most of the times when you are trading altcoins you are basically gambling. so no matter how "expert"  you are or you think you are, you would be still taking a huge risk and there is a big unpredictability about the altcoins that you can never shake. and that is only because altcoin markets are too  small and too controlled which makes them mostly manipulation and unpredictable as a result.

what you need to do is to study the market. for example you said "buy in a downfall" that is a big mistake. you should buy when the downfall is over not as it is still going on. among altcoins for instance there are many which are still on the downfall and buying them is the worst thing you can do. but at the same time there are others that have reached their bottoms and have been already at the end of their "downfall" which makes them good buys. they are currently getting pumped one after another while the big coins still go down.

there is no doubt about bitcoin price rise ever. $250000 is just one of the many stops on the way up. and I believe that everyone who understand bitcoin and knows a little about speculation would agree about this. but the real question where people have a hard time agreeing about is the "time". as in "when does bitcoin reach $250K?" and if you look at different speculations they differ only in this. otherwise they all say eventually the same thing.

whenever people fail to understand something they try to compare it with other things they know of so that they can explain the unexplainable! and in bitcoin world things like this that have a negative aspect to them tend to be spread fast and easy on the internet because people love FUD.
the fact is there is not a single thing that bitcoin shares with Tulips and that bubble but when you hear bubble (even if you google it) you find bitcoin bubble and Tulips!

if you look past the nonsense and look what is happening in the market you can understand why comparisons like this exist.

well, jokes aside that is what they get when they bag hold 100 different shitcoins and call it "portfolio". the right word is always going to be Bag Holder and the dumps are inevitable in altcoin market. when you get the pumps you are happy so you don't see this eventuality but it will always come and bite you in the ass.

the margin volume is higher because price is falling it is not controlled by anything! people are deciding to margin trade when there is a big downtrend like this. it is like saying when price was rising from $9k to $20k trading volume was huge so it controlled!!!

as for prices, there is manipulation in the market and nobody can deny that. but how effective this manipulation is on the price is open for debate. I disagree with calling it "control" but it is a powerful force.

altcoin dumps and bubble bursts can contribute to the bitcoin drop but not ICOs because ICOs are mostly receiving ETH and nothing else and when they scam, run away, or simply get dumped people dump them for ETH, some of them don't have any other way of exiting than ETH so if anything they are dumping ETH price not bitcoin's.

but altcoins as I said can cause a bitcoin drop in my experience. as they get dumped hard a lot of money exits the market and they usually run back to fiat and since majority of them don't have a fiat market or the traders are not on an exchange that has  a fiat market (don't confuse USDT with fiat) they have to go through bitcoin.

nah, bitcoin price is falling for the same reasons that it has fallen all the previous times. there is no conspiracy theory behind it for any country(ies) to enter bitcoin and crash it to enter! it is just the market dynamics combined with the whales manipulation that has been going on for nearly 9 years now.
price rises and falls all the time and sometimes like these days the whales are more active to make more money from these ups and downs so that they can increase their bitcoin wealth.

I don't know what will happen or where the bottom is going to be but I can tell you that we are reaching that point where people finally give up hope for bitcoin and stop doing anything. and just like 2014 where price reached the absolute bottom and (some) people had given up on bitcoin that is when the accumulation begins and then in a couple of months that rally begins.

yes it may happen and it may even go lower but the problem is the volume is pretty weak as you have already observed yourself and that in my opinion shows the fact that traders have left the market and they are staying away from it because it has become unpredictable for them (thanks to the manipulation of course). that leaves mostly whales themselves so they have to sell to their own orders if they want to crash the market any further and you don't make any profit that way because there is no more bitcoins left in the market to be sold to you so that you (as a whale) can buy more cheap coins and make profit.

what you see on the coinmarketcap now is the result of these coins being around for a while. not a new coin coming out and getting pumped. any coin that is fresh and has a low price can get pumped to higher prices very easily. specially if you are good at pumping coins and start from a higher initial price.

for example you can see here that a shitcoin with price of $0.14 got pumped 8 million% (yes you are reading it right it is not a bug it was pumped on Yobit) and reached rank #3 in coinmarketcap. it lasted there for a while too and its supply isn't as big as what OP suggests it is only 2 billion.


and here is my 1+ year old topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1842964.0;all

there are two types of people who are "spreading" the pessimism. (we have more types with pessimism but they keep it to themselves).
1. the newbies who thought they were about to become a millionaire because they invested something like $100 in bitcoin
2. those idiot traders who think if they attack bitcoin now the price can go lower so they can make a bigger profit in their short trades.

