A crypto currency distributed by a central bank, I don't see how that wold be any different that the local fiat.
Maybe because crypro currencies get more popular every day the central banks thought they want to participate and bring something similar on the market.
But I don't see who would want to buy a state controlled crypto currency.

I don't think either that it is just guessing. Even not educated guessing.
There are patterns to see and informations to evaluate. With some experience it is possible to predict the developenet of the charts within certain levels.
But of cours the predictions will never be accurate 100%. There are too many variables, too many possible events nobody is calculating with.
That is why diversifying is always good in my eyes.

There are three options when I am giong to cash out:
If I am in desperate need of money and everything else I had is gone already.
If the amount of total bitcoins I have passes the one million dollar.
By January first 2035. That date is not absolute, but I am planning to start my retirement there.

When I think about it, I am not so sure if it would be so easy for the people to move.
China wants to keep the money in China. I doupt they will let their citizens leave on a larger scale and let them take their money/bitcoins with them.
The government  there has blocked the transactions between the lokal currency and the crypto currencies. In case the people would want to leave, I think they woud get blocked as well.
Regarding the VPNs: China will ban them in 2018. I have already read articles about that.

I think as well it might be possible to reach th 30K already in 2020.
But it will be much harder to stay there.
Setbacks are inevitable, and the higher we climb, the larger the setbacks will be. And the longer it will take to get back to the level we were.

Bitcoin as the only currency that will not work.
It can be used aside a fiat, I think that would would be possible.
There is a reason why the central banks try to keep thier local fiat stable, with a small inflation: to keep the economy running.
A volatile currency as the only currency in a country that will bring only chaos.

Bitcoin has become an investment, and investments can not controle the economy.
And controling the economy, isn't that exactly what bitcoin stands against with its decentralization and the anonymity?
I think that bitcoin was created in order not to have too much influence and power concentrated in one place.

Buying or not buying at the moment, I think that is a question what the personal strategy for the investment is.
When somebody expects bitcoin to go to 100K in a few years, it really does not matter a lot if he buys at 3K or 5K.
If somebody trades frequently, he uses the small ups and downs of a few percent. To him the buy price does not matter much either, because he will soon sell again after the price has raised a bit.
The only group that should really take a close look at the buy price are those who want to hold it for just a few months.
In that time period the price can go down and might not have recovered at the point where the selling is planned.

I somehow get the feeling that bad news sells better.
It's not only a thing concerning bitcoin or the financial industry.
The positive news, to me they seem to disappear much faster from the media.
But whenever there is drama, you se reports about that over and over again.
Until nobody can hear or see it anymore. Then they move on to the next drama, if they can find one.

I don't think that China is out of the game.
If I understand it correctly, the exchanges are still running, the only thing that has changed is that they do not accept deposits in the form of the chinese fiat anymore.
Actually, if that was all China was aiming at, they could have said it in the first place. It would have saved many of us from a lot of trouble.

I think the bitcoin price will rise before the fork, just because of the example the BCH split gave.
After the split, the value of BTC and BCH together was higher than the value of BTC before the fork.

And I do not fear the outcome of the split.
After the fork I will have both, the new coin and BTC. One of them will be the future investment or payment system.
It's not like with the China rumors, which created the fear that a big number of bitcoin users will not be able to use their coins anymore.
It's the oposite of that: the people will have more coins to trade.

I am thankful for every exchange that opens outside of China.
Each of them weakens the intensity of new rumors about bitcoin in China.
We had those rumors in the past, and I am relatively sure that somewhen in the future they will pop up again.
The more decentralized bitcoin becomes the less harm those rumors can cause!

With trading I always had the impression that I missed some chances, sold too early, bought too late.
That brought me under some kind of pressure to make things better, what made my success even smaller in the end.
I still buy and sell, but I would not call it trading anymore.
It's more rearranging the investment in crypto currencies that I have, based on my long term expectation into the individual coins.

The government in China has certain goals on why they do what they do.
First of all they want to keep money in the country and strengthen their economy.
Mining bitcoins contributes to that goal. The mined coins can be sold, even abroad, and the money flows back into the country.
I think as well that even if the mining power based in China breaks away, bitcoin might become a bit slower, but far away from not functional anymore.

It is always the question on how you earn your coins.
When you only participate in a signature campaign, I am sure you will need more than a year to get a complete bitcoin.
When you have a special set of skills that you offer, or you have a regular job that pays you with bitcoin, I can imagine you will achieve it in under a month.
Finally bitcoin is money, and it all comes up to the question, how long do you have to work until you have the amount of money to buy one at the current price.

Many (but not all) stocks offer a dividend. A yearly amount of money they pay you as a form of interest. You don't get that when you hold bitcoins.
And when you buy a stock, you buy a part of a company. Companies have to give out certain numbers about their financial situatation. The level of information is better there.
With crypto currencies, you have nearly no information. That makes an investment in crypto currencies more risky, their price more volatile, and the possible profits bigger as well.

The mempool was even empty when we had the price decrease and with it a very high order volume last week.
That only leaves the conclusion to me that at the time where the pool was full, we had a massive spam attack.

And this somehow makes me wonder: if the days of the highest tradred volume do not fill the mempool, why again do we need the segwit2x fork?
Just to get rid of the spam attacks?

I think that we are heading towards a cashless society.
One possible option how that is going to happen is that banks somehow adapt the blockchain technology.
Of course there will be no miners like we know them in bitcoin. Just some kind of list that contains all the transactions.
And that list would be without public access.

The price is just a result of supply & demand.
China broght a lot of money and demand to bitcoin. But I see no reason why the rest of the world should not be able to compensate that.
Of course it would take a while, but people in other countries are turning to bitcoin as well.
The 5k are only a matter of time.

The only thing that is limiting the minimum amount of bitcoin to buy is in my eyes the fee you have to pay.
I don't think that the fees should be higher than 1% of the traded amount.
Sometimes you have to pay a minimum fee or a fixed fee. I would always compare that fee to the amount I want to invest.
If the fee is higher than the 1%, I would either search another way to buy or wait until I have more money for a larger investment.