the "break" was not a major thing, it was a small size rise above the line in the picture and as you can see the price is still the same. if it was a real break out then price should have been higher that this with a faster rise.
it may be a little soon but we are getting there, 2 more days remaining from January and I think next month will be much more exciting than this month. specially with transaction fees going down fast.

nothing beats a "hard copy". you can use a paper or better yet a notebook where you write down your passwords, etc. the notebook can contain lots of things so that it is not just your obvious "Password Book"! it can be a phone book for instance.

and try to keep the things you store to a minimum so you don't have to worry about storing 100 different passwords.

you should not invest because you are too impressionable and you also have no idea what you are doing. you just look at what anybody tells you without understanding what they are telling you those things!
you just look at random names, there are 1700 altcoins out there if you want to choose randomly, feel free to start your gambling journey but don't call it investment.

try educating yourself about cryptocurrency and see what projects offers what! don't just listen to the advertisers.

hmm. there are physical bitcoins out there, I don't know if there are any plastic ones, but it is practically a simple object with bitcoin logo on it which also actually contains bitcoin with the public key and private key and everything.

is your friend sure that it was not just an ugly collectible?
https://www.coindesk.com/10-physical-bitcoins-good-bad-ugly/

very true.
I am not an expert in trading in any ways but I have been trading for nearly as long as I have been around so I have some idea what I am dealing with. and my goal is to get back to it after being away for some time and try to reach the 2x. how successful I would be this time is unknown...

I wanted to start this topic to share some ideas and goals here. I may even start one of these from X to Z in Z months myself ... I don't know how much people would like that though.

I have been around quite a while now and I have seen a lot of people start up these "challenge" type of topics here saying something like "going from 0.01BTC to 1BTC in .... months". I sometimes follow them a while but I never see them in long term. as if they give up or get bored with updating it here!

so my first Q is has anyone finished any of these so far?

I want it mostly for motivational purposes I have been away from trading for a while and I wanted to get back on the horse again, probably in a month or two in March when the market is heated up to the max again.

if you have any suggestions, I am all ears.
my plan is to start with something between 0.01BTC-0.1BTC and try to make 100% profit each month (increase 2x monthly).

that website is not keeping track of or monitoring transaction times. it is a static list with fixed values in a table.
and it is based on average block time in each cryptocurrency then it multiplies that average time by the number of confirmation required by exchanges (the generally suggested number) and shows the time.

for example for bitcoin it is 10 minute on average. so 6 confirmation means 60 minutes.
for bitcoin cash, since it is fork of bitcoin, it is the same 10 min but 20 confirmation means 600 minutes.

you repeated "accurate" 3 times but you are missing the most important point. coinmarketcap.com is not an exchange or "trading floor" if you want to call it that. it is a website, more like a database which is taking the price from the real exchanges and then posts an average price every 5 minutes on their website.

nothing about this is "accurate". it is a good source to know what the price is, just for the sake of knowing if it is $10000 or $15000 but it is not good if you want to trade. for example if you want to see if you should activate your stop loss or if you should sell because you reached your profit target. for accuracy you should always check the exchange where you are trading at.

actually there are multiple concepts which are very similar but differ in some aspects.
privacy, anonymity, confidentiality and security are the ones that I can think of. I could not possibly start to explain it in English lol but you can read articles online to understand the difference. like these for example: https://breakthroughanalysis.com/2017/04/14/privacy-vs-confidentiality-vs-anonymity-who-knows/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/10/how-does-privacy-differ-from-anonymity-and-why-are-both-important/

I remember seeing a chart from localbitcoins.com showing an increased volume coming from China the same day the news from Chinese government regarding exchange regulations came out and in a short time it reached a lot higher! specially since price started rising right after this news.

so yeah, people will always find a way of doing what they want when it comes to peer to peer stuff. look at how pirating has been alive and strong for many years even with all the raids and that is a real illegal thing that everyone agrees about. but there is nothing wrong with bitcoin...

even if altcoins implement SegWit and LN, it still wouldn't make the valid competition for bitcoin. the network effect (the security, decentralization, and adoption) is the biggest thing that bitcoin has which none of these other altcoins have.

there still are other cool projects and innovations that can compete with bitcoin even with its lightning network. nothing comes to mind right now but when we are talking about technologies there is always something new coming along that beats everything else.

