never say never. cash will also become obsolete some day as the ancestors it replaced. it has its own flaws too. and it is harming the planet as we need to keep cutting trees to print more of it!

besides the world is moving towards digitalization, it is not just money. cash may not be replaced by bitcoin but it will be fully digitized soon. heck it has already started. i can't remember last time i paid for something with cash!

you can't say the market is unpredictable then at the same time predict it with "expecting" something.
but kidding aside the market is really unpredictable specially at this point. the only thing you can do is to look at the previous times and see how the reversal happened in those times. although past is not the indication but it is all we have for now. and so far it seems like most traders loved the 2013 bubble and aftermath enough to prolong this bubble aftermath similarly. so it is not unthinkable to say they will repeat the recovery too.
in which case we can expect another massive dump and a sharp reversal resulting in breaking some big resistances. in which case all these low highs and low lows become meaningless.

i disagree. of course i am assuming that by "stimulus" you mean something that kicks starts the rise. in which case we don't really need something like that to start the rise. it can simply begin after hitting the bottom and as everyone gets tired of waiting for a lower price. just like all the previous times that price was stuck in a low bottom. for example the 2014 bottom at $220.

although it is possible to  see some sort of hype initialize the rise like the ignition under the rocket, it rarely starts like that. those "stimuluses" have mostly happened after the rise had begun.

$3000 although being low is not a serious threat, anything lower than that because it is a major buy support, can be a bad thing. although it is not because of what OP says, there is no such thing, but because it will increase the length of the downtrend by a lot more and that will also damage adoption since it slows that  down significantly.

the cryptocurrency market as a whole is currently in a terrible shape and it has nothing to do with the altcoin prices that have been dropping hard. but the problem is with the total number of them that are available and the high percentage of useless coins that are in circulation and wasting resources every day!

this market is in serious need of a big purge to flush at least 1800 altcoin out of the market so that it can become a little cleaner and maybe become healthier.

i wouldn't call it "simple" correction though!
we already had about 85% drop which took more than a year and the trend is not yet reversed. nothing about this is "simple". a simple correction would have been a normal bear market that lasted 6 months with about 30% correction (or worst case 50% since this is still a small market) followed by a month or two of accumulation and then slow rise.
what we had was mostly like a year of shoring and then manipulating the market to get those shorts filled.

my friend you are not complaining about bitcoin, you think you are but you really aren't.

what you are complaining about is the banking system and regulation laws. and you are complaining about them in a wrong place. this is a bitcoin forum not a banking system or government related forum.

all the "headaches" you just described here are coming from the banking system that forces you to bend over backwards in order to use your own money. and the government that forces the exchanges to force you to send them your documents. so if you are unhappy about KYC and AML laws then you should complain in the correct place, which is with your government

you mistunderstood the whole thing here! most probably because you Ctrl+F searched the number "21" and found that line. which is not even 21 million but 210 thousand.

that line which you posted is not the 21 million limit although it is somewhat related. what is happening there is that every 210000 (210k) blocks we cut the block reward by half. an event known as Halvening these days! and 4 years is the result of time between blocks thanks to difficulty (210000 ~= 4 * 365 * 24 * 6 block/h)

AFAIK nowhere in the source code there is any constant set for maximum number of bitcoins. it just happens to be that much because of the way all these other things are calculated (block reward, block reward halving,...)

the more people give up on bitcoin and become hopeless about it, the higher the chance of the rise is going to be. it is not because of some magical elf behind the curtain but it is because the dumping pressure and manipulation is there only because these people are selling with each manipulation and when they give up and go away, the whales can no longer make profit since there is nobody left to milk so the rise starts soon after.

not it has absolutely no similarities to that which makes it the worst example you could have made. why? simply because when they are building a shopping mall you know there will be a building there with actual usage, you see the yare putting a lot of money and man power into building it and it won't be abandoned when it is done building.

do we have that in ICOs? absolutely not. in comparison they are only spending a small amount of time copying some code from other previous projects and changing the name and getting paid for it. there is no product, there is no usage, there is only money that chances hand from gullible people to scammers.

