it seems like this news is becoming kind of viral.

although i have a feeling that there is no much truth about it and it is mostly "rumors" than anything else. reading different articles online it seems like all the news sites are also taking advantage and repeating the same thing like always! without even checking facts.

i dare say it even had some effects on the price and helped a little rise. the same way random FUD causes a little drop.

but if it comes true, the long term effects on it must be huge. it will be a very nice publicity for bitcoin and in long term it will introduce bitcoin to many others and lead to wider adoption and much more usage of bitcoin as a currency. we can expect the $10,000 to come faster with it.

there is a pretty good change that they had some plans behind the curtains to make a large amount of profit from bitcoin. a $1000 dip is not a small profit! imagine if they have invested about a million dollar in bitcoin and that would be a tiny investment on their part. with that they could have made a very large sum of money in just a couple of days and only by puling a public stunt like that.
it was easy money that makes anyone want to use any power they have to take advantage. of course we will never have any kind of proof!

it is true, there have been a rather popular petition to get Amazon to accept bitcoin and litecoin but a petition is just a petition it doesn't mean they are accepting it. it takes time and more petition for a big business like Amazon to allow bitcoin on their site but i do really believe that they will accept bitcoin sooner than you think. there is enough demand for it anyways.

banks say all kinds of crap. you shouldn't really pay them much attention. otherwise we would have given up on bitcoin last week that JP Morgan bank CEO said bitcoin is fraud
as long as it is not a law and it is not official all of it is just empty talk that nobody cares about.

in any case it is pretty interesting to see how different countries are treating bitcoin though! majority of countries are currently considering bitcoin as a legal way of payment and as a legit currency and then you still find random talk here and there about how it is not!

first go educate yourself and then come back.
learn what bitcoin is and what it does. what a currency is supposed to do and how many merchants have adopted bitcoin.

then look at any ICO you like and see what they really offer and what they really do in the real world.
i think you will get your answer here pretty clearly. you don't even have to spend much time or have any experience any 6 year old can help you see the difference too.

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as for being good investment, there are many options. they get hyped up and manipulated so they get pumped a lot. so it becomes pretty profitable to invest in some of these. and this has nothing to do with being a bitcoin rival or even being useful. they can be the most useless thing in the whole world and still be profitable.

but one thing is for sure: when they say they are bitcoin rival you should stay away because they are using the biggest lie of all times.

what hassle ?
it is actually much easier to buy altcoins with bitcoin than it is to buy them with fiat!

using fiat is known to cause a lot of delays and issues. you MUST sign up, verify your account and give all your identity/documents to the place where you are buying from and pay a hefty fee for your fiat transfer and wait a long time until it is credited to your account.
that is fiat hassle.

with bitcoin you just sign up and give your Email or use some service such as ShapeShift which doesn't even need that. and pay a tiny transaction fee of a couple of cents and you are good to go.
and this is all the BTC hassle!!

this is what i have also been saying from day 1 that Kim talked about how they will implement micropayments in his project and make megaupload that you can ask for money. but the issue is that as long as everything can be found for free, nobody is going to pay for it.

and as for what Omega said about "content creators" i don't get why they would want to use this service though! they can do it directly themselves without a third party.

there are a lot of reasons for ETH price falling hard. most of them have to do with the fact that ETH is a big pump and dump scheme and also another important fact that people overlook is that one of the reasons why ETH was pumped this hard was the existence of ICOs. countless ICOs were created and each required ETH tokens to participate which creates a fake demand and pumps the coin.

as people stop buying into ICOs and as they realize how scamy they are, additionally the Chinese government banning ICOs all lead to removal of that fake demand and dumps ethereum price.

i don't see any ban for any cryptocurrency in China! people are still using cryptocurrencies. they are investing in them, they are mining them and holding and spending bitcoin! the localbitcoins volume from China is once again starting to grow.
and on top of it all the government of China has said that OTC trading of bitcoin is allowed for anyone who wants to do it.

the game is just a market manipulation by whales and they are using China just because nobody is able to verify it or better said everyone is too lazy to verify the lies. even Chinese themselves are saying "all you hear is FUD"

quite the opposite.
price manipulation and spreading FUD is pretty hard. well to be correct creating and spreading FUD is easy but making it effective is hard. you cal look at @kwukduck for example. he has been bullshitting here for nearly as long as bitcointalk existed and it has never been effective as fast as i can remember. everybody mocks him for his stupidity. and market always does the exact opposite of what @kwukduck says
the effective FUD is when market is dropping and then it has to have some reality to it. you can't just use any lie to create FUD. it always helps when a dumb news site publishes some click bait with your FUD.

