the only thing you need to know is that blockchain technology is not something that one country can control. it is the technology that is open source and anyone who wants can get on board NOW and become the giants of tomorrow. for example you can see even small countries such as Venezuela are getting on board pretty seriously and they are even mass educating their population. these countries will become big in the blockchain technology in a couple of years. it won't just be Russia to dictate anything.

cheap? if you are looking for making a quick profit this week then you are looking for pumps. so you need to follow the money and see where it is going. today it seems like it is going in a couple of coins but i personally have my eye on NANO and i think it is having a good day ahead of it with a nice little pump coming for it.

you mean the technology alone be adopted?
yes, but i don't see any change in the speed of it. it has been going on for a while. banks, governments, and a lot of other sectors even have been adopting the blockchain technology for themselves. we already have 2 or 3 altcoins issued by the government of different countries. for example the Petro which belongs to Venezuelan government. this will continue to happen this year too. of course the adoption is always speeding up but there is no indication of this process to speed up more than usual for now.

but if you mean adoption of altcoins?
then no, i think it will actually go down because last year proved to a lot of newbies that they can simply lose a lot of money and the valuable experience thy gained was the fact that more than 90% of the altcoins are purely pump and dumps, specially the top 10 coins which are advertised the most...

these two statements are very misleading. because "can" in this context means there is a 0.000001% chance of that happening.
we all know that bitcoin is still pretty volatile and market is so small still. so an unexpected incident like a big exchange (like coinbase for example) getting hacked can cause havoc. but what are the chances of that unexpected incident happening?
we only have trends and what currently is going on with the market and we need to speculate based on that, not what might be. and what we have is a rising trend with a strong buy support.

reason number 2 doesn't mean anything at all apart from some social media hype that may or may not help the pump. and the other 3 reasons you are separating from each other are basically the same thing. and they are all repeating the same old false hype about Ripple partnership with X number of banks! the funny thing is that these banks have never even be interested in XRP and they have always discarded it as fast and hard as they could and instead they took the technology for themselves!
none of these are a reason for such a huge pump of XRP. we will surely see pumps of this useless coin but to have such a huge pump we need the same scenarios as last year with a lot of pumps and lot of newbies coming in so that we can steal their moneyz.

slowly but surely people are going to realize that ICOs have always been empty promises since now the older ones are now truly showing their faces and also because there have been a lot of scams. this is the same faith as the premined altcoins! they also had a good run initially and a lot of money changed hand in the early days of that old scam but eventually people started to learn and stopped being so dumb enough to give their money to these premined shitcoins.

i honestly don't know if this is a good news or a bad one!
of course this is expected because sooner or later everyone is going to get on the bitcoin train because so far they are past the different stages of denial and despair and now they see they have no other choice but to get on board.
but them getting involved with bitcoin can bring some havoc on the market even if it is for a short term.


lol, i think you are confusing bitcoin with some shitcoins that get hacked every week such as ethereum

litecoin is one of the rare altcoins that actually follows bitcoin everywhere.
in other words what you see as "breaking downtrend" is because bitcoin stopped dropping and has reversed some time ago and is now on the rise. so litecoin is also following it right now to the top.
and of course there is always all the efforts and advertisement done by the creator and developer of litecoin, Charlie Lee.

and why is it that you think that? just because there was a lot of spam on reddit and elsewhere saying "bitcoin is a store of value" it doesn't mean people actually believe it. and it certainly doesn't mean the value of bitcoin is like this because of that way of thinking!
the only thing that shows is the fact that there has been a spamvertising campaign going on similar to the spamvertising campaign saying "bitcoin cash is real bitcoin".

from the dawn of altcoins everyone wanted to make a lot of money from them so they have been doing everything they could to make that large amount of money. their methods have been changing but the main purpose is always the same. from about a year ago the ICO fever started and people saw they could make a lot of money fast and easy by just creating a new shitty ICO. ever since that day they have been doing just that. it is simple and it doesn't need a full on project and blockchain and doesn't require that much coding. it is just copy paste for the most part.

