this question is being asked nearly every week and every one of you who ever asks this only starts topics like it because they have bought ethereum and want to get rich. you people think just because bitcoin has gone up to $10k+ that means any other shitcoin can also do the same!

but what you are forgetting is that bitcoin didn't rise by chance! it went up because it is useful. you can use bitcoin as a currency, it has real merchant adoption so it is actually doing something in the world.
in comparison ethereum does nothing. it is just a platform like 20 other platforms that offers smart contract features in a bad way actually, and it is only worth higher than the rest because it is advertised and pumped more.

additionally you are forgetting that bitcoin has 16.8 million coins in circulation and will stop at 21 million.
while ethereum has nearly 100 million and will never stop creating new supply.

in other words the following statement:
is basically saying that a coin with a huge supply and an unlimited supply can be worth higher than bitcoin with limited and small supply!
if you tell that to anyone who knows basic economy they will die of laughter

you are asking two different question without knowing it.
one is about bitcoin price rise and another is about what people call dominance by mistake.

regarding price rise you should know that bitcoin rises more and it is a solid rise because it has real usage. it is the biggest coin which has actual "currency usage in real world" and altcoins lack this important factor. and thanks to that bitcoin's adoption increases so its price increases more and has no permanent drops while altcoins get pumped and when they are dumped it is usually a permanent price loss.

regarding what they call "dominance" you should know that it is simply a false factor called market cap. and total market cap was mainly bloated thanks to creation of hundreds of altcoins and tokens in the past couple of months and also huge pumps of all coins specially big ones like ripple and ethereum which bloated the total marketcap and decreases the share of bitcoin. these 2 caused the drop to 40% or whatever % you saw and now that they both are going away the % is rising back up again.
in any case it has nothing to do with "dominance".

yes they can. a bitcoin block can be valid as long as it has at least one transaction and that one transaction is the coinbase tx which is giving the founder of the block the block reward plus fees. there is nothing forcing a miner to include any additional transactions in that block, only an incentive to get the fees.

if you check the blocks that are found every day you sometimes see these "empty" blocks right now. of course the reason for them is different (for example spy mining). or you can simply check the early blocks (anything below 100) to see empty blocks.
example:
Block #511512
 https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000000d637d922588b7d30c85fd35d87b42ef86a8ce9609764e
Block #10
https://blockchain.info/block/000000002c05cc2e78923c34df87fd108b22221ac6076c18f3ade378a4d915e9

nothing happens because there is nothing significant about $11k anymore. it is one of the prices that bitcoin keeps visiting and until it reaches a much higher price like $12k, you can not say anything or be excited about this price.
* it can go to above $11k again like last couple of times and go back down to $9k range this time test the bottom at $9800 possibly and then rise up again.
* or it can go above $11k and break out and we see the rally be started.

there is no possible way to say which one is going to happen though.

don't confuse warnings with full on opposition.

it is logical to give warnings about cryptocurrencies and encourage people to invest more responsibly. all the countries have already given such warnings because people have been getting reckless and were taking huge risks, for example using their credit cards and maxing them out to buy bitcoin.

but going against bitcoin, banning it,... and generally any FUD is a different story. it is not something you should follow. you should stop believing in your government if they do something like that, and maybe they need to be changed if they are setting laws that are against what you believe in...

best thing to do is to look at the charts of an altcoin.
market cap, paper, blockchain, ... are all useless when it comes to altcoins which can get pumped just because some pump group or some whales decided they wanted to make money from that altcoin. and looking at these things won't tell you when the pump is going to come. although you can know that a coin with huge market cap can not be pumped big time anymore but a small market cap coin can get pumped 10000 times and give that much profit to you.

a couple of weeks ago when the "drop" was speculated because of Chinese holidays and lots of FUD about banning bitcoin and bullshit like that, the drop happened. and when it was over the recovery and then the followup rise from the bottom $6000 to $10000+, you can call that the rise.

also you can see that ever since passing $10k, each drop is smaller than the last one and the price reaches a little higher on each followup rise. this can mean money is coming back to the market but slowly. if it breaks $12k you can be absolutely sure that it is THE rise.

one of the countries with the most corrupted banking system adopts Ripple which is the most centralized altcoin out there.
the worst part is, India has been showing all signs of being against bitcoin and altcoins for a good part of last year to this day. if they did really adopt Ripple then i think we should seriously stay away from this coin because it starting to smell more and more fishy every day.

check out TradingView, i know it has bitcoin and i have seen some people link some of the altcoins where they did some analysis on.
https://www.tradingview.com/s/bitcoin/


here is what it says below "technical support" board:
"Questions regarding issues with Bitcoin Core, nodes, the Bitcoin network, transactions, and addresses."
do you see any remote connection between any of that with "Technical Analysis"[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis

first you need to figure out what your country's tax laws about bitcoin are. you can also consult some professionals in this matter, specially if you have been trading a lot i urge you to do this. their fee is nothing compared to what fines you may have to pay if you don't pay your taxes.
then you calculate them and pay it. and i believe the tax you pay is based on your "profit" not capital. so it can not be more than your profit.

