to reach 204 trillion market cap you don't need money! you just need to create a lot more shitcoins and increase the supply. it is a simple formula that can easily be manipulated. you have x and y that you multiply and get the total market cap you need money to increase x (being the price) but since you can't do that you increase the other variable which is y (being the supply) and you easily get the huge number. just like what happened last year.

existence of speculators is not a bad thing on its own if you ask me. it is inevitable and we are all speculators in one way or another. you can't say you have bought bitcoin or even earned it and don't speculate about its price and not interested in the profit that it gets you. so you are a speculator too. but in the end it depends on how many are purely in it for speculation and how many are also in bitcoin for the technology. I'd say in bitcoin there are enough people who are interested in the decentralization aspect and other benefits that comes with it but in altcoins possibly everyone is only in it for the profit.

these mentions on their own are not automatically positive so we shouldn't just get excited when we hear about these cases. for example when the movie Dope came out in 2015 people were excited about it since it was bitcoin centered. but what it showed was usage of bitcoin for selling drugs on the dark market! as it is usually the case with most of these "exposures" they always portray bitcoin in a bad way and that is more harmful than anything else.

just because you don't understand what value means and how bitcoin has it, it doesn't mean bitcoin doesn't have value. if you start defending value the way you are doing here then about 80% of things that currently have value in the whole world become worthless.

the more I find out about ETF the less I want it to happen.
what I understand so far is that something like ETF is best suited for things such as gold that you need an intermediary when you want to invest in it. for instance gold ETF makes it easier and more convenient for people to invest in gold but not store gold itself.

but what is the point of bitcoin ETF? nothing I can think of! bitcoin is something that you can buy and store and use on your own. the whole idea of it was that you never need a third party ever again. but now we are introducing a third party to use to buy bitcoin and not hold bitcoin itself but something like an IOU instead of it! that doesn't make sense to me...

to be fair bitcoin core is not bitcoin, it is one of the implementations of bitcoin protocol and it happens to be the reference implementation and also still be in beta after 9 years but I don't think we can also consider bitcoin itself as a protocol as being in beta. bitcoin is young but is a solid protocol that has been thoroughly tested and battle hardened.

they are all speculating about everything that is related to this news. everything including the amounts that are being moves,  the addresses that are linked, where they are going to and who they belong to. and a lot more. and the worst part is that most of the things they say are pure guesses without solid evidence to back it up. the total amount may not even be t hat much.

as for the tweet, it is just a firm trying to advertise their services in my opinion, nothing more.

like any other trading strategy, margin trading also requires experience and also it is mostly a matter of preference. for example I have little experience in it and I don't like doing it so I have never done it more than trying it out and seeing how it looks like.
it obviously has its risks and rewards and more importantly requires a certain market condition which is basically a downtrend. and in this case ever since OP opened up this topic there has not been that many good opportunities for margin trading and big profits and that shows one of the biggest limitations of this type of strategy and the risks associated with them.

it depends on what you are investing your money in for long term. for example if you invested in Apple or Microsoft, ... or companies like that then the long term outlook have been awesome for you. but if you invested in some company that disappeared and died then obviously your money vanished in the long run with it.

I also want to disagree with this in OP that is saying:
“What seems too high and risky to the majority generally goes higher and what seems low and cheap generally goes lower.”
When majority thinks something then that thing will definitely become true. for example if majority thinks a certain price is low and cheap then the majority won't just stop at thinking it, they will act on it which means they will buy it at the price where they think it is cheap and as a result price won't go any lower than that.

yeah, good points. I have noticed this too. there are still a lot of people who have the mindset of "getting in early to beat the scam system and make profit"! it doesn't make any sense to me. I may be able to justify those ICO investments that aren't clearly scam but there are cases like the HYIP scams that I can never wrap my head around. for example if you visit the Investor-based games board you can see that there are still scams going on there although their popularity has dropped compared to previous years.

technically speaking halving is not increasing the rarity of bitcoin nor does it reduce the supply. and as time goes by there is more and more coins available for people to buy because the supply is increasing every day and bitcoin is not burning or being destroyed (apart from a small percentage of loss due to loss of private key,...) so even with halving the supply is increasing.

what halving does is that it slows down the process of creating new supply or slows down printing bitcoin. and since a part of sell pressure is from miners selling their new coins, halving reduces that so the price can rise easier in the future after the halving. and that is why everything before halving is pure hype.

this is just a new type of limiting your vision. before people only looked at the charts while zoomed in and only saw the changes in a couple of days then made their assumptions about bitcoin future. now people like this one you quoted are doing the same by only looking at one of the cycles that bitcoin had, then they ignore ALL circumstances that created that cycle (basically put their head in the sand) and then make the conclusion that it should be repeated!