the amount lost for real is never going to be that much and also you are assuming people are going to continue losing bitcoin over time is not as correct as you think. obviously losses will happen but not as much as before. the more valuable bitcoin is becoming and the more education people are receiving the less losses are going to happen. for example back when you could find a block with your CPU and get 50BTC you never cared enough to hold it so there are a lot of lost wallets with large amounts of bitcoin in them.
but as bitcoin value is higher and will be higher in the future also people aren't going to be as careless. and also each person is not going to have 10000 bitcoin to lose. they will have smaller like 0.01 to lose so the total is not going to be that much either. (it is declining).

and finally i should add that the cap is at 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshi. there is enough zeros to cover any losses.

it doesn't seem like a newbie question. i would also want to know why OP thinks the volume is weak! it actually has been about 6-8 billion dollar every day of the past week.
with that said the price and how it currently is performing has nothing to do with the volume, the volume is always lower when price movements are smaller. but the fact that it is still higher that other times when price was stable you can consider this phase as an accumulation where buys are happening a lot despite price being kept down.

no bitcoin is a currency. and all the value that it has comes from it being a currency. if you remove that part of it and turn it into what bitcoin.org people was pushing (ie store of value) then you will be killing its value.
it is good to see this nonsense has stopped!

invest in what?
you can never talk about the market as a whole because when it comes to pumps each altcoin performs individually. for example in the past couple of days i have bought 2 different coins (shitcoins to be exact) which got pumped more than 100% and i gained some profit from these big pumps easy in a couple of days only.
the timing is dependent on individual coins and whether they are in a bubble or not and if they have a pump on the way.

Polo is no longer as popular as it once was and its popularity keeps on declining as other new exchanges come along with better everything such as Binance!
and i don't think they will ever bring back Monero, it is the fear that led them to de-list it and it was possibly because of fear of some 3 letter agencies since they are based in USA

i disagree with both of these.
it doesn't look like resistance to me, it is more like an accumulation phase where the whales are continuously buying bitcoin while keeping the price at the same level as best as they can so that they can accumulate more. this phase is one of the most  common phases before a big break out.
and regarding the drop i have to say if we were to see a drop we would have seen it each time price tries to go up above $10k and fails not after it went above it. everyone who wants to panic dump they are doing it now with each manipulative dump to prevent the rise.

regulated exchanges that operate under government supervision and according to law a lot more trustworthy than unregulated exchanges which are shady and are run without any supervision and can scam you and run away at any moment. it is like the difference between NASDAQ and Yobit

so if bitcoin was listed on such exchanges a lot more people will be willing to invest in it because of a lot lower risk, so it can increase the adoption and the price can go up.

you can at this point because this news is old, even when this topic was started it was rather old and as you can see from the price history now (and also by that time) this news had no effects on price whatsoever. and news like this are not known to have any effect on bitcoin when a small country with no prior affiliation with bitcoin does something to it not to mention this was not even a major thing.

there are two kinds of pumps.
1. the individual altcoin pumps.
these are happening every single day without an exception. there is no stopping that even if 1500 altcoins are in red and bitcoin is also in red, there always is a couple of altcoins that are getting pumped.
2. pumping season where every altcoin is getting pumped.
this is rare and it is usually happening in summer when the market is filled with more newbies. and for this the market has to first be purged from them and the altcoins have to be properly dumped.

value is always based on utility. altcoins have none of that so their only value comes from speculation and it is purely depending on how the speculators are treating the market. and since most of them are only interested in making profit and getting out, the altcoins have turned into pump and dumps where they go in, pump, get out and move on to the next one.

the real value however should be given to innovation and to those coins that are actually solving some problems. but unfortunately such coins go unnoticed only because their supply is reasonable hence their market caps are smaller.