it is not really consistent and if price rise is all you care about in an altcoin then 90% of them should be in the long list of things you like.

empty blocks each of which containing a dozen transaction and they are all less than 100-200 kB. in other words this "feature" has been a useless thing to have so far since nobody even bothers to use it.
secondly what will happen when the 8 MB blocks become full someday in the future? another hard fork to 16 MB this time? who is going to run a full node with such gigantic blocks? nobody wants bitcoin with centralized master nodes.

of course there are so many different definitions of the term "shitcoin" and everyone sees them differently but mostly people call useless coins, scam coins, those copycats which just copy paste the code from another project, those coins which not only solve nothing but also create a lot of issues,... these are the main characteristics of these coins.

the issue is that shitcoins are usually the most profitable and even big with the largest market caps. which is why they remain alive like this.

try looking at the charts. for example this one is easy to use: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd
do you see all the "swings" there? the same swings will continue to happen for the foreseeable future too. and until market grows a lot more than what it is now, the swings will remain the same.
you can compare them with old "swings" of 2011-2013 for example and see how it has changed. and how smaller they are now. (look at percentages of change not just amount).

to answer your question, there is a change for going up to $6000 but i do not think it can last up there. so far the demand shows a better support at the current price above $5000 and even possibly back to $4800+ for a short term too.

market capitalization is a way to measure stocks of a company. when it is used for bitcoin it has so little meaning and when it is used for altcoins it becomes absolutely meaningless, specially when it is used for comparison.

and it is the circulating supply by the way not the total.
market cap = 16,621,875 (current supply) * price

probably not
first because if there were a pump coming, it would have happened already. the clock is ticking, and the pumps should always happen before the news not long after it. this has always been how the news works.

second because when they eventually switch to PoS and the rewards is distributed to ETH holders on intervals, many will start gaining free coins as their reward and they will want to sell them. or at least a part of it to make profit. this always creates a sell pressure in coins with staking reward and a sell pressure means declining price.

with that said this is ethereum we are talking about. the whales can decide to go against everyone with their millions of dollars and make a big pump happen!

both of them are nearly at the same level really. so if you only have these two to choose from then choose either of them, it doesn't really make much difference.

but if you want my opinion here is the difference:
cryptopia is more active and has more volume. it seems a better option. there is a much better and a working API on their platform whereas Coinexchange does not have the private API at all (last time i checked). they just have a public one and never bothered adding the private part. it shows lack of interest from users. and the volume of Coinexchange is also lower.
as for interface i prefer cryptopia over coinexchange too.

in other words 2 days ago you made a very nice amount of profit from your investment because it is a price near previous ATH and no matter when you bought it is a 100% sure profit since all prices were lower before this.

it is not "pump" it is a "rise" or "rally". it may seem like nitpicking but in fact that is a huge difference between these terms.

you should have bought when the $5000 was broken.
now you should wait to see a correction (which is happening right now as we speak) and buy back.
not not over wait though. price will never go down to your very low expectations. i say it now, below $5000 is very unlikely for some time at least.

because of a very simple reason:
- bitcoin has real usage so it is adopted more and more every day
- altcoins like ether does not have any real usage so their adoption is capped to pump and dumps only.

right now ETH is in a bubble which needs bursting. it is still resisting it though. but it will have a very hard time rising more than this.
as for litecoin, it is still above 0.01BTC which it take as a good sign, this coin keeps its price up but there is not much reason for it to rise now. maybe in the near future when Lightning Network became more popular with its Atomic Swap LTC can be used everywhere.

that is ridiculous and if they really go through with the premine they will ruin the project themselves. i could see some potential in BTG because of its mining and because it was from bitcoin and there were no fight. it could have been a clean fork creating a nice thing for "GPU miners" to join and mine but having a HUGE amount of premine is really shouting shady behavior.
yesterday i saw them try and justify this premined crap but it really doesn't make any sense.

i say it now, the developer only wants to make money from this. it may go up in price even like how ETH did with its premine but it won't be any better. it will always be a useless fork to pump and dump it.

you forgot to say why, you know as in speculating! not guessing something
just because you opened XAPO and saw the price rise fast doesn't mean it will go up another 100% in one month! i admit we have seen pretty crazy stuff with bitcoin but this kind of rise in one month belongs to 2013 and with the willy bot present... now it is more of slower rise and 100% rise will take at least 6 months or at least after S2X fate was determined.

dude the fork in October (25 of October) is called Bitcoin Gold which most people don't even know about. it is an obvious altcoin which even has a huge premine!

the fork you have in mind is probably the November fork called SegWit2x. that is a very different story and i can say a long time from now.

