not exactly. the 2014 bear market ended back in 2014 when price reached the bottom of that time meaning $200 levels. this basically happened in early 2015, then we had an accumulation phase and the bull market had already started by October and by November we already had a 100% rise.
block halving happened in July 2016 and by May (3 months before) price was already nearly $500 which is 150% higher than the bottom levels (of course if you take $150 which was an instant as the bottom then it is 233% higher).

BitPay is a US company and it is processing a lot of transactions, it basically owns a big database of bitcoin transactions, where they came from, where they went and how much each person owned and it is associated with a lot of additional data such as IP addresses and personal information possibly gained from the merchants they are processing these transactions for....
they may not care enough about losing a little bit of market share to competition if they are getting paid by some agency for this database... wink wink.

not selling does NOT cancel out the crash. not selling can only slow down the crash but it will happen. you can see it in altcoins that are crashing these days despite so many bag holders holding on tight to their bags of worthless tokens.
what cancels out the crash is buying, in other words the demand. in simple terms there is always some sort of balance between those selling (supply) and those buying (demand) and if that balance is disturbed the price moves in a direction to re-establish that balance again.
for example when there is unlimited supply of some coin, it will continue to have a sell pressure on the market that no amount of demand in long run can cover so it will continue to go down. and when there is limited supply and the demand is growing (Like when more people adopt bitcoin) the price will continue to go up.

you should have been around to know what I meant by quoting "fraud" in my comment. if you google who said it you can find out that it was the JP Morgan CEO who keeps saying he doesn't care about bitcoin to talk about it but at the same time he constantly talks about bitcoin and attacks it. this "fraud" comment came out at an interesting point where he spread this FUD in the media and then price crashed. later on we found out their company bought a lot of bitcoin in that small crash!
you see it is not about opinion. it is about shoving that opinion down other's throat to achieve something.

you got something wrong! not "everyone" thinks that. and that is why bitcoin is strong. and it is not just something you invest in and make profit. it is a unique decentralized payment system that can not be controlled, censored, restricted, or anything like that. and all of these attributes are making it strong. these are the reasons why more people are going to buy (aka dump their centralized fiat for decentralized bitcoin) bitcoin and why its price will go up. not because there is more profit on their centralized fiat.

true only if you had a way of knowing who is lying and who is telling the truth!
if I say my prediction is bitcoin price will fall down to $3000 you have no way of knowing if I actually have that prediction or I want price to go from $7000 to $6900 so that I can buy bitcoin $100 below the market value.
you see it is not about inaccuracy, it is about people spreading nonsense in hopes that others follow their nonsense so that they can have the result they want out of the market.

looking back at the thousands of comments I have seen in the past 7-8 months that price has come down from ATH, a lot of them have been predicting ridiculously lower prices such as $3k I mentioned above by now. so if this "study" were true then price should have gone down there already!!!

the difference is that Apple and Android has been good products instead of being pure shit.

bitcoin was NOT the first but it is the BEST among the existing cryptocurrencies. it may not be the best thing you can hope for because it is not perfect but nothing is ever perfect in the world.
calling bitcoin technology "old" is like calling a 3 month old infant an "old timer".

I keep going back to the possibility that these drops that we see these days in bitcoin are caused mainly by the over-pumped altcoins that have been getting dumped for a while now. that is a lot of money that has been exiting the market and most of it is exiting through bitcoin and that can effectively bring its price down.
we have had clear example of it too. for example when Bancor was hacked and millions of dollars worth of Ether was stolen the dump of ETH brought bitcoin price down with it.
in this case the drops will end when altcoin dumps are over.

the important thing to remember is that just because once in the past it took a certain amount of time before the big rises begin it doesn't mean every time after that should take the same amount of time to have the same amount of rise. that was a one time thing and the situation was very different (smaller market, biggest exchange in the whole world with 85% of the volume ran away,...)

