And from that article.

"Competitors are gaining because of bitcoin's inaction. They believe protocols other than bitcoin have continued to gain traction because they're useful for payments; those protocols are currently capturing value that otherwise would have been bitcoin's.
Existing upgrades aren't enough. They say the addition of code to the blockchain in August hasn't brought about the capacity increases promised."

Isn't it interesting that Bitpay, one of the loudest S2X fans, hasn't bothered to do the slightest thing with Segwit first before going all in on a potentially ruinous hard fork?

And Bitcoin is wiping the floor with those oh so threatening alts at the moment.

Because I'm still struggling to find much out about Bitcoin's single biggest ever attempted upgrade/hijack/disaster/salvation.

We're less than two weeks or so away now and as far as I can tell we still know very little other than bland PR speak. I've seen no reviews of code. The lead developer has just launched some alt. Plenty of businesses have come out against it. Even the ones that advocated it are not going to call it Bitcoin when it launches. Barely a single miner has said anything about their actual intentions. It has no nodes other than Amazon discount specials.

Big blockers have their BCH and that's humming along steadily. I still don't believe it's going to happen myself. Convince me otherwise.

I owed my elderly mother about £250 for something. I said I could pay her back the money or pay her 2.1 BTC. She took the BTC. That panned out rather well for her so far.

You'll get different answers from different people. Kraken themselves have said they won't accept them though I'm not sure how old this is - https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006785528-Deposit-information-regarding-third-party-payment-processors-e-g-Revolut-The-Currency-Cloud-Transferwise-etc-?mobile_site=true

This is a relevant thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUK/comments/753726/transferring_uk_bank_revolut_gdaxkraken_safe/

One person in there added an extra middle man.

Would you really go on this journey and still sell at the end of it? You'd probably have a far, far more fruitful retirement if you hung on to as much BTC as humanly possible. It's not as if inflation is going to go away to compete with Bitcoin.

My main thought is something that hasn't been mentioned very much - 'subject to regulation'.

Ask one hundred people what Bitcoin is and you'll get one hundred different answers. The only way we'll know is to let it continue doing its thing and see what happens. It's one of the great unknowables of the modern age.

The Amazon 'news' is a load of shit.

Retail adoption does nothing to increase the price.

Bitcoin couldn't cope if 1% of Amazon sales were via BTC.

There is no incentive for consumers to buy something so they can buy something, especially when there'll probably be a premium and the exchange rate falls by the time they're ready to pay.

Merchant adoption is a side show to nowhere. It'll happen last, it won't be a driver in BTC spreading further. It's great for those of us who already have it. It's a terrible deal for your average buyer and that won't be solved any time soon. Amazon won't have the margins to offer enough of a discount and what do they care anyway?

I'm not particularly interested in anyone's overall opinion, even more so if they're from old school finance. No one knows where this is going to end up and anyone making declarations of any type will wind up looking like a prize tit.

We need to sit back and let nature take its course. As long as arses are covered in case it all goes wrong then it's the greatest show on earth.

If you're in the market to make money and you can stomach losing it, Bitcoin is better because at this moment in time the vast majority of the world still doesn't understand it and even fewer actually own any.

As education and adoption grows the price will only go one way. Even if 90% of the world decides it's a piece of shit, that 10% is still many, many, many more times the number of people who are currently involved.

No one bothers with forex, gold or stocks for fun. They're looking to grow money. Bitcoin has far more potential to do that simply because of the position it's currently in. Because of the same position it can of course set all your money on fire too.

Without early adopters there would be no Bitcoin. It's easy to sit back and moan at their riches when everything looks healthy and strong. Back in the day it could've gone either way.

And the information was out there for anyone to discover. Anyone who isn't an early adopter only has themselves to blame. It wasn't being withheld.

It's also safe to say that most people who did have what is now a vast amount of wealth have probably lost it or sold too early. There'll be very few who sat around until now completely intact.

The reason it's important is that no one, but no one, can corrupt the information.

If we take something like property titles in the developing world, if there are any at all they'll be in the control of one corrupt department that can be bribed or wiped. If the man in charge feels like having your farm away then there's not a huge amount you can do. You may not have had the ability to record anything.

If the same property titles were on a blockchain there's no one in control, no one to corrupt and it can be verified anywhere in the world at any time. That's a big and important leap.

There is no limit. Even if it reached every human being on the planet there wouldn't be a limit. Its ultimate job is to deflate which means eternal gains versus regular currencies.

Because for a large swathe of the world it's now the only game in town? If they're continuing to ask it then they must be getting enough of it to keep the price at that level. I wouldn't be confident holding such a card myself.

True. The level of stupidity on display here constantly blows my mind. People seem to genuinely want to throw their money away. There is a bit of a difference between being sucked in by a load of horse shit on here with a fancy site and some shills versus being solicited via a crappy email, but maybe I'm crediting people with too much intelligence.

I'll be curious to see how this approach pans out. Not very successfully is my guess. Your average Bitcoiner is hyper paranoid to start with and they'll be a thousand times more internet savvy than most people to begin with.

The average 419er victim is some grandma who got her first computer that week or a horny grandpa.

The crash happened when the news broke weeks ago. It's no longer news. It's been and gone and been put to bed.

At present the Chinese are trading P2P with sites like Localbitcoins but I assume its days are numbered too.

The majority, yes. But not OKcoin and Huobi. They got a month long reprieve though I really don't know why. Perhaps they had more to unravel. They were also the exchanges who were playing with customer funds with shitty investment schemes so perhaps they wanted more time to torture them.

One of the things that's rarely mentioned though is that new money rarely gets as far as an exchange. It'll be far more likely to go through Coinbase or Localbitcoins, both of which follow exchange prices rather than dictate them.

You're full of shit, not that you're a real person anyway.

There is not one single legitimate option to get 0.1% annual appreciation on Bitcoin in this galaxy.

Using what is known as deduction this tells me that an operation that promises to double your Bitcoin is not legitimate.

9 times out of 10 though newbies won't listen and will throw their money away for the sake of moronic greed so best of luck with your loss.