It all depends on what type of dominance you are talking about. Bitcoin is suppose to be a global decentralized currency that should make global transactions a lot easier and cheap. It's supposed to be a good option for common daily purchases, and since it has a fixed limit cap, and is not tied to any governments it could also work as a store of value, just like gold. Basically is gold improved, holding all of its benefits, but going further because gold can't really work as a payment method and it's more dependent from the centralized financial system.

For this specific purpose, I do think bitcoin will remain dominant. Maybe not in the short term because right now there are coins that still have faster transaction speeds, and lower fees (even though the fees are much lower right now on the network). But on the long term, and if the lightning network succeeds, then I think BTC will be the most advance coin for these objectives.

If you consider just marketcap dominance, then I don't know. Maybe in the long term it will, because if it succeeds as a global currency, it will need a huge market cap, but in the short term, I do think that ethereum might switch places with BTC. Simply because ether will always have a much larger supply, and it's suppose to be work as a platform for tech companies, and now people are even talking that it could find it's place as a "bond" simulator. If it ever does this, and invades Wall Strees, then it's market cap will be even bigger than BTC.

Not saying this is a good or a bad thing. Both coins are great, and have different purposes, and I think both will be dominant in their goals. Don't really care about which coin will have the biggest marketcap.

Just saw this post now, and I had no idea about all those coins that already had segwit and were working on off-chain scalability solutions like the lightning network. I new about litecoin of course, since it kind of serves like a test bed for bitcoin, and got segwit activated a long time before bitcoin, but I definitely didn't knew about all the others.

It was curious to see that Eclair was working on lightning for other coins, since I believe they are also one of the teams that are developing lightning network on BTC as well.

Just a question though: Why not include Bitcoin on the Lightning Network (mainnet testing) list?
Isn't Blockstream testing on the mainnet as well?

Here is the link
https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html

Well we might have another bull run in 2018. We seem to be recovering from the correction now, but it's still to soon to tell. I think it will all depend on how regulation gets done, and if lightning network gets released this year or not. The hype has slowed down, which is a good thing, and another bull run will only be made if bitcoin proves itself. This is a good thing in my opinion, since we want the price to go up based on strong fundamentals and development and not based on speculation.

Go ahead and buy bitcoin, but be aware of the risks and don't do it expecting that it will surely go up. I also buy bitcoin every chance I get. I only do it in small amounts since I can only risk what I'm willing to lose, but although the market seems to be recovering, and from a trading perspective (not a long term holding perspective), we still need to beat the $9k mark, and that should get us to $12k. We can of course fail to do that, and face another pull back. Nothing is granted in crypto, and don't forget that. If you are trying to get profit in the short middle term, be careful and wait for confirmation. If you are just increasing your long term positions, and you are waiting for BTC to get adopted and usable, then go ahead and buy some now because we might go up. If we go down, then you will be still happy because you will be able to buy more at a lower price.

I was actually going to try them but got stopped by the gas fees. I usually pay 80cent for a transaction on etherdelta (either trades or deposits/withdrawals) but when I was trying IDEX I would have to pay 10x more for a deposit (40k gas around $8), and I read in their faq that the average fee for a trade was 140k gas so I didn't even tried it.

What fees on average are you guys paying there? I though about adjusting the price, since I use metamask, but I was afraid that it wouldn't work, since they ask in the faq for users not to change fees (and from what I understood we can't even change trade fees related to the transactions).

@xaviervilla Thanks man, I really appreciate that. I really like bitcoin and crypto in general, and all this fud attacks were really bothering me. I'm not a "follower" and I think crypto in general deserves some critics, which are perfectly normal since it's a "live" and "evolving" technology, but seeing being hut by fake new is just wrong. Glad you are enjoying this initiative.

Please do share some news you that you consider positive, and expose some fake news, or news that you believe are having a negative impact on crypto, that is way bigger than it should.

