Saudi Arabia is introducing a 5% VAT next year to help stabilize their budget due to all the lost income from oil production. So it's clear that the low oil prices are having an impact on their ability to run their country, and it will continue to be a problem as world oil consumption slows and starts to drop in the coming years. Electric cars will account for a large percentage of lost oil consumption.

Bitcoin isn't likely to be the next big thing. By all appearances, Bitcoin is on the wane and other alts will replace it as more useful, faster, and cheaper alternatives. Right now, Bitcoin is at capacity and the mempool is overflowing with unconfirmed transactions. This has pushed the transaction fees through the room which makes Bitcoin rather worthless for commerce. On top of that, the solution being worked on is the Lightning Network, which is a centralized system that takes transactions off the blockchain in order to free up capacity. So essentially, the solution to Bitcoin's problems is for Bitcoin to stop being decentralized and start being centralized? In 2018, I'm looking for Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash to likely pass Bitcoin in market cap as people flee BTC for more useful and cheaper cryptos.

Ripple will likely prove to be more useful than Bitcoin in the long run. Bitcoin's network is crippled by capacity issues, and the plan to "solve" it is the Lightning Network, which is a centralized system run off the blockchain. That is, the proposed solution to Bitcoin's network congestion is for Bitcoin to be less like Bitcoin and more like Ripple. So any criticism of Ripple in that regard is hypocritical because Bitcoin will soon be employing the same tactic. Second, Ripple was created to utilize Blockchain to solve issues banks face in value transfer, and it is already backed by some of the largest financial institutions in the world. It's the implementation of blockchain's potential, just without the bloat and expense of running it on Bitcoin's woefully inadequate blockchain. In a comparison of which system is better, Ripple will prove superior, and I expect Ripple and other alts to eventually pass Bitcoin in marketcap as Bitcoin continues to fail at what it was initially set up to do, and perhaps as soon as before the end of 2018.

There will have to be some mechanism of estate planning involved to make sure the wealth stored in crypto is accessible to heirs. It's the same thing with cash, if you hide cash somewhere any nobody knows where it is when you die, there's no way to recover it and it's just lost. Crypto owners who intend for their heirs to have access to whatever crypto wealth they own upon their death will need to plan ahead to ensure it's accessible, because it won't be otherwise.

Stocks are a legal ownership of the business you hold the stock for. Bitcoin is merely a speculative asset that produces no income, produces no profit, and is only worth what everyone else agrees it is. That makes Bitcoin's value arbitrary and dependent on things you have absolutely no control over. By contrast, while stocks also are somewhat dependent on a consensus for value, they have an inherent value as well because they represent a legal ownership in a business that produces income and profit. There's no question as to what the safer investment is, and it's not Bitcoin.

The danger in expecting this as a rule is that when it doesn't happen, everyone who thought Bitcoin always had to go up after a fall will lose a lot of money for their foolish expectations. Nothing in the world is guaranteed to go up in value, so why people think Bitcoin is a special exception continues to baffle me. People are so wrapped up in their emotional attachment to Bitcoin that they ignore how poorly the coin actually functions these days. The mempool is overflowing with unconfirmed transactions and fees are averaging $35 now to get your transactions through. How on Earth is this an improvement from fiat, or an economical way to transfer value? Perhaps Bitcoin never recovers to a new high at this point because the coin is not competitive to all the alts that do a better job at being Bitcoin than Bitcoin itself. I believe 2018 has a decent change of a flippening. As to what coin that will be, I don't know. Ethereum and Ripple are good guesses, and Bitcoin Cash is a good third alternative. But I will be surprised if one year from now Bitcoin is still the largest crypto by market cap.

I don't remember Amazon ever accepting Bitcoin. Perhaps you're thinking of Overstock? Overstock accepts Bitcoin still. Amazon has recently registered several crypto-related websites, but there is no additional information about the plans there. If Amazon does accept Bitcoin, I find it more likely they'll use it to lure in consumers who are inclined to pay with it (although, with $35 transactions fees, who is going to shop with Bitcoin for everyday purchases?), but it's more likely than not that Amazon will use an intermediary to process transactions and forward the proceeds of sales on to Amazon in fiat and not retain any crypto themselves. Amazon announcing Bitcoin would drive the hype cycle even higher for Bitcoin, but I don't see it having any practical impact outside of hype.

The continued drop indicates that money is flowing into alts faster than Bitcoin. One way to look at this is that there are over 1000 other alts, and for Bitcoin to be holding this level of dominance is fairly impressive. The other way to look at it is that Bitcoin is not providing the solutions or usability (read: scalability) that the market desires, and people are voting with their dollars for more worthy replacements. That's what I'd be worried about as a someone who believes that the current BTC price is sustainable. I haven't seen any good arguments for that in light of the overly congested network and unjustifiable transactions fees. There are cheaper, faster, and more scalable alts on the market right now, making a flippening all the more likely as Bitcoin continues to fail under network stress and becomes less competitive day by day to more nimble alternatives.

FOMO is driving a lot of this mania. People see (or more likely, they THINK they see) everyone else making tons of money on Bitcoin and crypto, and they pile into it with no regard for how it works or what determines the price, and that's not a sound basis for making an investment decision. That's a classic action in a bubble. People losing a lot of money is the only thing that restore sanity to all this has become.

