The difficulty has been greatly reduced on BCH in an attempt to make it more profitable to mine, but it's still not on par with BTC. The developers know this and it's a thing they actively track. Here's a graph of their attempt to reach profit parity. They've made strides to that end, but ultimately it's out of their control and will be determined by the market at large.

Do you own any PoS personally? I dabbled in Clams for awhile but found I didn't particularly like it as a currency. The fast blocks are a nice thing to have, but the inflation rate I didn't find particularly beneficial. Although I suppose that over time, the inflation rate becomes more and more insignificant as a proportion of the overall coinbase, but that also requires a more robust use-case than Clam had at the time I stopped following it. Perhaps it's still the case, but at the time its main utility was as a gambling token for Just-Dice.

The SEC has acted quite slowly in response to crypto. They are not looking for the right time to "attack" or do any such nonsense. They are on the record (and their actions reinforce this) that they are taking a deliberate and measured approach to cryptocurrency so as not to needlessly squash innovation with regulatory overreach. They're in a tough position though, as their mandate is to protect individual investors and devise rules to enforce existing securities laws, so they (rightly) are continuing to study developments in this space.

The paper dollar could be replaced by a digital asset, but it's likely to be the digital version of the dollar, which already dominates the US economy. More transactions and more value is conducted electronically than in physical currency, and the trend continues to grow. Visa during its quarterly conference calls openly talks about its war on cash. Private companies are increasingly pushing electronic payments and consumers are increasingly preferring it. No need to revolutionize the system with bitcoin, the system is already in the middle of a massive evolution.

Considering retail profit margins are generally around 1%, if your currency moves against you by 1% or more, it either eliminates your profit or turns the profit into a loss. The difference between btc moving 1% and fiat moving 1% is that if the USD moves 1%, everything in the economy moves with it since everything is denominated in dollars and the change is a wash. When btc moves 1%, it's relative to the dollar, so the gain or loss is a relative one on top of whatever fiat is doing. The USD movements are only relevant if you're doing business in an area that would necessitate exchange.

As for the three points you highlighted, I fully agree with all of them. Any one of those is a boon to the system, but all three would make bitcoin a viable alternative to the USD for merchants.

Because bitcoin doesn't have an "open" or "close" to the trading day like securities markets do and trades around the clock, there's no easy way to determine what the price change from day to day is. All the exchanges therefore use a rolling 24 hour period to note daily price movements, which is essentially a useless metric. This is how that method shows a price change hour by hour.




The brown line shows the "change" displayed at any given time against the actual price of bitcoin (yellow line). Essentially, the "change" is always comparing to a point exactly 24 hours ago, which is essentially meaningless because it doesn't tell you if the price is currently moving up or down, just what it was compared to a static point 24 hours ago. After a price increase and then steady price for a period, this method would register as a "falling price change" 24 hours later, which is technically true but meaningless to derive current actual price movements. Here's another more dramatic example of the distortion:



The brown line (price change) doesn't in any meaningful way reflect actual current price changes.

Wouldn't it make more sense for exchanges to classify a trading day as 00:00-23:59 UTC, and display an intra day high and low and then measure the current price against the previous days' high and low? That would at least give the price change metric a current value that far exceeds the current method.

For example, if BTC traded at a low of $2800 and high of $2900 yesterday and is currently trading at $2850, the exchange would show Low +1.79% / High -1.72%. That at least gives you an indication of where it is presently in relation to the high and low yesterday, whereas the current setup only tells you whether it's up or down vs. where it was exactly 24 hours ago, with no information about how far it has or hasn't swung in total since yesterday.

All it would take is for one exchange to start doing this I think for them all to adopt it.

What is it that you think was confused, exactly? Because every time someone has an opinion differing from you, you label that as the other person misunderstanding or being confused. It's rather embarrassing for you that you think every instance of a different opinion is the other person being confused. Because apparently you think I think that BTC and BCH are still connected or affiliated, even though I don't.

