it is not always newbies though. I have seen multiple times that the news sites start talking about bitcoin in their title then continue it with purely speculating about altcoins. or for instance they are clearly talking about bitcoin in their article but they use the word "crypto" or "crypto market" for it as if it is general and what happens to bitcoin will happen to the rest of them!

another massive altcoin dump has been going on today specially in big coins like Ethereum which actually was among the biggest dumped coins today with nearly 20% drop. and that led to a small but still a 5% drop in bitcoin price today.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/02/the-collapse-of-eth-is-inevitable/amp/

interestingly enough despite all that bitcoin price is still pretty close to $7k mark and it is resisting all the money that is exiting from the altcoin market through bitcoin causing this sell pressure in bitcoin market.

people always say bitcoin drops makes altcoins dump. but this example among a lot of others is showing it is the other way around in a lot of cases.
I am wondering how many more times do we have to see these types of dumps before we start accepting there is a big problem with the altcoin market and that is damaging bitcoin too.

I don't know to agree or disagree with you
what you say makes sense, increasing your knowledge of the technology that these cryptocurrencies you are trading can help you but when it comes to trading, specifically trading altcoins, that knowledge is not going to be helpful as much as you may hope. for instance you may have a pretty good understanding of the blockchain technology and find a very good coin that is implementing the technology in a very interesting way and you may find it full of potential because of it .... but these types of coins are never profitable in the altcoin market!

instead when you look at shitcoins and the worst projects out there, you can see huge profits on daily basis is taking place and there are hundreds of traders that are taking advantage of it.

it may sound strange or even a terrible thing to say, but learning how pump and dumps work may give you a much bigger profit than anything else can.

you say people with bots using the exchange APIs are trading using those bots and that increases the total volume on exchanges, right? so how in the world is that fake?!!!
those are real people making real trades with real money. they just use another way of contacting the exchanges. you use the web interface by opening the website of the exchange in your browser, those guys use the API calls inside a program. the result is the same and nothing about it is fake.

you shouldn't be trading based on fixed percentages anyways. you should be trading based on the market itself and its movements. for instance if there is a rise you should speculate how much it can go up and then set the percentage based on that not have a fixed amount for every trade.
if you want to have some sort of restriction for yourself like to prevent getting greedy, then have some range where you sell at. for example between 4% to 10% and  then choose one percentage in that range and sell there.

bitcoin market cap which is basically its price rising and nothing more, is not rising because altcoins die and it is not no-rising if they don't die!
altcoins exist in a parallel market that is used for higher risk speculation and profit making and not much else. which means with or without them bitcoin will continue to grow. it can reach $50k-$100k and more prices and altcoins still be the same pump and dumps with more or less the same size.

that is a big IF though.
what I got from their post is that they basically went to top 50 universities in US which already have some sort of course on blockchain technology and ask their students about cryptocurrencies. of course it didn't mention how those students were chosen, if they were from different departments it would be more accurate than if they asked those participating or have participated in one of these classes.

exactly my thoughts. why would you want to use bitcoin if you want to carry around a "piece of paper", just use cash, it is more convenient that way and it is accepted everywhere.

even if you wanted to use bitcoin then why use lightning network? why not simply use bitcoin with on-chain transactions? you can print private keys each containing a certain amount of bitcoin in them (10k, 50k,...) and go around giving them as money and if there is "change" you can also print an "address" on the same paper which they can send the change back to.

actually not much about the "crypto market" is considered normal specially when you are talking about the whole market including the altcoins in the mix and compare it with other markets. and the reason is all the manipulations and the altcoin pump and dumps that keep happening.

what you read in topics here is not usually correct!
I suppose you are talking about the SilkRoad drama that has been circling online for a while now. and I have to say it is mostly rumor and partly FUD trying to create panic. the only way selling on an exchange can push the price down is that if the seller wants to push the price down. otherwise only an idiot would sell a large amount in one go to give himself a huge loss.
not to mention that if you sell that much you won't even be able to withdraw the fiat. according to you it is $802 million, at least 50 red flags will be raised on your  bank account if you receive that much not to mention that the exchange is not going to even have that much fiat ready to just give it to you.

