Bitcoin is not dead yet. Now there are developments that will improve the speed of bitcoin transactions. If tests are successful then everyone will forget about BCH. If Roger Ver does not come up with something better)))

It would not fall.. all those who are saying that it will be a total failure are probably being paid by Roger Ver in order to spam this forum with all that crap. Just relax, it will work fine if that is your real problem at all. And it will fix a lot of things in here.

You can investment your money in land, house, gold, silver, stock markets, fixed deposits & savings in banks, start some business or invest in some business (like restaurant, hotels etc..)

Actually Bitcoin and crypto currencies are not required/unwanted 

Dozens of applications to mine bitcoin in Russia have been received already from companies and individuals from China and the EU, as news.Bitcoin.com reported. The Russian Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Association has invited colleagues from China and Slovakia to help increase Russia’s appeal to relocating miners. Spanning 11 time zones, filthy rich with natural resources and cheap energy, the largest country has a lot to offer. It has been estimated that the mining industry can pour trillions of rubles into federal and regional budgets. And Russian experts say authorities must think about creating the right conditions to accommodate the market.

How often do you take profit back to fiat to lock the profit? And how much (percentage) do you take out, when/if you do?
I’ve been in the crypto space for 6 months now and haven’t done it yet, but I think I’ll lock my initial investment into fiat soon.

price is still high at the moment even after the crash, dont think that it fall to 20 sats again

What the actual flock, there's way too many forks for bitcoin. But the question is will they get listed on exchanges? Well if it gets listed then i'll exchange some to eth haha

Between 2014 and 2016, doubts about China’s growth prospects led to capital flight. This forced the central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), to defend the exchange rate. The bank spent a quarter of its foreign exchange reserves, almost $1tn, to keep the renminbi from depreciating. If the reserves decline below a safe level, the PBoC will be forced to raise domestic interest rates to attract foreign capital and to keep investors from leaving.

It is mandated by the government to force its people and businesses to pay its taxes.And if you do not qant to pay taxes there are laws that are punishing people for not obeying the law.And sometimes lead to serious cases.So they are oblige to pay taxes.

India's government has reportedly sent tax notices to cryptocurrency traders and investors following a nationwide survey.

According to Reuters, a survey found that Indian citizens conducted more than $3.5 billion worth of trades and other transactions across a 17-month period. The government also collected data from nine exchanges within the country, and per the report, notices have been issued to "tens of thousands of people."

As a result, India is now looking to tax capital gains, as well as receive information about how much people own in cryptocurrencies and where their funds are located.

Ethereum has hosted a lot of activity recently, and while many crypto enthusiasts see that as a positive sign, as the network's usage soars, its history gets longer and its blockchain more unruly.

And although network congestion leading to transaction backlogs and rising fees has taken the spotlight, there's another issue this scale causes – a growing database that puts significant storage costs on users wanting to run a full node.

That database, called the ethereum state, hold all the computations that need to be memorized by the computers supporting the platform and the ethereum blockchain itself. And with the costs (both in time and money) of storing the state increasing, fewer and fewer people are choosing to run full nodes, which many worry will centralize the network into the hands of only a few arbitrators.

And developers recognize the problem.

For one thing, ethereum developers are well underway engineering protocol-level changes such as sharding, aimed at minimizing the database.

But since these technologies are still in development, other stakeholders, namely those running ethereum clients – the software needed for users to communicate with the blockchain – have been under fresh pressure to cope with the growth of the state database.

"The fact that improving this stuff is critical has been known since late 2016, the ideas have been floating around for half a year to over a year. Where are the implementations?" said ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin on a developer channel recently.

The frustration is palpable with both Buterin and Afri Schoedon, who manages technical communications at ethereum software client provider Parity. Schoedon told CoinDesk:

    "At the current growth rate it's predictable that the state is going to grow very fast this year, to a point where it would be hardly manageable on small devices."

In an effort to limit the effects of the unwieldy state, then, the two most popular ethereum clients – Geth and Parity – have recently released updates that attempt to improve the situation.

The first update, released last week by Parity, reduced storage requirements by eliminating unnecessary, temporary files produced as the software memorizes ethereum's history.

By vastly minimizing the storage requirements, users hooking up to run full nodes then experience faster synchronization times. And with that, the company said its ethereum software could now be run on a hard drive instead of a solid state drive (SSD), a particularly notable feat since long sync times have made ethereum unable to run on a hard drive since last summer.

The update even got an excited response from Buterin, who said on a developer channel,  "Wow. How did you guys accomplish that?"

As a result of the update, users have been reporting a vastly improved experience.

At the same time, independent developer Alexey Akhunov has been working on a rewrite of the geth client, called "turbo geth." Described by Akhunov as an "obsession," the project aims to remove a lot of unnecessary repetition in how ethereums' clients process the overall state.