It's transparent in the sense that everyone and anyone has the ability to see the ledger and verify that transactions have taken place or that certain addresses hold the funds they maintain they do, and that proof of ownership or control can be published and independently verified. Also that the source code is open source and verifiable. Transparent doesn't mean that anyone can see who is making transactions at all times, which is also true of cash, which is anonymous in nature, so there's no real change there. In theory then, Bitcoin is an improvement from cash because it is more transparent in how it is created and who controls the creation of it, and there is no discernible difference in the anonymous nature of the transactions than there is from cash.

Wage growth is higher than inflation currently. If that's one of your determinants for an impending recession, the conclusion doesn't follow because the premise is false. The scenario isn't as great as it could be if places like the US weren't revamping their tax codes to allow the ultra wealthy to pay less taxes through pass through entities, but it's certainly not the impending disaster you make it out to be based on one of the limited data points you're using to support the conclusion.

Oakland rents shouldn't be construed to be more than a local issue because the factors affecting the housing and rental prices there (Silicon Valley driving the prices) do not exist on a large scale elsewhere.

Falling from 19,000 to 12,000 doesn't suggest to me the bubble has popped, especially if it recovers somewhat right after. This looks like a correction with a dead cat bounce. I don't know if there is a technical definition of a bubble popping, but to me I would say that a bubble popping would need to be at least a 75% drop in price, with a long term establishment of the price at the new drastically lower level. After the correction, the bubble looks less inflated, but by no means does it appear to be popped.

The term "bubble" doesn't denote a scam, it just denotes an asset whose value has become disconnected from reality as it trades on momentum without any regard for inherent value. Alan Greenspan termed the coin "irrational exuberance" to describe the stock market during the tech bubble in the 1990s. Crypto is definitely in a bubble phase, the parallels with the tech bubble are uncanny, with companies with no real business or assets changing their names to include the word "blockchain" in their name and experiencing stock pops for no reason other than the name change. Classic bubble.

It's hard to determine what short term fluctuations mean in a large sense. One trend that has been fairly consistent is that BTC dominance has been steadily declining for some time. When I started paying attention to this as an important metric, BTC was around 80%. It's been on a steady decline from there, usually not dropping below 50% and rebounding to the 60s when on an upswing. But now it's in danger of falling below 40%. This metric is important because it signals how much money is choosing other alts than Bitcoin. It makes it increasingly likely that a flippening will happen, especially with how bloated the mempool is with unconfirmed transactions and the unreasonable transaction fees that accompany that. Bitcoin becomes increasingly useless day by day with no shortage of suitable replacements that are cheaper, faster, and more useful.

Arguing that electric cars aren't the future because they cost more in price and consumption is like someone in 1900 arguing that cars aren't the future of personal transportation because they're more expensive than horses and require oil to run on, where horses are cheaper and only require less expensive food. It's an argument based on a limited viewpoint that isn't going to end up proving true. Electric cars are the future, the infrastructure to power them is being built the same way as gasoline powered infrastructure needed to be built first to allow cars to replace horses.

More people are getting into crypto, but not necessarily Bitcoin. Bitcoin's percent dominance has been on a steady decline for some time now. That means more money is coming into crypto as a whole but going to other alts more than it is to Bitcoin. Bitcoin's network has become a joke. Transactions are slow and expensive. It is increasingly obvious that a flippening will happen. There are many alts that are better at being Bitcoin than Bitcoin is, so it really seems it's only a matter of time. ETH, XRP, BCH and LTC are the most likely alts to pass Bitcoin in market cap, and it may come as soon as 2018.

Bitcoin's inherent disadvantage is it doesn't scale, and in that, Bitcoin is just as useless as Tulips and the analogy is appropriate. Bitcoin Cash exists because Bitcoin can't/won't scale. There are now routinely 150k unconfirmed transactions with spikes up to 300k. Fees are sky high. The average transaction fee for Bitcoin is no over $35 while it is about 3 cents for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin will eventually lose a great deal of its value because it's useless for payments, a fundamental aspect of a currency. Without utility, all the speculation is not value that will ever be realized. The present conditions make it almost certain that another crypto will supplant Bitcoin as the dominant crypto. The question is just which one is going to do it.

The world has been moving towards a cashless society for a long time before blockchain, and would continue moving in that direction even without it today. We already have digital fiat without blockchain, so that's not a prerequisite. The world will go cashless without Bitcoin, and it will do it better, as digital fiat is far more useful than any crypto due to its wildly fluctuating value. Companies like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Square have done far more than Bitcoin has in moving the world off cash.

Crypto can become mainstream without bitcoin being valuable. It's increasingly likely that crypto will continue to increase adoption and that some other more useful coin will replace Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash doesn't have the current congestion or scaling issues, although I'm not particularly keen on the way it was split off. There are other more worthy replacements. Litecoin is good, Dash is good, Ripple actually has corporate utility that these others don't, so there are plenty of other alts that are more worthy than Bitcoin itself at this point, so make sure you factor that into your investing thesis.

The success of crypto is not the same as the success of Bitcoin. If you're a long term Bitcoin holder, you absolutely should be concerned that Bitcoin is a bubble, because the bubble could burst on you before you can get out.

And yet right now, you're selling was the right call as Bitcoin drops below $12,000. That's the problem with bubbles- you never know when they're going to burst. You would have to believe that you would know the when the top is before it's evident and with no warning or visual signs. Then you would have to believe that you can get out faster than everyone else. These are not safe or rational beliefs to have. Selling to lock in your gains is safe. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.