the fees shouldn't be high like this and we are all angry about it. and by we i mean all the bitcoin users not the miners, the miners are enjoying it.

but the reasons people like Ver and their followers talk about fees is because they want to advertise their baby called bitcoin cash specially now that it is being pumped hard!

i always have the same question for them: "what will they do when 8 MB blocks were full and fees of BCH were also increasing to the moon?"!!
suffice it to say that i have not yet received any answers from any of the BCH supporters so far.

articles like this are usually written by people who suddenly come into some large amount of money (large for them not necessarily large per se) and now think they got rich and "wealthy because of bitcoin".

if you read the article you can see the author is quoting it from a Kenyan cryptocurrency miner who is a young guy from east Africa and claims to be in poverty.

but the thing is, he became rich because he invested in a business and that business happened to become successful and very profitable. it just happens that business was cryptocurrency mining. he might as well started any other business and that business could have became successful!

this is going to become a common thing in certain countries in the near future. mostly countries which have some issues with using foreign exchanges, like the popular ones: GDAX, bitfinex,...
in the said countries the demand for bitcoin is increasing a lot more than their local markets can mange so the price shoots up and since people want bitcoin they are forced to pay higher and higher prices. the arbitrage won't work since as i said above they have issues with using foreign exchanges so the price won't come down that easily either.
we have seen this before (which is still going on) in India. and now Zimbabwe and a couple of other countries but in a much smaller scale.

it all comes down to how much bitcoin we are talking about here. with different amounts you can do a lot of different things.
if you have a very small amount then it is much easier to just leave it on the exchanges to receive the small equal amount to sell and increase the amount you own.
if it is medium amount which is something that gives you bigger amount than the fees (eg at least 0.01 worth of new coin) then it is still worth it to keep it on exchanges.
and if you have a very large amount then you can deposit a medium amount on exchanges and keep the rest in your cold storage to claim the new coins later on yourself. but still receive something in first wave.

i think this is an issue that we all have experienced.

what i do is two things. first i choose the market that i can speculate better and be more successful at. for example many of the altcoins are more suitable for me most of the times.
second i trade only when i am sure. my strategy is to never buy anything unless i have good reason to. i never buy to hope price goes up. i buy because i am fairly certain the price is going up. this can reduce the number of trades that i make but i prefer less trades and less profit with 0 loss than lots of trades with bigger profit but a lot of losses to negate all that!

i gave the exact same advice back when price was about $2000 and then $3000 to people asking the same question as you and i am going to repeat it for you here:

you can buy in steps. you don't have to invest all the money you have now. for example you speculate that there is a chance that price can be $8000 in a month from now and also there is a chance that price can be $6000 (arbitrary numbers) so you buy something now and if price went lower you buy more if not you at least have not missed the boat and have some bitcoin already and then buy some more at higher price.
the first step is hard though, the step of speculating about price and coming up with those numbers.

you can call this some sort of "risk management investment thingy".

i will celebrate that day and will invite all of you to join my party.

you see, one of the things that i like about bitcoin is its distribution. it never had things like premine. you could mine any block from 1 to today if you were willing to do it and get the reward. you could always buy any amount you wanted too.

but something that may bother many (not exactly unfair but lets call it unfair) is the early adopters who got 10000 bitcoin for only 100 bucks for example. if any one them "dumps" that means that much bitcoin is being re-distributed among lots of people. lets say 1000 people will hold that 10K bitcoin instead of one. that leads to a fairer distribution.

if i am not mistaken this is a European thing, they use "." (dot) as thousands separator. so that is indeed 100K.

and that is not just Coinbase, there have been a lot of other signs. other websites are seeing more traffic, the google trends should show higher searches too, there is also increase in trading volume by that much, and on top of it all we can see the increase the number of transactions which is shown in the unconfirmed ones (50k currently)

because of the recent big news about CME and the fact that a lot of new investors are not investing in bitcoin i wouldn't be surprised if the price went up another $1000 after the SegWit2x rise.

you see all those new investors may not know what a fork is and what it can do so they may be scared and waiting on the sidelines to invest in bitcoin. so as soon as the fork is done, they will start buying big time and it can be a cause a big rally.

