The old chain is still in tact ("Classic Ethereum"), and people mining on it may be able to get a lot of (Classic) Ethereum, but it is also virtually worthless by comparison to Eth, so not really very compelling.

I'll be interested to see what Bitcoin does in the next financial crisis. Everyone here seems to think it will become insanely valuable like gold, but I think it will have the opposite effect and decrease drastically in price due to the risky nature of holding it. In a crisis, there will be a flight from the most risky assets to the safest, and that means major outflows from Bitcoin.

Credit cards do not necessitate taking loans. It's advisable not to use a credit card if you can't pay for whatever you're buying in full. Anyway, swap out credit card in the above example with debit card and point remains that the vast majority of transactions that take place in our economy are already using electronic money.

At least you're honest about your statement being speculation. So many people who post here are convinced that their predictions are based on anything other than a wild guess, even though they post nothing to support their opinions. At least if you were posting a technical analysis based on trading volume, that would be one thing, but I've yet to see that. Everyone just spouts optimistic nonsense because they're praying for a higher price.

That is absolutely how a normal market works. You trade in the present on the expectation of future profits. That's how the stock market works, it's how bank deposits work, it's the very basis of capitalism. Markets are forward looking by nature. When people expect a price rise due to an event, it's logical and obvious that they trade ahead of that event to profit from it.

What's interesting is that we did indeed have a fall in equities of 10%, as the analyst predicted, but we've since made it up and more. So if you sold everything in fear at the beginning of this year, you lost out.

People who expected that don't know how markets work. Any price increase directly attributable to the halving happens weeks, and probably months, beforehand because markets are forward-looking. If you consider that the price more than doubled in the 10 or so months preceding the halving, I'd say that looks about right.

Financial crisis will tank the Bitcoin price. Nobody is going to flock to a risky, speculative asset when they're afraid of the future economic prospects. The only reason Bitcoin is doing "well" now (relative to where it has been) is because investor sentiment is flying high in the US. This fantasy that Bitcoin is going to hold value like gold in a financial crisis is foolish.

If you've ever bought anything with a credit card, you've used digital money. It's not hard at all. Most the transactions that take place in America are digital transactions.

The "cost of banking" is the bank's profit margin, so is it your position that banks are going to adopt Bitcoin and cut themselves out of profit? Cuz that doesn't make much sense to me.

The inflationary period of Bitcoin (where new bitcoin's are created) will be over, however, mining will continue. It's just that at that point, the only thing being mined will be transaction fees.

That 90% figure is based on nothin and shouldn't be taken seriously. Plus, as more miners leave, the rest of them mine more profitably. The system reaches equilibrium far before 90% of the miners leave the market. 

All the stock indices are posting new high after new high. The market is an an upswing. When economic uncertainty rises, and it invariably will, the indices and the btc price will both come down. Not only is $350 not impossible, I'd say it's likely at some point in the future.

That's not how mining works at all. Bitcoin's supply increases at a constant rate (minus halvings) regardless of how many miners there are. If there are 100 miners or 1000 miners, the number of coins produced is the same.

Although they often move in near-unison, they're not linked. Bitcoin is just the most well-known. When the value of btc rises, it raises the value of everything else too because part of the volume is based on trades between those two currencies. If Bitcoin disappeared, there would likely be another to take its place, it wouldn't be the end of crypto.

But even then, you're talking about e-money in a form controlled by the government. Our economy and banking system is largely electronic already, but the control of the supply is still down top-down, from the Federal Reserve and the banking institutions it oversees.

That's true of just about all advertising ever. I'll give you three examples:

1) Commercial websites. You go to CNN for news, not the ads; you use gmail for the service, not the ads placed in them. The ads just support the business of delivering news or e-mail.

2) People watching TV programs don't care about the ads, they just want the program. The value for the advertisers lies in the fact that people see the ads, regardless of whether they want to or not.

3) Nobody really cares to see or seeks out to see billboards on the side of the highway. There's usually never anything terribly interesting on them. However, that's valuable advertising space because so many people see them anyway.

In summary, advertising is a numbers game. The more eyeballs you deliver, the more valuable your advertising space is. Nobody wants to see the ads, but that's not terribly relevant. The only difference for faucets is so much traffic is generated by bots, and bots don't have eyes, therefore provide zero value to advertisers. This is why incentive-based traffic (like faucets) is prohibited by AdSense and other advertising networks.

But that has nothing to do with people not wanting to see the ads.

That makes sense. So at this point, with ads off, is all the revenue the site generates then from people who deposit coins for the purpose of gambling?

Stable prices are the best thing for bitcoin, but also, the community's definition of "stable" is extremely warped. People say that the price is stable when it trades in a $20 range for a week. Zoom out a bit and you will see that these periods of "stability" are always between highly unstable periods. The one constant for bitcoin is that the price is not stable. Has never been since inception, and I don't anticipate it becoming so in any meaningful way any time soon.

If the mania over the halving didn't get the price to $1k, I don't see anything else this year acting as a catalyst to get there. The rally has petered out.