the bottom was $10k which was half the ATH price, and 50% drop/correction was more than enough to get the market back on track.
however right now the buy support seems to be around $9500 which is holding strongly but that doesn't mean it can not be broken. a big dump by some market makers can simply break it and a simplest of panics will help the drop to become bigger than just a dump. although I don't expect any more big drops after the $5900 bottom which we saw but things change all the time.

this has been discussed before and nobody wants this to happen because the eventuality of it is going to be the same. I believe it was LukeJr who first talked about this (the biggest one that made a lot of noise anyways) and it was before SegWit activation and was saying it to force SegWit activation, possibly to scare miners into adopting it!

long story short, this will never happen for bitcoin. you can create another altcoin like the 20-30 alts that have been created so far but bitcoin will not make this change.

unfortunately none of them are exactly trustable. they pretend to be and a lot of them have long history of being around and giving services to people but none of it makes them actually trusted. and for good reasons. they keep scamming people either by singling them out or doing mass scams on different levels: running away or scamming groups of them.
for example look at past 3 months and how Bittrex which was one of the trusted exchanges for years scammed thousands of users.

what do you want to do?
do you want to buy bitcoin and become rich over night? then no it is not a good time, never is a good time for that because bitcoin will not make you rich.

are you really interested in bitcoin as a new technology and a decentralized currency? then yes. it is a good time to buy bitcoin and learn more about it. start with a small amount and try things out, learn what bitcoin wallets are and try to find what is most suitable to your needs.
look where you can spend bitcoin to buy stuff online or offline. see if it is beneficial for you to do that.
then in the end there is also the profit that bitcoin's price rise will give you as a secondary benefit.

so far bitcoin doesn't show either sign for moving in any direction
it is stuck between $9500 and $11000 and may not break free for another month, the rise may have been a sign that bulls are still around but it was also a sign that bitcoin is not completely ready for the next round of rises.
the same was true as the price fell below $10k. there is no enough dumping to push it any lower either.

I usually report them to moderators as "low quality topics" as the sticky on top of this board prohibits them but unfortunately not much happens. so I say let them run their course, the more these FUDsters make an ass out of themselves the more number of people will become familiar with the notion of FUD and what it really means. hopefully in time everyone learns to go "with the flow" of the market not panic sell after it ran its course and was finished!

this is very true, but remember regulations are not always the same and are not always friendly. sometimes in the past even some regulations have been restrictive more than anything else and that can eventually hurt businesses. I think it was in one of US states where they set some license laws for bitcoin related businesses in 2016 which forced a lot of them to leave that state.

good job on the numbers, it was interesting.
I also believe they made most of their profit from actual mining, and let us not forget how they created free money for themselves out of thin air when they went ahead and single handedly forked bitcoin and created their own coin to mine called bitcoin cash.
additionally by gaming the Emergency Difficulty Adjustment of BCH they made a lot more money than normally would have been possible.

like always when there is a dip in price, it becomes a better time to start buying bitcoin. and right now there is a nice dip with price lower than a big buy support.

I can't promise you that price won't fall more, and I can't tell you when this trend is going to reverse and rallies to begin. but what I believe in is that price will be a lot higher than this in near future and I have believed this for as long as I have known bitcoin and have been buying more amounts every month no matter what the price was ever since 2014 and will continue doing so.

by "that" I meant what this topic is about, a country trying to pull itself out of economic crisis.
if this was a similar attempt then they would have never invited people publicly to come and work on the project.
maybe it turns out to be the same thing in the end. but so far it doesn't look like it to be honest.

and it is not necessarily a bad thing either. these days a lot of countries are working on cryptocurrencies one way or another. for example Japan's Biggest Bank Is Releasing Its Own Cryptocurrency In March

fees weren't high all year last year to come down now. they were high for a couple of months and came down as soon as spam stopped.

your numbers here don't make sense. first of all number of transactions per day is nearly a fixed number because blocks have been full for about 2 years now and being full means bitcoin is used to its max capacity.
the numbers you posted at first (200k-400k) are number of unconfirmed transactions and it didn't half, it disappeared. from 200,000 down to 2,000 is not half.

since usage of SegWit is not yet that big (around 10% still) I'd say it wasn't the reason.
also what does it have to do with your title and holders?!!!