@dado7 Thank you for your links again. I already had the one related to the Arizona State on the list, and do find the one related to the Winter Olympics quite positive as well, even though it is an isolated event. It seems crypto is having a good entry in the Olympics (also found this (article)), where a team promised to include bitcoin logos depending on how much they would get from their fund raising campaign in bitcoin.

I will not add them, just because they are "isolated" events, and I do believe that bitcoin already hit mainstream adoptions in terms of awareness, so although they are positive news, I don't think they will have a major impact on bitcoin image. Still worth mentioning though, and I enjoyed reading them, so thanks for sharing.

I found another one today, related to south Korean regulation. I had already talked about it in the "fud" list of the post, but I had no article linked to it, so I will link this one there. It seems they might "copy" the NY’s BitLicense, in order to regulate their own exchanges. Nothing final, as they will wait until the elections in the country take place, that should happen in June. Here is the (article))

Well MyEtherWallet itself can be hacked since it's a website. Even if the site isn't directly hacked you could be victim of phishing or other attacks. The best option to get extra security is to use metamask or similar options. It's the same thing with etherdelta for example. They were recently hacked, and a lot of users lost some funds because they were putting their pk directly into the hacked site. Had they used metamask to interact with the exchange, they would be fine.

As for your doubt regarding the security of pk itslef, I think they are secure. It's easy to think otherwise with your example, but you can't really fix chars like that, and a brute force attack would still need to use the other combinations and would go no where. If it was easy to do it, I'm sure we would have known that by now.

It's really hard to explain people what bitcoin is because they are very used to the current system, and they only hear what the media says about bitcoin. Usually media likes flashy titles, and loves spreading fud because it sells, so since your friends don't really dig more information about bitcoin, they will jsut stay with the hype around crypto markets, and they will of course consider it a ponzi, or a bubble, or something that will never work.

What you did was just fine, you told them to read more about bitcoin. I would suggest you to tell them to listen to Andreas Antonopoulos since he is really passionate about bitcoin, and explains things very well (getting it technical but simple to understand). If they don't get convinced by him, then they will only get convinced once BTC gets adopted.

Any news on this. I normally use metamask so I didn't had any problems with the last hack. I also don't have anything in the exchange right now, but I was considering selling some tokens I received recently. I looked into the site and they seem normal to me, so do you think it's safe to make the sell?
Have anyone used them today? For me they are still the best option to sell tokens, since many of these tokens never get listed on exchanges, so I hope everything goes well.

Actually, no you didn't have that much of a chance. You posted 5 "trains" there, and yes there were a lot more, and even recently we had U.cash and E-coin with profits of 1000% which is just crazy. But the thing is, that you had plenty of scams that came along with those good wins, and you also had plenty o projects that weren't scams but didn't really paid off. So it would still be hard to make a good investment on those few projects. I considered invested in NEO and Qtum for example, and on a few more you didn't mention there, but I know I also thought about investing on some others that went bust.

We just have to many options there, and it's hard to tell which ones are good. To be honest I don't even know if those 5 you mentioned are good projects and will survive (expect for Ethereum, that I really think it's a good project, just like Bitcoin).

Well the thing is that bitcoin is not suppose to be just a financial asset. I know that right now BTC is mainly used for trade, and all the speculation that results in fud and fomo is great for trading because of the huge price variations it causes. But like I said in the OP, even though I trade, I would gladly give up trading, if it would result in a stable coin that we can use for normal purchases. That is the main goal of bitcoin, and I hope it achieves it. And for that goal, the fud and speculation don't help.

Anyway it seems we are fud-less period right now, which is good, and I have two more good news to add to the list.
Nothing really special, but it shows that BTC is still being used for purchases (this time to buy apartments), and that the US is slowly sending positive signs towards crypto (like the Arizona state passing a bill that will allow it's citizens to pay taxes with bitcoin). Like I said it's nothing special, because the state will have to sell the BTC in a 24h period, but it's still positive.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/a-pair-of-british-entrepreneurs-sold-50-luxury-flats-for-bitcoin-in-dubai (apartments sale)
https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-arizona-senate-passes-bill-to-allow-tax-payments-in-bitcoin (Arizona passing a bill to allow it's citizens to pay their taxes with BTC)

I would like to change my "old" BTC address to the "new" segwit one.
Please pm me, if I need to sign the old address.

