no price is ever going to be a "dangerous area" for bitcoin. not $1 trillion nor $0.01. in other words even if bitcoin price drops to 1 cent it still will go on as I will be the one who picks up mining it with my PC as the difficulty drops.

that is how bitcoin works. if it is more profitable to mine then there will be more miners then difficulty will rise and make it less profitable (or better say reasonably profitable).
if price drops and it becomes less profitable to mine, some miners will start leaving (slowly) and the difficulty will drop making it easier to mine and making it more profitable to mine bitcoin (or better say reasonable profitable again). in the end the balance will be disturbed for a little while before things go back to normal again.

that will not work as long as you are using any kind of exchange that requires you to withdraw to your bank account. Coinbase or any other, or even using a mixer won't change a thing. when you withdraw to your bank account you are showing that you have that amount of in bitcoin which now you have liquidated.

you either have to evade taxes by going off the market and off the charts with cash.
or be a law abiding citizen and pay your taxes. in which case go consult some tax expert or something in your jurisdiction, don't trust what people tell you online we are not experts specially in other jurisdictions which may have very different laws compared to what we have.

there is two things wrong with this speculation.
first is the fact that the World Cup has already begun and we have not seen any change in bitcoin price that can be noticeable enough so that we can associate it with this and say this speculation was right.
second is the fact that there are a lot of ways to gamble on these games that are more legal. the problem is online gambling is illegal in many countries and people are used to normal ways of doing it with fiat which are also legal. if they want to use bitcoin they also have to gamble illegally in many jurisdictions and also go through the hassle of buying bitcoin which is signing up on an exchange, verifying account, installing a wallet, learning how to use bitcoin,.... so they won't do it!

short answer is: yes but it is not an easy task.

unfortunately when we talk about manipulation first thing people think about is either one of these two:
1- some big evil whale who simply clicks a button and price moves in his desired direction
2- any random small thing (even a comment) that is bullshit about bitcoin.

well they are both wrong specially the second one which we are seeing a lot of these days. you can't even put a dent in the market when you start a topic here talking nonsense out of your ass
and regarding the whales it is not as easy as you think specially when we are talking about bitcoin which has a much bigger market than the altcoins with their small markets and their controlled supply. it  takes a lot of work, a lot of money and it is very risky because a lot of money of the whale is at risk.

there are solutions that we can seek.
for starters as others mentioned more trustworthy exchanges that are under observation and can't scam you is a start. we need exchange owners to be known and can be prosecuted in case they scammed us.
but also these days we have the decentralized exchanges that you can't lose money to scams because of the way they work and the fact that you don't leave your money anywhere. everything happens right then and there. we just need them to grow more and become easier to use.

all the technical discussions about this question apart the answer to your question is very simple: bitcoin was not created yesterday. it has been around for about 9 years and it had a real value for all that time (the incentive) if it was possible to brute force a bitcoin address then it would have already happened.

it is not about just finding the whales though. finding them is the easy part, a whale is someone who has a large amount of money or bitcoin, that's it you just check their balances on exchanges and you find them. the hard part is to figure out whether there actually was a manipulation or not and the even harder part is to prove that which is nearly impossible to do.

ICOs aren't the reason but they generally speaking ICOs and all these pumped up shitcoins have been effective in the bitcoin price drop. it is mainly because people invest in all these shitcoins with bitcoin and they even buy ETH with bitcoin to invest in shitty ICOs. this means when all the ICOs and shitcoins go belly up people run away and they run away through bitcoin! meaning sell shitcoin for bitcoin then sell bitcoin for fiat and that creates a big sell pressure on bitcoin which pushes the price lower.

but it is not the reason for the drop it just makes it bigger. the reason in my opinion is pure manipulation by the whales to buy cheaper bitcoins.

SEC is just trying to pretend they are relevant and create an illusion of their power. otherwise this market was not created yesterday. it has been around for 9 years and the manipulation existed ever since exchanges started showing up. they never cared to do anything about it so far.
not to mention that bitcoin doesn't belong to SEC or even US for that matter. they have no power to do anything at all.

my theory is that they are waiting for a good time to release these things and also use the hype that it gives them to pump their useless token. for example imagine when the ETH dumping is over and done and it is at the bottom. they can easily start accumulating by that time and then release these things one by one while hyping them in the media by spending some money advertising it like always. that can simply help pump it back up a lot.
I'd say that is pretty genius... and that is the strategy they have been using so far.

basically all you need is a good plan ahead of yourself so that you can stick to it and know what you must do under different circumstances.

for example when you buy an altcoin named X you should set 2 price levels for yourself. 1 for when price rises (everything goes according to plan) and you want to sell. during pumps it can be any percentage for example 10% profit or 30% profit is  the most common ones but you can sometimes go as high as a 100% profit during a pump. sometimes setting a time frame also helps like saying 10% in 3 hours or 100% in 24 hours.
another 1 for when things don't go according to plan and price falls under the level you bought altcoin X at. this is known as Stop Loss. in a highly volatile market it is hard to set this but it is a good thing to have. somewhere around 5 to 10% is a good place for me.

there are similarities between the two times but not that many.
- 2018 and 2014 are both a period of time that fall after one of the many big bubbles that bitcoin had. they both are the bear market aftermath. the similarity ends there!

