No, we merely saw a dip from the all time highs. Bitcoin has these large price swings anyway. Bitcoin is not in a bubble like some people say and the media simply parrot this narrative after some prominent future tellers. To me, this dip is no different from the past such corrections. Fundamentally, nothing really changed from a week ago. That the Chinese government is trying to crack down on Bitcoin is nothing new. They will keep trying to find a way to control this market. I do not see any signs showing that serious investors are rushing for the exit. Do you? Drop a comment. From where I stand, we are headed for the $6K next.

I would also add that the Chase CEO is playing a very weak hand by trashing Bitcoin. He should focus on his “house of cards” instead because it may go down crashing before we see the end of Bitcoin.

Government has the power to ban bitcoin in their country. But The only way to ban bitcoin is to ban the Internet in the entire country (north Korea style).

There are already countries who banned bitcoin other than china, so this is just a normal event on the cryptocurrency world. If you guys are afraid that bitcoin will die because China banned it, don't be bother by this. Bitcoin could exist without this Chinese Government, there is some countries already who trusted bitcoin and make it one of their currency, and one of them is Japan, so rest assured, bitcoin will still live and will keeping booming as always and will sooner lead to revolutionary period throughout the world industry.

As of China, government has only closed exchanges. But soon they'll be launching their own cryptocurrency through which people can easily buy Bitcoin. But all the funds coming and going from bank would be under government scrutiny through their cryptocurrency. This is what they wanted to achieve. They never wanted to ban Bitcoin.

Other factors which I think is they can prohibit mining or regulate it so hard that everybody stops mining all together. China did this and banned mining and trading bitcoins recently that's why it is possible that bitcoins can be banned. If the government however does intervene, they will most likely stop mining operations and the bitcoins harvest will not join the circulation, reducing the supply further making it more expensive thus preventing investors to buy more because it's expensive.

They can't ban bitcoin, but they can ban exchanges and adoption.

Of course this would not eliminate the presence of bitcoin, just as heroin ban doesn't make heroin go away, only opens up opportunities on black market and skyrockets the price in that particular market

Capital Economics, the winner of the 2012 Wolfson Economics Prize for its proposal on how the Eurozone could be safely dismantled, now proclaims that Bitcoin -- a system of fast, economical, decentralized, sustainable, scalable, trustless, unhackable, and immutable data-registration -- is worthless.

First step would be reading Bitcoin’s original white paper published by Satoshi https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. This paper alone created a whole new billion dollar industry.

After completing the white paper, you can go through FAQs on Bitcoin’s official site https://bitcoin.org/en/faq.

If you want to learn more about Bitcoin history, you can read Digital Gold. It has all the details about Bitcoin since its inception to late 2005. Digital gold is a highly recommended book, definitely worth your money!

Antpool
Owned and operated by Bitmain, a privately-owned company headquartered in China, Antpool is the second largest bitcoin mining pool at the time of writing this article. Although Antpool is based in China, its website is fully translated into English (as well as Russian), and Antpool’s official mobile app is available to everyone without any restrictions. Antpool offers a variety of security options, and its polished mobile and web interface makes it very attractive to inexperience bitcoin miners looking for their first mining pool to join.

India is not the only country that is grappling with regulation issues in the crypto industry. Countries such as the US and South Korea have been sending mixed messages to their respectively growing crypto communities in the regulation that they employ. Conversely, Japan made history when it became the first country to declare cryptocurrency as legal tender in April 2017.

If you meant to ask whether an address has been previously used or not, then you only need to check the transaction history even if it currently has zero balance.

I am not sure whether there is a way to trace when a bitcoin address was last opened via its private key, but if there is a way then that would help you verify the address.

As the blockchain technology going to spread around different industries - we will need those who can rewrite regular apps with the blockchain. Also we will need those who can write smart contracts according to the situation (for instance a real-estate auto contacts or contracts that allow musicians automatically get paid for their tracks on spotify). Also it’s important to keep different cryptocurrency platforms and ethereum safe and updated and after the cryptokitties big time other games will likely appear on the scene, which will require more blockchain game develoopers.

There's a wrong concept in your question. The Bitcoin actually can't be hacked, it's too hard and difficult; what hackers do is put a trojan in some junk mail which the user open, steal all the info about the wallet (address, password, etc) and transfer to 2 or 4 accounts in order to lose tracks.

This is something very common and usually the targets are people who have a big amount of BTC in one account.

Just because the transactions are on the chain and visible to everyone, doesn't mean many people will get caught. All you see is money moving from A to B to C. The only way you get caught is if you send your coins to an exchange, and they rat you out.

There's no real way to identify most addresses on the chain.

No it's not.

In fact, safe investments are almost impossible to come across. All types of investments have an upside and a downside. That means there is always a certain level of risk involved. There is the possibility of losing money, no matter how minimal.

That being said. In terms of risk, Bitcoin is far from safe. It is an investment of high risk. This is largely due to the volatility of its price and the absence of exact value.

With high volatility, there is the possibility of a big drop or a big rise in prices. Given that Bitcoin relies on the simply economics of supply and demand to support its prices, the same simple economics could be it's undoing. If everybody starts selling, you will lose money. If there is a strong interest, you will make money. But a smart investor never focuses on the possible wins. His main focus is possible losses he could incur. Based on the metric of volatility then, Bitcoin is highly unsafe.

When it comes to value, we really aren't sure whether Bitcoin is going to be eventually accepted as a store of value or a currency. In investment, this uncertainty spells doom. For an investment to be considered safe, you have to be able to assess it's value and determine it's price. This is something that Bitcoin investors have been unable to do. Most of them refer to it as digital gold, and that it's price depends on consensus. But this only works when it's accepted universally as that. Before that happens, things could really go either way.

Remember, investing with the hope that something will rise in value is called speculation. Being able to value and determine the risks associated with the instrument in which you are investing your money is what investment entails.

Investors might lose some but they make it back somehow. Speculators get rimmed big time.

So the answer to your question, Bitcoin is not a safe investment. At least not yet.