We won't know we've hit peak oil until after the fact, when the downward trend is clearly established and no foreseeable future events could spike oil consumption back past peak usage. We're probably pretty close in that I would expect us to hit peak oil within 10 years though.

It's interesting to note that when the idea of peak oil was first introduced, the author who created the concept predicted peak oil, based on the history of oil production, would be reached in the year 2000 at 12.5 billion barrels per year. In 2016, world production was 35.4 billion barrels, with slight yearly increases continuing to be projected for the time being: 35.9 billion in 2017, 36.5 billion in 2018.

Since we are virtually halfway to what everyone would have considered at the time of this post to be a ridiculous notion (that bitcoin would anytime soon be at $10,000 when it was trading below $300), we should have enough of an idea at this point to lay waste to the assertions made in the original post that the only reason Bitcoin would be reaching $10,000 is because the fiat currencies of the world are tumbling due to hyperinflation and everyone is turning to bitcoin to flee the ravishes of the evil central bankers, dear god save us all.

With bitcoin now trading above $4500 in a not completely volatile way, it is not the failure of world currencies that has pushed bitcoin to this price, but pure speculation. The OP also misses the irony of saying that at $10,000, they will never sell for fiat but would rather go on a shopping spree at various merchants, which is the same as converting to fiat anyway. The point isn't whether or not you cash out to fiat specifically, but cash out period to lock in your gains. If you do that with fiat or consumer goods, that's a distinction without a difference; it's the same effect.

If you're sitting on a pile of gain in a speculative asset, there's no reason here (and certainly no reason provided by OP) not to take risk of the table and convert to a more stable currency, which all the major fiats of the world are compared to btc, eve though it trades at $4500.

It's not tautology, it's a truism. It's true because it's true. Obviously everything has value because of a lack of something that would destroy that value. It's so obvious it's not even interesting to point out. But that's the nature of value nonetheless, in that value is forward-looking. Remove the certainty of future survival and all assets lose value.

As for the first statement, I agree. "Creates" is the wrong verb; I should be saying it "enables." In this change, it is more accurate and the central premise of my point remains. The excess economic output enabled by a robust international banking system allows for bitcoin as a speculative asset to retain a lot of speculative value. And in a devastating international crisis or global economic depression, all speculative assets will lose value as people turn to guarding wealth rather trying to expand it by taking on risk.

That's not a conscious choice, just an unintended consequence of being popular.  The price has risen to the point where only the rich can afford to buy quantities of bitcoin at a time, but that's no different from any other pricey asset or luxury item for that matter. It's not designed that way, and no one is conspiring for it to be that way now either.  It just is what it is.

The fee issue was a confluence of limited block space and too many transactions (including many illegitimate spam transactions intended to drive up the price). But transaction fees are market-based here. If bitcoin can't do anything to keep them in line, it will largely lose its utility as a cheap value transfer mechanism, and thus a lot of the reason for using it, which will result in a decreased price.

Blind faith gets lots of people in trouble. I'm sure during the deflating Tulip bubble, there was some guy thinking exactly the same thing, and what do you suppose all his faith got him? Any asset bubble is prone to pop without warning and for no specific reason other than it ran out of steam and everyone ran for the exits. At times, bitcoin resembles too much of a bubble for me to consider it not to be a foregone conclusion.

Since the US is the only market with dependable and transparent numbers on supply and production, it's generally that the larger global oil market moves in conjunction with the most reliable data available, and since the US is reporting down numbers and releasing oil from the strategic reserve due to disruptions by Hurricane Harvey, that's likely why you're seeing oil prices up now.

How is it at a very bad price? They manufactured this coin out of thin air and it's maintained a multi-billion dollar market cap since inception, which ostensibly means they manufactured billions of dollars worth of value out of thin air and based on nothing.  And there has been enough buying activity to support this valuation for weeks now. I wouldn't at all consider that a "bad price." It's damn near a miracle, and pretty fortunate for anyone with BCash that they haven't been crushed by a wave of sellers.

I certainly concur with your analysis about the purposeful targeting of mining, but I don't think it's intended to be abusive. It's just following the money. When it's more profitable to mine BCash, that's where a sizable group of miners go.  When they run the difficulty up to the point where it's more profitable to switch back to Bitcoin, they do.  I don't see anything currently that suggests it's intending to be abusive rather than intending to optimize income.

First, thank you for the more cordial tone. Your posts are much more interesting to read when they're just presenting your ideas and not attacking.

Can you explain what you mean about relay attacks and exchanges? Not sure I'm following that part.