besides this was 5 days ago and price has been rising ever since. so you can already see how false it was.

no it is not!
experience is the most important thing in trading! experience to know what to do under different circumstances not have the same recipe for everything that happens (hold) and then call that "patience". while trading you need to have flexibility, you need to be able to go in an out of the market as fast as possible and at the best time possible.
it means when you see red you should run the other way and move your money to some place which is not red and make profit while the first place is in red the come back when things changed again.

to be honest this looks to me more like yet another random statistics with a huge margin of error and it is always because of their selection process. the selected groups are too focused and have no diversity. it is like looking for alcoholics in a bar!

besides 18%  seems such a huge percentage considering the fact that bitcoin price is still pretty low. such adoption percentage would have been accompanied by a much higher price. so far the best estimation I have seen for adoption has been less than 1%.

well this wasn't one of those unexpected moves though! this has been a very slow rise which is natural in a market that has increasing demand over time. so price should technically have a slow upward movement at all times, specially when it has been staying at a fixed price like the bottom at $6k for a long time.

an unexpected rise would have been the case if price had gone up to $7300 in less than 1 day. which is not the case here.

that website is only good if you want to learn how base58 encoding works and only if you want to play around with some keys that you are not using. but there is no source code for it, so it may contain bugs or ever worse it may be recording every private key that you enter in it online so it is not at all secure.

for a better tool you should always suggest bitaddress.org it is open source, you can see the source and download on github and also it is tested so the chances of bugs are nearly zero. it accepts all formats: hex, base58, base64 and BIP38 encrypted

just because someone is advertising his creation a lot and everywhere he can, it doesn't mean his creation is good. it means he has a lot of free time at hand and a lot of money to travel around and advertise. in case of ETH, the fact remains and it doesn't change all the downsides of it such as its centralization and premine and bug and backlog/congested network and the huge blockchain that prevents people from running a node.

you can no longer pump and dump bitcoin anymore. the market has grown so much bigger with the number of exchanges and number of investors in it that no matter how big you are, you won't be able to pump and dump it. you can certainly influence the price if you are a whale and manipulate it but pump and dump is very different.

what they can do and still be profitable is to pump and dump altcoins. that has a lot lower risk since they are smaller and they are already pump and dumps so they have their work cut out for them.

no, bitcoin is not a bubble. not anymore at least. you could have called it a bubble when price reached $20,000 in less than one month because the speed was super fast and almost all of that rise was because of FOMO but you can no longer call bitcoin that ever since we saw a big drop of 70% which not only corrected the market but also created an inverse bubble in bitcoin effectively making it be underpriced.

did you even have to ask?!
it is so obvious that I feel silly saying NO! just because someone has a username called "Satoshi" on some platform and is talking about bitcoin doesn't mean they are real Satoshi. and so far everyone who has used this name after Satoshi's disappearance has been using it to scam people. in other words to perform identity fraud.

if they were giving advice and explained real strategies then it could have been good, because even if they don't work for every situation the explanation itself could give you some experience in dealing with different situations and to know how the market generally works and how you should make profit from it.

but the real problem is that they always disguise their nonsense pumping attempts as an investment or trading advice. we have lots of groups that are calling themselves names such as "signal group" or "trading discussion" but in reality they are the same scam pump groups that are not sharing some basic charts pretending they are analyzing but in reality they are pump and dumping.

it is easy to reach a high price and rise a ridiculously big percentage but not always. so far these big rises have always been after a bull run not the start of it. for instance we first have a slow rise and a bull run and price goes up a lot then we have that big-bang where price shoots to the moon suddenly and then enters a big ass bubble which bursts later on.
looking at 2017 as the example we had the slow rise to $1000, even to $2000 and then we entered the bull market and were rising well enough with a very strong support to near $8500 to $9000 and then the end of the year began with that big ass shooting to the moon where price suddenly went to $20k and fell down. in fact this is one of the reasons why I say bitcoin is underpriced and should be back above $10k already.
in any case the rise to $20-25k is not going to happen because it is still a big shoot up and whatever this market is, it is not a bull market yet.