first of all this affiliate thing you are talking about is against the rules of all the exchanges that have this system and they can easily close down both your accounts and take your money and never give it back to you.
secondly if you are really a half decent trader and can make profit from this market there is enough profit for you in a trade that you never need the tiny affiliate reward they give you in comparison.

unfortunately these days the social media is being used to mislead the newcomers into buying shitcoins that are not good at all. these days there are a lot of newcomers starting with cryptocurrencies and since they have no idea what is going on in this market they seek help from others. while doing that they fall prey to the pumpers who have already bought some shitcoin and now want to dump it on them.
in other words I think twitter is more like a 1 edge sword which cuts the newbies deep.

I still think that we are in for more of a slow rise than anything else. which means what you see now is not a "pause of growth" but the growth itself but at a slower pace than what you are used to because of last year.
you can think of it as something like 2015 where price was rising slowly from $200 to twice that value at $400.
right now we may see big jumps and possibly big drops too because market is not yet 100% calm but we are getting there, if you see the recent jump it was the same as last time we were in $6k range but this time it was slower. last time we went to $8k+ but this time it was a slower rise to $7400.

I say if nothing unexpected happens (like a bit exchange hack for negative effect or ETF approval for positive effect)  we will continue seeing this slow trend continue.

there was never anything called "MtGox nightmare" ever to want to wake up now. there however was FUD and dumb people in the market who fell for that FUD.
this was discussed multiple times already, Mt Gox was never the reason for the drop for many reasons including the fact that they were selling a long time before the drops even began and also the fact that they explained that they weren't even selling on the market to cause any kind of crashes.
at some point people wanted to push the price lower so they started the drama and people fell for it. so it was another FUD like anything else. and you can not use the same FUD many times, it only works once.

if we start talking about these nut jobs then we will be talking until the end of time. they are mostly newbies with little amount of money and sometimes no understanding of how the market works so they think if they spread some bullshit on the internet like on forums, social media platforms,... they can FUD bitcoin down so that they can buy it and make a tiny amount of profit when they sell it again after the recovery. it is more like a disease really! if they spend half the time they spend online on trading instead, they can make a lot more profit...

just because PoS seems more interesting and fast than PoW it doesn't mean it really is safer, faster, ... than it. there is always pros and cons to all the designs. you can already find the problems and attack vectors of PoS online if you do some research. and it certainly doesn't mean it is the future of cryptocurrency.
the problem with most of these things is that they are never fully tested. bitcoin with its PoW is battle hardened since it has been at the center of attention for 9 years and under attack and it has worked properly all this time. others weren't tested or attacked as well to pass or fail although there has been fail cases in some altcoins.

well centralized exchanges were also small once with their orderbooks thin and a big spread between their bids and ask orders. but people started using them and little by little the number of users grow so did the orderbook size.
and I feel like that is the same problem with decentralized exchanges these days. everyone is afraid of using them because of this reason and that reason and since they have the alternative (meaning centralized exchanges) they are not forced to go there either. but at the same time they expect these exchanges to grow on their own!!!
we need to start from ourselves. these are DECENTRALIZED projects, if  we don't contribute, nobody else will.

talking about more rise now that the rise has happened means nothing, it just shows that you are one of those people who is always late to every market movement. instead you should have been talking about the rise back when price was at the bottom near $6k and everyone (except FUDsters of course) were discussing about this rise that you are seeing now.

additionally further rise and reading $10k+ and setting a new ATH can not be concluded based on this rise alone. right now we are only getting back on normal track of slow solid rises towards the $1 million target that bitcoin has been on ever since the start in 2009.
other than that we need some indication for speculating big rises.

this has nothing to do with "bitcoin security" it is about the "exchange security" which is basically a "website security" thing. and this is already old news and not to mention one of the most common news for a couple of years in this business. whenever you go on an exchange there is a chance that it is going to get hacked that day which is why everyone keeps repeating you should never leave your coins on exchanges and also this is why the Decentralized Exchanges are gaining popularity.