What is "technically" not possible about accepting BCH payments in addition or as opposed to BTC? I don't understand this logic. Let's say I'm a merchant. I accept BTC for goods/services. In order to do so, I need only to have a BTC address. If I wanted to take BCH, all I would need is a BCH address. How is there a technical barrier there? Accordingly, there is no barrier stopping merchants from taking any other alt as payment either on a technical level. So the second pin of my premise is that just like every other alt is failing to win over against Bitcoin, there's no reason to think they would win over against BCH either. If BTC goes down, something is likely to become the dominant replacement, and if the BTC demise is attributable directly to capacity issues, it makes more sense to me that the closest alt to BTC and solves for its weakness takes its place. I believe that would more likely be BCH at this point than anything else.

Gold historically has been exactly that, a hedge against disaster or a failsafe to preserve wealth in uncertain economic conditions. The volatility exhibited by Bitcoin is great when it's on an overall upward trend has it has been for months, but everyone forgets how terrible it was owning Bitcoin at $200 for a year after it was trading at $800 and people were wondering if it would ever see those highs again.

Yes, I agree with your definition that any hard fork is an alt. And further that BCH is an alt. I would like for it to prove to be just like every other alt, but I'm not convinced it is. Let me refine a statement though that you pointed out, the network isn't a clone (since network is made up by the participants and by defintion has to be different), but the network infrastructure is a clone at the split point. The thing that differentiates BCH from just another alt is that anyone currently transacting in BTC already has funds in BCH and switching or adding BCH requires less friction than a substantially different blockchain.

As for you answering my question: what's preventing you from switching to BCH, you responded then network and demand. That's partially my point. If the BTC network once again proves unable to scale and handle the capacity crunch, then you don't have even that, and if inertia is the only thing keeping BTC the larger ecosystem, I think you'll see parity or eventually BCH emerge as the winner if BTC can't get its act together.

In the world of Bitcoin, this stretch of upward momentum is quite unprecedented when taking into account the amount of overall dollars this price appreciation represents. I rather suspect that downward pressure for any length of time will cause all manner of doomsday prognosticators to start telling us all how smart they were to predict it.

Some people seem to think buying a house in bitcoin will save you tax money. Regardless of how you buy your house, you're going to have to pay taxes on it when you sell. If you're buying a house with bitcoin, you're still going to use the USD equivalent for tax purposes. All real estate transactions are registered with a county or local government office, you cannot buy a house anonymously. You will also still be subject to real estate taxes while owning, not just when you sell. Bitcoin does nothing to help you evade taxes on real estate.

This viewpoint violates a very widely accepted concept that markets get more valuable over time. All the great wealth generated via equity holdings has come from long time horizons. Even in Bitcoin, the greatest gains have come from sitting on coins you own, not actively trading them where you open yourself to daily volatilit risk. Holding since 2012 would have made you far richer than trying to trade your coins on a daily basis (in all likelihood).

I see your point, but I don't consider what I said to be contradiction. First of all, I was speaking only in regards to stocks, which do not comprise 100% of my investments. I also own bonds, real estate, and crypto as well as short-term notes. The diversification was only in respect to the equity portion of my investments.

So I suppose there are two types of diversification, and I was speaking about the smaller set. There's diversification across investment types (what the asset is: stock, bond, real estate, commodity, crypto, etc.) and there's diversification across industries which is most commonly (but not exclusively) used in relation to equity investing. If you're invested 50% in stocks and 25% in bonds and 25% in real estate, and all your stocks are in one industry, I wouldn't consider that diversified. You could be well-diversified inside crytpo (10% across 10 different coins) but equating 100% of your investments and I wouldn't consider that diversified in the larger sense either, since crypto by and large is dominated by btc, and whatever btc does it for the most part drags every other coin with it. In equity investing, there are defensive stocks that perform better in recessions than growth stocks which are very dependent on good economic conditions. So there are several ways to get at diversification, but in each case it's going to depend on the facts of the case. I would say a general way to put it is you're diversified if a general event doesn't impact all your investments at the same time. (Exceptions for catastrophic market events, which will drop everything, because you can never be diversified to the point where you never experience losses.)

Clams pre-seeded everyone who had a btc, doge, or litecoin address as of a certain date I believe with a certain amount of clams. It kind of went nowhere for awhile until it became the official token of JD. I don't know if it was always intended that way or if he just capitalized on a new coin that he liked the distribution method of. Doog is from Canada, but it's unclear to me how he expected Clams to be legal where bitcoin wasn't on his dice site. I claimed all the clams I was entitled to and followed it for awhile. I eventually sold out of it because it's just another alt with no utility outside of JD in my opinion.

Interesting though, why do you want Litecoin to switch to PoS?

