Yup.

Any alternative needs to be
a) scandal free
b) quick to confirm (under a minute)
c) able to handle a large volume of transactions in 24 hours
d) not require people to download mega amounts of data that fills up their hard drive, just to run a wallet.

Most whales who sell, do so on the exchanges, where most of the steem just sits. Poloniex for example is sitting on about 5.4 million steem. See

https://steemit.com/@poloniex/transfers

And poloniex doesn't get involved in curating, and neither does bittrex. So lots of these sales will reduce the power of the whales. Remember that curating depends purely on the power of those who actually vote in a 24 hour period.

It will be interesting to see who dumps their coins when the new rules come into effect. It should reduce the curating power of some of the whales, and boost the curating power of dolphins who don't sell.

I don't think mainstream adoption is coming at all. How many people use bitcoins to purchase stuff from Overstock?

Bitcoin is behaving more like an asset class (gold, property etc). People who want to store wealth away from the prying eyes of govt. People in places like Venezuela and Argentina who are dealing with delinquent currencies and want something to hold it's value.

But in the west normal fiat will continue to be used to purchase the necessities of life.

The only losses I've ever made are due to exchanges going kaput because someone hacked them/stole their money. I was lucky I didn't have any coins on Mtgox, but I did have coins on Mintpal and Cryptsy.

Sadly exchange rate risk is the biggest risk in bitcoin space.

Or it might be that some people just took profits. No-one ever got poor from taking profits.

You can arbitrage on western exchanges, but hard to do a western-eastern exchange arb because eastern countries have capital controls.

Suppose you bought bitcoin on bitstamp and transferred the bitcoin to a chinese exchange and sold it for £30 higher. Then what? How do you get your fiat out of a chinese exchange given China has capital controls? You'd have to leave it there and hope bitcoin's price in China goes below that of the western exchanges, and then you can buy bitcoin and transfer it west. But the price in china might always remain higher, in which case you are stuffed.

I hope people took some profits, as I advised yesterday.

I think this is good news. Doge benefitted the crypto community as a whole when they did things like sponsor the Jamaican bob-sled team and Nascar drivers. It brought worldwide publicity to cryptocurrency and removed the idea that it was just about gambling and dark nets (which was the image bitcoin had).

I wish them luck and I hope the doge price has a boost on the back of this.

In terms of names, my favourite was Bottle Caps, followed by Doubloons.

So is this definitely going ahead next week, or are they going to try to get some publicity for it first?

Have you tried advertising on Steemit? They're going to be introducing an advertising feature - if you go to the steem thread and PM the developers, they should be able to talk you through it.

Is this because of the Canadian dollar falling? Bitcoin looks really good priced in sterling as well because the pound fell! 

It is India, because they are swapping out their old notes and some people are trying to put their money into gold and bitcoin instead.

Trump isn't an issue - and the Federal reserve is certain to raise interest rates in their December meeting, which will strengthen the dollar. If the dollar goes up, bitcoin will drop, so take a modest amount of profits before the Fed meeting.

And if it is the end of the world and the internet goes down, there won't be anyone investing in bitcoin at all! Because bitcoin depends on the internet, electricity, electronics, smartphones/PCs, it really depends on the existing world surviving.

I'm sorry but it is claptrap. The USA has changed presidents on schedule for 250 years and will go on doing so, war or no war. And aliens won't affect that :-)

The dollar is rising, that's why bitcoin fell back.

As for Trump's policies - infrastructure building tends to accelerate economic activity if the renewed infrastructure alieviates choke points. So if the economy does well as a result, the dollar and interest rates will continue to rise and bitcoin will fall back further.

Might be worth taking some profits.

My prediction is March 2017. France is having it's elections and may leave the euro.

Bitcoin has been tied up with the crisis in the eurozone - Greece, Cyprus, and now France and Italy. And that is because a CURRENCY is at stake, the euro. In the US the dollar isn't under threat at all, so it is a bystander in the bitcoin story.

No it is not. The big move in bitcoin that made it mainstream came in 2013 when Cyprus confiscated the savings of it's people to bail out the banks.

Basically countries like the USA and UK, which have had a very long period of rule of law, are not the drivers of bitcoin because the dollar and pound are trusted by their citizens. The same goes for Sweden and Denmark, they are stable countries who control their own currency.

Bitcoin is of benefit to those countries who DON'T have the rule of law and are thus very dangerous. So Argentina, Venezuela, various places in Africa and Asia, and the eurozone countries. 

The biggie for Bitcoin is March 2017, when France has it's elections. One of the candidates wants to leave the euro. Changing currency brings instability and I expect funds will rush into bitcoin, gold, the dollar, pound and swiss franc just before the election.

Brexit has had no effect on bitcoin.The vast majority of Brits are happy with the pound sterling and even happier that we are leaving the EU. There is no crisis in the UK - the economy continues to do well and unemployment continues to be low.