i get the point about bitcoin being a currency but what i don't get is why use an illegal activity such as "buying drugs" as an example? it is not like we lack use cases that you have to go look in the dark market to find a use case! there are hundreds of different use cases and millions of merchants. use one of them like saying "those who pay for their meal with bitcoin", "get part of their salary in bitcoin", "top up their phone using bitcoin lightning network",....

well good for you but i don't think you are doing the right thing by having "ALL" your savings in bitcoin. as long as humans were making investment, they were advised to diversify and also to invest what they can afford to lose not all their savings.
of course your strategy depends on your lifestyle but for an average person, specially the bread winner of the family doing something like that is reckless in my opinion. don't get me wrong i strongly believe in bitcoin's future and i have a large stake in it but i still keep fiat and also other assets as a safety net.

isn't Bakkt supposed to be a place where people can buy and sell bitcoin? if so then what you call "bloodshed" is their bread and butter! in other words if anything they should have pulled the release forward instead of postponing it.

as for ETFs, they are old news now. nobody cares about SEC and their decisions anymore...

are you trolling or incapable of reading the dates of transaction outputs that are spent? all the previous outputs that link to this transaction have happened in 2018!
not to mention that at first look this is a P2SH address (starting with 3) and this type of address was not even around in Satoshi time .

i think this is the first time you are looking at other transactions that take place on bitcoin network.
large size money transfers are pretty common. they don't only occur on price drops. not to mention that you have no way of knowing if it was a "sell" or a "big ass buy"

the only thing that this picture proves to me is the power of belief. that is in human nature. it is used everywhere too. for example the Placebo is a known fact in medicine where a patient who takes sugar pills is cured because of it!
in the market the same thing is true based on my observation and this picture proves it too. people kept on believing that the "bear market" must last as long as the last time. so when the price was stable, when the accumulation was on the way and lasted months, they still didn't move a finger because they believed in a prolonged bear market instead of a normal market where it has a reasonable length bear market.
and now we have the manipulation which is actually going to prolong he bear market for real. so in a way they got their wish

well first of all this is bitcoin we are talking about, you don't need to wait for the order book to fill up, it fills up in half a day, or in 24 hours tops and doesn't change that much afterwards.
the stability lasted a lot longer than that.

secondly when price becomes stable, traders leave the market. and their leaving means they take their money out of the market. and that means less bids in the order book so if someone was really doing that, they were clearly seeing order books thinning instead of filling up.

bitcoin has always been the target of all kinds of drama. and during each drama there are always some people who are surprised about its existence and try to explain it by connecting it to strange things such as mining farms!

the fact is, this market has always been susceptible to FUD and hype and is always known as a roller coaster. this won't change for as long as the market is small and filled with newcomers while also contains big whales.

it is funny to see how everyone is quickly changing their statements these days to still remain on top of the news sites and make their name and their business name heard by just guessing a random number based on the trend they see!

in any case none of this is normal so coming up with numbers is only proving their lack of understanding of the market. drawing lines on the chart, looking at previous trends,... are all meaningless at this point.
the drop is manipulation and dumping pressure by outside forces not the market itself. and we have no way of knowing how strong they are going to be and how much panic we can expect hence we can not predict the bottom of the current drop.

they have been creating "fake money" out of thin air for years and it is not just stable coins. it is basically any new altcoin and tokens that have been created in the past 10 years without adding anything to the ecosystem.

do you think any of the ICO tokens were really needed to be created? how about the 5000-7000 different altcoins that have been created in the past years?
there is no reason for more than 90% of them to even exist but they were created and created wealth out of thin air.

apart from the obvious fact that was mentioned in the first reply (bitcoin doesn't need any centralized middleman) i was thinking that this may increase the security of exchanges and prevent them from being hacked and things like that.

i think that at first it may be introduced as more secure,... but eventually the same hacks would occur. because the system is still the same. there is some secret information that if the exchange doesn't protect it will be hacked. and unless this bank asks for other assets to back the funds in case of hacks, i don't see any improvement whatsoever...

nobody really thinks that except those newbies who are bag holding ethereum and are brainwashed into thinking DApps are actually needed for a cryptocurrency! and have forgotten that a "currency" doesn't even need that. bitcoin is designed to be a decentralized currency and it is just that and is doing a perfect job with all the attacks so far.