I don't believe there is any meaningful influence of bitcointalk or coinmarketcap on the market prices that you are trying so hard here to prove. but if what you say is true and sites like coinmarketcap and bitcointalk lose their influence the first thing that will happen is that altcoins that are currently on top of CMC will get  dumped real hard because main reason for them to be on top is because these sites say they are on top. so expect coins like ETH and XRP to go down at least 80%

as long as there are gullible people, there will also be scammers waiting around the corner to take their money and put it in their own pockets. and it is usually exploiting these people's greediness to perform a successful scam.
in this case an investment promise with a high return. when newbies who have been losing money because altcoins were getting dumped on them see the opportunity (the fake illusion) of earning a big profit they jump in, head first. but then they get scammed.

I don't think any of the things you mentioned here are an actual good news. they are positive but not important enough to be considered a factor leading to a rise.

as for ETF, before this I used to think it can lead to a decent rise then after it is rejected a drop back down to $6k-$6.5k can take place before the real rises begin. but at this point I think people have given up hope about ETF's approval or even its positivity for bitcoin. more people are starting to think more realistically about ETF nowadays.
with that said we may see a very small rise followed by an even smaller drop after ETF rejection but nothing significant enough to warrant any action.

if bitcoin starts rising only because of things you mentioned such as banks investing in it or countries,... then it means bitcoin has already failed and will not survive for long. the fact is bitcoin has been rising (and will do in the future) only because it doesn't need these things. because bitcoin as a decentralized currency that nobody controls already creates enough incentive for people all around the world to want to own some of it and benefit from using it. the rest are only additional pushes on an already rising price.

a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is only successful if it has more utilities, to put simply bitcoin or any other coin in the future are unstoppable when they have real usages. things such as exchanges (centralized ones or decentralized counterparts) only concern a small use case and a small group of people known as traders. and being unstoppable has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is for them to buy and sell bitcoin on daily basis!

not really. hashrate and its increase/decrease status only shows profitability of mining said coin and possibly introduction of newer equipment with more efficiency. and fall in hashrate only indicates that miners stopped mining, the  reasons of which can be anything like costs of electricity in their area going higher or for instance some disaster in a mining facility like fire...


wrong. miners in early days were mining BCH and switched from bitcoin to it because it was more profitable to mine it than bitcoin. it was like this for 24 hour periods:
144 blocks/day * 12.5 BTC reward per/block * ~$4500 (Aug 2017 price) = $8,100,000
~1000 blocks/day * 12.5 BCH reward/block * ~$900 (Aug 2017 price) = $11,250,000
(1000 was possible with magic of EDA).

but the main message of stories like these is to show usage of bitcoin not fiat. note that it is not saying she survived with a thousands bucks. it is saying she survived with some amount of bitcoin. using a Visa, debit, ... are using fiat not bitcoin even if you top them off with bitcoin you are still doing an exchange of bitcoin to fiat then you use the fiat which raises the question of why bother with bitcoin in first place and pay an additional fee instead of sticking to fiat!

they didn't ban "cryptos" they banned advertisement of scams aka ICOs that have been taking the money from newbies and scamming them day after day.

WRONG. this has nothing to do with bitcoin and acceptance of it or altcoins and acceptance of them. for instance altcoins aren't adopted at all by anyone other than speculators because their main purpose is getting pumped and dumped. and as for bitcoin it is being adopted in different sectors even if something like Facebook allows bitcoin-related services to advertise on it or not.

the first step is to stop creating scam projects, specifically ICOs that are creating a pointless token just to raise money! start by building legit cryptocurrencies set out to function as a crypto-currency not a speculation tool. then you will see things change on their own.