since one of my iconic goals is the "1 in a million" thing the main conclusion that I can make from this is that back in 2011 I could be 1 in a million with less than 90 bucks but now it costs more than $150k to become 1 in a million


exactly.
the 70% drop is HUGE. some people don't realize this and just focus on the FUD and repetition of certain low numbers like $3k, 2k,... over and over again as if repeating it can make it true!
I have been saying this for a long time that the circumstances of 2014-2015 bear market is very different from now. the market is gigantic compared to then. right now there are a lot of investors dying to come in or come back in since they sold at some point with profit and want to re-invest. with all the adoption that has been happening we can not have a long bear market like last time.

it is a little drop in difficulty which doesn't change much and the price rise is not that big either and it just happened. I don't know about Hashflare but these cloud mining sites usually have weird fees with a lot of rules that is always in their favor not the user's.


the main reason for that is because they always end up becoming a Ponzi scheme because they can not make enough money to justify their own costs and earn any kind of profit.

I don't know of any country that "tried to ban then changed their idea"!
there has been a lot of concerns about bitcoin in all the countries without exception, some people said it should be banned but that doesn't mean they tried banning bitcoin. it just means some people had the idea which was rejected by the lawmaker for many different reasons.

sometimes when there is a big price rise or a big price drop a lot of users start buying bitcoin and withdrawing them which puts a lot of pressure on these exchanges and some of them don't really have strong servers so they fail to respond to that huge load.

in cases like this waiting a little while is better in my opinion.

very interesting but I still can not believe that people would choose cryptocurrencies to protect themselves from hyperinflation. generally speaking in cases of hyperinflation and when your country's currency is being devalued you want to store your wealth in something that is more stable than a cryptocurrency which happens to be super volatile and can go up and down at any moment.

I am not saying we are at the bottom because price went up from $6k to $6.7. I am saying we are most probably at the bottom because $6k was tested multiple times in the past 7 months and could not be broken. the charts right now look like you dropped a ball on the floor, it bounced back up big first then came down again then recovered smaller then came down again and now it is laying there on the floor.

and the longer price stays here in this "calm" state at this current price (the last part of the chart on the right which is extending with every day) the more confident I become that this was the bottom and now it is accumulation phase


not to forget that this is nearly 70% below the ATH.

this is just my perspective but I think the difference between Mt Gox and Btc-e is the general shadiness and anonymity of Btc-e and that is the reason that has kept it alive to some extent. Mt Gox was in Japan and the owners were a lot more clearer than Btc-e. there are some Russian affiliation to this exchange but the fact is nobody really knows where they are, who they are, where their banks are,... you can search all you like but you won't find anything.
all the offshore accounts and hidden money tucked away all these years is the reason why they lived.... and all that attracts people who don't want to  reveal their identity when trading bitcoin. hence the current trading volume on the new site. and it is not just dirty money. there are many people from countries under sanction for instance who can not use US markets and the rest aren't accepting them either so their choice is localbitcoins and btc-e.

anything below 10% change, specially when it takes a couple of days to be achieved is negligible. it is not a jump, the negative of it is not a crash either. they are simply small price movements that are normal and you can not say it is because of this or that.
in bitcoin if people were really excited about this particular news then price should have jumped 10%+ in a couple of hours instead of rising about 8% within a couple of days.

right now we are simply going back up to where we were before the Bancor hack occurred and pulled the price down because of panic sells.

not to mention that BlackRock didn't start anything in cryptocurrencies nor bitcoin. they just started having them under observation.

the "fate" of the market, really?
the "fate" has been clear from the start even without all this SEC drama these days. and not to mention that SEC is just US Security and .... not the whole world's while bitcoin is a global currency and the whole world is the adoption ground of it.
ETF is not that big a deal in my opinion. last year we saw multiple attempts at getting SEC to approve them and they didn't and all the while bitcoin continued to be adopted and go up regardless of that.

I wouldn't get my hopes up for a huge rise this year like reaching the previous ATH at $20k or prices higher than that, it may not happen. but it is possible to start a bull run this year. basically because price has reached the bottom and there is no more down left to go. so the reversal is inevitable but to have a huge rise the market needs more time to properly change course from the bear market to a bull market.

the problem is people forge that USDT is an altcoin not real dollars. so they think if they create more USDT then bitcoin price can be "pumped" that way but that is where you are wrong. if that was true then creation of millions of altcoins every day would have pumped bitcoin to an unimaginable number for its price by now. if it was fake then people receiving those USDT coins would have dumped then on USDT/USD market and would have crashed its price below $1.