Indian government has been scared of bitcoin for a very long time now, I believe it has at least been 2 years that they have been attacking it with all their force and each time they push back the Indian  population buys more and more into bitcoin.
I remember last year we had a very similar news regarding some bitcoin ban in India which I think was in fact some restrictions on exchanges and that pushed the price up 40% over in India and the  volume on localbitcoins.com India went up about 200%.

how can someone be careful about something that is out of his hands? I mean when you invest in a casino bankroll, it is not up to you to change what happens. you invest what you can afford to lose (like any investment) and then it is pure luck and also honesty of the casino to whether scam you or not because there is no way of proving the fairness of the investment part of the casinos! for example a whale winning big time may not even be a real person!

as for investment the only other sure thing I know of was investing a large amount of bitcoin (I think 100BTC was min) in a mixer (bitmixer.io to be exact, which closed down a while back). but generally if you invest in a real business you should be able to get a good profit and with low risks and higher rewards. the problem is finding that business and also having a larger amount of bitcoin than 1-2BTC for instance.

they made some altcoin or tokens just to pump and dump it and make money, they didn't really make a token (eg pokercoin) to solve any problem that didn't even exist. that is why they are useless in nature and that is why the websites that are created for these are looking worse because the people who make these things put the least amount of thought in them to increase their efficiency.
it has been like a factory creating something and that thing is new ICOs, they spend least amount of time, put the least amount of effort in and make as many tokens as possible to maximize the amount of money they get from gullible people.

usually whenever price falls, there is a surge in volume since there will be a lot of people who are taking advantage of the situation (the discount) to invest their worthless fiat money into valuable bitcoin and then hold it long term. and it is always hard to invest a large amount without raising red flags so most of them do it slowly and over time.

this surge that you witnessed, specially since you said it is from localbitcoins might be that. and I don't think we can take this as a bull market signal or trap. it just is!

it really depends on how much you are familiar with the blockchain technology and also how much you are planning to learn!

if for example you know nothing and just want to know the basics and have a simple idea of how things work then go to Coindesk.com and visit their articles about "What is bitcoin", "how does mining work",... they will explain to you in simple enough words how things work.

if you want a book to do that and also have some more details so that you can learn a little more advanced topics then search for Andreas Antonopoulos, he is the only one that I dare say understands bitcoin and knows that to teach that to others. he has a couple of books one of which called Mastering Bitcoin, read that.

I disagree because this doesn't sound realistic to me on many points.
for example if someone is holding ever since $12k+ and price falls down they will sell for sure and when it reaches a ridiculously low price like lower than $5k they will surely surely sell! unless they have not bought bitcoin for profit! and that is unrealistic for most people so the sell pressure will start up IF a big dump were to happen.

but a sell pressure doesn't mean a drop or a bigger drop on its own. a sell pressure only means more sells, it can go either way depending on the buy support and how that can cancel the sells. in this case I do believe that there is an increasing buy support as the price goes down. for example if we need 100BTC to crash the $20k price, we will need 1000BTC to crash $15k and 10000BTC for $10k and it will be 100000BTC to crash $5k (arbitrary amounts of bitcoin to show the point). and whales do run out of bitcoin at some point since you can never go against the tide forever. there will be a point where you will be pushed back by the tide (the tide being the total strength of the buys).

so you are correct that the downtrend is limited but the limitation is because more people are buying more bitcoin as the price goes lower so it prevents the downtrend to continue forever and eventually will reverse the trend for good.

no you are mistaken because of a lot of FUD in the media. there were no several countries ever! what happened was that a tiny place in New York State started planning for some restrictions on usage of electricity and that news was exaggerated in less than a day into a big FUD.

you don't have to worry about miners they are making their profit (with or without your worrying!) thanks to the way bitcoin is designed (difficulty and all that) and also not to mention the potential of growth that bitcoin has.

you are getting two things wrong. there is no real, original, blah blah... bitcoin. there is only "bitcoin". and bitcoin is what the overwhelming majority decides is bitcoin. if having no SegWit and having 8 MB blocks could gain this majority it would have been bitcoin and since it couldn't do that, it is an altcoin.

secondly price doesn't matter in this argument. of course it is obvious that bitcoin will always have a higher price than all of its forked altcoins but that is not set in stone. for example there are altcoins (42 coin for example) that are worth a lot more than bitcoin but that doesn't make them any good.

when I said John McAfee is spamming "positive" news about bitcoin not because he believes in it but because he wants the publicity, nobody believed me. now here you go! proof that McAfee was in fact begging for attention instead of anything else and he is not milking the opportunity as much as he can.

first he started by hyping bitcoin and gaining a lot of profit from the rise that would have happened without him too and then with the popularity he gained that way, he then started with altcoin pumps where he bought some shitcoin and then advertised it on his twitter account to get it pumped so that he could dump it and gain profit (classic pump and dump group). now he is also promoting ICOs and getting paid to do it too.

nobody can possibly answer this question. we only have speculations to give and you can already see many of them in the speculation board https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=57.0 which happens to be for this type of questions.
you can also check out TradingView.com for more speculations and actual technical analysis done by many different speculators.