Segwit Address: bc1qz5rm59pgkfwv7tclylp7vzy4alcyx0u98hkyyz

Not sure if this is true, but those would be excellent news for crypto markets. Given the results of the last SEC meeting I would say it's possible because they were quite positive on crypto, and showed that they think crypto is here to stay, and they will not attempt to kill innovation, and are only concerned about scams and greedy people trying to take advantage of all this hype. I do believe we can already pay taxes with BTC in Japan, since its considered legal tender there. Since individual states in the US can pass different bills, maybe this is true. I sure hope so.

I understand what you are saying and that's why I think regulation will play a critical role in validating crypto markets. It's just like the .com bubble, where people tried to make money out of the innovation hype. There is a lot of hype in crypto as well, and people are showing some exuberant and irrational behavior, that is not good for the markets. I'm glad we had this crash, and we will probably have a few more which is a good thing. This way only good projects will stay alive, the hype will go away, and people will start investing only in good projects.

By trend you are trying to ask what people are doing now? Like are they trading or holding coins? Since the markets are having a hard time recovering I would say people are quite divided now. The dump seems to be over now, although we are not out of trouble yet, since we need to see bitcoin break the $12k barrier to prove that is in an uptrend again, and people are either buying or holding their coins.

I'm actually doing both things. I have long term position that I will not move regardless of bitcoin price. I do this because I believe I will be able to use bitcoin in the future, so the value of BTC comes from it's development potencial, and not from it's market price. I do have some funds to trade, because crypto markets are quite good for that, and I wont ignore that. Not having a huge profit, but I'm doing ok, so I will continue.

I must admit I felt a little strange the first time I went to a casino. Although gambling is a perfectly normal activity in these days, at that time it was still considered as a "bad" thing, or as an addiction. So when I was walking in the casino I actually felt like people would judge me because I was wasting money in luck games. Of course that I rapidly understood that I was being stupid, because they were all there doing the same thing. I actually had a lot of fun there and it was a good night. I don't go to casinos that often, but I never got that feeling again.

Although I agree with you, when you say that this is a great opportunity to buy bitcoin now, I don't think that focusing and justifying the buy based on bitcoin price is a good approach. I think that, is what put us in this this massive sell out in the first place. And if I'm completely honest, I guess that was what put us at the all time highs as well.

What I really want to see, is people talking about bitcoin development, and the progress that is being made in terms of regulation. This is what will get us the adoption we all want, because BTC is a solid project with tremendous potencial.

No, you are completely correct, and I actually listed the Facebook news about the ban on the list as well. For some reason I thought you were saying that Facebook add ban was bad for bitcoin because of the ban, and not because of the FUD it was generating (no idea why I thought that though). I was just stating my personal opinion about that, but I guess that we have the same opinion, or at least we both consider that as FUD. It is there already, and do keep posting more news as you encounter them.

Recently I have been looking for swing trades and not day trading, but the principles are the same, but I just keep my stop losses lower and I try to ride my profits for a while (normally adjusting my stop loss on the way up). I don't have any particular coin for this, since all alts, and bitcoin as well, do some wild swings overall, so anything will do. I wait for my indicators to trigger, alerting me that there might be a trade possibility, and I enter the market.

As for the coins, I have some small positions on ether, stellar, cardano and tron right now.

I think that it's precisely because of that reason (fiat being backed by debt), that puts the hole system at risk. The financial crisis back in 2007-2008, was caused by the US housing bubble burst. Banks were giving risky loans, everyone was buying a house, the prices of the houses kept going up, people start investing in the house market at huge prices, and when it burst, the houses were worth less than the loans that were previously offered, and everyone lost money. Since banks can print money at will, they can then make risky loans. If their money were backed by something real, and not the debt itself, then they would not have loaned so much money, and maybe the house bubble wouldn't have been created, because people weren't buying so much houses in the first place.