it will all come down to how much they are earning from their operation without doing shenanigans. for example right now when they mine a block they earn 12.5BTC which is about 31000-32000 USD without considering the fees.
this amount will be halved soon and then halved again and again. eventually fees will be all they can hope for unless price continues rising (as it was so far) so that 1.5625BTC is equal to $30,000-$40,000

that day if the number of transactions they handle hence the total amount of fee is less that their desirable amount they will start they spam attack machine that they have been testing and perfecting for the past 3 years.
the worst part is, that day it will kill bitcoin. it won't help them at all.

the solution is not simple either. it is not just increase the block size to have more tx and have total fee, there are a lot of problems with that. i hope we can come up with something before that day comes.

well the no house edge and also the only 2 outcome are big differences.
i may be "technically" wrong about this but i feel like there is a huge difference between a game with only 2 outcome (ie coin flip with heads or tails) and a game like dice with many outcomes (ie all the numbers possible). maybe someone can do the math here to prove me wrong.

as it was said a billion times already, blockchain technology and all these different people, groups, corporations, banks, ... are only interested in the technology not the thing itself. the same with bitcoin and fools always see the front of the news and think they are adopting bitcoin.

you don't understand it now, and probably won't for a long time. but the day that this so called "Alliance" released their own version of smart contract platform based on ethereum but completely separate and unrelated to ethereum, that day i want you to remember this comment.

you can see how many flaws Microsoft is seeing in Ethereum:
https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160827092146if_/http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nswamy/papers/solidether.pdf
read this PDF, it is good for you.

in my opinion ICO scam will have the same fate as pre-mine scam.
they are effectively the same thing. you get a lot of money out of nowhere. in pre-mine you at least had to do something about the coin and pump its price to be able to make the most profit but in ICO things have gotten easier for scammers! they get paid in something else, and that something else needs to keep its price up! as a result they don't give a rats ass about their own project...

but eventually all these things will die. and right now it is starting. a new wave of newbies are coming and asking "how do i make my own ICO" that leads to 1000 shit that people lose a lot on and will leave this method of "gambling" alone.

this means you are accepting the risks and have so far been earning a lot of profit.
lets say you started doing this only for the past 6 months. and that means if you got paid $2000 in January now you have $5500 because of the profit you gained from this past 6 months for just letting the coins stay in your wallet!!!

it is not for "lately".
bitcoin has always been volatile.

so far bitcoin has NEVER lost 50% in one day.

yes sell it for cash and hide the cash under your bed. that way your bitcoin value will stay the same in USD forever

a bitcoin mixer is not the only way of mixing your coins and it is not even the best way of doing it. there are many different methods you can use to mix coins and each give you a different level of privacy.
in the end it will all come down to what you want out of this privacy. some people want to keep their affairs private. like for example you posted your bitcoin address on the forum but don't want anyone knowing how much bitcoin in total you own, or where you spend them.
but for some others they want to hide their illegal activities. and that is the tricky part.

i can't say it is a must or not but it is certainly good to have good services around.

on Epoch time 1500900666 when the dark forces of evil line with all the sixes line up, price will start rising up and as more sixes add up and we reach the epoch time of all sixes 1506666666 price will be 1000K
- Lu

there are a couple of things that i am currently confused about too.
BIP91 was supposed to reject blocks. but i am not sure which blocks, blocks that didn't signal with version bit 4 (which BIP91 uses) or blocks that didn't signal with version bit 1 (which BIP141 uses).
it is activated nonetheless and is supposed to reject blocks!! if someone could clarify which one would be great.
my guess is version bit 1 since most miners dropped bit 4 already and are on 1

as for BIP141 and the version bit 1 they are already signalling with 100% support see this: https://www.xbt.eu so there is nothing to reject anyways.
as i always said bitcoin is too big and too expensive to split. 12.5BTC+fees is nearly 35000$. signalling against majority (this 100%) means you miss that much money when your block is rejected.

nah, trading is not supporting.

trading (at least in altcoins) is when the trader takes advantage of manipulations and pumps to make a large amount of profit. it is a good opportunity that shouldn't be missed. but at the same time it is a hard thing to successfully pull off because of timing (in other words not get in after the bubble).

contrary to that investing is more of supporting. because you buy and hold and buy when it comes down and accumulate.

these are my definitions and i do do trading but don't do investing and supporting ethereum and most of the useless altcoins like it. my involvement with ethereum is not anything but profit on my bitcoin stash.

i don't understand the reason why any exchange would want to "disable" their wallets? even for August 1.
there simply is no reason for it.
for the soft fork the only thing needed is higher number of confirmation and being aware of the possible orphaned chains
for the hard fork of BCC on August 1 the only thing needed is using their replay protection. and it is pretty simple stuff.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-cash-replay-protection/56874#56874

this belongs to an altcoin board and not bitcoin's speculation board!

and as far as bitcoin is concerned there is not much of a correction going on, unless you are calling the price rise from that FUD dump a "correction".
if price continues going up most of the altcoins (including your list) will most probably get dumped.