Since the network is identical at the split, you have the burden of proof I suppose of arguing against the notion that there isn't already a system in place that can pick up where it left off at the split point. So yes, while I am assuming that merchants or people who were accepting bitcoin could just as easily accept BCH, since the network is a clone, the addresses are a clone, the private keys are a clone, etc., it seems logical to me that people abandoning the unusable network would find the least friction in taking up the BCH network. If you are a merchant or consumer using Bitcoin, what's preventing you from switching to BCH? Especially if you've already got coins there and especially if the network is gaining favor with the masses amidst a general increase in unusability of the BTC network. That's not to say any transition would be seamless or pick up where BTC left off months after the split, only that it offers the least friction to cross over. Also, any switch wouldn't happen instantaneously. Bitcoin wouldn't suddenly be "unusable" in one instant where it was perfectly usable the instant before. It would be a long, slow march towards unusability, just like last time, and as people become increasingly more frustrated with delays and high fees and the developer's overall inability or unwillingness to address the issue, there will already be a nearly identical system that can address the capacity problem, and as bitcoin loses favor over time, BCH will increase in value as it becomes more viable.

Now, obviously, that is all opinion, as any projection is. That's not a prediction of what will happen, that's my opinion of what is the most likely outcome if bitcoin can't solve capacity. I am rooting against BCH, and I want BTC to remain the predominant crypto. But Bitcoin is not magic. It's 100% fungible and any crypto can replace it with relative ease. Its only advantage is inertia at this point. If it squanders that and allows BCH to reach price parity amidst a capacity crisis, that may the irreversible tipping point.

Because part of the compromise to pass SegWit was a promise to implement a doubling of the block size within 3 months of the the SegWit activation. I believe this was to appease the large faction of people who believed that SegWit would not be enough, and even with SegWit2x in the plans, a large faction still believed it wouldn't allow proper scaling, and that's where the last hard fork came from. BCH is the group that split away hoping to provide their own answer to the scaling problem (8 mb blocks, no SegWit).

Well let's back up a step then. Because I think you've incorrectly assumed something about what I believe. I do not think that people can effortlessly move between one chain and the other. At the split though, anyone who had BTC now have the same amount of BCH, so the user base is essentially pre-installed in BCH. If BTC seizes up and becomes unstable or unusable, you don't have to move your bitcoins off that chain or convert them to BCH, you already have those coins (up to the split point, anything done with BTC after that isn't reflected on the BCH chain). BCH's threat to BTC is if the BTC blockchain can't handle future capacity and BCH reaches price parity with BTC, because then user aren't losing money by abandoning the unusable network (TO A POINT, this is not an absolute), you're incentivized to use the functioning network and because of price parity and the fact that your coins are waiting for you there (up to that split point), it lessens the switching costs as opposed to any other alt trying to supplant BTC as the dominant crypto.

Extra transactions? Do you expect we've already reached peak BTC transactions? Because if not, those are the extra transactions I'm talking about.  The future transactions above and beyond the current rates as BTC continues to grow. My opinion is (and this has to be the part you're disagreeing with, otherwise you don't have a point here) if BTC becomes unusable because it can't handle future capacity, BCH is a more likely alternative than any other current altcoin. I don't think BCH has a legitimate claim to BTC's legacy, but there are people who do, and ultimately that's a consensus thing. You can disagree with it, but if everyone else thinks so, your opinion doesn't matter. That's what I'm acknowledging as a possibility, and adding the opinion that BCH has more of a chance to claim that mantle than any other alt because of all the other reasons I listed above.

Do you see how pedantic arguing about confusion is? Because I could belabor the point about how confused you must be to not understand what an opinion is or how you're advocating your own opinion if I was equally as obsessed with sticking you with a label rather than having a conversation. You'd be a whole lot more interesting to discuss this with if you weren't so caught up in your own ego, but your superiority complex makes conversing with you a major chore sometimes. I am interested in having a more productive conversation that discusses ideas rather than getting caught up in strutting around on the boards in your own self-righteousness, if you've any interest in that. Bceause I can be convinced my opinion about BCH is wrong with a compelling, reasoned argument, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that basing your entire post in the premise that I'm confused or your disagreement isn't a disagreement is not compelling reading.

Yes, a perfectly fine addition to the list of mainstream commodities, but I wouldn't go so far as to say oil has volatility like bitcoin. How often does oil trade on swings as large as bitcoin in as short a time? Oil is comparative to gold and silver, but not bitcoin. In addition to oil, gold and silver have the ability to trade "a few dozen" percent in a few days time, but not nearly as frequently as bitcoin. Bitcoin's volatility I would put a whole magnitude higher, both in terms of the percentage swings, the time frame those swings occur (which are shorter), and especially in the frequency with which those swings occur in those time frames.