, .... or go to offline shops for instance in malls in Japan,... you can see bitcoin is accepted as a real currency as payment. but not other shitcoins even if their rank is #2 or whatever or even if their advertisers tell you how awesome they are!
2. the more risk taking investors. these will want profit so they go to altcoins. for them the ranking does not matter. profit is all that matters. this profit can be brought to them by #2 coin or #1700 coin.
3. the newbies. these form the bulk of the market and they are usually running around and putting their money in different places and let it sleep there for a long time. they basically make a bet and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. for them, the ranking is everything. if a coin is #1, 2,... or top10 they will  get more excited  than a coin with rank #269 even if it can give them 10 times the profit.

based on my observation using the blockchain technology to create a decentralized currency has been the only usage of this technology. there are other possible usages but they have all remained as a possibility so far and each time we see another usage for example the DAPs that you mentioned we only see some bullshit excuse to create something to make money out of not to solve anything.

so yes cryptocurrency will remain the main application of this technology and bitcoin will remain the only one that is doing it right for the foreseeable future.