While it's nowhere near ready, it has opened up some interesting avenues of "speculative optimization," Akhunov said in a recent developer chat.

For example, Akhunov suggests “hard coding” certain information about the ethereum state into the clients themselves. Ultimately, the goal is to adapt the software to simply run using random access memory, or RAM, which could make the clients much faster – allowing them to potentially synchronize with the network instantly.

Developers at Geth itself are also working on optimizations, for one trying to correct a quirk in how information is stored when a client syncs with the network in what is called "fast" mode. Described by Geth core developer Péter Szilágyi as "really horrible," the existing code is likely to be replaced along with a whole bunch of updates that make synchronization much faster and less storage-intensive.

There's also research being done into a client type called "stateless clients," which only store a compression of the overall state.

Even Buterin is interested in the idea, recently undertaking a study that describes a scenario where "miners and full nodes in general no longer need to store any state." Plus, Buterin said later in a developer channel, stateless clients would also alleviate the need to clear up the state by other measures, such as pruning old, irrelevant data, for example, empty or long-inactive accounts.

"I'm now in favor of the stateless client approach," Buterin wrote.

And there is even speculation that stateless clients might be possible without making protocol-level changes.

Touting such clients as a possible solution to the scaling hurdles faced by ethereum following the success of CryptoKitties, Akhunov wrote in a recent blog post: "I believe (stateless clients) can be implemented already now, without any hard fork, 'simply' by changing the ethereum clients ... This means that nodes do not need to access storage from files and block validation times should drop significantly."

However, client optimizations can't be the only thing the network relies on to decrease state concerns.

According to Szilágyi, eventually, client optimizations will reach their limit. And then developers will have to turn their attention to in-progress technologies, such as sharding, which splits up the ethereum database into smaller pieces stored at different nodes, in an effort to alleviate the pressure of storing the full database on individual clients.

Perhaps in response to the recent strains on the network, sharding development has advanced in recent months, with an early stage specification sketched out on Github.

"We can optimize the database and make it ten times faster and more optimal, which gives us room to grow to ten times our current size," Szilágyi said, adding:

    "But eventually, we will get to the point where we won't be able to do database optimizations anymore, and by that time we need to be able to shard our data."

Ripple owns about 60 billion of the 100 billion XRP created, giving it a market value -- based just on its holdings -- of close to $80 billion.

The company's revenue is unknown, although CEO Brad Garlinghouse told CNBC that some banks are paying the company millions of dollars for its software. Regardless, $80 billion is far ahead of where any reasonable investor would value the company.

Ripple has placed limitations on how much XRP it can sell each month to remove the concern that it will suddenly flood the market with tokens. The company placed 55 billion of its XRP in a "cryptographically-secured" escrow account and can release up to 1 billion every month. Ripple has never come close to selling that amount in a month and said in December that it's averaged selling 300 million XRP a month since mid-2016.

By selling a tiny fraction of its holdings each month, the company brought in over $90 million in the first three quarters of 2017.

Dear God, people say crypto is the Wild West and while I understand that is one of the reasons we all profit, I am getting my first taste of the bad.

Cryptopia decides to close down close ltc and doge markets, locking up my money and offering absolutely no time frame for when I may be able to access it.

HITBTC, my 2fa randomly quits working. Support is non existent. I have hundreds of dollars sitting in there, and possibly losing hundreds more by missing trades.

Learning lessons I guess.

"Market Closing

Due to being unable to provide any kind of realistic or accurate ETA on both the DOGE/LTC markets being resumed, we have decided it best to close these base markets at this time. Please close any open orders, and we apologize for the inconvenience."

Why doesn´t he put his money where his mouth is? "We would be buyers ..." doesn´t sound as if
he or his fund actually bought the dip. Personally, I think that we will see a much lower Bitcoin price
than 9000$ in 2018. Many people bought in for the easy money and when they realize that their investment
won´t double or triple in a month they will sell their Bitcoin holdings out of disappointment.

We should all keep in mind that many people that entered during the 2017 bull market have
never experienced a prolonged bear market.

I believe crypto has te be used by a bigger % of people to get less volatile,

in my eyes...monero is the most adapted and liked privacy coin and it will grow in the next time.

but after all...its not guaranteeing real privacy (it was tracked already multiple times by the CIA etc.)
So even now it is still the most adopted one...sooner or later a real total private coin might take its place. with a finished and untraceable tech.

Joseph Battaglia, a special agent working at the FBI’s Cyber Division in New York City, said during an event last week that widespread use of the increasingly popular cryptocurrency might impact the way the agency conducts investigations.

Addressing a group of about 150 law students at New York's Fordham University, he said:

    "There are obviously going to be issues if some of the more difficult to work with cryptocurrencies become popular. Monero is one that comes to mind, where its not very obvious what the transaction path is or what the actual value of the transaction is except to the end users."