Thanks for sharing this article, it is truly interesting.
The current speed of blockchain is probably inappropriate for big companies with constant flow of clients and when instant transactions are required, but if we are talking about small international online stores or sales platforms, blockchain is superior to bank transfers anyway. New consensus mechanism, however, will allow big players to adop blockchain, so it's a good thing.
Standards and other features will help blockchain to be treated more seriously. Let's hope the positive changes will come soon!

I know that mainly people are frustrated, because it's been nearly a year since the huge price drop. Portfolios are still 70% down and nothing seems to promise the brighter future. I wrote a small article about the adtantage of the current situation and would really like to hear what you think about it: https://medium.com/@nd.invest.ico/the-true-face-of-the-crypto-market-4ae165912e8a.
Thanks!

Forgive me for expressing my disagreement, but I believe that we could also say that blockchain is fast. It depends on what we compare it with. The transactions are also relatively cheap and I am not sure what you mean when you say it's expensive to run (no need to make a PoW rather than PoS and ICO allows to gather money for initial development). In about 10 minutes the network receives the first confirmation of the transaction (which is usually when companies start processing your request, so we could say that this is the transaction speed) and the fee is $0.6. When I recently made a Swift transfer on 400 euros, the fee was about 15 euros (!) and it took two working days for the transfer to be received.

I think that an important disadvantage of blockchain is that as the network gets bigger, transaction fees and speed are inevitably becoming worth. That's why I think DAG is a very attractive technology, because it has the biggest issues during the initial stage with improvements as the network expands.

Bitcoin is special because it's the first and most trusted cryptocurrency. What op writes in the article, however, largely seems to be true for most of cryptocurrencies and is more about the advantages of blockchain and limited supply, rather than bitcoin specifically. So if we talk about why blockchain is special, our company decided to adopt blockchain, because it makes the transactions a lot easier and faster than while dealing with banks. As we have partners in different countries, we are used to issues like a lot of time for a Swift transfer to be processed and very significant transaction fees. We will accept only our tokens as payment on the platform, because we don't want to fall victims of the extremely volatile crypto market in general.

I would love to see people buying bitcoin not for holding, but for an opportunity to buy goods and services with decentralized pseudo-anonymous money. It would also be great to see the price that is not affected by any sorts of news but the one that truly reflects what people believe in. No skyrocketing, no bubble bursting, but a reasonable price with gradual growth that is confirmed by the community.

You are right about bitcoin, but altcoins can actually be different. For example, Byteball has a net of private transactions with blackbytes. There are also other cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zchash, as xtraelv pointed out. However, I came through some articles that were doubting the real anonymity and maintained that with good work it would be possible to tract down the coins to some address. But it's more like there are people who say that Tor is not safe ans cannot provide pure anonymity, so I am not sure those articles made sense.

Thanks a lot for nice words, guys, and TMAN for one merit! I won't be asking for merits anymore! I am locking this topic now.

Hey, guys! This is an official account of ND INVEST crypto project. I was planning to participate in forum discussions and then reach a Junior Member status when I reach 30 points of activity, but, as you know, there is a new rule that requires one merit to reach that level. I wanted to become Junior just to look a bit more solid here and to be able to post images. As far as I know, theymos asked people to give merits to newbies who write something that can at least be called good. I hope there is at least one posts I made before that can truly be called good, so I am asking you to take a look at my posts. I wouldn't do that if I didn't find it really hard for a newbie to receive merits. My feeling is that many members are just not reading the stuff newbies write.
Thanks a lot for your assistance!

When people loan money, they can often forget the deadlines for paying back and stuff like that, so your project might help to  manage time and funds. But it's a shame there's actually no whitepaper on the website, even though it looks as if there is a download link. The fact that our ICOs whitepaper is not fully ready yet is the reason I'm postponing the creation of an ANN thread on bitcointalk, because that's what people will be asking about. And it would really be nice if there were photos of a team of this project. People like to make research about these people (at least, to determine whether the team is real and these people actually exist). Good luck!

If we take a look at markets on coinmarketcap, there is a weird amount of trading to USDT. It's funny that the first two exchanges are marked as 'volume excluded', which I guess means that the reported volume is incorrect. I am no expert, but this looks like a price manipulation to me. Let's take a look at the news. Some just state that the is a bullish trend without providing explanation. Forbes says it's because Bitmain files for IPO (xenomorphe1 mentioned this reason above as well) and Bitcoin cash has something to do with Bitmain (if though there's no direct connection between these two). Now is a good time for long-term bch investment, but perhaps the price will get lower again and it's reasonable to wait.

Cardano is currently about 10x lower than ATH. The team is very socially active, which is a good sign. The coin also experienced some positive price dynamics lately.
The team is very serious about their project. It didn't simply release whitepaper and tried to stick with it, but decided to receive independent reviews from experts. The platform is rather nice, with POS system as well as slot leader [pseudo]mining. They are trying to solve transaction price and speed problems and I think they can succeed in the future when the market gets bullish again.

I suppose you are right about points expressed in 1, 3, while some others can be doubtful. For instance, problems with hacks occurred before and I am not sure that there are really more hacks now than there used to be. I am also not sure I understand what you mean by #4. Is it about the whales manipulating the market? And what are speculation losses? Could you elaborate more on this topic? Regulations are still on their early stage and I am not sure that it affects the price right now.
As for Google ban, it was one of the big reasons before, but the news is old now, so I don't think it affects the current situation.
I agree with Iyeman, that you  should add to the list the point about SEC declining ETF applications. There've been three major price drops over the last two months related to this issue. And SEC might continue to affect the market, since new applications are filed and new rejections are most likely on their way.

