jackpot is like winning the lottery for me, it has always been like this!
it is like wasting a lot of money on lottery tickets for that very small chance of winning a large amount of lottery money that will never happen to you ever but you still keep on buying the tickets and waste your money. so far neither jackpots nor lotteries have been kind to me, I am specially unlucky when it comes to these things.

let me clarify something for you, there is no such thing as "signal group" anywhere that you can simply join and get "signals". what exists is a lot of "scam channels/groups" that are calling themselves "signal groups" and they call the crap they tell you "signal".

what really happens is that they buy up some shitcoin that was already dead and when its price goes up and they want to dump it, they tell YOU who are reading their bullshit channel to buy that shitcoin. and as you buy it, you are buying from their sell orders. in other words they dump on you to make money.

this is exactly the biggest problem with the bitcoin community in my opinion. when someone (sometimes it doesn't even matter who) makes a prediction and is close to what the trends look like, everyone starts praising them and making them into "future tellers".
so obviously there are people who will take advantage of this attitude.

enters John McAfee! as bitcoin price picked up and started its rally last year he increased his statements about bitcoin. stated talking about how it will rise and started predicting it over long term. the only reason why the dates were in far future is because he wanted to buy as much time he could and also it is a safe bet to say bitcoin is rising to a big number over long term!
why? well to make money! and he has been making a ton of money from this silly publicity that we gave him. he has been getting paid to advertise scam ICOs ($105000 per tweet!) he has also been paid to advertise shitcoins and also advertised shitcoins that wanted to be pumped so he could dump them and make a huge profit from that trade.

if anything the rises tend to happen during Summer which falls within June and October. so I guess if previous trends is your clue here then price should only rise during that time. anything else that may or may not happen is against the common trend and is unpredictable at this point.

just because price is fluctuating less than before it doesn't necessarily mean there is manipulation happening. just like when there is a rise or falls happen there is not always some manipulation. and this stability might be because of the weekend effect and the fact that we are closer to the bottom now than before so the buy support is canceling out all the dumps now.

it also may be because of some uncertainty about the near future price that also shows up on the volume charts (lower vol now).

I am sorry to disappoint you but this method of making silly topics in this forum is getting old and it is not effective as you may think. even the infamous kuwakduck gave up this silliness long ago and went away after the knew his silly methods are see through.

your guess is not coming true and you have to reason for thinking it will.

nothing that hasn't happened before!

the newbies are booted out of the market slowly but surely and the whales are taking their coins out of their hands at a big discount. as the number of newbies dwindles, the drops become slower and smaller. eventually there is no more newbies and the rise will start up. after the rise went up for a while and some panic sells (bear traps) happened a big rise will happen where the newbies come back to buy what they sold at a much higher price (FOMO period) and we see another rally start up again to reach $100k this time.

until the beginning of the rise, newbies like OP will continue calling bitcoin bubble, dead, dropping, pump and dump, .... and make the whales laugh.

bad news never ends. there is always some bad news coming out and some idiots trying so hard to make it into FUD but the market trend is important. for example last year we have had lots and lots of bad news like these days but the trend was up so nobody paid them any attention!
now the trend is down and people are so interested in the negativity while there are lots of positive news about bitcoin!

there is no such thing as groups of full time traders that share anything valuable with others!

trading is a war and people aren't giving away information and knowledge to others, specially newcomers for free. even if it seemed free or even if they asked for a registration fee, be sure that they are benefiting from giving said information to you.
in most cases what they tell you is a clear definition of a pump and dump group. what they do is that they choose a dead shitcoin, they buy it slowly and then as the price starts rising up and goes higher a little because of their buys, they start telling YOU about that shitcoin and as you buy that shitcion they start selling (dumping) it on you to get the profit and get out.
in other words it is a sly method of taking your money without you even noticing because you are giving it to them unknowingly but willingly.