BTC and BCH are two separate coins, but it is not like any other alt because BCH is essentially a clone of BTC with the only difference being block size (i.e. capacity). Up to a few days ago, they had the exact same history. That is, first and foremost, something no other coin gets to say. BCH is the only coin with the chance of claiming legitimacy of the "Bitcoin" legacy. So BCH is quite different from litecoin because BCH and BTC share a common history as of several days ago, and BCH's entire point is to SUPPLANT bitcoin, not operate as a compliment to it like litecoin has always maintained was its purpose. If BCH didn't want to SUPPLANT bitcoin, there would be no point in branching off. BCH did so in the belief that the only way to save bitcoin was to correct the biggest flaw in allowing the network to scale appropriately, capacity. The only way BCH maintains value now is if they ultimately prove to be right about the capacity issue. If BTC's blockchain once again becomes congested and unusable, BCH's is the closest ecosystem to bitcoin, not litecoin. Additionally, if litecoin is so superior in speed and cost and capacity, it would already be beating BTC, and it sure as heck would have replaced BTC during the last several-month-long period of congestion and skyrocketing fees. The fact that it's not and it didn't means Bitcoin has something that the market desires beyond what litecoin offers, (call it legacy, name recognition or some unquantifiable attribute) and at a point where BTC no longer can meet market need (due to capacity restraints), the most likely chain of events is for the market to latch on to the closest thing that matches Bitcoin, and right now that's BCH on account to there only being one difference between the two systems.

You can disagree with that, and I fully expect you will, but don't be such a pompous jackhole that you think because I have a different opinion than you it's because I'm confused. That level of arrogance is incongruent with having any type of worthwhile discussion.

But again, this operates on the notion that the only way to disrupt a PoS system is to seize control of it, rather than disrupting it's ability to propagate a network by attacking or taking offline the computers that make it up, does it not? Even under PoW, you don't have to seize control of it to render it unusable, you just have to destabilize it to the point that blocks can be corrupted.  (I say "just" knowing this would be a technical feat.) But I would think that you could hamper the system the same way by disrupting the network activity in PoS. Theoretically, what happens if a wallet with 51% of a PoS coinbase is not connected to the network? I would think they don't get to solve any blocks, otherwise the network would grind to a halt. If 51% of the coinbase in PoS is not connected to the network, doesn't that degrade network security the same way as taking out a large portion of the mining power making up PoW? My guess would be yes, but I don't know, which is why I'm asking.

The capacity is immensely important. I'm not a fan at all of BCH, but to the extent the differences have merit, they ought to be considered fairly. Extra capacity is the whole point. If BTC reaches capacity again and the network slows down and fees skyrocket, all of a sudden BCH looks much more attractive. I don't see the point in BCH unless SegWit2x proves to be unable to cope with future transaction load and the developers again refuse to make changes. At that point, you've got a clone with the capacity to handle the extra transactions, and I'm sure if push comes to shove, they'd adopt SegWit on top of it creating even more capacity. As for why anyone would use that over Litecoin is the same question as to why anyone uses Bitcoin over Litecoin if the transactions are so much faster and cheaper over there. BCH has one thing that differentiates itself, and that's a very recent shared identity and an outside shot of claiming itself the legitimate Bitcoin chain with the masses. (I don't buy it, but if everyone else eventually does... well, we're all at the mercy of the consensus in that regard.)

I guess I'm just trying to understand how cryptography figures into it then. In PoW, everyone is "mining" to solve a cryptographic puzzle, and the person who does it gets the reward of new coins. But there are still computers hashing an algorithm in PoS, even if that's not how the blocks rewards are chosen. But in any event, it seems like targeting the computers decentralizing the network (miners in PoW and hashers or whatever they're called in PoS) would have the same effect in both systems. It would be a horribly inefficient way to try to disrupt the system, but it should have the same effect on both. This operates differently from the notion that the only way to disrupt the currency is to seize control of it (by owning majority in PoS or the majority of the hashing power in PoW).

I believe the 1MB blocks could handle 7 transactions per second (that's the most common number I've seen cited). In any event, that's irrelevant since SegWit is supposed to increase space by 60% for transactions in the blocks, and then the 2x portion of SegWit is supposed to increase the blocks to 2MB in November. Back of the envelope math puts the transaction capacity then at 22 transactions per second. When trying to talk about the merits of BCH, that's the number you need to be competing against. Three transactions per second is either intentionally understated or ignorant.