why would anyone migrate to an altcoin? lets say I want to pay for something online, and they barely accept bitcoin, what would me migrating to an altcoin solve for me?!!!

maybe like everyone else, Facebook banned anything ICO related not in general cryptocurrency related. and that happens a lot actually. I have never bothered to check the real announcement by Facebook, only saw the bullshit that news sites post and that can easily be wrong.
in fact it is pretty common that the bans are regarding ICOs since they are the main scams and the main reason why there is a ban in first place. and funny thing is the news always reports this as bitcoin or crypto ban in general!!!

what the hell is happening?!!! since when do countries release pump and dump centralized altcoins to pull their country out of financial crisis? and who would in their right minds invest in such things?

it is one thing to take advantage of cryptocurencies and start adopting the technology in your banking system but it is another to release a coin to make money, and do it officially! although OP's reference is a click-bait shitpost, so he may have exaggerated the situation.


this has nothing to do with that.
they have publicly started inviting people (experts) to come join in developing a new test cryptocurrency for now.

more works have been done on bitcoin. there is even talk of mining bitcoin in Iran

it is very strange to see people are still trading bitcoin like this, in an alley! and it is not the first time either, not the first country. the first I think was in New York!

for the millionth time people, go to a public place, a police station even or a bank, a mall,... somewhere with people around and make the trade. when the man in the van with tainted windows tells you he has candy, don't gen in his car.

speaking of bitcoin when price goes up and down, it doesn't mean it is getting pumped and dumped! pump an dump has a very clear definition which doesn't include daily fluctuation of a real market like bitcoin with real demand. of course there is manipulation in the market but that still doesn't mean pump and dump.

regarding altcoins, things become different. the size of their market which is a lot smaller than bitcoin's and also the fact that 1 person or group can hold majority of that coin through different ways such as premines and ICOs means it is so much easier to manipulate and as a result pump and dump them.

to answer your main question, the news is real. even the FUD contains some part of the reality otherwise it is not FUD it is called bullshit and it is too obvious. the thing you need to look for is timing and also reaction of the market to that news. for example banning, regulations, exchange hacks, ... happen all the time. last year we had at least 3 or 4 major exchange hacks and price didn't even move down because market didn't care and it was bad timing for any kind of drop at that point.

what you say is like winning a coin flip once and then saying your "strategy" works and you will always win it. one of the things about gambling is that you sometimes win and sometimes lose. you are right now on the "winning" side of that process and you will soon see the losing side. not to mention that during this journey there is one thing that ensures your loss and it is called "house edge". you can not win in long run when it comes to gambling like this.
when using martingale you are just giving yourself some false hope since you get lucky sometimes. but 1 losing streak (which can even be as big as 40 reds in a row) is enough to wipe out all your money and all you have won so far.

I doesn't matter how much faith I have in bitcoin if it drops to $1000 I will lose it all. and I say it is absolutely impossible for that to happen.
$1000 means that everything so far was meaningless! all the rise, all the buy supports, all the millions of people buying bitcoin were an illusion, all the adoption that took place among merchants, all the records that were broken among them were an illusion.... which simply is not true! as you can see price couldn't be kept below $10k for long and the bottom didn't last that long either.

it is the same situation with all the altcoins that don't have fully anonymous transaction, which is practically 99% of them. you can always see their rich lists somewhere. for example https://chainz.cryptoid.info/ has lists of most of the altcoins and their richest addresses.

and it is always the same, some exchange or some developer who owns the coin and its premine or ICO or something like that. it is rarely and nearly never an individual who actually bought and holds all of the coins in one place and becomes a whale. whales usually don't stay in one altcoin!

it doesn't make any difference. it is a bitcoin address which is receiving some funds. whether you created it or the exchange doesn't change anything about that. the only thing different is that the exchange will have control over that address (the private keys of it) so they control the funds not you.

about your other question, not all exchanges allow you to generate a new address. so you will be stuck with only one forever. some others do. exchanges that I have seed do this are C-cex and Yobit. there may be more but I have not used any that allows this.

1 satoshi is worth $0.00011 which is not even 1 cent yet so yeah 1 satoshi should go to a higher price so that it can become stable as a currency and be used more also. and guess what, that is exactly what has been happening all this time. with more adoption the demand increases and that increases the price. but also it decreases the volatility of this price. you can not compare the volatility that bitcoin has today with what it used to have years ago.