It has already hit my north target for this month, and a little bit more. I'm expecting a fall over the next month or so, but I'll still be hodling because I don't know of an exchange I can trust to hold FIAT for me (any opinions on that appreciated - I'm not US/EU based which restricts things a little).

I'll watch it fall if it chooses, because I expect much better things by the end of the year, so rather than being Gox'd, I'd rather keep in cold storage for now and wait for larger northward moves where the only reason I would trade out is in anticipation of collecting a few more coins at a better price after that.  If it does get a bit toppy then I'll consider moving into physical gold and wait for a new buy in opportunity back into BTC.

7tps is a bit of a moot point.  The protocol can adapt to that easily, what we need is consensus on where we want it to go.

Personally I'm thinking the 2Mb/4Mb/8Mb it a decent compromise for now while we work out where it's going to go.  We can change if it turns out different than expected.  It's not baked in by any stretch of the imagination.

If every block is nearly empty, or nearly full, it doesn't change the mining energy required.  it gets solved and submitted no matter what.  What concerns me more is distributing the mining geographically like it used to be.

Bank overheads around the world use quite a lot of energy too.  I haven't personally seen one with a solar power installation.  I think Tesla company has a way forward, as solar costs are coming down by about 20% per year at the moment.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't find an easy example.  Earlier today I went through every post, and just now I've been though just a few pages looking for for one but did not find it.

I'm very interested in the service, though if I traded (never have) then it would probably once every several weeks or monthly to try to accumulate more BTC, and the price of the service seems reasonable.  I was just trying to correlate the prices given to the regular charts of the most popular exchanges.  It's well into the early hours where I am, so maybe can check tomorrow to see if it was an error on my part.

The country I live in it is very easy to bring FIAT in, but not so easy to take out, so I'd rather go straight to BTC if there were such a way.

It's not a large amount anyhow, and I don't really ever expect to see it, it's just that the number of BTC I have is a round number that I don't want to go below at this point, and I'd like a bit of bunce BTC just to use for purchases online.

I'm curious about the service, and was considering subscribing due to the claimed accuracy (usually within 1% or so), but looking at the historical data on bitcoinwisdom, I can't correlate the numbers.  It says in historical data at one point, that it reached 3xx, when the charts I have suggest 2xx.  Im I missing something?  Clearly I need to understand the information to make an informed decision.  An explanation of the error in my reading the chart/price would be much appreciated.

If Gemini prove themselves to be a decent conduit that people can use to move sizeable amounts through, then that would be positive, but I don't see why it would impact the price on it's own that much (maybe upwards a little).

We need use cases that have been fully developed to show the real value of the concept, and that will take time to see how it pans out.  I'm thinking multiple years at least.

The scope of its (Gemini) user base on a world wide view needs to be a lot more to impact the market in a significant way.  USA is only 5% of the world population, and if they only have access to half of the states at the moment, then changes will not be that significant from an individual users point of view.  Maybe institutional investors could skew that a little, but I think most would just test the waters for a while before going in with both feet perhaps, sometime in the future.

I think it will climb a little from a few months prior or post event, but nothing dramatic.  It's been talked about too much and that firework will likely just fizzle a little bit.

A reputation system could take care of a large part of that.

$10K does seem optimistic, so I would say not probable, but I wouldn't say not possible.  There is just too much that can happen between now and then to make any sensible predictions though.

I've heard various numbers, many suggesting 1 million participants in Bitcoin users.  What if each user gave $5-10 dollars worth of BTC to friends/relatives at Christmas, so that to use it they have to put in some effort to learn about it?

Extending that to Birthdays, how many people do each of those 1 million people know?  Is that not helping yourself by helping others?

If Gemini can prove itself to be solid and reliable then that is useful, though remember that the whole of the USA is only about 5% of the world population, so its immediate impact is not likely to be that great.  Worth keeping an eye on though.

$300 isn't a significant number for me.  If it climbed quite a bit and the market at that time started to look a little toppy (can't put a price on that without seeing how it pans out) I might get out of the market, but only because I thought it could come down a bit and I could buy a few more.  All FIAT money would go back into BTC though after a correction, should it happen.

I don't trade BTC purely because I don't know I could trust an exchange to keep viable if using a large chunk of money.

About 20 years ago I was an amateur Commodity trader (not a successful one), and emotion got me everytime.  I could be cold and logical with paper trading and kept logs of the trades, but in live trades I couldn't hack it - kept second guessing myself.

If I knew a place to trust for holding money while waiting for the next inter-day trade then I might have a dabble, as I've watched my cold storage value swing wildly without batting an eyelid.  I don't really want the cash, but would be interested in switching in and out of Gold/BTC to park it when not in use.

I'm one of those people that think it's a binary outcome of a heck of a lot or next to nothing.  By 2020 we should know if it has gained a foothold or not, though suspect it's adoption rate could be more Linux like than viral.

That said, in the last two days I was chatting with two different people and I blabbed out the word "Bitcoin" to explain something (I wasn't being an evangelist), and both pulled me up on that word and asked me to explain what it was, with phrases to the effect of "I must make time to learn more about that".  This time last year it would have gone right past them without hearing the word Bitcoin in their mind, but it seems awareness of the word is growing, even if they haven't dipped their toe yet.

I certainly prefer BTC over lottery ticket equivalent.

I withdrew BTC and left a little for a FIAT withdrawal to test whether it still worked.  They don't owe me any BTC, only FIAT, but if by some lame chance I did get paid out, I'd prefer that they paid me in BTC even though it's roughly double the price that it was at the time.

FIAT I can earn from many places, but BTC is now a scarce resource that I value more.

I'm not sure why there is so much push back on this.  If he makes public a prediction, then it will influence the outcome, so keeping it in a vault makes a lot of sense to me.

I will watch in anticipation to see how accurate they turn out to be.

When it looked like something was wrong with their behaviour I moved out 80% of my holdings that were in their hands elsewhere, and the remaining 20% I asked for in cash (well, money), just to test it.  I got the BTC portion, but never got the cash portion.  It was an amount that is a long time ago and water under the bridge, and not life changing.  I did file a claim, though I have little hope of seeing any of it really.

Edit:  I've been wondering for a while, if you had a very substantial amount of assets, where is safe to keep it these days, even if you're not looking for interest, but absolute security?

That's a tough call.  Gox had both positive and negative influence on the USD price.

At a guess (and only a guess), I'd say it would be somewhere like where it is now, or maybe a little higher if peoples confidence hadn't been shaken, though that would have to account for the media attention that Gox had in influencing price rise, so it's not something I have the ability to reverse engineer.  Maybe some smarter folks could weight those influences.

Because the whole market knows about the halving, and will be looking at the previous one, I suspect that there will be some that are waiting to find out what the price is nearer the time then jump in a couple of months before it, then because most people expect it, little will happen.

Then...just as everyone gets bored it might do something upside that shocks us all.  Most of us are dumb f'ers when it comes to this kind of thing (and I don't exclude myself), so what most of us think, is probably not what will happen.

Personally I look at it as something that has a fair chance of failure, but I'm sticking with it because if it works, the rewards could be exceptional, though that leads back to diversification of investment and not putting all your eggs in one basket.

I still would like to believe that I'd never have to sell, and use it for its own value without getting involved in other value transfer methods too much.

I wish people would use it when they buy from my modest online company.  Visa/Mastercard/PayPal are nasty from a vendor side of the deal.