LOL. if any random altcoin out there which is getting pumped and inevitably dumped could have any effect on bitcoin, then bitcoin would have died a thousand times over by now.

this coin is not even big enough to be known among users. so who cares if it dies or not. it is like a grain of sand in a big desert.
or maybe you think this is the first scam among altcoins?

there are actually different theories. some say wars lead people to invest their money in valuables to try and save up any loss when their country's currency tanks. so they choose bitcoin as one of their options so it may lead to a huge bitcoin price rise.

some say it won't affect it since people will be concerned about other stuff during a war. and even if the above is true, people will look for old stuff such as gold instead.

in the case of Blockchain.info app i believe it was removed because it was buggy and annoying and then one day there was a very serious bug found in it that led to a huge total amount of bitcoin lost. so they had to remove it to prevent further losses. the loss was the fact that they were idiotically using Random.org to generate their random number!

the FUD obviously always says a dumb number as its bottom. the purpose of a FUD is not to guide you but it is to scare you so they say $1000, $2000, etc. it is the same as before when $2400 was the all time high and a correction was on the way. the FUD kept repeating that $700 is on the way and price never went to $1xxx range even!

apparently you have to log in or something to read the full article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-wild-ride-shows-the-truth-it-is-probably-worth-zero-1505760623

but here is the break down: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/wall-street-journal-argues-bitcoin-is-probably-worth-zero-joins-obituary-list/

the article is already added to the list of obituaries: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/

lets have some fun then

who are these most people and where is the reference?
- who said he is American? (s)he could have been from anywhere!
- yes but also some say he was above average with all mistakes he made which describes a large population.
- yes, so does a lot of others

for all we know Satoshi was a group of people

so does many others.

or maybe it was because Gavin Andereson went to that 3 letter agency.

in order for this to be true, you have to prove that Satoshi and Hal were the ONLY 2 people mining bitcoin and you have no proof of that. there may have been a third person called Ross Ulbricht who found out about bitcoin, started mining it and thought about creating SilkRoad.

also i didn't see any TX ID anywhere! where is the proof? that article says "...scientists found an account..." didn't mention any bitcoin transaction!

or Satoshi is dead.
or the group decided they should not move those coins ever.
or Satoshi is already rich and satisfied with his life that doesn't need to sell bitcoin for more money.
or Satoshi is waiting for a good price and $3xxx-$4xxx looks stupid to sell.

that Wall Street Journal article never said these things. you just made a conclusion that was the last thing that article was meant to say. the article was mostly attacking bitcoin and saying it is useless and a waste of energy. the author of that article did not even understand how bitcoin works. which means the article did not worth even wasting your time to read.

and also i should add, just because other things depend on something (like them depending on Gold) does not mean that is the only way things can have value. the real value comes from supply and demand. and the demand for bitcoin is there and that means it has value. the value being above $3000 each and rising with the rising demand.

these things are usually not "viruses" they are more of phishing type of attack. where they just put something in the middle to get the username and password of people who go through their malicious application to reach the website they want. that is why it is a little harder to detect these too.

but if you report them properly to the store, they will remove it surely.

i agree
that is why i said users won't like this. it is always the reality of the money they get and on top of it the reality of the chance they have to earn more money from it. technically speaking you can claim the faucet, change the multiplier to a big number and roll once and win a huge reward and that is one of the main parts of gambling. people are playing for that chance.

for short term investments if you are day trading then all three of them are good options as long as you really know how to trade them. to buy in the dips and sell on highs. bitcoin is currently fluctuating between two prices that are perfectly clear and unless it can break any of the lines it will continue to do so and also bitcoin in long term will rise so even if you make a mistake you won't regret it for long.

both LTC and ETH have high volumes enough for this type of trading strategy but also they are a bit riskier moves to trade them like this because it may take a much longer time for them to recover and sometimes they don't move much.

and remember than trading like this in altcion market means you are locking your funds up in a small profit while others are shooting up to the moon.