I seriously doubt it. since most of what they did was just social media drama and nonsense rather than an actual spam attack/stress testing the network. and this is already old and they have not done anything of significance since then. I still haven't figured out what their motivations were for this shenanigan but I honestly wouldn't be surprised to learn they were advertising bitcoin cash in this weird way.

there is always some damn newbies who would ruin it for everyone.

and the concern is not about paying 200 satoshi! it is about the fact that mempool now contains transactions that are paying 5 times the recommended fee and that can be the start of how fees shoot up whenever there is a backlog.

is the fee estimation of the website broken or am I missing something?

for a while now I am seeing the minimum withdrawal fee has been increased from 40 satoshi to 200 satoshi. at first I thought the website just increased it but looking at the payments it seems like they are paying higher fee than usual.
for example this is the latest withdrawal (SLOW) which should have paid 1 satoshi/byte but it is paying 5
https://www.blockchain.com/en/btc/tx/7277b96054ac64261b2ffdf6d8fa7be6462d1731812d6a42047da7e6f7d2dee7

if you look at the mempool at that time it was empty and you can check the block that it was included in and previous ones and see they are filled with 1-2 s/b transactions.

so what is up?

having another new bull market this year is not the same as setting a new ATH though. I completely agree that it is impossible to reach $60k but we can easily see a bull market this year. it is true that we had a big bull market last year but we also had a huge bear market that lasted long enough and price fell down enough (70% drop). we can easily see the rise for the rest of the year and reach back above $10k and that can be a very reasonable bull market for this year.

they have turned Bitmain into some sort of scarecrow or a boogyman to scare people with every time they want to spread FUD and I believe it is mostly because they ran out of ideas and all their previous boogymen got busted like China banning bitcoin and killing it FUD. they all come to an end eventually since there is no reality to any of them and meanwhile people will always fall for the drama and get stuck in this web of deceit while the silent majority is accumulating bitcoin at cheap prices.

how are you sure about that?
bitcoin is new and it is the first of its kind. it is the only decentralized money which some people still consider experimental but there is no way of being sure about it ending badly!!! all the evidence points to a better future for bitcoin and continuing stronger than ever in the near future and far future. yes there is also a chance of it ending badly but only a small chance and with all the effort put into improving bitcoin that chance is closer to zero.

what are you even talking about? if there is no support then what the hell was $6k and why did price jump back above it each time it was tested with a gigantic dump? we have reached the bottom with the strong support at that price and the market has started its recovery. the shorts and all the rest are not the only thing in the market, there are other opposing forces, sometimes the balance is disturbed so the price moves in one direction until it reaches the balance again (meaning at $6k) then again it is disturbed and moves in the other direction.

saying price falls because people are shorting and never recovers is like ignoring the other half of the market as if they don't even exist!!!

you are getting a loan in "Bitcoin" not in "fiat" so why should you pay it back based on its fiat value? also would you pay back 2BTC+interest if the price fell down 50%? since it can go both ways.
in my opinion, like any loan you should only consider how much you took in BTC not in fiat and then pay back that in BTC and that is completely fair. besides people usually take these loans to trade with so they are making profit on the bitcoin they took and in the future price will be a lot more stable so all this wouldn't matter.

the FUD is only effective for a short period of time before it stops being effective. you never see FUD continue influencing the prices forever otherwise price would have dropped down to zero. and as for the hacking incident the last one was an ETH hack and it had nothing to do with bitcoin and the fact that bitcoin price also went down was because ETH got dumped in my opinion.

as for the price rise, it is going to happen since we are at the bottom and there is no way left to go but up.

that is only 1 line of my comment in answer to your comment talking about manipulation which is price manipulation since there is no other form of manipulation present in bitcoin. as I said you are trying too hard to say bitcoin has no future with none-reasons.
and I find it interesting that you focused only on the price part of my whole comment, as if I struck a nerve with that one line.

it is not about speculation it is about adoption instead.
with Lightning Network we can open up a lot of opportunities for accepting bitcoin, many people are complaining about confirmation times and fees and a lot of things they don't even understand. if these things go away with LN which is offering instant transactions with little to no fee, then we can see a lot more adoption. and that can help the "skyrocket".