Mining helps to ensure decentralization, but I think that token distribution can also be decentralized enough if the team doesn't possess much more that 10% of the total supply. IMO the decentralization that matters is the one of the strong community with nobody owning a significant amount of coins in the end. If some token is very popular and about 80% of it is circulating in the global community, it's decentralized enough for me. What is bad with fiat is that even with major currencies like Euro or USD there are institutions that can make a huge impact, essentially keep everything under control.
I agree with the op that as long as it works out well for the community, it's fine with whatever way of generating the coins.

A friend shared a link to Ubex ICO with me: https://www.ubex.com/. If I got their official info right, they sold 4k ethereum worth tokens in a single day! It's obvious that this ICO has a strong team and a massive budget. Their website, whitepaper and official video are all looking very good. They also have a lot of partners and participate in solid blockchain events around the world.
It is hard not to invest when you see all of this. But I think that the project is not that good (even though it still might be successful because of the hype around it). It is basically an idea of improving content advertising by uniting neural networks with blockchain. Moreover, their official video is kind of scary, because it looks like a dystopian future of total machine control over our private sphere is inevitable and we can either join them or be against them. I am not in favour of ruining what it left of human's privacy, so I think that people should not support such projects. What is your opinion on this matter?

While the general idea seems appealing, it is also intuitively wrong to force someone to send merits. I think it would be fair if sMerits of a person who didn't merit anyone in, say, a month,  were disappearing or even being trasnferred to some people who are meriting others on a very regular basis.
I also think that it could be very good if there was a limit of merits to be sent for one post. I can see that sometimes people are receiving 10 merits for a post that doesn't make any sense at all.

I understand you. I was hoping to become a Junior Member soon, so that our company could look a bit better on this forum. Getting one merit might not be that hard, but I believe that in general it is very hard for newbies to be meritted, since most of members simply ignore our posts, since most of newbies are not contributing anything to the discussions and are only posting to gain activity. Good luck to us, mate, on the way toward better ranks on this forum!

The prices are indeed increasing every year and I expect the $20k ath to be repeated in December 2018 - January 2019.
Well, this depends on the website we're looking at. On coinmarketcap, the lowest price in this period I could find was $6225 on 22nd of June. The highest was $20001 on 17th of December. I think that this data is approximately correct and the differences might be caused by the op preferring another website (preev.com, for example, or some major exchange like binance).

Yes, probably years will pass before we will be able to pay with cryptocurrencies for our goods and bills. But this day may not even ever come if people continue to treat cryptocurrencies the way they mainly do nowadays. Most of people in crypto community are holders and traders. They are interested in profits they can eventually hope to convert to fiat, not in replacing fiat. Our company wants to contribute to the adoption of cryptocurrencies. We will replace the payments that are currently proceeding in fiat into crypto payments, because they are a lot faster, cheaper and more efficient.

Hello! I am not sure what kind of project you are looking for, but maybe our future ICO (Pre-sale starts on 10th of October) will be of interest to you. We are a real estate and car sales company that has a car dealership in Budapest and a luxurious hotel on Cyprus. We want to create our platform, where people will be able to see announcements about urgent sales of cars and houses (this is just a start, since we have 9 years of experience in this field, but we are planning to expand) with discounts from the market prices. Once a person finds a suitable product, he/she transfers a 5% deposit in our token to the seller, reserving the car/house. You can learn more about our project on our website: https://www.ndinvest.ltd/?lang=en&NDC=1&sbm=1&payment=BTC. The wesbite is not fully ready and we are still adding some information. Unfortunately, the same holds for our whitepaper, which is currently proofread and will be available in about a week.
One of the proofs that we are not goind to scam people is that we will create our platform and release the tokens even in case our ICO is unsuccessful (you can see this info on our website). Moreover, as we have our own goods we sell, it is unlikely that we would risk losing what we already have by scamming people who will make sure our reputation is destroyed. And besides, you will always be able to file a report to cyberpolice as our registration data, main team members and headquarters addresses are all available on our website. [I'll add something from myself here. I was hired by this company as a Social media and community manager. I've been on the crypto market for more than two years and also often wrote on this forum from my personal Legendary account that ICOs are scamming people and investing in them is not worth it. But I really see the people named as the team on the official website, I know that the headquarters address is true, that the car dealership and hotel are really there. These are good decent people who simply want to accept payments in a cryptocurrency, because of being tired dealing with fiat banking transactions.]
If you'd like to know more about our ICO, you can pm me to ask any questions. I will also provide you the links to our social media accounts (unfortunately, people mainly don't know about our project yet, so you'll be among the first ones to join. We are planning to start attracting people once our whitepaper is officially released).  

Yes, people keep writing about some Staker coin, but I wanted to recommend DASH. The return is about 7.5% per year, which is not that much, but fair and reasonable. And besides, now is the holding time anyway, so why not to profit a bit from it. Dash is a storng coin and it may rise a lot in price eventually. Another great coin to hold is NEO. The return is 2% lower, but the price is ridiculously low and holding it will probably be profitable anyway. Other reputable coins have really low returns and it's completely useless to hold them expecting to profit from POS.