Of course.  That's what happens near the top of every bubble - most investors convince themselves that it's just going to keep going higher, because they observe arbitrary trends and then try to use the past to predict the future.

Most people who believe this are amateur investors who are not used to the concept of a bubble.

It also means that they're likely to be terrified at a price fall, and would sell if the price dropped and stayed down consistently for over a couple of months.

That's correct.  The price of BTC increased and the Bitcoin fees increased, so the value of the block reward + the transaction fees (what miners receive when they mine a block) increased.

Because of this, more miners piled in to join the "lottery" and try to mine a block.  At the next difficulty adjustment (a difficulty adjustment occurs every 2016 blocks), how difficult it is to mine a block is altered in order to ensure that a block is still mined approximately every 10 minutes.

The mining costs are going up because the price is going up.  Correlation != causation.
Exactly.  They are correlated because if the Bitcoin price increases, the reward for miners in fiat terms when mining a block increases.  Not the other way around.
Nope, you'd have to read about how Bitcoin works.

That's my main point.  They don't know or care that they have gold, but they have it.

That means that they don't need to own gold for speculative purposes - they already have it anyway.  If there's any crazy scenarios that a lot of gold bugs and crypto enthusiasts think are likely to happen, gold will be more useful because people will already own some of it.

Obviously there are other things which people would own as well, but gold is superior to most of them since it doesn't deteriorate or tarnish easily at all, so people would still have it after a long time and they could use it in society.

Anyone who tries to give you a definitive answer about this and isn't at least somewhat tentative with their language is kidding themselves.

We can't be certain what will happen - what I can tell you though is that it's possible that a large group could decide to short BTC - like a hedge fund for example - and if they do, it will have a large impact on the price.

It's also possible that the futures trading will make Bitcoin accessible to a wider range of speculators and push the price up further.

Well it's only in America, and the bulk of miners seem to be elsewhere.  Places like China, where the Internet is far less neutral than the US, large groups are still managing to mine.

In America though, I suspect it'll have little effect.  ISPs don't have much of an incentive to go against miners, and if they did, the ISP would still have to publicly state what they're intending to do, which would cause a lot of protest.

In the long run, it could affect pretty much anything that Americans do on the Internet, since they could make small changes and creep up on them a bit at a time.

cancelled
1.
decide or announce that (a planned event) will not take place.

Now, I'm not saying that there's no chance that it will ever happen, but it seems very unlikely at this point because they decided that they had failed to garner enough consensus to go through with the fork.

In future, you should avoid putting money that you can't afford to lose.  That includes Bitcoin in general but it especially includes worthless tokens for something that doesn't exist yet.

 

It's very difficult to judge when a bubble ends.  

Either you panic sell when there's a dip and then it rises back up, so you buy back in and convince yourself you're "riding the wave" again, or you hold it until the drop is very dramatic and you've lost a large portion of your original investment.

That's why the richest people are generally value investors.

This is a hideous way of describing the value of Bitcoin.

The cost of mining rises and falls because of the change in Bitcoin's value, not the other way around.  The fact that electricity was used in order to create Bitcoin has no effect on Bitcoin's value, apart from the sunk cost fallacy that may be exerted by miners (as well as speculators).

Also, the block reward is not a permanent feature.  In about 123 years, it will no longer exist.

The US government in particular has been known to be very shady about these things.  Here's an example.

It might be a good idea to be paranoid crossing borders with hardware wallets - one good way to protect yourself would be to enable passphrase protection and put a smaller amount of your coins in a wallet with one passphrase, then a larger amount in a hidden wallet with a different passphrase.

If you're asked for whatever reason, you could (correctly) call it a banking device.

The good thing about gold as a store of value is that most people own at least a small amount of gold already - it's useful in electronics, jewelry and other things which are likely to be consistent across different societies.

There's also the fact that it doesn't tarnish and it can last a long time.

Bitcoin could definitely be useful for this purpose but it's certainly not even close to being a significant threat to gold yet.

No, I'm saying that it should be treated as a good thing when Apple succeeds in removing scams from their platform - not necessarily that everyone should trust Apple's ability to do so. 
It's a very simplistic way of looking at humans.  I'm all for raising awareness of scams, but the best way to do this is not by allowing scammers to leave their apps on the store, which appears to be what you suggested:
If a scam is openly available, people are very likely to get caught up in it.  The more that are removed, the better.

