some people act as if this is the only pump that has ever happened in the history of alternative cryptocurrencies! it is not even the biggest one in the past 24 hours for goodness sake.
FFC went up 200%, CCO went up 150%
BTQ went up 500% in last week
ERY (on cryptopia too) pumped 500% in past week.

you see, it is pretty common thing to see altcoins be pumped like this.

"bounties" are more like giveaways, and in most cases they give away what is worth about the same as a faucet. and when claiming a faucet you don't even spend as much time as you spend hunting these bounties down!

of course you sometimes get lucky and get some that is worth more, but you sometimes get lucky in a faucet claim and hit the big jackpot too!

it is just my personal experience though, i prefer something that when i spend my time on, i can be sure to get something out of it.

don't make arbitrage more complicated that it is. getting Contract for difference involved in the process makes things impossible because you need to first act fast and get it all filled and second have to account for prices, wasted time, fees,...


you are more on track here.
you can take a more complicated route in order to perform arbitrage but more complication means harder to perform and higher risk and possibly even more wasted time all contributing to less profit or even loss.

here is how you could do it.
lets say bitcoin is worth higher in bitmex. your method of arbitrage means you sell BTC there and then transfer the "money" to the other exchange. well you don't have to use USD to transfer money! you can do it with USDT, XRP, LTC, even DOGE. but prices of these need to be stable. so you sell BTC on bitmex to one of these, transfer it to the other exchange and buy bitcoin with it there.

price is mainly testing the resistance at this point, i wouldn't call any breaking new for now specially since it is $11800 on bitstamp and $11920 on bitfinex.
but it is true that price has been stabilizing around these prices for now and even though sometimes the drops seem big but they are not big for bitcoin!

if a breakout happens, price won't stand around previous levels such as $14k anymore it may shoot back up to the ATH because right now there is an accumulation going on while a lot of investors are standing on the sides keeping an eye on bitcoin to see which way it goes.
that is how sideways action always works and that is why volume drops a little inside that triangle. it needs to break out so that big amount of money that is standing out decides what to do.

there are a lot of reasons that people are not accepting bitcoin as payment and being decentralized is not one of them.
here are some of those reasons:
1. lack of customers willing to spend bitcoin. there may be a lot of bitcoin investors but only a small percentage of them are spending it.
2. high fees. which may be temporary now but that throws people off.
3. high volatility. unless you are converting back to fiat immediately or believe in the future of bitcoin, it is tough to accept a volatile currency.

of course there are ways. what do you think all these fights over the past 3 years were about? it was about scaling but also part of it was from government trying to take  control, centralize things and kill the decentralization and push for less privacy and more traceability of bitcoin.

luckily we have fought all of the "hostile take overs" off so far and we need to continue doing so.

the Initial Coin Offering which is practically raising funds for no product is not the most legal thing in many countries. the fact that it is not yet banned all over the world surprises me a lot. specially since majority of the ICOs are pure scams!

my expectation is that all countries ban ICOs one way or another. at least extreme regulations for them is a must.

you are being too general, you need to focus more on details rather than just saying "crypto". for example Warren Buffet was not talking about crypto in general but bitcoin specifically.

and the choices become extremely limited in general. for example the reason i become interested in bitcoin was because i saw a decentralized currency that i could use to pay for stuff without any problem.
but that same thing "decentralization" is not true about half of the altcoins and "currency" for 99% of them.
this means even if i wanted to i couldn't use them for "Buying things / Shopping" which is your first option.

well right now we have a pretty good example which you can always refer to. and that is Japan.

adopting bitcoin as a currency meant creation of a lot of new jobs. and these jobs require a lot of employees. and economically speaking that is a big deal in any country. so you can imagine the positive effects.

banning on the other hand can mean none of these jobs can be created and at the same time people will have issues investing in bitcoin and possibly others because you can not prevent them from it anyways, and that can mean exiting of money from the country. both of these are terrible for economy of said country.