ripple is one of those coins that is 100% pure pump and dump. other altcoins may have some extra thing going on for them like ethereum having the ICO pumps, but Ripple has nothing more than pure pump and dump.

so they way these pump and dump coins work is that they have a period of pumping where they can even reach a big ATH and there is a lot of profit there. for example we saw 7000% rise in it thanks to the gigantic pump of it. but after the pump is over, there will be a very long dumping phase where first the owners and whales dump and cash out to go to other coins then newbies panic sell and finally since there is no more pumps the price slowly goes down.
this will last until the next pump phase which can take a month to more than year to begin. and it depends on when the same owners and whales decide it is time to make money from that coin again. so you can not predict the time of it.

the owners of Circle have no idea how to run a business. they are more like children playing adults. they had a crappy service which could not compete with the alternatives such as Coinbase and they didn't make enough money from it. then instead of finding where the problem lies and trying to compete they started whining about how bitcoin is bad. i remember the owner even spreading some FUD about bitcoin's future.

it seems like they couldn't succeed without it and now they are trying to take over a big altcoin pump and dump central called poloniex to make money that way! with the way they have been performing i wouldn't be surprised if they ruin poloniex too!

SegWit and SegWit2x are not the same thing. the names are clearly different so are the projects. SegWit2x was an old proposal which shared the first part (being SegWit) with SegWit and then it had a second part which was the 2x part (being the increase of block size to 2 MB). it gained support for the first part and activated it but didn't gain enough support from community for the second part so it never was activated and the proposal was abandoned for now.

the news you are quoting is simply saying the full support for SegWit is now added in one of the bitcoin clients called bitcoin core. this has nothing to do with SegWit support itself, it was active ever since September 2017 and it certainly has nothing to do with SegWit2x.

i am sorry but that side by side comparison is bullshit because it is comparing apples and oranges.
first comparing bitcoin with traditional old assets such as gold and stocks is silly. if you want to compare then you at least have to compare today's bitcoin with 50-100 years ago gold, for example during the gold rush or something like that. but not with today's gold which is an ancient, established and HUGE market. bitcoin is a 9 year old infant which is being compared with a 1000 year old ancient!

second, comparing bitcoin with other altcoins such as ETH and XRP is wrong. both of these coins and other altcoins are 100 times more susceptible to manipulations and pump and dumps. plus prices of most of them like ETH are mostly controlled by their centralized investors such as big banks in the background. and the pump and dumps happening there increases the volatility that much

you need to change your sources then because what you say doesn't even make sense. it seems like someone was trolling you! there is no SegWit2x anymore, there hasn't been any for months now.

what issues?!!!

it is just another useless fork coin without anything remotely interesting created by some random person who is looking to make a lot of money by abusing the name of a popular project. it usually is taken from bitcoin but since there are already a lot of them and they are starting to fail to gain any kind of pump, they have moved on to other altcoins to get the higher hype and pump.

you are now posting contradictory speculation in this board and quoting people we don't know, who may not even exist
the day after this topic you posted another one saying price is gathering momentum to rise!

the fact is, right now bitcoin is mostly unpredictable. while having a strong support at $9300 and $10,000 things are still unpredictable. which is why the most possible scenario is that we continue seeing the same small ups and downs without any big change. because anything big will lead to price coming back to around $10k because of either dumps to bring it down or panic buys which will bring it up.

1. i don't know why this picture is like what you posted but what i see is very different!
in fact recently there was a big drop in number of bitcoin unlimited nodes. and even if there was a rise, that doesn't mean there will be FUD about bitcoin!! maybe someone was trying to do a Sybil attack on BCH!


https://coin.dance/nodes/unlimited

2. why use a twitter link of some random dude when you can see the mempool yourself https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,1w
this sudden increase what thanks to a couple of empty blocks + a lot of consolidation which means the full blocks only had <1000 transactions inside which some having as low as 200 tx
and it is over now!

3. i don't see any unusual hashrate change!

i am afraid changing PoW algorithm is not going to change anything in the long term. as long as bitcoin is being mined, it is going to be mined by some equipment. it is called ASICs that are designed to mine the current algorithms. if you change that, there is nothing stopping the same people to change their ASICs to mine the new algorithm.
unless you can physically restrict one person from having more than 1% of hashrate, in the end there will always be someone who is willing to invest more and have more mining equipment and have more hashrate.

in my opinion, the only way to fight that is to get more miners with more hashrate to join the network to reduce their (for example bitmain's) percentage of hashrate.

of course it is a pump and dump, so are the coins that you have invested in and are so proud of them. there is not much difference between any of these. nobody uses them for anything aside from speculation (trading) and because there are virtually limitless number of choices people dump one coin for another to pump and make profit then move on to the next to do the same. it is a vicious circle but it is what it is, unfortunately we can not do anything about any of it except accepting it as an ugly truth and try to benefit from it if we can.