I share your concern.  The upward movement is accelerating.


Zooming out to look at the last year or two, the chart is indeed looking parabolic in nature.  But I still don't feel like we've quite reach an actual blow-off stage in the current cycle yet.  We've had some times of crazy upward movement, but there hasn't been anything insane yet, like shooting up $2000 in a single day.  Maybe that won't happen before we have another significant downturn.  But, for example, if you look back to the runup at the end of 2013, it went from about $200 to ~$1100 in less than 4 weeks.  In percentage terms, we haven't seen anything like that yet.

Going forward, I think that LTC may have problems competing with other coins, especially bitcoin cash.  LTC does have faster blocks and blocks that aren't full, which are nice advantages over bitcoin, but BCH remedied some of those issues with larger blocks.  At least for a while, BCH will remain "shiny," while LTC is kind of old and "dull."  Before, LTC was superior to BTC for transactions, but now that we have BCH, why use LTC?

There's always a risk of hacks, pretty much everywhere and for any coin.  Even major exchanges get hacked from time to time.  The risk is likely greater with ICOs as the teams typically don't have the experience in the crypto sphere that other people have.  For any ICO, make sure you learn about what kind of security they're using.  Even if it's good, I would look at any ICO as a very high-risk, speculative investment.

Thank you for pointing out the coins that have done well.  Now could you please name all the coins that have failed over the last few years (the hundreds and hundreds of them)?

My point (to everyone) is to be careful.  If you're new to cryptos, don't just buy a coin because someone says it's going to the moon or because the chart looks good at the moment.  Do your research and invest carefully.

This is not entirely true.  There are very significant hardware architecture differences between CPUs and GPUs.  CPUs typically only have a few cores, but you can do anything you want with them.  GPUs have many cores on them (thousands), but they are optimized for running large numbers of pipelined vectorized instructions in parallel.  GPUs also have much less cache per core, and memory bandwidth between the GPU and the rest of the system is also an important consideration if you want to keep all of those cores busy.  This is why developers that want to try to make their coin "ASIC-resistant" or "GPU-resistant" use algorithms that require a lot of memory.

Hi aTriz,

It's been great working with you in the past.  May I please join?

Bitcoin Talk Name: CoinsCoinsEverywhere
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Well, it's true that since the bitcoin blockchain contains a record of all transactions, if you spend enough time, you can trace where money goes.  If you can associate addresses at the "on-ramps" and "off-ramps" with particular people, you can trace their money.  Of course that does take a lot of effort.  So yeah, fiat cash is more anonymous.  And it is certainly more convenient.  But you can do a lot of things with bitcoin that you can't easily do (or do at all) with cash or fiat (like international money transfers).

I'm sorry, but I have to say no way to $50k.  Yes, bitcoin goes on crazy rallies sometimes, but I just don't think there's an avenue for enough investment money to pour into the market to make it go that high in a couple of months.  If we get a good Santa Claus rally in December, I think $10k could be in the cards, but $50k is just too much.

I think we do need cheaper and faster transactions, but the NYA was not the way to go about it.  If segwit2x had happened and become the dominant bitcoin fork, we would have had those things, but I think we would have paid a huge price in terms of trust in the crypto.  If a segment of the community can come along and usurp bitcoin once--implementing their own changes without broad consensus--what's to stop them from doing it again in the future?  These changes might have been very good in the short term, but the precedent would have been bad.

I think that bitcoin futures will definitely give bitcoin more legitimacy in the Wall Street/financial world, but I doubt that the futures will be enough for the SEC to approve an ETF if they're concerned about regulation.  Since futures are just a derivative, they don't add any regulation to bitcoin.

I would guess that for those who are glad that the fork was canceled, there won't be too much bitterness, as long as those people weren't involved in trading B2X futures or something that got crushed as a result.  I wasn't happy about the way they wanted to try to change bitcoin, but I'm not too upset about it since they came to their senses and didn't try to go through with it, given how much division there was.


My guess is that they were hoping that if they kept pushing, they would get most of the rest of the community on board.  They probably decided to pull the plug as the date was approaching and they weren't gaining support.

Not at all.  At this point, I think that hoarding helps it.  The more you decrease the supply available for trade on the open market (e.g., through hoarding), the higher the price is going to go.  Price increases continue to grab more people's attention, which should then lead to greater participation and adoption.  Hoard away! 

I disagree.  I think that the uncertainty over possible chaos with the segwit2x fork has been holding bitcoin back.  I, too, want to see cheaper and faster transactions, but given how the whole NYA went down, it seemed to me like the only good outcome of the fork would have been if segwit2x turned into another alt coin.  If it had taken over BTC, I think that a lot of trust would have been lost since there wasn't community consensus.  I was for the segwit2x changes but against the manner in which they tried to make them.

Agreed.  Given how much bitcoin has gone up over the last few weeks, I'm not even sure I would call the decline back to $7k worth mentioning--it's practically intra-day noise.    In any case, if we can stay above the bottom of the segwit2x cancelation news reaction (~$7k), I will remain bullish, even in the short term.

This is certainly true, and I've also been concerned about the migration from bitcoin to alts after the fork, but I'm a little less concerned with how well support around $7k has held.  Given how much alts have gone up in the last 24 hours, I would have thought that bitcoin would be tumbling.  But it's managed to hold, so I think we've got a shot at not having a major post-fork (or post-fork-cancelation) correction.  I'm hoping we go sideways in the $7k to $7700 range for the next week or so and then resume the uptrend.

Yes, there is certainly an ebb and flow to the price action.  The pop we had yesterday after the segwit2x cancelation was a little troubling in the short term as it certainly seemed like a blow-off.  The ensuring mini-crash that followed backs that up.  However, without the uncertainty of segwit2x, I think we may resume the uptrend in the near future.  We might need to take off some of the froth that has accumulated over the past couple of weeks, but I'm pretty bullish right now.

I think that the cancelation of the segwit2x fork is a very positive development for bitcoin.  I would look at the next correction as a good buying opportunity.  With segwit2x out of the way, I don't see anything major from a fundamentals perspective that's holding bitcoin back.

Before you get into trading, keep in mind that many people don't make a profit over the long term.  If you want to be profitable, you need to understand that learning to trade well is going to be a long process that will require more patience than you probably realize right now.  You almost certainly will not make large profits early in your trading career.  You need to start small, learn to trade well, and then gradually increase your trade size as you build confidence in what you're doing.  One of the most important things you can do is make sure you don't let a trade get out of control and take a huge loss.

Yes, it was a fiasco, but as you said, they went about it in the wrong way.  A good scaling solution is needed, but the whole community needs to be on board with it.


Almost all of the recent rise in the price of bitcoin cash happened before segwit2x was canceled.  I think there was a lot of interest in South Korea, or something like that.  Although I'll admit that it's possible that people were thinking that segwit2x was going to fail and thus started buying bitcoin cash.

The time to buy alt coins was yesterday after they announced that the fork wasn't going to happen since it seemed like a lot of people dumped alt coins to get more bitcoin before the fork (of course it's easy to say that in hindsight).  However, alts may still see some good rallying in the near future, especially if bitcoin drops some more.  A lot of the more minor alts have been beaten down pretty badly, and even the major alts like ETH haven't kept up with bitcoin's rise the past couple of weeks.  Watch for breakouts.