- 2013 bubble was mostly a fake bubble that was created by 90% fake volume and pure manipulation and a little real money going in.
2017 bubble was partly fake bubble and manipulation like less than 10% fake volume if I am generous. the 2017 bubbles was not as big as 2013 bubble either.

- 2014 bear market started with the bubble burst and correction but intensified by the Mt Gox scam
2018 bear market started with the bubble burst and correction but intensified by basically no reason! mostly FUD and panic sells and people wanting to take advantage of the situation to short bitcoin and also abuse the Futures that are currently available to us!!!

- in 2014 there weren't that many big altcoins or ICOs to pull the bitcoin price down but in 2018 there are lots of them around which are getting dumped hard and pulling bitcoin down with themselves.

with the decline in volume I would say the traders are no longer buying bitcoin nor selling it. most of them are staying out of this mess that was created by the constant dump by the whale manipulations. that means you can't really predict the price because everyone is out for now.
we need some solid signals for the money to come back to the market and trust it again otherwise we will be stuck here because there is no money to buy it up and there is no bitcoin to be sold so neither rise nor drop is going to be easy for the time being even if it is a short one.

I can not find this on the market anywhere which raises the question whether this was real or just trolling? if anyone has the link to the exchange that has this I would appreciate it.

in any case there is no confusion if some day someone created bitcoin core, in fact I believe it can remove a lot of confusion from people's mind as it once and for all proves that when you add a trailing word to bitcoin you create a useless altcoin so if someone by any chance didn't know this they will figure it out!

two things. altcoins are going down because they need to go down as the dumps are coming after all these months of pumping them. investors are exiting!
also there is nothing wrong with selling. in fact in most cases, even for bitcoin, you need to sell your coins when you see the drop starting. the problem is timing. newbies sell when it is already too late, experienced investors sell when the drop is just starting and has not yet reached bottom.

Warren Buffer does not understand the cryptocurrency market and is probably not even familiar with how the pump and dumps work. I personally have made a lot of profit by only holding a coin for a short time. not exactly 10 minutes but mostly less than an hour. in fact the bulk of my profit is like this from the altcoins' pumps.

you end up losing only if you hold altcoins in my opinion. but anything else that you hold: bitcoin, gold, stocks of a good company that is expanding,... you will make a lot of money.

nice comparison and it certainly looks that way sometimes.
I believe it is because whenever there is a dump (the pressure you put on a spring) many of the investors sell to get out and stay out until the shenanigans of the manipulators are over. then when the time comes for the rise (removing the pressure/force from the spring) they come back or mostly jump back in and the rise becomes big. and like always they are followed by the weak hands  this time FOMO buying instead of PANIC selling. so the rise becomes even bigger.

name 1 good DAP that has actually done something and explain what that something was. if you can show us a real world application of DAP not just what they promised to do but what they actually did, then you are correct.

but the problem is you can not do that because so far all of them have been ICOs to raise money not to actually do anything. they promise to do this and  that and solve a lot of different things but in the end when it comes to reality you  can see they did absolutely nothing. they just got paid to release a token for trading on exchanges. and that ends there!

these days is like the birthday that never ends for the FUDsters who love bashing bitcoin while bag holding their shitcoins. the funny thing is for all of them they are losing a lot more money on their altcoins than they could have on bitcoin and when the recoveries happen bitcoin will shoot up to the moon not their shitcoins.

in any case I find it strange that Bill Gates had a 180 degree change of opinion about bitcoin. there must be something going on in Microsoft, possibly an altcoin they want to create? or does it go deeper?

what news?
miners are the same as they ever was. there was no secrecy about it ever.

and do what with it?
China is not as chaotic as you think. the government can not just go kick down doors of houses and confiscate people's possessions. and what you see in China is a couple of big mining farms and the rest is mining pools where people from around the world including China connect to. the hashrate that pools show is not the same as the hashrate of a farm. farm is just a part of that pool. in order to take the mining power they have to also find each individual who is mining and take their mining equipment too!

stop watching bullshit on youtube which is made by idiots.

someone who was predicting $43,370  just because price was rising fast is not an expert he is instead an attention whore. it works like this: when price is rising you keep predicting bullshit high prices. for example when it is $20k you say it will reach $50k when it is $50k you say it will reach $1 million and so on.
and it works both ways. when price is dropping the attention whores come out then also. they keep predicting bullshit low prices. for example when price is $10k they say it will be $5k, when it is $6k they say it will be $3k and so on.
it is extra funny when they do it about altcoins since there is no way of predicting when a pump bubble ends and when its dump is gong to end.