Getting some free coins is not the only good reason to hang on to what you've got just before the fork.  It's also a good hedge in case the unexpected happens (although I'm not even sure at the moment which is the expected outcome and which is the unexpected one).  As long as you have both sets of coins, whichever "wins" after the fork, you're covered.

People are increasing their investment and bitcoin has become very widespread, but how does that keep it from being a bubble?  Maybe the question is, how would you define a bubble?  At what point would you consider the price of bitcoin to be in bubble territory?

The problem is that there's no good way to determine how much a bitcoin should be worth.  While one could argue that this means that bitcoin might be undervalued, I think it's much more likely that this means that bitcoin is overvalued.  Now, that doesn't mean that it won't keep rising, perhaps for a long time.  But demand by itself cannot keep prices rising forever, and when price starts to fall, without an idea of what a bitcoin should be worth, there's nothing to keep the price from crashing hard.

It might be the same, but I wouldn't count on it.  It sounds like there's a lot more controversy and uncertainty about who's going to go which way with the November fork than there was with the August fork.  And now that a lot of people have realized what happens with a fork (i.e., you get extra coins), they may behave differently than in August.

Indeed.  I just looked up the total market capitalization of all major stock markets throughout the world.  The sum is around $69T (http://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-stock-exchanges-by-size/).  $1/sat would put bitcoin close to 30 times that, so yeah, not happening anytime soon at all.  And you also make a good point that bitcoin may get "voted off the island" eventually.  It's still riding its claim as the first cryptocurrency to ever higher prices, but there's better technology out there.

I understand that there are some major players in the bitcoin ecosystem that like the idea of Segwit2x and support it, but the solution to all of the uncertainty seems pretty simple to me, at least from an investment standpoint: make sure you can access your coins on both chains after the fork and hold them both as a hedge.  Wait until the dust settles to see which is the clear winner, and then sell the other.

Awesome--after seeing another thread questioning whether 1 satoshi could eventually being worth a penny, I thought to myself, why a penny?  Let's go completely nuts and hope for $1/satoshi someday.  As great as this would be for those of use who are holding bitcoins, I don't think this will happen in our lifetimes unless A) medicine advances enough that our lives are much longer, or B) USD goes down the toilet and is worth far far less than it is today (not an impossible scenario).  We're talking a market cap of ~20M bitcoins x 100M sat/bitcoin x $1/sat = $2000T = $2 quadrillion.

As long as bitcoin maintains its current overall upward trajectory, even during a financial crisis, it's still going to be gaining more value than fiat currencies that are experiencing hyperinflation.  Even in the rare situations where inflation in a country is hundreds or thousands of percent per year, those numbers are usually measured against reserve currencies like USD, and if bitcoin is appreciating with respect to USD, its value will be appreciating even more with respect to those hyper inflating currencies.

While Chinese users will indeed be able to continue to trade on other exchanges, I think the concern is how do they exchange their cryptos for yuan?  For many users, particularly investors, if they can't convert to fiat, they're not going to be interested.  I'm sure there would still be ways, for example they might be able to convert to USD or EUR and then exchange that for yuan, but I would think that that would not be worth it for smaller investors.  I'm sure the large miners will figure something out, but it may cost a lot more to convert.

If you're looking to invest for the long term, as with any other investing, it's best to buy in increments over time.  Buy some now so you don't miss out if the price just keeps increasing from here.  Otherwise, wait for more dips and buy when those happen.  It's impossible to know where the long-term bottoms are going to be, so you need to average in over time.  You won't get the best price, but you should get a decent one on average.

As many have pointed out, historically, financial crises of various sorts have driven some people to cryptocurrencies, which has been a boon for bitcoin.

But here's an interesting question: if a financial collapse pushes people into bitcoin, could that actually make the crisis worse because people are taking money out of the banks and other savings and buying bitcoin?  Or, for that matter, could people running toward bitcoin actually precipitate a crisis due to withdrawing too much money from the banks?  This seems unlikely now, but what about in the future if bitcoin is worth $25k, $50k, or more?

I think that all anyone can honestly say to this right now is maybe.  The fact that we broke back up into the $4000s again is a good sign that the next leg may be up rather than down.  But we really need to get back up above $4500 or so to demonstrate that the market has recovered from all of the recent China issues.  However, even if we do, such a quickly-hit bottom around $3k makes me feel like we still need to "clear the air" (i.e., have a good shakeout) before we can return to a healthy, solid bull run.