It's a bit of a misconception that you "receive" the new coins when a fork occurs.

A fork of Bitcoin is a split in software - generally the Bitcoin Core client - which alters the consensus rules (these are rules which nodes have to abide by to be compatible with each other, such as the block size).

When the new software is created, it will involve using a new blockchain which shares the original blockchain's history until the time of the fork and then has its own blockchain from there on.

Because it shares the blockchain's history until the time of the fork, any coins which you owned on the Bitcoin blockchain, you also own on the new blockchain.

They treat it as a risk - they don't guarantee that it's going to happen.  I'd definitely agree that it's very likely.

The article makes a lot of very generalised statements about what gives BTC a value, but not why it gives BTC the specific value that people are paying for it right now. 

People "are buying anything from food to smartphones to expensive cars" with Bitcoin, but to what extent?  Not to the extent at which the majority of people buying into BTC recently are doing so in order to buy those goods with it.  So there could certainly be a crash.

The article also points out that in the dotcom bubble, some companies ended up being successful later, but it's important to note that many investors are not here to wait for several years for a recovery.  Some dotcom companies never recovered at all.

Yes.  But if you want, you can have additional passphrases in order to protect yourself against theft. 

That way even if someone is right there pressuring you to give up information, the majority of your coins could remain safe provided that you protect your privacy.
If they want, they can even export the seed to another wallet which is compatible with it and they wouldn't have any PIN at all.

Nope.  In one Starbucks, the wifi was used in order to mine Monero on customers' laptops.

This wasn't even Starbucks doing it - it was the third party that provides their wifi.  And even if it was Starbucks, it wouldn't necessarily be intentional.  It could just be a rogue employee or attacker.

I won't be clicking on these articles with stupid titles like that.

Apple is a private company.  They have the power to decide what they allow on their privately owned system, and that is not a restriction of freedom in the slightest - Apple are simply using their freedom in order to remove scams from their platform and people freely choose to use Apple.

You can't just blame the user all the time.  If scams are rampant, a large number of people are going to get scammed, and it makes sense for centralised platforms distributing apps to prevent too many users from downloading these scams.

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MyEtherWallet have had loads of different scams over recent months.  The scammers are all over Slack as well.  Hopefully, users will become more careful.

A lot of them are on this forum as well - a lot of people will become bears once the price drops for more than a few months at a time.  Some people convince themselves that price drops over a day or two is all the bearish pressure that we're going to see, but most markets have bear markets lasting a long time eventually.

This forum is a bit of an echo chamber for bulls - I think that the tables will turn very dramatically alongside the markets.  Deep into a bear market bears will be prominent herew, and deep into this bull markets bulls are currently prominent.

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Bulls get rich, bears get rich, pigs get slaughtered.  I haven't always been a bear - I've only been a bear since the price got irrationally high.

No.  The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks (approximately two weeks).
No.  It adjusts every 2016 blocks so that it will take approximately 10 minutes for a block to be mined.
Because if a large number of miners leave at the same time, it would theoretically result in slower blocks until the next difficulty adjustment, so the reward would remain the same for each miner.  After the difficulty adjustment, blocks would go back to normal speed, so it would be extremely profitable for the remaining miners.

A Ponzi scheme is a system which asks for investments and then distributes returns to its investors accordingly until it collapses.

BTC does not "distribute" returns to anyone - it is simply an asset that can be bought and sold at any point, similarly to gold or a stock.  It also doesn't promise returns to people.  

It's also not a pyramid scheme, because even though pyramids involve a somewhat less centralised system, they rely on people in the pyramid making money by recruiting more people, whereas the effects on the individual in BTC are completely negligible.

It's not really a debatable matter.  BTC can't be a Ponzi scheme - it's not possible because nothing is centrally managing it.

Different services use different seeds a lot of the time, but if you have two services that are compatible with the same kind of seed, it's perfectly fine.

That said, you have to realise that by using your seed in multiple wallets, your coins are as strong as their weakest link.  For example, don't use a hardware wallet seed in an ordinary software wallet on your PC, because it would defeat the point of using a hardware wallet.

This makes it pretty much pointless to try having a seed in two places, because the main purpose of doing it would be convenience (for example, you would have one wallet stored very safely and one that is convenient for everyday access).  You might as well just use different wallets.
BTC and BCH use the same address format, so I think the same rules apply as long as you're using a legacy wallet.  I'm not familiar with VTC so I can't tell you, but I doubt it.