I myself am very excited about DAG and am generally always looking for ways to remove the blockchain which most of the limitations are coming from.

exactly!
in time I have learned that all of these things are good, and you gain a lot of good information by looking at trend lines, etc and even doing some technical analysis. but at the same time it is not the most reliable thing to have when it comes to trading, specially trading altcoins.

the "news" is the biggest thing that can change the course of a cryptocurrency. not to mention how many pump and dumps take place in the altcoin market which is practically impossible to find and predict.

on one hand we have a lot of tools such as TA which are not 100% reliable. on the other hand we have a market that is manipulated which makes everything that much harder. and that is the most important thing I have learned.

that's the thing though! most of those predicting the price drop (who usually predict around $6k) are doing it because they have missed the boat. they have to base for what they are saying, it is just their wish for bitcoin to have another drop so they can not-make the same mistake they made last time.

I wouldn't say it is prolonged. it is not months of downtime. it is only a couple of weeks. and considering bitcoin has been rising for most of 2017, a month of drop and staying down without any major rally is quite expected as a correction.

the fact that there are centralized places using a decentralized currency in a particular way does not mean that decentralized currency is not decentralized. it just means when you use that particular platform you have to abide by the rules of that particular platform.

and actually those platforms have those rules not because they are working with bitcoin, but because they are working with fiat and banks!

so I say there is nothing ironic about this. the way centralized exchanges work is pretty logical. the way we use bitcoin is not. you can very well trade bitcoin in a decentralized way, whether by using a decentralized exchange or just simply trading peer to peer.

if you are using centralized exchanges such as the usual ones you have heard of: Coinbase/GDAX, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Kraken,... then @AGD above is correct. only deposits/withdrawals make it to the blockchain.

but when you use the decentralized exchanges, you do make on-chain transactions.
that is of course unless we are not talking about a side chain something like inside Lightning Network. in that case only opening and closing the channel makes it to the blockchain, the rest of the transctions don't.

patterns like this do exist and they tend to repeat themselves. for example it has been many years that bitcoin has a sizeable drop during January and then has a much bigger recovery in February. the repetition is because of the causes that are being repeated for example the fact that January is the first month of the year and also it coincides with the Chinese new year which is celebrated by many Asian countries.

but also it is because at some point people expect the same thing to be repeated so they act on it. for example they sell because they expect the drop!

the important thing is to have these patterns in mind but don't think of them as 100% rules.

there is always an increasing adoption of bitcoin which is constantly contributing to the long term rise of bitcoin price. last year this adoption was "booming" which is why the price also "boomed".
here are major incidents that contributed to this big rise:

• mainstream adoption of bitcoin in Japan. finally Japanese decided to officially accept bitcoin as a "legal method of payment" and that was a big move helping the rise a lot. mainly because of hundreds of merchants in Japan that started accepting bitcoin. this was also led to change of views in other countries even in Russia after years of negativity against bitcoin.
• removal of  taxes on bitcoin payments. again in Japan and a couple of other countries like Australia. and you can imagine how merchants that were already accepting bitcoin and the new ones felt. which helps with the adoption.
• the end of 3 year scaling debate in August. finally the scaling debate which was a very big slow down for bitcoin's growth came to an end when the big blockers forked off and bitcoin could finally come to consensus and have Seregated Witness activated which also opened up lots of future possibilities such as Lightning Network, Cross Chain Transactions (Atomic Swap), more anonymity (Confidential Transactions), ...
• price rise itself. when bitcoin performs well and it is rising and giving a lot of profit, a lot of new investors become aware of it and start investing in it in order not to "miss the boat"
• a lot of publicity in the media which is practically advertising bitcoin!

it was a bad day indeed but not because price went down, it was a bad day because it once again proved that bitcoin investors do not understand the market at all. they care more about FUD, regulations, Korea, China, .... than they care about learning what the hell bitcoin is.

if half of these newbies investing in bitcoin started looking more into it and tried to educate themselves to understand what a censorship resistance an decentralized peer to peer digital cash means, then price would have never been this volatile with big dumps and big upswings while whales become richer and richer.

this does not seem like the most reliable source that you could use!

I am still going to say the same thing as ever: they never banned bitcoin. they closed down their exchanges that were unregulated and shady. and they did that months ago and nothing has changed that I am aware of so far.

as for people, they are still mining bitcoin and trading bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies off the counter and went back to the real way of trading decentralized cryptocurrencies meaning peer to peer.

there is this market which has a huge value (~$600 billion) then there is this huge amount of money going in and out of this market every day ($30-$50 billion).

when you look at it like that, you can understand why every government would want to regulate this market. and you will ask why haven't they done it already?!
and it is not just about taxes (revenue for the government) but also it is all the money laundering opportunities that these unregulated exchanges are providing people. and we are talking about money flow not cryptocurrency flow. and when you use fiat money you need to follow the regulations.