November, when the second hard fork happens? Boy will that destabalise things, because the miners will then have three chains to choose from and the hashing power will be moving wildly from one to another. The chain that is most stable at that time wins.

Agree! The paper should be the logo - it emphasises the "cash" element.

A while back Brian Armstrong was asking on Twitter for suggestions for new coins - don't know what came of it.

GDAX/Coinbase are very conservative, they don't like the idea of delisting coins, so will only list coins they think will be there permanently. Look at the struggle Litecoin went through to get listed!

I think the criteria for new coins is a) huge sustained volume, b) innovative developers c) real evidence of adoption

Not many coins fit that bill

It depends very much on where the epicentre of the world war is.

During WW2, the main epicentre was Europe, with wars also happening in the Far East, and North Africa. But if you were in South Africa, South America or India, the war passed you by (though India was part of the British Empire and sent troops to fight in both Europe and the Far East, it was not attacked itself, because protected by the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean (at that time planes couldn't fly that far without refueling, so couldn't conduct bombing raids on them).

In the next world war, it's likely the main theatre will be the Pacific, and the Middle East. The Americas, especially the east coast, should be safe, as should Africa and Europe.

But why weren't the segwit wallets ready to go on August 1st? It's not as though they didin't have notice that segwit was being activated. This has been discussed on and off for three years!

Really it's pretty shabby planning.

People are beginning to use litecoin to bypass bitcoin fees - that's a new development and a new use of the coin. See

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/litecoin-transactions.html

Transactions are at an all time high.

If litecoin can actually persuade merchants to list it, in order to avoid fees, then it's anyone's guess where the price will end!

Litecoin has surged because people are using it to move money to avoid bitcoin fees. Nothing to do with segwit (no-one uses segwit on the litecoin network).

Regarding bitcoin, stats show that only 1% of transactions are segwit, it's too complicated for users.

Nice find OP. Looks like if the difficulty doesn't stabalise, the real problem will emerge in 2018, with an accelerated halvening.

That means bitcoincash has about 18 months to solve it's problems...

This. RDD has lost it's way. It occasionally gets pumped by pumper-dumpers who accumulate cheaply, but it always falls back because no-one uses it.

Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, so the asset you should really compare it to is gold. And the reason to buy bitcoin instead of gold is that the gold market is heavily manipulated (plus gold is hard to move).

Monero has had a pump, which has increased it's price massively. See the following chart:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/

I do not recommend buying Monero at these prices - you would be buying at the top. Instead wait a few months for the price to drift back down again before you buy.

Litecoin (and Doge and Ethereum and Monero) are being dismissed because there is a genuine chance that in the midst of the BTC/BCH shenannigans, people will switch to one of them to actually move money and do business.

We're already seeing this in action - people in the scrypt mining pools electing to get paid in litecoin or another alt, to avoid fees. People who earn Steem switching it directly to Litecoin which they can change into fiat, thereby by-passing bitcoin altogether. It's happening. The number of exchanges allowing alts to be traded for fiat directly is also mushrooming.

I think most people who are moving money from exchange to exchange are using litcoin, ether or other alts to avoid fees.

The issue is for those who have their bitcoins in their own wallets at home. They have no choice but to pay bitcoin fees if they want to buy something or cash out at an exchange.

I wonder if one of the consequences is going to be people abandoning their own wallets and keeping money in regulated exchanges (where they can easily swap for an alt if they want to move money).

I think they've done everyone a favour and exposed a vulnerability in bitcoin. Bitcoin was fine when it was the only sha-256 coin being mined apart from peercoin, and the miners had no choice of what to mine.

Now they have a choice, you can see what happens - which is incidently the same thing that happens in the alt world for scrypt coins, where miners switch what they mine almost daily, only people somehow blanked that experience out, instead of learning from it. Megacoin and Mooncoin used to have this problem and they solved it using a Gravity Well readjustment where the difficulty was adjusted after every block.

Sadly the bitcoin and bitcoincash developers tend not to take any notice of the truly innovative solutions found in the alt space. Perhaps now they will. Because if it's this easy to disrupt bitcoin, any govt or dark actor can do it.

You can see it on this page:

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin%20cash-addresses.html

(scroll down for the addresses)

It looks like the bitfinex cold wallet has the most coins

If bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency in existence, then yes, the 1mg thing would be a massive problem.

But if you look at the cryptocurrency space as a whole, you can see that most transactions are done outside of bitcoin - Ethereum for example usually does at least 300,000 transactions a day, and then of course there is ethereum classic, litecoin, monero, dash, doge etc.

So money is moving, it just isn't moving through bitcoin.

I think it will either stay within the $4200-$4400 range, or drop below.

Investors are a bit nervous about this occilation in hashrate and the occilation in the transaction mempool. They're going to sit on their hands for a few weeks to see how it plays out before deciding whether to put more money in.

Segwit has activated, but no-one is using it. That's because most wallets are not segwit compatible. To use segwit you need to transfer your coins to a segwit address (incurring a transaction fee) and then send using that segwit address (incurring another transaction fee). It's too much hassle so people are just sending using the old system.

It's going to carry on like this for another few months.

Meanwhile bitcoin is now finding blocks every 7 minutes! At some point the difficulties will equalise and things will settle down.

I think we might see a rise for Litecoin. It hasn't really done much in the last few months, but thanks to the whole fees/hardfork drama on bitcoin/bitcoincash, people are starting to take another look at LTC, especially as the fees are low and it confirms fast.