#3 and #4 are the most serious ones that I have been seeing these days specially among newcomers. the result of which is becoming a bag holder. most of them are not trading in truth. they are throwing their money away just because someone random on the internet told them to buy something that can give them profit. then lack of plan means they have no idea what to do. they end up bag holding lots of useless tokens in hopes of a profit that never comes.

it is strange that news like this doesn't have the effects that they should technically have on the price these days. if this was any other time, something like this could at least trigger a 10% rise and price would have gone up to $8000 but for some reason it seems like there is some sell pressure in the market which is preventing the rise from happening!

quite the opposite.
a second layer is only working if the first (underlying) layer is working fine. Lightning Network needs bitcoin to work fine meaning to have reasonable on-chain fees and little to no backlog. otherwise if there is a huge backlog like during the 2017 spam attack and fees are huge then you can not use LN either.

still nidacoinlove is talking nonsense though. nothing has failed! he seems to be caught up into some altcoin bag holding scenario.

these two statements are contradicting each other!
if it is a dump then it is not a healthy thing. and if it is a healthy correction then it can not be a dump.

and I disagree with calling this "necessary" because a correction "drop" is only necessary when there was an actual big rise not any kind of rise. and this rise was a correction of sorts after the huge drop to $6k. we were recovering from that bottom not having a rally!

I also disagree with using the term "highly" here because things aren't as bad as you think although the manipulation exists in bitcoin market.

the correct answer in my opinion is both.

as an investor you should always consider the risks of your investment and bitcoin is not without risks. additionally we are not done with fiat so we still need it and if someone is trading to earn, then you also have to store some fiat to actually earn something that is spendable everywhere instead of bitcoin that is only spendable some places.
but at the same time you want to increase your shares of this scares currency so you store part of your profit in bitcoin.

of course in the end it will all come down to individual strategies and the amount of money someone has. for example if you are trading with 0.001BTC then it doesn't make much sense to go to fiat or have part in fiat and part in bitcoin!

I think he is talking about mass adoption not just adoption and movements. and I agree with that, it will take a long time (10 years sounds about right) before we reach maturity and see bitcoin mass adopted. other than that we will continue seeing adoption slowly take place as it has been in the past 9 years and price will continue to move upwards with it.

it seems like imagination among scammers is running wild these days but their creativity and knowledge is dwindling every day! in the past they at least made an effort to actually hack you and steal your money. nowadays it seems like they just make up a story and then ask you to pay them money

what happened was probably this:
some kid went on dark market and bought a password database which was leaked from some website or something with emails. then made up a automation script which chose every email in that list and sent the same message to them just changing names, password and possibly the bitcoin address requesting payment. and now that kid hopes for ROI...

I don't know if we can call it "official" but I think the Ƀ is for bitcoin. https://bitcoinsymbol.org/

although I have never seen anybody using "Ƀ" symbol before. all the merchants, websites,... offline or online that I have seen so far are using the BTC symbol which is also visible in the bitcoin logo file (the orange circle thingy you see everywhere).

ps. what is the last one (₿)? I see it as a square

if all you do when buying bitcoin is having "hopes" for a higher price then you are doing it wrong. and maybe "investing" in bitcoin is not something you should have tried in first place.
as for the ups and downs, they are normal market movements. if you watch the charts in long term you can see it is filled with them.

check the charts yourself to see if that happened before or not!
and why would you even want to know that? it doesn't change anything. last year for example price has been rising nearly all year long but we have not had the same this year.

it needs a little more than $50k to reach 1 trillion market cap and $50k is not something that far away to reach. it will take time, probably until  2019 to get there but we will be there. I remember a year ago people were eagerly talking about gold parity and when will price reach about $1000-$1200 and there was arguments that it will never happen.... look where we are now!

by the way I still find it pointless to compare market cap of a company with market cap of a cryptocurrency since market cap for the later doesn't mean much.

nothing is stuck. the adoption is still happening just like before and LN is also being used and adopted, it is growing as we speak. but you shouldn't expect miracles. you won't wake up one morning to see every single person on the planet using bitcoin and LN. it is a slow process...

there is no "entry barrier" for bitcoin so that others have lower than that. it doesn't get any lower!

altcoins don't just lack popularity, they lack utility, security, decentralization,... and have many added issues.

bitcoin will never become "world currency" but also at the same time it won't be "a few people" who own bitcoin!

I feel like you are only thinking in black and while. as it something is either 100% or 0%. which is wrong. the world is grey all the way.  you have to come to the middle.