in the dropping phase which started on 7 of January price already tested the $10k bottom multiple times. once during the initial drop and the peak of panic on 17th and next after the FUD peak of 23rd and finally it was tested yesterday on 26th.

each time the support shows its strength and keeps the price up.
i don't expect this to change even if there were any new FUD and panic which there won't. but as you may well know this is bitcoin and nothing is impossible.

for now you should expect the same sideways although i am still feeling bullish

first of all the government is there because we put them there, unless you live in a dictatorship! and the government is just a bunch of people we chose to go there and set the law for us. if they are setting a law against your views them you made the mistake of choosing them

secondly you are talking about a decentralized system that is censorship resistance and all the effort from the beginning was to preserve these aspects. government opposing this system is not going to kill it.

altcoins have never been stable and probably will never become stable in the near future either. in fact one of the reasons why many investors turn to altcoins for trading is that they are extremely volatile due to their pump and dumps and that makes up for a good opportunity for those who want to make profit and are experienced in trading altcoins.

true, but i believe if bitcoin starts remaining in this "well-defined range" and traders become sure enough of its stuck-here status, we are going to see some serious move into altcoins.

that has been what usually happens whenever bitcoin is like this. everyone moves on to altcoins to pump them. and i am not talking about top altcoins which are already over-pumped. i am talking about all the rest of the coins which were pumped last in March to May of 2017.

it doesn't have to replace anything to become big. bitcoin can become big and adopted and be used for all these things you said but credit cards, banks, paypal,... also exist.

for example when PayPal first came out, there was a lot of talk about how it will replace everything money related! of course it was mainly advertisement, but still you see what i mean.

the main thing about bitcoin is that decentralized feature of it. that is why it makes it different in my opinion. and then the additional features such as security, irreversibility, low fees (not now but generally speaking),...

this is a good question. bitcoin is irreversible so it mostly protects the seller but the thing is, seller is one person or company and it is easier to solve a dispute with them because you can find them but it is hard the other way around meaning when someone uses PayPal and charges back or stolen credit card and makes a payment.

and just like stocks what you are suggesting here is this:
"when you invest in stocks you should diversify into penny stocks too if you want to reduce the risk".

do you see how it doesn't make any sense now?

that is the issue with altcoins, they are more like penny stocks market than a real market. and then if you consider the level of manipulate and pump and dump that is happening in altcoins you can realize that when you "diversify your money" it is best that your cart contains: bitcoin, stocks, gold,... instead of being: bitcoin, altcoin1, altcoin2, ... altcoin10,....

just because you don't understand how amount of bitcoin is fixed and how this simple consensus rule is enforced by the decentralized network, it doesn't mean you are correct.

you have to educate yourself before making statements like this.

if you are so new that you have to ask this questions from random people on the internet then it is not the best idea for you to invest in altcoins! because you seem unfamiliar with this market and because of that your chances of loss are huge.

instead try to stick to smaller investment and bitcoin only and then slowly watch the altcoins and decide for yourself which coin to invest in after you saw at least 20 of them rise up and crash hard after they pumps were done. so that you know what you are dealing with here.

i wouldn't use the words "pump and dump" but i have to say it is not impossible to manipulate the bitcoin market. we have seen multiple examples of it already. have you forgotten the Jaime Dimon "bitcoin is fraud" thing?

of course it is getting harder and harder to manipulate the market as it grows. but it will never make it impossible to manipulate the market, just like any other market!

yeah, it obviously is a good news for the people there who wanted to continue being involved with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

but i say a better news would have been if they continued with the ban!
in which case it would have helped with building the infrastructure for more decentralization and pushed people towards understanding that a decentralized currency such as bitcoin does not need government approval. it is permission-less to use it.
and as we all know "Necessity is the mother of invention"!

not necessary. things move together, the technology was introduced then it started being developed and as a matter of fact "the technology of lightning network" was already done a while ago.

what you are seeing as "being developed" are the applications that are using the technology or protocol. and they need time to become perfect and without bugs as much as possible.
think of it as building a new wallet from scratch for bitcoin.

that is true...