It depends from geovernment to government how they want to deal with crypto currencies.
In general it seems like the less democratic the government, the less accepted is bitcoin by them.
I suppose that has something to do with controle.
The good thing is that the public notification of bitcoin in general seems to be improving.

Bitcoin has only a few million users.
And many of them use it as an investment, not as a currency.
I think stability is a very important element for a strong currency.
Bitoin is way too volatile for that.
There are a few strong currencies in the world, but bitcoin is not amongst them.

Why would it not make sense?
What bitcoins purpose is and what people use it for, those are two different things.
I am not saying that every bitcoin address needs to be veryfied.
But I say that there might be a market for verified bitcoin adresses.
The anonymity of bitcoin is for some people a reason to work with bitcoin. But for others the opposite.
If both sides of a transaction want it more secure, why not?

I think that this might very well be possible in the future.
A connection between a bitcoin address and a mobile number.
Not for all addresses, of course.
But I can imagine that some companies want payments from veryfied wallets for security reasons.
To them it's important to know who they are making business with.

I think bitcoin can not be both, a currency and an investment.
A currency is a medium of exchange you use every day because it has every day more or less the same value.
The investment you keep because you are expecting to have profit from it.
Giving away an investment is always hareder than giving away a currency.
So if you just look at it from a psychological point of view, an investment and a currency can't be the same.

I am really wondering how that would work.
The driver needs a confirmation that the payment is processed in a block, and that can take a while at the monet.
Otherwise it might happen that the transaction is not processed at all and the coins go back to the original wallet.
Waiting with the passenger in the car till that has happened is somehow not an option.

The way bitcoin is working right now it can't replace conventional money.
When you look at the blocks, you see that there are about 2000 transactions in each of them.
One block is created every ten minutes. Without segwit, that is the most bitcoin can do at the monent.
And even if everybody uses segwit, I guess that the number of transactions made by conventional money is far bigger than the bitcoin network can process.

I guess five years ago people asked the same question about the price we have today.
I am sure that you will find people who buy bitcoin even for the price of 50K.
Nobody needs to buy a whole bitcoin.
For the same amount of dollars you need to pay for one bitcoin today, you will get about 0.085 bitcoins once the price is at 50K.
That bitcoin amount is worth a transfer.

The price is calculated on every exchange seperatly.
You have some people who want to buy, and some people who want to sell.
When you find somebody who accepts your offer, or you accept the offer of somebody else, the deal is done.
And that is the price for the moment then.
I guess the price you see at coinmarketcap is an average price of the main exchanges.
If you look at the market closely, you will see that every exchange has a slightly different price.

That is a successfull description that you earn money when you buy something cheap and sell it at a higher price.
But I guess many of the people here in this board already now that.
Maybe it's smart to think about where to store your coins during the period you wait for the price increase. And don't forget the transaction fees.
Or keep an eye on the altcoins. Some of them tend to climb even higher than bitcoin for a short time and fall after that again.

Of course bitcoin is now mainly an asset.
You buy it if you have a bigger amount to invest or if you are expecting a bigger increase in price.
Then the fees are not very relevant to you because the don't eat up your profit.
When you are a small invester you need to have an eye on the mempool. When that is empty, fees are lower.
Of cours that always depends on where you buy your coins. Some bitcoin institutions do not adjust their fees even if the transaction fees go down.

The fees are a problem to traders, and those who want to make payments with bitcoin.
When you are a long term investor, the fees will disturbe you not that much.
I suppose that much of the money that is in bitcoin right now is brought by long term investors.
So I do not see a crash or anything like that coming due to the fees in the near future.
But a solution must be found, because the situation right now (and the discussion that comes along with it) brings a lot of uncertainty.
And uncertainty is something long term investors do not like.

The blocks in BTC are full, filled with about 2000 transactions each block.
The one full block on the BTH chain had 37K transactions. That means the BTH blocks can store in a little more than an hour what BTC blocks needs nearly a day for.
Whether the BCH pool is invulnerable or not, only time will show. But it clearly has a better chances to do so.
Taking away hashpower is another cause that leads to the same problem, but I think it needs to be dealt with separately.

When this thread was started in 2015, bitcoin was a currency.
Fast, cheap and anonymous. But now bitcoin has become an investment. The fees are high, transaction times as well.
You can not compare those two anymore. The biggest advantage of a payment with bitcoin is the anonymity.
Other reasons to make a payment with bitcoin I do not see at the moment.

I think is is very surprising that venezuelans are actually mining cryptocurrencies.
There are many reports in tv that show the conditions there. No food, no water no electricity.
It is understandable if they use bitcoins instead of their local fiat. But mining is something that consumes a lot of electricity and you need to have the hardware for that.
I can only assume that there are a few companies who do so. For the large majority of the population I do not think they have the options to do mining with profit.

I think that even if we have a bitcoin price of 50,000 dollars, there will be always somebody who thinks it will reach 60,000 dollars.
Sure, when that time of these prices really should come, everybody who buys now will have a much larger profit.
But it will not be too late to start investing into bitcoin even by then.
You just buy a lower percentage of a whole bitcoin then.

I ment the mempool of Bitcoin Cash. There was a large number of transactions on August 16th made with BCH. Over 120 thousand. All processed within five blocks.
My intention was not to say that BCH can help BTC.
I wanted to point out that BTC has a problem with the mempool. BCH has a mempool too and managed to get 25MB out of it within five blocks.
For the every day use, I think an empty mempool is better than a full one.
So if BCH as a fork can achieve that, why not the original?

I am searching for the bad news and can not find them.
Bitcoin is going through some developement, but it's nothing bad from what I can see.
There was no hack, the price seems to be doing fine as well.
From where I stand, the news seem to be avaerage, not bad. At least not for the moment.

I think that basically the price of Bitcoin Cash is what it is because everybody who had bitcoin got the same amount Bitcoin Cash after the fork.
We have seen in the Ether fork that this situation can be used to make money, and many people used their experience from that time.
But to me Bitcoin Cash has some real value: It can empty mempools.
That is where bitcoin has its biggest disadvantage, the long transaction times, the high fees because of a full mempool.
Although most blocks of Bitcoin Cash are nearly empty, Bitcoin Cash has proven to be able to handle a massive upcoming of transactions with one single block.
And this capability we need in bitcoin as well.

At the moment I am wondering what coin will have the name Bitcoin in December.
If there really is a fork, I see a good chance that the new chain will get the name Bitcoin, and the old chain will be renamed by industry and exchanges.
It really all depends on that possible fork. Price, names, the whole future of bitcoin.
Hopefully they will come to an agreement.