"hard fork" is meant to do that. but this fork that we are talking about did no such thing. the "hard fork" that you have in mind is more like an upgrade. this fork that OP is talking about is a way of creating a new altcoin by copying the code and the block history. and its purpose was to take over bitcoin and gain power by having full control over everything including price, network, development,...

it failed to do that but it is still harming bitcoin.

^^ you only buy and sell constantly and get involved with the market if you are a trader. otherwise if you don't want to trade which is the case with most people for a lot of reasons including lack of trust in exchanges, then you only invest. and times like this when we are officially in a big dip is a good time for investors to buy bitcoin at a big discount.

you won't be able to make any significant amount of money from "earning websites" specially those you posted here, let alone become a millionaire from them. i think you are too caught up in the hype of their advertisements. the thing is you will spend money on these sites and worst of all spend a lot of your precious time on them trying to earn and trying to gain referrals while the site is the only one that is making money and they eventually run away and leave you broke!

the 95% that i mentioned is for when you want to improve the system with a hard fork to to create a useless altcoin that nobody wants.  bitcoin is designed to be  decentralized and that means the whole network or at least the majority (95%) has to agree with the rules that we call "consensus rules". when you fork with less than that, it means you don't have the majority's support. for example bitcoin had forks before. a hard fork in early days to fix an overflow bug, another fork a couple of years later to add P2SH scripts and the soft fork of last year to add Segregated Witness. all done with that high support which is why bitcoin is working well and decentralized.

technically you can create a fork with your own PC, you don't even need any ASICs, you just use your CPU to mine a block but you have to change the difficulty and how it works for the fork to work. then build on top of it to have a new blockchain. but that blockchain (that new coin) will be only used by you alone.

that is what happened with bitcoin cash fork last year in August and it happened now with a fork of this fork again to create a copy of copy coin!
as for their hashrate, there is currently a war between these altcoins over it and there may even be some 51% attacks on each other. because they lack that support i talked about and they started this trend themselves when they forked from bitcoin last year with that little support they had!

not directly for obvious reasons that he doesn't have any effects on the market directly. but indirectly and through propaganda he succeeding in creating a dramatic environment in which the price drop could happen easily. that environment was the FUD filled social media filled with threats of dumping 1 million bitcoin on the market.

it is like a couple of years ago when Mike Hearn spread some bullshit about bitcoin being dead. he didn't sell to crash the market, the whales did it for him after his FUD.

how can this drop be any indication of the direction? was the drop from stable $200+ down to $150 an indication of the direction that bitcoin goes in? or was the drop from $450+ down to $320 an indication? or.... dozens of other cases of drops during stable phases of accumulation.
each drop had always had a reason, most of the times some big FUD about bitcoin being dead, some exchange getting hacked,...

i think sometimes some people think that the term "whale" and what it means is exclusive to bitcoin only and doesn't exist anywhere else in the world! whereas the term alone didn't even begin with bitcoin. it is a known thing that exists in any other market.

tell me who are the whales in Gold market, Stocks, Forex, Oil,... or any other market out there? the whale is just another trader who happens to have more money and can have some influence on the price. sometimes more on some markets than others.

news sites like the link you posted however love to make things bigger than they are. it is like they put a magnifying glass over it.

a government manipulation would be a lot bigger than this and the consequences of it would be a lot bigger. what we are witnessing these days is simply the same old whale manipulation of the market to get the coins out of the weak hands and put it in their own pockets at a cheap price so that they can give it back to them at a higher price when the rise happened and make a profit in this process.

it is not always support it is more like adapting to new world and the changes that are happening in it so that your "business" doesn't evaporate overnight just because you refused to change.
banks will surely get on board the bitcoin wagon eventually even if they are resisting right now. not to mention that most of them are saving face because the government has banned them from getting involved with bitcoin so they are saying it is bad that they don't want to not that they want to buy they are not allowed!