How do you figure this?  Based on this logic, as the market cap has grown, volatility should be decreasing.  The last several months have shown this not to be true.  A $1T market cap isn't going to make things better.  If you want bitcoin to stabilize, either you need some kind of respected central authority to set the value of a bitcoin, or you need some other way of definitively determining the value of a bitcoin.  Without some kind of agreed-upon value, the price will keep swinging all over the place because there will be no particular price toward which traders know they should head.

I agree that the closing of the Chinese exchanges will affect the price of bitcoin, but will it surely drop from here?  It may, but it also may not.  Price crashed when it was first revealed that China was going to cut off bitcoin trading on speculation that such news would result in a price drop.  So at least some of that is already baked into the current price.  It may drop more as exchanges close, but it's also possible that everyone who was going to sell has already done so, which could lead to a rally instead.

This is something I'm not 100% clear on either, but I can come up with a few more things.  As you said, I think the risk that one of the bitcoin forks that isn't initially supported much by the community could be more successful than BTC is a concern.  Forks are disruptive to the bitcoin ecosystem, with some players not being willing to support all forms.  If BTC starts forking every month, in a year we'll have like 15 different kinds of bitcoin.  Nobody wants to have to keep up with all of those different pieces of software.  Too many forks could also dilute everything about BTC: price, mining, etc.  If enough forks seriously split up the bitcoin network's mining capacity, BTC could become much more vulnerable to a 51% attack.  New investors will also either have a hard time picking among the different bitcoins, or they may simply avoid it due to too much complexity.

It sounds to me like your friends have some understanding of financial markets, and it sounds like they are aware of the risks that are present in investing in cryptos--even bitcoin.  While I think that you really do need to be in the first wave of other cryptos to stand a good chance of making a significant profit, I think bitcoin still has waves left in it...but of course I don't know for sure.


Limited supply makes it easier for price to increase, but you still need demand.  The confidence that a lot of people have that bitcoin will keep increasing is propping up the demand right now.  But if that confidence should ever be shattered, look out below.

The problem with this is that price can't simply come from demand and nothing else.  From wikipedia: "An economic bubble or asset bubble ... is trade in an asset at a price or price range that strongly exceeds the asset's intrinsic value." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble]  What is the intrinsic value of a bitcoin?  How much is it actually worth?  Unless it's really worth thousands of dollars, it's in a bubble.

There may not be a specific institution or entity that is inflating bitcoin's price, but there is a very broad, general group of people that is doing so: speculators.

Yeah, I was thinking about the fork earlier today and wondering what effect that's going to have on all the crypto markets, and how I want to play it.  I, too, would like to hold on to as much bitcoin as I can before the November fork.  And then there's also the bitcoin gold fork in October...more free coins!   But somewhere, somehow, this is going to have to take some kind of toll.  We can't just keep forking bitcoin every month so everyone gets free money.

The strong support of the community is an important point.  My impression is that bitcoin's resilience is due in large part to the people who have believed in it from the beginning.  They're the ones that have kept buying when all the speculators were selling.  It's very possible that bitcoin wouldn't have bounced back from the major crashes it's seen in its history without a group of people that have been dedicated to supporting it, especially financially.  The question is, will there come a time when the speculators outnumber the community members by enough that the community can no longer support bitcoin when it has a major crash.

It is possible that the price of bitcoin is not in a bubble.  But I don't think that time is necessarily a factor in this case.  I agree that 8 years is quite a long track record (and, really, the price bubble has popped a few times, but it's always reinflated even bigger than before), but bitcoin is also different from other historical bubble situations in that it has taken a long time for it to become accessible to the average person, and it's still not really there yet.  It's possible that this inaccessibility is greatly delaying the "reckoning" that may happen one day.  Bubbles don't truly pop until just about everyone who can and is at all interested in investing has bought in.

In the short term, no, I don't think it would be nearly as popular.  Most of the outside attention that bitcoin gets has to do with its crazy price swings.  "Bitcoin up 5 bazillion percent" headlines get people's attention.  Without that, I don't think there would be much interest outside of those people who are already interested in cryptocurrencies.