"best" is too vague in my opinion. best in what sense?

as for volatility, bitcoin is the worst investment. other investments like putting your money in a bank or investing in gold are much better.
as for rise and potential profit bitcoin is the best since it has a limited supply and also a lot of potential for growth.
for security it is the best but only if the person cares enough to learn about it and secure his wallet.
as a trader bitcoin is a so-so investment in my opinion, it has a lot of swings which are also big most of the times that traders can make a lot of profit from but also at times it becomes very unpredictable which makes trading hard.

and they keep on spreading the FUD that Russia has banned bitcoin

in any case one of the best news have always been this kind of news about real adoption of bitcoin as a currency and this one is double good news because it is not only real use case of bitcoin but also it is going to involve tourists and bitcoin is always best when you use it as a tourist so you don't have to worry about converting your money into foreign currency and don't have to worry about security of carrying large amounts of money around.

the first step that is usually forgotten is to understand the market movements and then speculate it with decent enough accuracy. and in bitcoin it is not always easy to do that an if you fail at speculating the market you will end up losing a lot of money trying to do this type of trading. you can search about stories that came out last year during the dips at the start of the year and see the money that was lost by different people.

the effects of FUD is always secondary to other stuff. that is why when some idiot starts some random bullshit topic about bitcoin, nothing changes and price continues on as it was before.
the FUD is only effective in a negative way when there is a dump going on and the timing of the FUD needs to also be good so that it intensifies the panic sell that is already going on because of the dump that was started before the FUD.

not really!
in fact everything about the regulations in Japan have been good so far. the exchanges need to be regulated but you seem to have forgotten how many of these exchanges have scammed their users so far and gotten away with it simply because nobody were watching them.
and  some exchanges (which apparently plan to scam in the near future) that are not happy with these regulations only prove that we as the community should also force them to comply with these regulations and don't let them get away with it.

feeling the need to buy now is not necessarily a FOMO!
in fact these days are considered good days for buying bitcoin because it IS in a dip and no matter what happens next you are buying it at a lower price than it was before, and to be exact price went as low as 67.5% below the ATH and came back up a little afterwards. so buying in that dip meant a nice 10% profit in only one day and that is just for short term.

because of the unexpected drops and then finally because of the manipulations and the bear market, a lot of investors cashed out and stayed out of the market. but that doesn't mean they went away for good, they are out watching the market closely and waiting for the manipulation to stop so that they can jump in.

this also means if there were a big dip, all of them will jump back in. this will happen around $6000 and will only grow in size if price goes any lower meaning it will be a lot more buy support at $5000 and so on and at some point (probably between $5k-$6k) it becomes impossible to push the price any lower.

haha, hey kiddo you are way too late to the FUD party involving MtGox and you are not just embarrassing yourself with a dumb topic like all the post history that you and your alt account (which is also giving each other merit) are sharing

to hell? I say we are headed to heaven with all the discount we are getting

I completely agree with this.

nothing about exchanges is going to change as long as we don't demand it from them. and so far it seems like people are satisfied with the crappy, unsafe, and untrusted services all the exchanges are offering them!

this is actually why I think regulation for exchanges can be a good thing. they may be forced to follow some industry standards in order to operate and also it definitely increases their trustworthiness and because of that the market can grow a lot bigger and consequently the manipulation and volatility will be reduced. it is like a chain reaction...

well, that is what you get when we have a huge altcoin market pump that lasted for a very long time. all the altcoins were pumped and on top of that there were lots of new shitcoins created from forking bitcoin to all these ETH tokens that are being created every day. that bloats the total market cap into fake bubble territory and it will burst as the altcoins get dumped.
it may also crash bitcoin price as these altcoins get dumped all together.

so we just have to take your word for it just because you say it will rise? the same way you need to explain WHY you think price is going to drop, you also have to explain WHY you think price will rise.

and more importantly what do you think is going to happen until the rise starts in June? it is already 3 months and based on what can happen during that time, a lot of different strategies can be used to make the best out of the market until then. for example price may continue to fall before it rises back up again and during a fall it is best to sell first and then buy back at the bottom.