I disagree. bitcoin is undervalued by a lot. it at least needs to go up another $3000 to get where its real value is. this price is the product of a "push-down" not a correction anymore. yes there was a bubble, then there was a correction but that was months ago.

being stable or not has nothing to do with investors "trusting" it!!!
they trust bitcoin because of its transparency and security and also its being permissionless.
and we don't want any "big player" to come in. we want people to have the option to be able to use a decentralized currency not some "big player" millionaire to buy it and play around with its price!

that is irrelevant to bitcoin.

if by that you mean price will be more stable and won't have wild swings then you are wrong. we are very far away from that day. we WILL continue to see big rises, bubbles, big bubbles, corrections, crashes and big crashing dumps.
.... the rollercoaster continues.

what does bitcoin price being $XXX have anything to do with whether you invest in an altcoin or not?

investing in altcoins requires a trader. and the experience that comes with it. if you are an experienced trader then you for it and start investing in altcoins, otherwise if you are not familiar with the pump and dumps that is always happening in the altcoin market then you should stay away from it.
and that has nothing to do with bitcoin price, it can be worth $1 or $10 million and still the answer is the same.

why should we try and explain what backs bitcoin? you should be the one explaining why you think nothing is backing bitcoin and also more importantly you should explain why you think something should back a currency for it to be a currency.

and this part is just pure bullshit.


stop feeding the trolls like  First77. let him repeat the same idiotic comment another thousand times until he is blue in the face, or finger in this case. nothing is going to change

unfortunately bitcointalk does not have the option to give you an alert or something whenever one of your comments is quoted so usually people miss it unless they manually go back to the topics and check the replies to see it for themselves. which I happened to do right now.

bears got boned in the ass too in the past couple of weeks as the market was going sideways instead of going down you can see the symptoms of them getting "boned" on bitcointalk as there has been an increased activity of butthurt people who repeat the same doomsday theories again and again and wish for the price to go down so that they can make profit or possibly earn back what they have lost.

that is a common mistake and you are being brainwashed by the altcoin advertisers/bag holders into thinking that is true.
the fact it bitcoin being big has nothing to do with it being first. being first surely helped but the reason why nothing has yet come even close to bitcoin is because they either copy bitcoin's code/technology or they create something useless with a lot of problems while trying to fix a small and simple problem that bitcoin has.

if some day someone creates something that is REALLY good not just looks good then it will come close to bitcoin and it can even grow bigger than it. but such coin is not yet created and may not be created unless altcoin devs and the community stop wanting pump and dumps.

I don't think you know what "monopoly" means. try reading the link other poster gave you.

sooner or later it won't even do that temporary disturbance either.
you see government bans on a decentralized currency which is created with censorship resistance in mind is too ridiculous to even talk about. we all know that the drops are because of panic not because someone exits because of ban! and the panic stems from people not understand what bitcoin is. sooner or later this is going to change and when it does, it won't matter what the government does anymore.


you mean "role"?
no because you can't go to a shop, chop off a small portion of your gold/silver ingot and pay for a sack of potato. but you can go to a shop and simply pay with a portion of your bitcoin to do the same purchase without wasting anything.

best case scenario for who?
of course if he placed his buy orders around $4900 level falling to that price is the best case scenario for HIM not for anyone else and not for bitcoin. $4900 is equal to 75.5% drop which is a huge drop and we have no reason for dropping that low. the rise to at least $6000 last year was a 100% solid rise and from there to $10k was also mostly a solid rise. you can't really expect all that to be wiped clean.

what you can say is that since the rise from $10k to $20k was not that solid and was mainly hype then that drop is justifiable. not the rest. so people coming up with these numbers like $4900 are talking out of their asses even if they actually happen.

no you are right, bitcoin should begin its real competition with real currencies such as US dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen,... instead of just being a cryptocurrency and separate from them. it has already started though. as the merchants are adopting bitcoin as payment and as countries start recognizing bitcoin as a legal way of payment this competition begins.

I don't know why you call it "monopoly" though. that doesn't make any sense to me.

first of all the article itself is saying they control 42% not 51% and although when you look at percentages it may look like nothing but it is a HUGE difference there. we are not talking about 9% of a small total hashrate like 100 GHS total. we are talking about 9% of a HUGE hashrate = 37.395 Ehash/s according to bitinfocharts. that is 3.365 Ehash/s. that is not something you can easily summon.

secondly it is combination of more than one pool not just one pool having a large hashrate and it relies upon the fact that these pools are controlled by one company (bitmain).

and finally it is a mining pool not a mining farm. a mining pool's hashrate belongs to many different miners coming from many different places all around the world. they can switch to another mining pool if they feel like the mining pool they are connected to can 51% attack the network and ruin the thing they are mining and spending money on. they will take their investment (their hashrate/ASICs) to some other pool.