I disagree with a lot of things that you said. first of all this is trading board so the discussions should be trading oriented not "HODL" mentality!

when smart money comes it, nobody even knows it. that is why it is called "smart money" when things get out of hand that is when the others are rushing in long after that smart money!

again, "smart money" comes back in when everyone else is experiencing depression and to put simply when you saw people say "bitcoin is dead".
... same way that smart money was getting out when you kept hearing people say "bitcoin to $50k".

although this is not trading related but I agree with this part. for those who are so panicky and confused about what they should do, the best option is to hold what they can afford to lose and forget about the short term trends.

there is certainly manipulation in the market but to say it is rigged and run by bots is just silly!

not necessarily true.
first of all holding what? bitcoin, yeah of course since there is a very good chance that bitcoin will recover eventually since it still has the same big potential to rise to a lot more than current prices.
altcoins? definitely not. that may just be my opinion but I don't see any potential in any of them for long term.
secondly when? at the start of the drops when the bear market is just starting it is a good idea to sell (remember this is trading discussion). that means acting fast based on the trend you see coming and then you should also act fast to buy back what you sold when you see it reaching the end of the drop. in this case not selling is a big loss. and selling means a huge profit!
but at the same time if you act too late, like selling when price is already at the bottom then selling in that case means a big loss.

also they do it because during the drops manipulation is more obvious than other times. in bitcoin there is always harder to go down than up because of the buy support and whenever there is a dump there is also a lot of FUD and media attacks that is why it is most obvious during dumps.

for example ever since drop started, the media is talking nonstop about how bitcoin is being banned, is dropping, is dying, ... and all kinds of FUD about it. but when it was rising there was a big coverage then too but not as big and not as positive.

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regarding the article shared here I have to say like before it is mostly conspiracy theories of the author and there are only traces of truth in it not all truth.

ok, but your topic without proof is an attack on these sites and nobody will just take your word for it because you are a random account on bitcointalk that doesn't even have a history around so we don't even know you!

provide solid proof that these websites you listed here asked for documents regarding KYC and we will all stay away from them. don't provide any proof and we will ignore you.

that is what I was trying to say above. there ARE a lot of good news like always but the difference is that you don't hear them just because the media doesn't want you to hear them right now. they only spread things that are according to the trend and the trend is downtrend so they only spread the negativity.
last year they were only posting about how bitcoin is going to reach $50k, $100k, $1 mil,.... and the speculation of different people saying so. this year they are posting about how bitcoin is a bubble and it will drop to $2000, $1000, .... die,...

news is not what changes the price, it is only one of the many reasons why prices changes up or down. for example all these negative news that you keep hearing about in the media these days have been around forever but nobody paid any attention to them and most of  them may not have reached the major news sites during the price rises. but whenever the price starts dropping everywhere is filled with them.

the good news in OP, Lightning Network, has also been around for a while but for the same reasons it is not talked about all over the news only because it is a positive one and now is not the time for positive news because people are more interested in FUD and the drop for the time being!

it is not an April Fools Day fact that altcoins have been getting dumped hard so the market and the market cap that you quoted above has been falling hard. it is just a simple fact. and as for bitcoin the drop has slowed down significantly which can mean the drop is near the end since it is becoming harder to go lower because of the bigger buy support.

sorry to burst your bubble but if bitcoin were to end then all the altcoins would end sooner before even bitcoin starts "ending". and that is an ugly truth but it is a truth nonetheless. altcoins are created so that people can earn more bitcoin. some of them have added some interesting features and explored some possibilities of the blockchain technology but in the end they don't have the usability to keep them alive without bitcoin.
so instead of advertising and wasting your money on shitcoins, try to face the reality and only get involved with bitcoin and altcoin as much as they deserve.

it is true but also misleading because it is incomplete.
people don't just randomly decide bitcoin has value. it has some fundamental reasons. otherwise a lot of other things like grain of salt would have also been worth $20000 for example!
it is the utility of bitcoin that gives people a reason to give bitcoin a value. it is the fact that bitcoin is a decentralized and censorship resistance currency that makes them want to buy more of it (creates demand) and that demand increases its price.

I think we may be near the end of the bitcoin dump but you can never know. the manipulation has been strong so far and despite all the buy support, the price has been going down. but we are near the bottom so we may see an stable phase pretty soon and some even are speculating a rise back up although I wouldn't get my hopes up for now.

as for ethereum we are nowhere near the bottom of it because it is still in a huge bubble which needs to burst more before it becomes a viable option again. for now a bigger dump is more possible than anything else specially since the panic is just starting.

I don't know what the first paragraph has anything to do with this question you are asking here apart from making your post long but bitcoin is a new technology which has been growing constantly for as long as it has been alive. it is impossible to say whether it will survive or not at this point. all we can see is that bitcoin has the potential to grow much bigger and be improved a lot more at the same time. and so far it has been doing exactly these two so there is a good chance that it will in fact survive for a very long time, possibly during our lifetime until another new technology comes along in 100 years and replaces it.