based on your previous answer you are confusing the different types of centralization.
we have fiat that is centralized but it is trusted and used and adopted by EVERYONE. people don't doubt about fiat. it is legitimate.
we also have shitcoins that are centralized but they are shitcoins, they don't deserve the trust because they are created by a company or some group of shady people who started it to make money. Ripple and a lot of other altcoins fall under this category and that is why they will never succeed.

on the other hand if the government that is already controlling fiat were to release a centralized cryptocurrency that would be a different thing. it will be trusted and used by lots of people because they will see it as fiat.
however that has nothing to do with bitcoin or any other decentralized currency that may exist out there. specially since bitcoin and the likes of it are global and cheap to use while centralized coins (gov-coin) are limited to one country and expensive to use.

this could have been a valid discussion about the reasons of 2013 bubble if we already didn't know the reason. but we do know them. it was due to increase in mining activity thanks to ASICs and the high profitability of it accompanied by the manipulation of MtGox which was mostly their exit scam to earn a lot of money by pumping bitcoin with their fake bots and they succeeded because they were controlling more than 85% of the total market volume at the time.

the interesting thing about this speculation is that so far I have not met a single person who has sold his bitcoins for Christmas, or any other holiday seasons. but people keep insisting they are doing it. so let me ask the starter of this topic this, have YOU sold your bitcoins because it is close to Christmas? how much did you sell and why did you do that, didn't you have money already that you had to sell bitcoin for money?

if the answer is no (which is my expectation) then why do you think others are doing what you yourself didn't do?

how do you know that "banks" are buying bitcoin? do you have some sort of proof of this claim?
because it seems unlikely to me because you and I may be able to hide the fact that we are buying bitcoin but a bank can not do that easily. like JP Morgan last year which was revealed after they spread FUD. but so far I don't see any indication of what you claim.
there are whales who are doing this though but they have been doing it for years to increase their stakes in bitcoin.

that is mainly a political war between the two countries. otherwise it is the dumbest thing to sanction a bitcoin address which can easily be changed easier than changing your socks! and it is most probably because they wanted to set up the groundwork for discouraging people from using bitcoin to go around sanctions set by UN.

what you need to have in mind is that you will NEVER be able to buy at the bottom of any drop. it is simply impossible. only one order among millions will be at the lowest price. and since that price is unpredictable what we do is that we guess what the lowest price may be and then choose any price above that and buy.

that makes current price a good candidate for buying if you consider this to be the end of the drops or  close to it. in my opinion this current price is lower than what lowest price should have been which makes it a good entry point for me. but your speculation may be different so try making decision based on that.

only trustworthiness is important for me in an exchange and nothing else. their platform can be the worst thing among the other exchanges but if I could trust the exchange with my money then that would be enough for me to choose that exchange instead of better designed exchanges that are not trustworthy.

it is a matter of money and its safety. I am honestly tired of all these good looking exchanges which are trusted until the day they take your money and run away: Mt Gox, Cryptsy, Bittrex, C-cex, Bitfinex,... they all were good exchanges, with good support, low fees, high volumes, lots of coins listed,... but they all scammed.

all you need to say, since you claim it to be free, you should say it publicly not privately through personal message. and so far I haven't seen an actual trading strategy that can give you 3778% profit you just added 1% profits per day and reached that number the how to make 1% profit is the important part which seems to have slipped your mind.

additionally I would like to emphasize that since it is a long term thing it is not a good idea to "reinvest" the profit every time. a lot of things can go wrong including the exchange scamming you. so you need to cash out something even if it means less amount of profit.

it really depends on the strategy you are choosing and most important of all it depends on your experience in making profit. profit is not something that comes to you only if you buy random coins, it comes to you through hard work and lots of experience and a tiny bit of luck.

so when it comes to trading, you should stick to what you know. and as far as altcoins are concerned they are most profitable in short term. it doesn't have to be a day trading thing where you earn a fixed percentage per day but it should be short term where you dump the coins that are pumped before others dump.

