it is not always about competing with bitcoin when a new thing is created. bitcoin is there, growing every day and it is being adopted by more people. that doesn't mean they can't create a centralized coin to improve some internal transactions like increasing the security and speed and things like that.

it was hard to say yesterday but since the rise has not stopped and price is still up above the initial rise even after its correction at $8000+ I can say there is a good chance that this is the end of the downtrend and the chances of any more drop is decreasing with any minute that bitcoin spends above $7800-$8000.

it is true that bittrex has a better platform and poloniex has a lower fee and all the rest but none of these makes them good choices to go to and trade.

poloniex is a big place which stopped giving proper customer support and you will have a terrible time on their platform and if you encounter any problems you wish you have never used them before.
bittrex became big and some day decided to scam a large number of their users so they selected them in groups based on risk of retaliation and scammed them all, such business is not trusted at all.

it is not that simple. there is two parts about being a whale: 1. having a lot of money 2. knowing how to use it.
the second part is complicated so I won't get into it, just know that simply being rich doesn't mean they can become whales and be effective in a market.
about #1 you should know that there is no fixed number here, having a lot of money is a relative concept. you may say 1000BTC makes someone a whale in bitcoin market and also having 0.1BTC makes someone a whale in some altcoin's market. it depends on the size of the market which is mostly visible in form of daily volume and on orderbooks and size of orders in it. you can simply manipulate price of some altcoins with 0.1BTC while even having 1000BTC may not help you change anything about bitcoin price.

I don't know about 24 times a day but 7-8 times may be more up my alley. not every day but days that I am behind my computer.
and it is not really a big deal since I am behind my computer most of the times or my computer is on so an open tab with the site open is something I do and it is just a click, I don't have to even fill in any captchas since my balance is higher than the threshold because of my investment there.

shorting on its own is not a bad thing at all. it can give a very good amount of profit to those who are doing it correctly but the problem is that most bitcoin traders are always late to the parties. there is a time to short and a time to buy and a time to sell. as long as they are doing everything at its right time they will make profit and when they do it after that time was passed they will lose money.
the time to short was when price was falling, the media was filled with FUD saying x and y banned bitcoin...

this is more like a good sign than a good signal.
this rise proves that the demand for bitcoin is still pretty hot and there are a lot of traders standing on the sidelines with a lot of money in their hands waiting to come back in. they went out and stayed out ever since the sideways and unreasonable drops started to happen and market became hard to predict.
to be 100% sure I would wait until end of today and see what will happen. if the rise continues it can be signal for the bull market on the horizon.

don't count on trends like these.
although they do exist and they happen but they don't happen all the time. for example you may see 3 years of rise in March and in 4th year a drop in March. so try to just have trends like these in mind but don't rely on them to always be true because there are a lot of different factors affecting the market than just Time (different months).

instead of putting the definition in your own words and make it more complicated and also make mistakes in some places it is best that you read some trusted sources like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain or https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-is-blockchain-technology/ and understand what it really means. if you want to share it then simply quote the same text and put the reference here.

for example this doesn't make any sense:
it is called a crypto-currency because it uses cryptography!

like always bitcoin price went up and then with some delay the altcoins which have been following it down could get a breath of air and get pumped following bitcoin's footsteps. the start was with bitcoin but the reason is not clear, there are a lot of guesses but my analysis is that it was some sort of TA effect where people were saying it should rise if it breaks $6900-$7000 and since it did they all followed it by buying bitcoin so price shoot up.

as far as I know the only reason why EOS was having a pump was because it had a snapshot coming and some greedy newbies in the market was thinking about getting that free money from it so they started buying as much as they could and that created a pump then the hype started and the pump got bigger.
in short this is temporary.

$1000 price rise is only 14% which is about 4% higher than normal fluctuations of bitcoin. what I am trying to say is that $1000 rise from $6900 is not that big if you look at it in % form.

the reason is because bitcoin has been much lower than it is really worth for a very long time now and it needs to go up. this upward movement has been suppressed for a long time now which makes rises more like a jump up rather than a simple slow rise.
additionally it is kind of a Technical Analysis thing. price broke out of a triangle and that acted as a signal for traders that a rise is coming so they rushed to invest and price jumped as a result.

that is what majority of investors do and the minority are only bag holders. everyone eventually comes back to either fiat or bitcoin and mostly bitcoin since at the end of the day bitcoin is the only thing that will rise up in the long term because of its real world application and not just having illusions of application like what altcoins do!

I am no expert in TA but you seem to have missed the other part of this pattern!
as long as we are inside that triangle you can not tell which way price is going. the lows are not horizontal for you to call for a drop and your highs linked together don't form a horizontal line either to call for a rise. this pattern only means you can not tell which way price will go.
if it breaks below the support line it will drop and if breaks above the resistance it will rise and it will be bigger because there are investors waiting for such breaks.

ps. as you can see the rise part occurred! less than an hour ago price started testing that upper line and broke it so price went up, currently sitting at $7600+

there is always going to be some people who are getting into bitcoin and then altcoins only because of making money and not even through mining, trading, and generally other logical ways. but instead they want to make money by buying, holding and them magically becoming rich over night.
these people are the ones you saw saying bitcoin is done just because its price went down and their dreams were shattered with it.

I believe you still have to pay taxes when you are trading currencies with each other like buying and selling EUR and USD in Forex market and making profit from it. and as long as that is true, paying taxes on bitcoin when people use it as an investment (trading it on exchanges) is not that illogical.

but paying taxes when you use it as a currency to buy stuff is not at all acceptable which is why some countries such as Japan have already removed taxes on that part.
but you can never deny the fact that people are using bitcoin as both an investment and as a currency at the same time.

wrong
when bitcoin was first launched it had no real value. it was only some code on a computer. then that code gained value slowly as more people started using it and as it gained more usages and was exchanges with real goods as Franky1 said above it started to gain real value. and to this day this value is mainly increasing based on the real adoption that bitcoin gains as a currency and partly because of speculation.

bitcoin will always have trouble evolving and improving because it has a lot of enemies who don't want to see that happening ever. that is why a lot of FUD exists on the internet calling bitcoin a lot of negative names including Fraud, Ponzi,... but in the end, all of these are only obstacles on the road that will slow down the progress that will happen because there is a very strong network shaped up in the past 9 years for bitcoin no matter what anybody tries to show otherwise.

let me tell you what is really happening.
bitcoin price has been dropping for some time and now it has slowed down since it is n ear the bottom. at times like this there will always be a lot of people trying to short bitcoin way too late and also buy bitcoin at the bottom. all of these people will try to undermine bitcoin and the technology even. there is no merit to what they are saying and they always lack understanding of the technology.

maybe you were reading something old or maybe you were reading some FUD. bitcoin is not a bubble. bitcoin was in a bubble at some point and after a huge drop it is not only over but also we are underpriced.

there is a difference between someone with analysis and some idiot on the internet spreading FUD. try not to confuse the two.

because of the difference I mentioned above! and the fact that what you read was not from an analysis.

because there is no reason for it to drop or not rise!
what are your reasons for not believing it can not rise?!!