it is because Ripple is centralized and the company behind it goes around and tries so hard to advertise their product to banks. from a thousand banks they go to, there is bound to be a couple that listen to them and buy what they are selling.
and what they sell is the blockchain technology which Ripple is using not their coin which is XRP. and the banks involvement as you already know is only because of the technology not the coin.

the only thing different that Verge is doing is that they have become a lot more active and have been advertising the shit out of their coin. they haven't been doing anything proper that actually counts. their hype with pornhub was just a short lived hype and gave them some small pumps. nothing more.

unfortunately i think OP got overly excited about this little news!
as others mentioned i also think that this won't work the way it is being advertised to work. it certainly is a very interesting use of blockchain technology but unless they can find a way to prevent spam there is no way of controlling things.
remember that decentralization is not always good. for example if this forum was decentralized then it would have been filled with spam. and when there is incentive to spam (like spreading FUD) they will spend money to do it too. so even if the platform requires tokens and transactions and fees that still wouldn't prevent them.

it won't happen because they want something they can control first and is more stable second.


there is a bout 17 million bitcoins created and most of it has no known owner and the small portion that has known owners belong to exchanges.

the number of newbies has increased so the amount of spams by them has also increased that is why it is hiding all the real trades. besides when you are good at trading then you don't want to waste your time on a forum telling others what is what. you just go ahead and make your trades and enjoy the profit you gain from the altcoin pumps.

it depends on what your long term goals are.
i don't have any faith in any altcoin so i never keep any of them. my goal is to have a lot more bitcoin than i have right now. this means my profit from any trade goes into bitcoin. if i have tokens, altcoins, .... i dump them for bitcoin either directly or if i have to i sell them to ETH and then dump ETH for BTC. in the end only bitcoin rises the most.
and if i needed money i will simply sell a tiny bit of bitcoin to cover it.

basically the same as the other topic. you keep repeating Forex and trying to use TA but neither are relevant here. of course analysis works to some extent but that is not enough to make a speculation like this.
go to tradingview and see hundreds of them there, sometimes everyone is predicting a different thing. i can show you at least a dozen of them saying price is going to rise to $11,700


yet another reason why market capitalization is a false factor to use for cryptocurrencies!
there are a lot of shitcoins with huge supplies like eth with 100 million and when they get dumped the total market cap takes a bigger hit just like when they get pumped the total market cap bloats that much.

it is somewhat similar yet very different from 2014 in my opinion.
we have the big rise followed by a lot of hype and followed by a huge rise. and then we have the fall which was also huge (nearly 70% drop)  and then we have the consolidation phase. but the 2013-4 one took a much shorter time to have that rise then it took a much longer time to have that fall! so things aren't exactly the same.

first you have to convince the shops to accept the crypto you want to spend then spend it. or simply use bitcoin because there are a lot of places that accept it or use fiat because everyone accept it

saying that i have a feeling that this topic was created to advertise that ICO though...

all we know is that bitcoin's value is currently a lot higher that the current price so it means it is under priced. and also we know that the market has shown it is ready for the rise but also it has shown us that there are other forces that don't want it to rise and will prevent it.
now it is all about how long they can keep it up...

i blame you and every other newcomer who filled the pockets of these whales when you were so happy during the pumps and were buying all these useless shitcoins and investing in all the useless ICOs.
that was when you were making the whales bigger by buying their coins from them at a much higher price after they have already pumped it. now as these shitcoins' bubbles burst they are taking bitcoin down with themselves too....

i am not sure how things work in US but from what i read they are a government agency anyways and they are accepting bitcoin as payment. this means they are seeing bitcoin as a currency and this is happening while their country considers bitcoin as a commodity!
is this the start of a change towards accepting bitcoin for what it really is?

you can dream all you want, the market is filled with people like you who are dreaming for some random useless coin to go up so they can become rich! it can't say whether it will or will not happen, it is a gamble you may get lucky and win the lottery or you may continue losing money until you are broke!

my suggestion is that you change this attitude of yours and start trading altcoins seriously instead of bag holding some and wishing it gets pumped.

they actually are and if you ever had any amount of bitcoin make sure to try things out and see for yourself. then go to some of these shitcoins and try the same thing and see if they really are as good as they are being advertised. then try checking the risks of these shitcoins

ICOs are frauds whether they have a working Email address and communicate with you or not. they are asking for money and then they don't deliver anything but a token that is completely useless. you can make that token on your own without needing them. it is just a copy paste of some code which you can also find on the internet!

haha, if you ever wanted to know how someone can be confused about the meaning of "FUD", take a look at what OP said here once again.

he has heard something that something called FUD exists which causes the drops and he thinks FUD is the same as bullshit. LOL. he thinks we don't already know or won't check the facts such as volumes coming from different countries.

there is always 1 bitcoin and 1 bitcoin alone. if some small group of people choose to call that 1 bitcoin as something else like bitcoin core it doesn't make it something else. it is still bitcoin. and this bitcoin is the chain that has the majority support. the majority of hashrate, the majority of nodes, the majority of merchants and users,....

when someone makes a fork out of bitcoin they can become bitcoin if they can gain that majority support. like Segregated Witness soft fork in 2017, or the P2SH soft fork in a couple of years ago, or the first and only hard fork that bitcoin had in 2009 or 2010. it had the majority support and it became bitcoin.

when they can not gain that majority support they become altcoins. usually they are abandoned like many proposals that were shut down in the past like decreasing the time between blocks (suggested by Charlie Lee in early days which made him create LTC=another coin), or increasing the block size.
unfortunately some people can not accept defeat. they will come back and try ruining everything because they didn't get what they wanted!!!

i think you are confusing two things. volatility being an issue and volatility making bitcoin useless. there is a big difference between these two. volatility is an issue but at the same time the merchants/businesses will continue to accept it and people will continue to use bitcoin as payment (the millions of dollar that is being processed by the merchants is proving that.
but if volatility stopped and bitcoin became more stable then this usage will be increased by a lot which is showing it IS an issue.

just because you have cheaper electricity it doesn't mean you should jump into mining. mining cryptocurrencies is not something that is suitable for everyone. it requires an initial investment and also a dedicated space to put all the equipment and cooling systems and you will have to endure the noise of it all.
on top of it you should also be aware of the volatility.

banks and other corporations that are working with fiat (for example PayPal) are all afraid of bitcoin. they have been from the early days that it came out. but some choose to ignore their out-of-date status and instead attack bitcoin in the media but others choose to adopt blockchain technology and try to adapt with the new world so that they can compete.
guess which one is going to survive the future!