those with good ideas never start an ICO. they put the effort in, spend a lot of time and money and build a solid project. look at bitcoin for the best example in the field.

the investor should first decide whether he wants short term profit from trading or actual investment in solid projects. if it is the first one then any  shitcoin is a good option because of their pump and dumps otherwise the job is extremely hard and time consuming because you will have a sea of altcoins with no end and a lot of advertisement that will hide the truth

it was not ALL because of altcoins but they deffinitely contributed to the bitcoin price drop. but saying they "dragged bitcoin price down" is simply false. bitcoin entered a bubble and that needed bursting and that is exactly what happened. although it then dragged on and became a lot bigger than it should have become but the heart of it was because of that bubble.

altcoins only come in when the pumpers dump them on large scale (like the $100-$150 dumps that ETH had last year) and the sheer amount of money that is fleeing the market pulls bitcoin down too because a lot of it exits through bitcoin back to fiat specially from shitcoins that don't have fiat market..

we are having a very similar situation to 2014 but at a higher price this time since the adoption has grown in the past couple of years. the situation is after a bubble burst and the drastic downtrend that it has caused.

as for investment versus currency, i think that part is still the same too. both aspects of bitcoin have grown side by side. meaning there are a lot of people who see bitcoin as an investment which can only make them money while a lot of other  see bitcoin as a unique decentralized currency which is offering them a lot more than just profit.
so pretty much the same, only now there are more people in each group.

a "market recovery" is going to happen when the bitcoin price has reached at least $6000+ and it can be considered out of this undervalued state when it goes above and ends at $9k.

otherwise going from $3500 to $3600 is not a "recovery" just as going from $3600 to $3500 is not a market dump and end of all things!

what you should realize is that two things are important in every rise and fall: the size of it and whether we are passing a major number or not. and this has been neither.

you should seriously stop watching  crappy Youtube videos from newbies who are only creating videos to make money from their number of views increasing. most of them have never even traded more than a $100 worth of bitcoin in their entire lives and now they are posting "analysis" about the market!

this subject has been discussed so many times before and you can do a little search to find what people have  said so far and if you have anything then please try adding it to those discussions instead of restarting the whole thing here again.

first of all, for an exchange hack to affect bitcoin price it first needs to be a major exchange with a high volume. something in at least top 10 exchanges. Cryptopia has been such a tiny exchange. i believe it had a rank above 100 among other exchanges. such exchange getting hacked is not going to change anything at all.

second of all, Cryptopia has been acting shady for a while now and being hacked was one of the possibilities that was expected out of such exchanges. most people cashed out of it a very long time ago.

you can not plan ahead for recession like this if you ask me because you don't know what it is going to hit and how hard it is going to hit them. for example stocks market will surely plumet and it can drop pretty hard. the real estate market that someone mentioned may also plumet but it is one of those things that may not happen in all places.
as for cryptocurrencies because of the high risks they have, they may not be options that are considered by many. in other words most people tend to stay away from high risk assets during a recession more than other times which means they can drop hard too.

when all other possibilities are considered and none of them are true then the only remaining explanation for a drop is manipulation. for example right now you can not come up with any reason for price to go any lower. and nobody is selling their coins, everyone is just sitting with their hands on the big red button waiting to see if the whales manipulate the market more or not. otherwise if they truly wanted to sell then they would have already started selling....

the hype of that fork seems to already be over and in fact i believe the recent small drop in bitcoin price might have been because of the ETH fork hype dying off and the whales dumping the  coins they bought for short term profit.
people doesn't seem to be so happy about the big change they are forcing on them regarding this switch from PoW to an inferior algorithm.

almost every month we see the same topic out of someone new started here talking about the similar numbers. some say 1000, some say other numbers and they are always wrong because of the same reasons. because you can't know who owns what and who does those addresses belong to. not to mention that when you look at balances alone you are also looking at exchange addresses like Bitfinex  cold storage which has millions of dollars worth of bitcoin in it! is bitfinxed one person?