if there is anyone out there that is selling or buying because they "have the urge" then maybe trading is not the best choice for them!
trading means you make logical decisions nor random ones. in other words when you buy and when you sell you have to have a very good reason for either one of them. you analyze the market and see fit to sell now so you do it. then of course mistakes are made but that is a different discussion. mistakes are OK as long as you made it after proper analysis not a mistake that was made because of lack of thinking.

what I do is that I take a reverse approach as yours towards trading altcoins. it is not an uncommon approach and in fact one of the crucial steps to a successful trade. what I do is that I make a "good buy" instead of a "good sell".
this means buying at a good time when you know there is a rise on the way or there is potential for it. I guess you can say at the heart of it, this is all about timing. when you buy some altcoin at a good time you will only experience its rise and make the profit instead of waiting around for the rise that may never come and sell too soon or even worse sell at a big loss.

they did affect bitcoin price at some point in the past. specially when JPMorgan CEO called bitcoin a "fraud" publicly and he was constantly saying "I don't want to talk about bitcoin" but he continued talking about it!

but ever since they embarrassed themselves with all the FUD and also when people found out that they have been buying bitcoin in that particular dip they caused, nobody is taking them seriously. they may as well talk about nothing else but bitcoin and it has no effect on anything anymore.

you could have called this a pump, a FOMO buy or whatever when it first went up from $6800 to $8000 in about 1 hour but you would still be wrong back then too. this is none of these things. maybe we saw some traces of FOMO as we always see during all rises but it was not the main reason.
price is simply rising and it is going back to its normal levels. then after that with the increasing adoption price will continue to rise.

I disagree.
the ability to predict bitcoin has not changed whatsoever. if anything it is becoming increasingly simple to predict it as time goes by and the market grows. the rise and the way it happened doesn't change anything. speculation is not something you do once and be done with it  because that is the correct one. no. things change and with it the speculation changes too. we never had the mass adoption of Japan before 2017, it happened so price went up fast and big. and a lot of other things.

none of these means price is manipulated just because your initial speculation 2 years ago were wrong. it just means you forgot to adjust.

they keyword in your comment is "THEY". so unless you think 20 different bitcoin exchanges are secretly cooperating together to manipulate the price, then you are wrong.

never ever do this for exchanges or anything else.
because you are breaking Terms of Services of these businesses and they can legally seize you assets (all your balances on the exchange in this case) and there is nothing you can do about it. in this case not only you lose your money that you paid for the account but also lose all the money that you had on the exchange.
also if you buy an account like this you may receive a hacked account that can be recovered right after you received and deposited some money in it!

first of all now that you saw one pump in action you have to start thinking about what you really saw, what was the signs for instance and how can you predict it next time you saw one so that you can catch it quickly and enjoy the ride. this way you can make a lot of profit in short term and every day!

secondly you have to always learn to be satisfied with the profit that you get. for example if you got 6% be happy that you made a profit instead of regretting why you sold sooner than the ATH. you can never make the max profit ever.


not really but you can sometimes see when the pump is starting and is the fastest and also see when it is getting closer to the finish line.

unreasonable fear is not something that a true trader has. the fear that you are talking about is what the newbies have who think they are trading but in reality they are gambling.

a true trader has uncertainty and he always has it, it ever goes away. at times like the bottom when price was still around $6800 and was struggling or even when it jumped to $7900-$8000 things were still uncertain but since the ~$8000 held on pretty nicely and also because it went higher afterwards that uncertainty is no longer an issue. the rise is here now.
we may not yet be in a big ass bull market but the bear market is for sure over.

they sometimes fail not always. in fact Technical Analysis is a good tool for trading even in bitcoin. you can never fully rely on it but if you have it in your skills and read the charts with it, TA can give you a much better idea of what you are doing in the market while trading.

with that said I am also speculating that there is a good chance we will see $10k+ pretty soon and then from there we may start seeing some slower rises and go back to normal bitcoin like it has always been.

on one hand we have bitcoin which is decentralized and revolutionary which sets it apart from all the old monetary systems.
on the other hand we have Ripple and other centralized altcoins which are centralized to one group who control everything about the coin and they have not that many differences from old monetary systems such as banks.

so why do you think anyone would ever choose centralized coins such as Ripple and trust the shady foundation of it instead of using banks and trust the government and banks instead? your question is actually the difference between using Ripple versus using something like PayPal and in any scenario PayPal will win.