they won't do it because there is no reason for them to do it. they don't gain anything, or any advantage an instead they lose a lot.

first there are fees that they have to pay to convert fiat to bitcoin specially when you use an ATM the fees are higher than usual ways.

second is the fact that bitcoin is traceable but cash that they are giving up is not!

and finally a criminal who wants to buy illegal stuff (like a gun for example) can not pay with bitcoin because other criminal sellers don't accept bitcoin in return for that stuff, they want cash which is not traceable...

the new fork is called a lot of different names: bitcoin2x, SegWit2x, S2x, B2X, BTC2.
and you will only receive equal amount (like BCH and BTG) if they go through with the fork and it actually happens. in which case they need to first add a strong two way protection because the hashrate support is no longer as much as it was before.


i believe it is mostly a false hope because of CME news.

i also doubt that Dubai is the first, they are probably not even fifth country to issue a state cryptocurrency. and that is all advertisement for their new altcoin that also happens to be very centralized.
and altcoins like these have failure written all over them. and it is not just the fact that this altcoin is centralized to one government but it is also limited and centralized to one country!

for example as long as there is the global and decentralized bitcoin, nobody is going to use DubaiCoin the exchange rate alone makes it not a wise decision.

if that is so, then there is currently 1 billion billion billion billion bitcoin available because there currently are about 1000 altcoins and more than half of them are forks of bitcoin.

oh yeah?
there have been 2 hard forks called BCH and BTG so far. so you claim that bitcoin supply is now 84 million, right?

so go ahead and use one of these forked coins (BCH or BTG) which according to you is additional supply to buy this game for me ($14.99):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/730/CounterStrike_Global_Offensive/

guess what, you can't use any shitcoins instead of bitcoin...

with ethereum getting dumped hard in the past few weeks the total market cap has taken a big hit because the biggest market cap because of the biggest supplies belongs to ETH and when it loses price the market cap goes down a lot.

although the total market cap because of these altcoins is meaningless but the rise is completely owed to bitcoin rise.

bitcoin definitely has a great future and as history has proven it will only grow with increasing adoption and mostly because bitcoin is a currency and that gives it a great real world usage.

litecoin is a poor copy of bitcoin which doesn't offer much. but because of a good developing team it can grow a little bigger.

ethereum on the other hand has lots of issues from their platform to bloated blockchain and to all the bugs it has. and since it has not much adoption it can not grow to any considerable size.
as for its price the supply is huge and without maximum and that means a decreasing price.

it can rise up more. today's rise seems to be the start of a big rally actually if the speculation is correct.
they speculate that it has something to do wit the recent news about CME planning to launch a bitcoin market for traders. i don't really have enough information about what it is but it sounds like a bit news to me from what i have read. you can read about it here:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/31/cme-plans-to-launch-bitcoin-futures-by-year-end.html

long term investors, hoarders, hodlers, or whatever you want to call them exist in any market. they buy up the assets and hold them. sometimes cash out some and most of the times they just keep buying every now and then, mostly in the dips.

that doesn't hurt bitcoin because it is not everyone that does this. and besides we are headed for a high price and a stable price in the far future. by that time when we talk about how much 1 satoshi is worth, people will have a stable satoshi price and today's hoarders will be spending it happily like a multi millionaire.

not the "majority of mining community" but the "majority".

it is not just the miners that get to decide. you guessed the first part correctly, anything can change technically speaking. so the 21 million limit can also be changed. but the question is will everyone, or better said "overwhelming majority" agree with that change?

this majority is obviously starting with the miners since they are doing the work (it is PoW after all) but then it is all the users. if they remain on the main chain not the forked on, the price of the forked one will crash and never rise (example: bitcoin cash). and that makes it an altcoin.

you can't just ask these "what if" questions without putting a little thought into it!
for example why would every single person involved with bitcoin decide "at the same time" to not buy bitcoin anymore at any price?

there currently are so many other users with the same problem or something of the same category with their verification and they are all stuck and waiting for an answer from Bittrex support team. 8 days is nothing compared to what some others have been waiting for!