since LN is not something that is going to be finished in a day, I think we will see the rise before LN and then with LN we will see another big rise.

manipulating the price has nothing to do with ASICs nor with centralization.
just because someone has an ASIC farm and has a large portion of the current hashrate, it doesn't make bitcoin centralized. it just means he believed in bitcoin a lot more than YOU did so he invested a lot more of his money in bitcoin while you were nagging about why others are making more profit than you from bitcoin!

who cares about banks accepting bitcoin?
we have bitcoin to not need banks and their acceptance anymore!!!

this is off topic. ethereum is a centralized altcoin with a lot of bugs...

basically you are trying too hard, .... if you don't like bitcoin, you know where the door is. but I am sure you will never go away.

the problem with people like you who are complaining about confirmation time and accepting bitcoin payment is that you have never used bitcoin, never accepted it as payment and never asked someone who does to tell you about their experience.

for example if you ask shops that are accepting bitcoin payment (like a fast food that is accepting bitcoin) they say they have actually increased their sales and have never yet encountered any scams/double spends,... and they don't wait for confirmation.

there are two things when accepting a payment: the amount so the risks and the transaction itself.
when you receive a small payment (like for a cup of coffee or a hot dog) the risks of getting scammed is minimal and near zero.
additionally there are ways of analyzing the transaction to know the risks of accepting it with 0 confirmation. like the fee it is paying, whether it has unconfirmed parent, anything non-standard, has RBF,...

bitcoin technology is really beautiful I suggest you learn more about it.

none of these things are 100%, you can analyze a coin as much as you can based on its supply, the hype it has, do technical analysis and find the supports and resistances and trends, .... and a lot of things but in the end you will find yourself in a manipulated market since that is what altcoins are. and when manipulation comes in every other logic goes out.

eventually earning profit from an altcoin turns into knowing what can help its pump. for example when a random coin is listed on a big exchange it can go from 10,000 satoshi to 50,000 satoshi and back to 10,000 again just because it got hyped. and that is an easy 5x profit in a couple of days.

well demand is increasing anyways because more people are adopting bitcoin every day as we speak so new money is always coming in. even if we assume that adoption stops now there is still a lot of investors already in who are investing more money in bitcoin as they want to increase their share of this scarce currency before the mass adoption hits.

the problems with account verification in Bittrex has never been with you having something to hide or not. it has always been the fact that they suddenly changed their rules and forced you to submit your information with them. not to mention that you should not trust any random person on the internet with your documents even if they run a big exchange service. their service is not a regulated trusted exchange, they can easily sell your documents online and abuse your trust the same way they changed their rules overnight and stole a large number of user's funds.

that is true about half the market. what you are talking about is the overall market movement that is the result of all the traders that are in that market. manipulation won't work when it is going against that market movement. for example last year I believe it was around $2000 that we saw a bunch of bear whales started dumping to push the price down, they obviously were going against the market and they were crushed and lost a lot of money because the market moved up and killed them like bugs.
but when a whale goes with the market movement like pushing the price lower when it is already a bear market then they can manipulate it harder.

this is perfectly inside the realms of possibility and we may very well see that happen but such rises like that are not natural. you can not expect for price to reverse up and just turn into a gigantic rally and set a new record.
of course if price currently was above $10k it could have been a different story but now that we are not, even if you agree that bitcoin is extremely underpriced, it still would take a longer time to start the engines up and gain that momentum that leads to a new ATH

it will be positive but not a "mega" positive thing.
in other words the impact of India and their decisions now is the same as their impact when their reserve bank closed the exchange accounts. if you look back at the dates of that negative news and compare it with a chart you can see that price didn't move at all. so the reversal of that shouldn't have any significant impact either.

speaking of volatility and adoption it is not a serious issue really. of course the volatility makes it harder to use it as a currency sometimes but there are enough other positive points about bitcoin that makes the volatility negligible.
volatility only becomes a concern when you are investing in it and you are new to the whole investing thing. and that doesn't change anything about bitcoin's adoption that will still happen regardless.