most exchanges supported Bitcoin Cash too. and that was all that mattered because people wanted to dump it and they did. there is no other usage for it anyways.
s2x is different though because unlike BCH it has a large support from miners.
i just hope it won't turn into a war!

the only thing that i care about is bitcoin and the fact that it will remain decentralized. no matter what different countries do and what rules they put in place for it, nothing will change about bitcoin and the fact that it is decentralized.

apparently the market no longer cares about it either. the Russian news has been circulating everywhere from nearly 2 days ago and price has been rising ever since. maybe people caught up to these facts!

all your options can be true at the same time!
bitcoin gold is a crap altcoin fork from bitcoin which decided to have a very large premine and many people in cryptocurrency sphere consider that a big scam. so that makes this coin a "crap"
but that doesn't mean it is not interesting though. the airdrop that it will perform will be a good chance to make a lot of profit for many. you can just sell your reward and enjoy it, you can start trading it and enjoy the initial big swings. and a lot of things like that. which makes it "interesting and exciting".

i completely agree with OP, it is the same story every time the ATH is tested to be broken again. even same patterns can be seen on the charts,
- price trying to break ATH,
- not succeeding,
- drop,
- consolidation
- rise to test again.


and a little before that it was $400 and before it was $200 and people were complaining why bitcoin is too expensive.
i just posted this comment: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2254789.msg22840552#msg22840552
to share a link of people were complaining that price is $20-$30 and it is too expensive it should drop to <$1

hope you see the trend

NO!
we will always have only 1 bitcoin at all times. there never can and will exist any more than that. the chain with the majority support will be bitcoin and the rest of them will always be altcoins.

things like bitcoin cash and bitcoin gold are definitely altcoins because of the way they work. BCH was an attack on bitcoin with support of a handful of people (Roger Ver, Antpool gang)
BTG is an obvious altcoin which even has a huge premine

Russia never became hot on cryptocurrencies to now turn cold. that article is complete bullshit, trying to create FUD in the market. i don't know why though!
Russia has always had this hit and miss attitude towards cryptocurrencies (which is mostly bitcoin, altcoins are not even talked about really). you hear one official say crypto should be banned, another says crypto is the future and should be legal. next day you see Putin love crypto, tomorrow they say Putin hates crypto.

one things is for sure though:
Russia has not yet banned, prohibited or legalized any cryptocurrency so far.

when almost all the altcoins are completely useless, and then the rest are only alive with hype and false information and pump and dumps nothing else is expected. people consider this behavior as "shit coins". there are of course good coins too but they get buried under all the shitcoins that come out every day. it is a reality not to do something like you suggested!

then you know nothing about history.
so far altccoins are the reason for many of the issues regarding regulations and legality that bitcoin is facing. the most recent ones caused by ICOs!

not at all.
you are trying so hard to connect two things that are not even related!
people invest in ICOs with altcoin tokens such as ETH which they buy with fiat. bitcoin (in most cases) is not even involved.
and ICOs don't even do anything. they just gather some money and then give some out as profit and end!

interesting topic. i usually do it backwards though. meaning i usually go back and look at the topics from years ago which were exactly the same thing as today!
you can check them out yourself too. just go to older pages of speculation board, for example page 370.  it is the drama about $10 and $30 and some calling the drop to $1 again and bitcoin being dead and you know the usual shit

here is a fun topic which feels almost dumb now to read people talk about bitcoin being worth <$1
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43443.0;all
apparently bitcoin went to $30 as ATH and there was a correction down to $10 maybe and some were calling $1 as bottom. sounds familiar doesn't it? (bitcoin to $4900 then correction and some people calling $1000 as bottom)

something that drops from air (sky)! as in free money, giveaway!

there are new altcoins coming out every day, most of which are useless projects that can never get any attention any other way. so they give some free amounts away so that they can gain some attention. free advertising if you will.

and yes most of them are a waste of time because you have to bend over backwards to receive something like 1000 satoshi worth of that altcoin which is declining every minute!

i've got 2 things to say here:

1. replay protection:
the coin is not yet released that you are talking about it. it is not even close to being released yet. for all you know they will implement a strong replay protection like BCH.

2. premine:
that makes this an altcoin like hundreds of other altcoins. scam? if that is the criteria then ETH is the biggest scam in history of altcoins, it had 72,000,000 coins premined and that was almost all the ETH tokens in existence.
i am not defending BTG though, i am just pointing out that premining is a perfectly common thing among shitcoins like ETH and BTG and all the others like it. and apparently community doesn't consider them as "scams".