Right now, the prices seems to be going up. During the past 24 hours, the prices have increased by at least 5%. This may be due to the fact that there is no large-scale sell-off among the Chinese users. The users have simply moved their coins from exchange wallets to personal wallets.

What do you mean by shockingly bad? If they are low, how much lower from the Coinbase / Bitstamp rates? But to understand a bit more, could you please tell me which country are you residing currently. Localbitcoins are available in most of the countries, and the rates are pretty good as well.

I don't  think that it is possible to earn a living solely from crypto-trading, unless you are extremely lucky. Crypto-trading is very risky. Even if you earn profits continuously for five days, you can lose all of that in a single day when your trades go bad.

Agreed. I have accounts in both the exchanges, but in my opinion Bittrex is more reliable than Poloniex. Just check the Exchanges sub-forum and you can find so many horror stories posted by the users about Poloniex. Bittrex is not perfect, but it is safer when compared to Poloniex. 

Please check this chart:

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/coinbase/btcusd

The last dip occurred more than 48 hours back, and since then the exchange rates have risen by at least 5%. And even now the trend is upwards.

Could you please give me a link for the same? I have checked the BTC China website, and I could not find any (unless the statement was posted only in Mandarin Chinese). There are issues ongoing with China. And we can't sweep them under the carpet.

Right now we are in the recovery phase. The China ban pushed BTC below the $3,000 level, but strong demand from other regions helped the exchange rates to recover. The stabilization occurred at $3,500-$3,600 levels. Now we are witnessing an upward trend.

I don't think that Bitcoin Gold will be as successful as Bitcoin Cash, because very few of the major players are supporting them. Anyway I am happy. IMO, I am getting free coins and at the same time the value of Bitcoins in my wallet is not going to get reduced.

If Roger Ver can get a St Kitts Nevis passport using Bitcoins, then I think that it might be possible for you to purchase an island with the same payment medium. You need to inquire with the real estate agents. Since the amount is very large, many of them will be willing to add Bitcoins as the payment option.

If I am not wrong, then the previous high was $4,950 (not sure about it). To reach the 5K mark, Bitcoin still needs an upward swing by around 20%, which looks quite difficult right now (especially due to the situation in China).

That may be true, but the number of users in China is huge. It can't be easily made up by the other nations. And the most important thing is that China was one of the high growth areas for Bitcoin, along with India and Japan.

What is wrong with Bitcoin Cash? It is not even 2 months old, and yet it is having a market cap of close to $8 billion. Which other altcoin can boast of such a large market cap in a very short duration? And the best thing about BCH is that it didn't negatively affected the BTC market cap.

I don't think so. Because it is difficult to believe that Bitcoin will be able to achieve something which Visa/Master/PayPal failed to achieve. Not that I am having doubts regarding Bitcoin's capability. But I believe that Bitcoin and Physical cash serve different purposes.

Tax evasion has always been a big issue in China. That is the reason why the government officials are running scared of Bitcoin. They are afraid that Bitcoins may be used to hide individual wealth, and to transfer wealth abroad. Same is the case in India as well.

I think that the opposite will happen. If North Korea goes to war against South Korea and Japan, then the value of Japanese Yen and South Korean Won will crash. So the people in these nations will rush to protect their wealth, by purchasing assets such as gold and Bitcoin.

Banks have been in operation at least for the past 500 years. I don't think that it is possible to eradicate them. Rather than hoping for that, we can look in to ways to transform the banks. What is the need for physical banks, when we can do the stuff online? Online banks are much better than the physical banks.

It is quite difficult to predict, but we all need to remember one thing. None of the technological or digital goods last more than a few decades. Look at the CD ROMs. They were replaced by the DVDs. These DVDs were in turn replaced by the Blu Ray Discs. And I am sure that in the near future, Blu Ray also will be replaced by some superior stuff. The same will happen with Bitcoin.

5% is way too small. We had a 30% crash when the news came out (although the prices later recovered by 20%, reducing the loss to around 10%). On 30th, I expect the exchange rates to decline by the same amount, may be somewhere between 20% and 30% from the current rates.

Nope. That is very much fair. Else, spammers will create 10-12 alt accounts each and drain all the coins. And the worst thing is that these people will immediately dump the coins in the exchanges, causing a drop in the exchange rates. The genuine users will suffer in that case.

That is the case, at least with crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin which are protected against inflation. Even if we hold them, we will be able to reap good profits in the future, as these currencies are protected against inflation. As the user-base expands, their value will also increase.