I haven't really checked the altcoins prices recently to be honest but regarding bitcoin I have to say that there has been no "drops" anymore for days. what we have are normal ups and downs that the market always has. you should ignore all of them unless they are at some critical price level for example at a support or resistance line. which it clearly is not.


nothing! they continue dying whether ETH drops 1% or 35% or 100% or even if it rises. something that is useless like the tokens can not exist.

it seems like people "forced the history to repeat" instead of history being repeated as a "cycle" as many think. you can not find any logical reason why price should have fallen this much and like this and no reason why the bear market should even last more than a year!
but apparently people insisted on making the history repeat itself enough times that they willed it into being a trend now. specially with hundreds of comparison of this year with 2013 as if there was any similarity to begin with!

really? I never had that phase. and I have started with bitcoin back in one of the most FUD filled times back in 2014 when price was falling hard and here was filled with a lot of FUD about how bitcoin is dead, something like these days actually.
and every time I heard someone say some altcoin is better than bitcoin with some "fury" I knew they are full of it trying to hype it up to pump it up...
specially a coin like ripple which is obviously centralized...

it is not "nature of bitcoin" to be volatile! it is instead the way that world is treating bitcoin which is making it volatile. so in other words it is people, as you said in the second part of your comment it is the attraction of being volatile and the potential profit that this volatility can bring to certain people which we can call "market makers".
as a result it can not last like this forever. as the market grows this irrational volatility will also disappear. we just need to find a way to make the market big enough so that it can not be manipulated that easily.

being doubtful about something as new and revolutionary AND different is a logical thing and it has happened to every single person who has heard about bitcoin even the experts. but FUD is a different thing. someone who has doubts will start investigating and will create one topic tops and tries to ask questions to clear his doubts.
someone spreading FUD is creating dozens of topics and fills them with nonsense trying to create panic among newbies who don't understand what they are doing.
so don't confuse these two!

bitcoin is not designed to be used for people to buy day to day coffee so unlike what you think, it  doesn't really need to have that capability "to succeed". bitcoin is aiming at being a decentralized, censorship resistance and boarderless payment system and is succeeding at that. and this is why it has a lot of potential and the current price drops don't matter at all.

with that said, bitcoin is now have that capability to be used for day to day "micro" transactions by millions of people through the second layer solution called Lightning Network. and already some merchants have integrated it in their system and have been accepting payments for months.

long story short you are surprised about a 3% price drop in a market that is going up and down at least 10% per day and it has the record of up to 40% drop in a short time.

not to mention all the stupidly coded bots that exist on these exchanges which go nuts sometimes and make strange orders and on top of all that newbies with lots of money who think these bots are magical so they give them a lot of control then lose money...

usually nothing.
most of the times those who are making advice like OP are trolling others for the kicks. and sometimes they hear something about FUD and think they can replicate the results if they start multiple low quality dumb topics on bitcointalk encouraging people to go against the market.
as a rule whenever some random dude on the internet gives you financial advice you should run away like your life depended on it

the "news" caused the rise not the launch itself. it is the old buy the rumor sell the news or whatever
when the hype of Futures started the price started rising with it and broke the $10k and headed for $20k. by the time the market actually began the hype was over and the rise with it and we were in a bubble so the drop started.
it is like halving that people love to talk about these days. the price doesn't rise because reward halves on a certain block. it rises because of the hype of it and it starts rising 1 or 2 months prior to halving when the actual hype begins. then the real rise comes about 4-6 months after the halving as the injection of new coins by miners into market slows down and halves.

as for this BCH fork it was free coins for BCH holders not bitcoin holders and it is not just a fork it is a full on war between two parties with near equal power. but the last year's fork was free coins for bitcoin holders also it was a war but one side (BCH) was so weak compared to bitcoin side. and also it coincided with bitcoin fork to activate SegWit so it wasn't all about the free coins it was a rise due to scaling bitcoin and moving forward.

regulations doesn't change anything about a decentralized system so you can't say it "reduces the qualities of it" either. for example when bitcoin was regulated in Japan last year, none of the characteristics of bitcoin such as decentralization, being boarderless,... were diminished. if anything it became even stronger since it opens up to a lot more people that are now running full nodes, mining bitcoin, companies thinking about getting into ASIC manufacturing, shops accepting bitcoin payments, ... it is all growth.

not being emotional is not equal to selling whenever you see a drop. in fact selling in most cases means you are emotional and naïve!
being an expert means you know what you are doing. in other words if you buy or sell or hold or pretty much do anything else you have to have a pretty good and logical reason for them. for example if you chose to sell today you have to have a pretty solid reason believing price is going to fall more instead of being emotional and guessing it might drop only because you read a bunch of FUD on forums.