Yes. Kinda silly, isn't it?



You might be new to crypto, but it looks like you got a better grip on things than most other people. Many newcomers get easily spooked by the slightest of drops.

I guess a lot of current fears stem from BCH catching up on BTC the last few days, as apparently triggered by the cancellation of B2X and the upcoming BCH upgrade / hardfork. Brace yourselves for a few more days of drama until the dust has settled.

I agree with your general sentiment, but there's two points that in my opinion don't apply:


I honestly don't think merchant adoption has been increasing all that much since 2013. And what's worse, I honestly doubt that the amount of Bitcoin being used to purchase goods and services has significantly risen. I'd love to be corrected, but until I see actual numbers I remain highly skeptical -- even with Japan's move towards Bitcoin.



Bitcoin's supply is part of what gives it value, that's correct. But limited supply still doesn't prevent something from being a bubble. Heck, even Gold was close to a bubble just a few years ago.




During the dot-com bubble Google was far from a monopoly. They weren't even publicly traded yet. Google survived the dot-com bubble because they did what they could do best and focused on their core value proposition -- that is, being a really good search engine.

Google became a monopoly because they weren't in a bubble -- that is, they were simply worth it -- not the other way round.

Yes. Pack it up boys, we're done here.



DOGE.



DOGE confirmed.


On a more serious note, it's still a bit early for yet another Bitcoin obituary, is it not? B2X is out, but the game hasn't changed. Right now we're at the level of just 10 days ago. That's barely a dip yet.

Without any serious support this fork is unlikely to go anywhere. Given how such a fork would start off with BTC's current mining difficulty, but with only a fraction of the hashrate, it's likely to be abandoned rather sooner than later.



Same goes for whatever hardfork is scheduled on December, without community support it's just yet another alt coin.

The B2X fork appears to have been cancelled. However I wouldn't be surprised SegWit2x came up again in the future, possibly with slight changes and under a new name.



A lot of Bitcoin holders also lost a lot of money on B2X and BTG futures trading. I hope people learned their lessons about trading futures for a currency that is not even there yet. Just because it went well once -- with BCH -- doesn't mean that it will work out with other hardforks as well.

About the BCH fork: The way I understood it the upcoming BCH hardfork is only about fixing the EDA mess they are in, which means there shouldn't be any contention on which fork to use. But maybe there's another hardfork as well, who knows nowadays.

Seriously, there's hardforks scheduled for December and January? At this rate splitting fork coins soon won't be worth the effort anymore. People already hardly cared about Bitcoin Gold, I don't think any of the other junk forks are going to get far either. BCH and B2X at least had some sort of community support, but now it's just getting silly.

Same here. They received a lot of flak for how they handled (or planned on handling) the fork -- and in my opinion rightfully so. But conceding "defeat" was a classy move. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow, especially that late in the game, but they did it anyway. Hats off.

Now I'm sure that the SegWit2x discussion will come up again sooner or later. But then it will hopefully be a less antagonistic discourse, without a hardfork countdown ticking away like a time bomb. It looks like Bitcoin can finally move on -- for now.

1) I think one of the reasons for the run up in stocks is that there's little diversification alternatives due to bonds being rather unattractive right now due to the rising base interest rate.

2) There's no point investing in USD denominated stocks if you fear that the dollar is going to crash. If people were actually worried about a collapse of the USD they'd flee towards a) foreign currencies, b) foreign stocks, c) gold and d) Bitcoin... maybe.

addendum to 2) Stocks can serve as a protection against "regular" inflation. That stocks could serve as protection against hyperinflation is doubtable, as hyperinflation would most likely crash the economy and take the stock market down with it.

Same here. Zum Glück weniger gefachsimple, aber zunehmende Fragen aus dem Freundes und Bekanntenkreis. Dazu ganz viele Überlegungen ob's nicht schon zu spät sei und ob man nicht warten solle bis der Preis wieder gesunken ist. Und zwischendurch durch vereinzelt Leute die meinen X sei besser als Bitcoin weil Y.

Und dabei les ich die ganze Zeit in den Medien das man den Hype um Bitcoin ignorieren sollte, weil die eigentliche Innovation in der Blockchain liegt. Die Blockchain! Die allmächtige Blockchain! :O

A hardfork occurs when what used to be the same currency, starts following two separate set of rules -- one being the old set of rules (in the case of November, BTC), the other following a new set of rules (in the case of November, B2X).

Ignoring the hardforks that happened earlier this year, for the sake of example, up until the November SegWit2x fork, there's only BTC.