I think the way you can talk about holding and make a correct statement is if you say "depending on your reasons to hold it can affect the future of bitcoin".
for instance some people are holding bitcoin just to dump it as soon as price goes up or they feel some panic creeping up their spine because of some FUD. obviously these people are holding for the wrong reasons and they are the ones preventing any advancement.
but there are also others who are holding bitcoin because they believe in the future of bitcoin as THE decentralized currency of the world. for them holding and not spending is because they don't have an alternative option since bitcoin is not yet accepted everywhere.

I don't see how it is "particularly" impacting miners! Lightning Network is very important for bitcoin but I don't see any impact on the miners. the miners, like any anyone else, will benefit from it. the only difference that I can see is that the big ones like the farms and the pools are running some kind of server already with a full node on it, they can then add a lightning node to it so that they can also take the fees from processing transactions there also.

well this article which seems to be same as OP with different words is explaining the same rules (7 of them) in a better way: https://www.babypips.com/trading/part-time-forex-trading-20180214
but the internet is filled with these stuff: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/10/top-ten-rules-for-trading.asp

these are all talk and none of them would help any beginner to learn how to become a successful trader. in my experience people have to start trading to actually learning things. if you are trading Forex,... there are always demo accounts you can use to not even use your real money! and in cryptocurrencies you can always start with a very small amount of money and don't risk anything big.

there is!
decentralized exchanges, side chains, atomic swaps are the three solutions for trading cryptocurrencies in a way that you don't need a third party platform to sign up and leave your coins in. with these solutions you will have a decentralized place to meet other traders and do the trade and be done with it.
the downside is that they are not yet improved enough to have all the features of a centralized exchange and they are a bit harder to use for now.

I have also spent a lot of money on lottery tickets, not just here but in general over a long period of time in different websites. and my conclusion about lotteries is that no matter how much money you spend you will never win unless you are lucky. and if you are lucky then you wouldn't need to buy that much tickets in first place!
I have seen people win big rewards without an effort! there is no logical explanation for luck...

ps. website is offline at the moment... (Error 524 A timeout occurred)

you are forgetting about the buy support.
any major bitcoin price drop at this point will act as a buy signal for a lot of investors who are waiting on the sidelines watching the market move. if we see another drop back to the support line there will be a lot of FOMO buying in happening there. specially if the drop is one of those FUD drops or drops without a reason.

yes bitcoin is mostly used by speculators as an investment but that  doesn't mean it has no other usages! there are still a lot of people who are using bitcoin as a currency and pay for stuff online or offline. you can see all the online shops that are accepting bitcoin, you can check out the merchants in Japan that have been accepting bitcoin for a bout a year now. and on top of that you can always check out BitPay which is processing payments to merchants and services. BitPay said they have been processing $110M+ in bitcoin payments per month so you can't say there isn't enough utility!

some of them are traders which means they have to store their funds on exchanges while they are trading. and trading is not something you do one day and give up doing the other, your funds need to be active constantly from one order to another and sometimes you need to have an open order on exchanges so you keep some funds there eventually.

anyone who does it for any other reason is taking an unnecessary risk and they need to transfer it out to a cold storage (only one form of cold storage is paper wallet).

it wasn't a mining farm it was a mining pool called Ghash and it was lots of individual miners (and also their own hashrate) that were connected to that pool, when the article about the risk of 51% attack was published and these individual miners saw the possible threat drama they simply switched to other pools and their total hashrate dropped.

you need to be running a mining "Farm" to be using a lot of electricity to begin to raise some flags. otherwise I doubt having a couple of ASICs as an individual and mining bitcoin is not using that much electricity more than having your gaming PC on and playing call of duty

and if some day the government did start to pull some shenanigans on mining farms they will simply relocate to a new area with a new government that doesn't pull the same shenanigans...