That whole paragraph is the support of the claim. To try and re-word it: a robust international banking system has created the wealth of our current globalized economy. The wealth and stability of our economy gives people the economic freedom and confidence to chase speculative investments (because they're not worried they need all their resources just to survive and can risk those assets to attempt to acquire more assets). If you withdraw economic confidence (such as in a massive recession/depression), all the speculative assets would decrease in value as people rush to protect their wealth against the backdrop of economic uncertainty. When the future is in doubt, there's outsized risk in speculation, so the only people speculating on risky assets are people who are not in financial jeopardy and can afford it. This contrasts to the current economic and market conditions where there are a lot of people who can afford to speculate.

As for your asteroid scenario, which takes the above to the extreme, you've basically got it except for the conclusion.  In this scenario, the future isn't just in doubt, its end is certain. So it's the lack of a society-ending asteroid (or any other doomsday scenario) that gives future-looking assets (stocks, speculative assets, real estate, just about everything and probably including all currencies of every kind) value. If we knew that an asteroid was going to strike the Earth in 7 days and it would wipe out civilization, everything would immediately be worthless. In that scenario, the asteroid doesn't give assets value; the lack of the asteroid does. It's because we're certain that there will be a future that anything has any value, because value is very future-dependent.

Just out of curiosity (as I don't have any coins on the site currently, so have no personal stake in the answer), what will you do with the BCH coins held in Bustabit wallets on behalf of gamblers? Are you going to allow people to withdraw them? (Was that the point of the 'not interacting with BCH until it's stable' comment?)

Also, any plans to clone the site to handle BCH gaming, or will you stick primarily to BTC?

Well, you missed the doubler mate. It happened yesterday and there are now two distinct blockchains with different currencies competing for legitimacy.  May the best currency win, but also, I hope BCH dies a quick and inglorious death. Two currencies that do the same thing with only one slight technical difference (the size of the blocks) is not supported by market fundamentals. This split was orchestrated by a vocal minority, and now I think they will very much try to claim themselves as the legitimate chain, and any fight for legitimacy has the potential to get nasty.

Most of the money supply increases don't even come from the Federal Reserve but from fractional reserve banking. Banks take deposits and loan a fraction of it out, but the full amount is payable on demand to the depositor. There is now more money in the economy because of this, the physical currency exists that has been lent out, and the hypothetical currency the depositor can withdraw and counts as an asset. If the borrower uses his loan to increase the goods or services in the economy, the added growth pays back the loan and the money created in this system is warranted. If he defaults, that money disappears from the economy. When this happens on large scales, banks fail and we have a recession.

Perhaps I'm not as familiar with how PoS coins work then. How does ownership over coins factor into control over the network? Are there miners solving the blocks in the same manner as PoW? (If so, could you not just disrupt the miners solving the blocks to interfere with the system? Not to take it over, mind you, but to disrupt it and make it unusable.)

If anyone could reliably predict the start of a crash or the bottom of a dip, they'd be rich beyond measure. The fact that you can't is what creates uncertainty in investing. The fact is that the advice proffered is not actually followable, and anyone telling you they can predict such things is a charlatan. Smart people know better than to believe them.

I'm not saying that targeting miners is a technically effective way undermine a cryptocurrency, just that PoS coins are not immune to such a disruption if one were to happen. Since your original statement said this was only a concern for PoW coins, I'm broadening that to include PoS coins, since both require miners to diversify and protect the network. A mining disruption would impact both (not only PoW), but I do not believe either is in significant danger from having their operations disrupted by a targeting of the mining population.

"Big swings" is relative. Neither gold, silver, or other mainstream commodities, and especially not fiat, see volatility on the order that crypto has experienced in its short lifetime. Gold on rare occasions can swing 10% in a day, and that's a big move. Crypto routinely swings 20% or more in a day. Fiat is generally more stable than gold, and a few percent in a single day is a dramatic move. (Fiat during hyperinflation is another matter, it's not common and not normal, and is generally a one-way track.)

What does empty blocks have to do with anything? The blocks are empty because there's substantially low transaction volume as of yet, not because of some conspiracy. And you can't "keep" the difficulty high any more than you can "make" the difficulty low. The difficulty is a function of the solve time of the blocks. BCH works the same way as BTC, the difficulty adjusts up or down based on the the number of hashes solving the block and how long they take. So by "keeping the difficulty" high, they would only have to be mining blocks per normal. "Letting" the difficulty fall would be taking miners offline, creating opportunity for other miners to grab their share of the revenue, so there's no conspiracy, just miners working in their own economic self-interest just like every miner in BTC.