Once the SegWit2x hardfork occurs, you'll have both BTC and the equivalent amount of B2X -- ie. for every 1 BTC you hold, you now also have 1 B2X. Two separate currencies, that can be traded for each other -- ie. you can use your BTC to increase your B2X holdings and vice versa.

Keep in mind to actually have access to your B2X you need to either hold BTC in a wallet of your own -- ie. a wallet where you have access to the private keys -- or hold the BTC on an exchange that supports B2X. However the latter option puts you at the mercy of the respective exchange.

That's the postive aspect. The hardfork could still go awfully wrong, with both BTC and B2X losing significant value, so there's a certain amount of risk involved.

Look into yohost.org, namecheap.com and bithost.io.

Of those three namecheap is the most trustworthy, yohost the most privacy focused and bithost probably the cheapest.

Edit: Oh, and there's also zap-hosting.com. However while legit, their dedicated servers don't seem to be all that reliable.

Solidity and the smart contracts that run on it are still not even close to the level of security, reliability and stability that would be required for what Ethereum tries to achieve. Unless they get their shit together in this area I don't see a bright future for Ethereum, given that its extended scripting capabilities is the main value proposition that Ethereum brings to the table.

As a currency there's little to be gained from Ethereum, especially since its scalability is just as bad -- if not worse -- as Bitcoin's in its current state. Add to that questionable forking policies (I'll probably never get over how they handled the DAO, but maybe that's just misdirected principles) and the fact that Ethereum the technology can be easily decoupled from ETH the currency, I remain an ETH skeptic.

That being said, I think from a fiat perspective there's still room to grow, short term ETH might even outperform BTC for a while, but long term I don't see it pushing BTC from its throne.

Tether is a ticking time bomb, that's for sure, but at this point I think its influence is luckily rather limited. As in: I doubt that the trading volume of Tether -- fake or not -- is large enough to influence the Bitcoin price in a meaningful way.

That being said, should Tether get belly up we would still be in for a ride because it would disconnect a lot of exchanges, especially the alt heavy ones. Question being, whether this would pull down Bitcoin with it, or whether people would simply move to one of the exchanges that are still connected to the traditional banking system.

That's quite an interesting thought actually.

Nonetheless it would be kind of funny if a Bitcoin ETF still gets denied after a Bitcoin futures ETF has been approved. But I guess even the SEC would see the stupidity in that.

Regulators already came down on ICOs without much avail, so I don't see much changing on that front.

The ICO rush will stop once people stop throwing their money at overvalued projects of questionable viability which I don't think will stop anytime soon. The market definitely has cooled down a bit, but it seems to be rather easy to just pump out worthless vaporware ICOs, so this "business model" could stay profitable for quite a while still.

Don't worry, you didn't lose your Bitcoin Cash.

1) Create a fresh Electrum wallet (make sure to have a copy of your old wallet.dat ready as well!)

2) Backup the fresh wallet.dat file.

3) Write down the seed phrase

4) Send your BTC from your old wallet to your fresh wallet.

5) Wait for your BTC to arrive in your fresh wallet. Your old wallet now only contains BCH. Your fresh wallet now only contains BTC.

6) If possible, install Electron Cash (note the name Electron instead of Electrum) on a separate device. If you don't have a second device, remove the fresh wallet file from your current device but make sure you have both the backup and the seed phrase.

7) If you install Electron Cash on the same device where you used for Electrum before, it should automatically import the old wallet.dat file. Otherwise import the old wallet.dat file manually.


I think that about covers it.

I'm not sure about colored coins, but have you looked into nlocktime / op_checklocktimeverify in cooperation with some sort of dead man's switch? Maybe that's one piece of the puzzle you're still missing.

I'm pretty sure it's mostly due to regulatory uncertainties and less due to Bitcoin's volatility.

There's nothing that would stop Google from converting fiat to BTC at the point of payout and sending bitcoins to their publishers. Basically the reverse of what BitPay does.

Of course the exchange rate risk would then get transferred to the publisher accepting the payment. However it is safe to assume that a publisher accepting BTC payout would be willing to bear with the exchange risk as well, otherwise they wouldn't accept BTC in the first place.

In the site header, under your avatar, there's a navigation bar. Click on "Profile". Then on the left, there's a section called "Modify Profile". Here click on the second option, "Forum Profile Information". In here you'll be able to set your location, amongst other things.

Inflationary fiat currencies such as the US Dollars are needed to keep the economy growing. Would Bitcoin manage to utterly dominate fiat currencies, rendering them basically useless, the world economy would collapse because a purely deflationary currency such as Bitcoin would prevent economic growth. That is, unless a balance between Bitcoin and inflationary fiat currencies is achieved.