unfortunately none of the cryptocurrency exchanges are safe choices, they are all bad and with extremely high risks of getting scammed by them. there are some that are less bad so you can choose them. in other words you choose bad instead of worst. and remember that it doesn't matter how much the exchange looks good now and what feedbacks you hear right now, they may turn against you at any moment an rob you blind like what Bittrex exchange did last year with thousands of users.

for now I suggest Binance and kraken.

there is a hidden word in the advertisement of any gambling site and that word is "maybe" as in maybe win a prize, or have a chance of winning the big prizes. they are not promising you to always win, not even a guarantee of win itself but only to have a chance of winning and that is what gambling is all about. and obviously in their ads they have to say it like that otherwise you can't really tell people "come play here and lose money"! that is like shooting yourself in the foot

you have to consider a couple of factors:
1. difficulty (which everyone forgets)
2. bitcoin price
3. electricity and other costs.

2 and 3 are easy to measure since the numbers are simply found and 3 is a fixed number. but you have to measure how long does it take to earn a fixed amount, it can be finding of 1 block or earning 1BTC or earning in fiat like $1000 or something like that. and this is constantly changing due to difficulty adjustments.

ps. I don't think cost of mining is important at all! because you may think it is $7000 now and say price won't fall below that but it may fall and then if it falls below $7000 the cost of mining will be reduced to $6000 and so on.

there will always be people who are going to run a node whether it is a bitcoin full node or a lightning node on top of it and other people who are going to use lightweight clients that use their full nodes.
just like now that there are a lot of users using Electrum than there are users running an Electrum Node.
I don't think we can call this centralization.

the first thing to do is to take it up with the congress or the equivalent in your country and complain about the wrong decision they have made and voice your disagreement with the new law, unless you live in a dictatorship that is the way to go

and then if you live in a country with a corrupted government that is trying to screw you (like India) then you continue using bitcoin and give them a middle finger for miserably trying and failing to prevent the escape from their tyranny...
by the way bitcoin is not banned in India yet. but it may be in the future.

the internet is filled with these fake websites spreading malware around to steal other people's bitcoins. it is becoming a common way of scamming.
If I am not mistaken this is one of the reasons why Google banned cryptocurrency related advertisements on their platform because all these fake websites used their ad network to spread. for example when you googled Electrum, these fake websites came up on top in form of ads and people clicked those instead of the real one and lost their bitcoins.

this news sounded more like a threat or future plans than something that had already happened. I think OP's link is mostly FUD at this point and even if it is true, that doesn't seem to change anything for Indian population because there has been lots and lots of restrictions over in India for buying bitcoin and they have been buying it nonetheless and on top of that they have been paying up to 40% higher price for bitcoin for more than a year now!

oh and by the way this is one of Indian exchanges: https://www.zebpay.com/ as you can see it is still working and people are trading bitcoin there.

investing in multiple ICOs is not going to give you less risk since it is not diversifying anything, you are just getting involved with the same thing under a different disguise! the other ICOs may even be run by the same group of people that are scamming you under different names. and that is the risk of ICOs they are unknown and useless and the tokens never do anything so they don't have any long term potential at all.

nobody can deny that they are liking the price rise that bitcoin has and we have all bought, earned and held bitcoin at least partly because of the price rise. there is no doubt in that. but if anybody had this as their only reason to have bitcoin then they don't really know what they have. they might as well own some rocks and call them bitcoin and trade those! and such people shouldn't even "stay in bitcoin"!

if you could "fathom" the rise of last year, specially the last month when there was about 100% rise in less than month then you should also "fathom" the current drop in the same "financial sense"!

drops, whether sudden or gradual, only "oppresses" investors who were thinking price can always go up and only those who think rising price is the only way of making profit.

someone who needs "hope" to hold on to, or invest in bitcoin shouldn't even be holding or investing in bitcoin.

true and also they never cared about the bans their government has been putting on bitcoin so far in the past couple of years and their volume and also the price they are paying to buy bitcoin has been a lot higher than the price that we are paying for bitcoin in USD and the volume is also lower.