This might seem very disheartening but the only time we see true parabolic movement is when bitcoin's mempool begins to fill, up until a point where it's pretty much unusable. This rinse and repeat cycle will continue until bitcoin core decides to convince their followers that it has no economic principle and absolutely no room for growth. For anyone who truly wants the best for this space, please be aware that no innovative  currency in this ecosystem is able to fulfill the  extent of the  functionalities it intended to provide. If a worthy currency had  the chance  to perform the job that bitcoin poorly does, then we wouldn't be having any of these drastic shifts in volatility. This obviously doesn't exclude exchange hacks and fake federal reserves providing liquidity to coins (tether) because that's a whole other contributor for these kind of drastic downtrends. 

I'm anticipating the day exchanges become obsolete and atomic swaps become more mainstream/user friendly

There's no  way we will  see the gains that we encountered in 2017 unless you're investing in startups, you need to wake up and smell the coffee burning. My guess is that at bitcoins current price, you'd be lucky to double your money.

Ruben is it possible that you provide me with the example block for 199.16.31.96:3355?

Does anyone  have the windows build for gpu mining? If so I will contribute to any of the pools that were recommended above.

Ruben would you be able to recommend a pool besides corpool that has some sort of legitimacy. I wasn't  able to connect to corpool.

So pool 199.16.31.96:3355  is cheating miners??

Does anyone know if the Rochester pool is legit?

Other than that, amazing project with a transparent group of devs, I'm excited to see how the refund/chargebacks with binding contracts will  be tied to the rest of the DAG mechanics. If you guys need people for test net I'm happy to help

Are you guys planning on implementing any financial incentives for people to run nodes  (such as proof of stake)? I feel that this is one aspect in which would allow for a wider adoption in terms of new users in the future  thus improving  the coins performance and scalability . Rai Blocks lacks decentralization because of it's representative system  and steers potential new users away. Although, I still do think that the devs should hold a good portion of the coins to maintain a suitable balance.

If LN would be initiated this year, bitcoin would have a short term bull run and potential staying power if the demand for bitcoin doesn't outgrow the capabilities of LN ( which it easily could unfortunately). I think LN could be a potential negative turning point for bitcoin, because if it reaches this upgrade then  block stream will have the first mover advantage of collecting small portions of everyone's transactions from the side-chains. Making it fundamentally indifferent from something like ripple.

Once it reaches $1T there will be a huge correction, the market is hugely based on psychological Biases. Nothing fundamentally would change.

Seems interesting, although I wouldn't count on any of those partnerships actually being confirmed. The concept is really strong but I have my concerns in regards to it's scalability. If you plan on having all these partnerships you need to consider the network traffic in terms of providing decentrailized storage for clients , as well as creating a means of exchange for how the clients will pay for your services.

It seems quite interesting although I would personally just wait for it to hit  the first  exchange that accepts it.

Bitcoin always  experiences a  higher volume  of network traffic when it slowly begins to approach it's ATH , and it's usually because people highly prioritize some of their transactions way above the means of the recommend network fee, and those presumptions are usually based on how they perceive the rate of the unconfirmed transactions filling up in the mempool. If you wanted to accelerate your transaction, you could use a service like viabtc, although i would just be patient

Have you tried to search your  transaction on the block explorer? If its not recognized on the block explorer & if you haven't received a pending status from your electrum wallet then it's because your bitcoin is stuck in the mempool. Depending on the fee you provided, you can either accelerate the transaction with a service like viabtc or just patiently wait it out.