Hi guys, i'm just a newbie here. I've been curious on how the value of bitcoins increase and decrease through time. Is it because of the investors coming in for bitcoin? Are there ways that we can predict this? If yes, how? And in addition, what do they mean by forks? Are forks bad? My friend told me to sell my bitcoins before forks happen. Should I follow this?
I'm sorry for giving a lot of questions since i've been very interested in bitcoins and I really want to try to put an investment on this. I've been reading a lot about bitcoins and i've seen records from 2013 $7 bitcoins to now, $7000btc
You were given a lot of opinions already, so I will just add a few things that haven't really been mentioned yet. Again, like all the other users, this is just my opinion and nothing else. I will talk about forks, and I will say that I don't agree that forks are necessarily bad. They are needed, since it's the only way to create new updates or make any changes to bitcoin.
Some of those changes might be necessary and supported by the community, and in this case you will just have an update of the coin. This is what usually happens with ethereum, at least for now.
Other forks are created because some developers have different views on how to solve some of the problems bitcoin has. The bcash fork was an example of this. On these forks, both parties think they have the best solution, and normally compete directly with the main chain.
There are also some forks that work more like an airdrop. This was the case of bgold. They created something different from bitcoin, but they don't really want to compete with bitcoin. It's suppose to be just an altcoin.
I'm ok with forks, as long as they don't put the network at risk, because they are a way to evolve bitcoin. Also you get free coins, and you can decide if you want to support both chains, or just dump one coin and buy the other.
The free coins you get, are normally the reason that makes the price of bitcoin go higher every time a fork occurs. So I don't really agree with your friend. You should hold the coins or buy more, before the fork happens, because the price will rise. You can then sell some for profit, but never sell all of your coins, unless you no longer support the coin that just forked, otherwise you will be sending wrong signals to the market.
I think most of your other questions have already been answered, and like I said, I just wanted to add my opinion on forks, because we will definitely have many more to come, and most users still panic a little every time a forks happens, and I don't think that is healthy for bitcoin.