i have my eyes on Litecoin and also have invested in it, because it has shown potential for rise and in the past LTC has moved with BTC on many occasions and now that they both have SegWit this "move together" will be even more.

it actually is a possibility! bitcoinABC is not exactly being released by bitmain. it is a source code on Github with these people (https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/commits/master) who we don't even know are making the changes and commit them to the code.

the code is not even the fork of bitcoin! which means it is impossible for us to go through all of the code, line by line to check where the shenanigans are. if it was simply forked from bitcoin there were a link under the name indicating this and then you could simply compare the two repositories to see only the changes.
see the SegWit2x (btc1) repo, you will understand what i mean. it is simple and fast to check all the changes they have made to the code of bitcoin core.

long story short, i would not trust this client at all unless i can understand the code. which i don't have the time for.

p.s. it doesn't even have to be a trojan to leak your private keys. (just an example:) imagine if the way you make the transactions with their code has a bug in it that produces weak signatures and leaks your private keys when you sign a raw transaction and broadcast it!

this is what i understand and for that i say we don't need a merge for now:

BTC1 or SegWit2x has 3 parts:
1. signalling bit 4 (BIP91) and then if it was locked in, reject any blocks that are not signalling. since this was nearly all of the blocks and also because of 2 is happening right now, i don't see why we even need this.
2. signalling bit 1 (BIP141) which is happening now again with almost all of the miners. and this is already in bitcoin core and nodes are seeing this part already. again no need to merge anything.
3. (this is why i said not for now) the 2 MB hard fork part. and that is not happening for a couple of months and until that day and until we know how much of hash power is really going for it and a lot of other things, there is no need to merge anything.

these things are not exactly legal so you can't define illegal based on them being the opposite!

a scam in my book is when someone who has no understanding of anything googles "how to make my own altcoin/ICO" and learns how to copy paste. then makes a pretty ANN topic or some who want to spend a little more make a pretty website on top of it and then ask for money (aka start an ICO) for the job (which was copy pasting) they have done.

and with that definition there has been countless scams so far.

LOL, how do you think the world works? did you think it is a game where you can just press a button (put in cheat code) and print money?!!
even if they do, the money doesn't evaporate, it goes in the circulation when they "buy" bitcoin with it. and that massive amount of money injected in the economical circle will cripple it.
and why would they do this? what would be the motive?

it is still hard to give a certain opinion about bitcoin's future in the long term. even with the scaling debate coming to a conclusion and end.
we can see the growth, the adoption and the price rise that is the effect of these but what future holds is still unpredictable. it is safe to assume that the growth and adoption will continue this way and increase. as a result the price will also rise and then like a circle it will increase the adoption and so on.
by how much, we can not tell. we may see $50K, or we may see $10K

exchanges are not forcing people to place $1 apart orders, if the users want it they will place it like that. and in reality they are placing orders with smaller increments. it is the competition and it needs to be a more fierce competition which will only grow with growing number of users.
right now from the top order to the next $1 target there are few orders (less than 10) even though the volume seems big (~20BTC=55000$) on bitfinex until it gets there.

just open coinmarketcap.com and look at literary any altcoin in the past 6 months and you get your answer.
there are many of them that went up >1000% the biggest i can remember and be a part of part of it! was 5100%
many coins went up 100% (2x-3x).
and it is a safe assumption that a lot of people who invested in these pump and dumps got a big profit out of it.

and this won't last forever, things will come to an end. as you can see now, the pumping season is long gone. so if you are asking this and seeing all these big numbers don't get your hopes up you are too late.

for mining simply google it and you will find good articles to read. i think coindesk.com has a good one for beginners.

things like August 1st will always exist as long as you are with bitcoin, if it is not Aug 1st it will be another date, another drama, another uncertainty! history is filled with them.
just measure the risks of each of these and invest what you can afford to lose. it is a very simple risk vs. reward strategy.

Electrum is a good wallet, and if you use it properly it can be safe. using properly means cold storage (read electrum documentation) and on a clean always offline computer.

ETH is a good investment from time to time. right now i don't like it, because the risk of falling down hard is higher. and i have already made my profit when it was hot and rising in the initial pump. so i don't care about this stage at all. and prefer staying away.

you are way too late to make a decision about August 1st.

at first we didn't know what will happen, so it meant you should have sold some bitcoin for fiat only in case you were scared. and you should have done it when price was above $2500 at least.

then 2+ days ago as miners started signalling for BIP91 for real it meant you should have started buying bitcoin because it meant a rally is on the way.

and now it is too late because that rally is over and price is $2700+

for future, we still have the SegWit activation itself and that means another rally probably similar to this. and also we still have the long term rise of bitcoin price which will always happen. and it means you should buy bitcoin as much as you can afford to invest.

as for altcoins:
at first, they dropped because bitcoin price was dropping.
then bitcoin recovered and they dropped because bitcoin was attracting all the money and investors.
and in the future they will drop more because bitcoin will have its long debate sorted out and also because alts are in a bubble that needs popping.