it is very interesting to see how the market changes to make the impossible, possible!
by the time OP started this topic, prices like $7k-$6k were impossible because there were no indication of any drops and price was showing signs of sideways and mostly rise more than anything else. but the dumping and the manipulation accompanies with lots of FUD could successfully start the drop which then became unstoppable and make the impossible low prices a possibility!

at this point I no longer expect the big rise ($15k+ in 3 months) but also I don't expect bigger drops either. we have already seen ~70% drops from ATH twice.

you forgot about the supply and demand

supply of bitcoin, like always, is fixed and at 21 million. this won't change ever and for 21 million coins the current prices are so ridiculously low.
at the same time the demand for bitcoin has been increasing. ever since last year when Japan adopted bitcoin a legal way of payment, aka a currency, everyone knows that all the FUD that has been heard so far has been lies so they have been investing in bitcoin. we saw the short term effects of such adoption but it still is not over, it will continue like this in long term and as the demand for the fixed supply increases the price will continue going up.

only those people (probably including you) who wanted to become rich over night with bitcoin are now filled with fear and want the drop to stop.
the rest who know the real potential of bitcoin and use their own judgment instead of reading FUD bullshit online, know that these drops are only an opportunity to buy more and cheaper coins. lets say you wanted to invest $5000 this year, if price never fell you could only get less than half a bitcoin but you can now buy nearly 1 whole bitcoin now. so nobody wants this to stop because we know that pretty soon we will reach the bottom where we need to buy before the next rally starts and price reaches $100000

what you say is the same as saying sky is blue so cryptocurrency market cap is very low!

google.inc is a company, a company has real meaningful market capitalization based on its shares and the value of them and their assets which are real. the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is a fake and meaningless number. it is a false measurement which sites such as coinmarketcap.com started using to rank coins because they were lazy to come up with a better solution. market cap of coins is simply their supply multiplied by their price and we all know 90% of the supply of altcoins is fake, either premined and locked away or never hits circulation. even if it weren't fake it still wouldn't have made any sense to use market cap for coins.

I think this IS actually the problem we are facing right now!
everyone wants to be successful so they are taking risks but the problem is that they are taking risks that they are not comfortable with taking. like investing what they can NOT afford to lose for example. so when some FUD is being spread in the media they start to panic and end up making wrong decisions like panic dumping the coins they have bought at a loss and buy back way too late just to panic sell them at another loss!

playing it safe does not mean taking no risks. and taking risks is not contradicting any of the things OP said in my opinion.

the important thing about taking risks is about what kind of risks you are taking and how you are dealing with them and finally what kind of reward you are getting for that risk (risk/reward ratio for instance). in other words if we are talking about a gambling risks when they just invest in random coins and wish for profit then obviously that risk is not something that anyone shout take. but if the risk is a calculated one based on study and experience like investing in bitcoin for long term and buying it in a dip, then that risk is worth taking and that is also called playing safe.

you know sometimes doing nothing is the best solution!

for example if you feel lost in the market and don't know what to buy and what has potential,... then simply stay away and hold your fiat or bitcoin that you wanted to invest. that way you won't make any mistakes and more importantly you will reduce the risks you are taking.

someone once said that you should have a pretty good reason for every trading decision that you make and if you don't have that good reason then you shouldn't trade until you do.

thanks, this was a pretty interesting way of looking at things.

also I would like to add one more thing. this is something that people usually forget, and that's the fact that the way price changes affects the volume too. for example if price doesn't move at all or moves less than 5% (up or down doesn't matter) the volume will be a lot lower compared to when it is moving 40% for example.
so when comparing volume of these days with the volume of December for instance people should also take into consideration that big change too. the change in December was more than $10,000 and the change these days is less than $2000 so obviously the volume should also be a lot smaller.

this just shows that there are so many people invested in bitcoin without any clear idea what they are doing here which is why we see a lot of confused people around and eventually see a lot of panic sells and weird investing decisions when they buy bitcoin out of fear of missing out and sell it because of some FUD.
we need people to stop acting irrationally and start thinking more. if you want profit then you don't really need a rise to gain profit, drops can also be profitable. the easiest way to make profit from a drop is to buy even more bitcoin with the same amount of money and sit on it long term!