I read an interesting theory that Bitcoin was started by the US treasury, and that it was an experiment to help them design a new world currency. They saved the output from the first year's mining to help them control prices later down the line. It's starting to look as if Bitcoins are being removed from the market, and this is a good omen for long term price trends. It will mke it unusable as a payment method though, except for large transactions of course.

I'm thinking of claiming my Bitcoin Cash, and I may keep the wallet active for misaddressed payments. I'll move my Bitcoin holding into a new wallet, and use the existing address for a Bitcoin cash node. I'm considering using the same receiving address on both systems. This will allow me to refund a transaction that is sent via the wrong system, and request the correct payment. I'm sensing that some users don't know the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash, and this may help me to resolve the confusion.

The problem with failures is that they tarnish the image of the good products. Ths is especially true if they are mis-using the word Bitcoin in their product name.

Cybersquatting is a different issue, and it is deprecated in the domain name industry.

Are you posting there?

This started quite some time ago when the US impsed sanctions on Russian. You would have thought by now that they would have learnt that economic sanctions hurt the sanctioner more than the sanctionee. China id a massive holder of gold, and they needed Russian oil, so they worked out a system whereby Russia was paid in Yuan, and then used the Yuan to buy Gold. This gold backed Yuan is becoming a major world currency now, and it is likely that the Petro-dollar will be replaced by the Petro_yuan, and/or the Petro Ruble. The other result of sanctions was the creation of the AIIB. The US tried to isolate Russia and China from the world banking system, so they created their own to rival the World Bank.

It would appear that the Deep State ( Obama, Tony Blair, Soros and cronies) is attempting to move financial control and manufacturing away from the West and into Asian hands. China's gold exchange based on physical gold rather than paper gold is another example.

We are certainly living in "interesting times" at the moment.

I think it is a shame that people think this. I've started a couple of specialist threads - crypto domain names, and Bitcoin nodes over public wifi for travellers.

However, I'm surprised that my threads about the first settlement day for Bitcoin futures, and the imminent prosections for manipulating exchange prices didn't garner any responses.

I tried to get a discussion going about the futures trading market, but it seems nobody is interested, despite the fact that today is the first settlement day.

I gather the settlement time is 2:45 pm Chicago time, and the initial bid price was $20,000.
I started a thread about this on the intelligent discussion board, but it seems to have been ignored.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2771116.0

Bitcoin was the first into the market, and it didn't protect the name. As a result of this, many people don't seem to know which coin is the real Bitcoin, and dump everything with Bitcoin in it's name into the same bin. There isn't even agreement about the shortform for Bitcoin. The ticker code is XBT, and this is used by sites like XE. However most of the boards seem to use BTC, and many people seem to think of that as Bitcoin Cash if they have heard of it.

Looking at percentages to assess dominance is a bit misleading. As the herd increases, then the percentage of whatever metric you are using is likely to decrease, even when the real values may be increasing.

Money flowing into alt coins may be new money for the crypto world. It isn't certain that it is a flight from Bitcoin.

So should every tablet be called an iPod, every car be called a Ford, or every auction site be referred to as Ebay?

The only reasons to use Bitcoin in the name are - you aren't smart enough to think of a good original name, or you can't afford to buy one. You want to give your project an image of respectability that it probably doesn't deserve. You want to diminish the market dominance of Bitcoin.

Using a parallel chain to bribe Bitcoin users to support your creation is becoming a bit old hat these days, and calling it a fork is another deception trick in my opinion.

https://www.ethnews.com/market-manipulation-101-bitcoin-futures

Watch this space to see how it works out.

Actually " Bitcoin Interest" is doubly deceptive. It sounds as if it is a scheme for you to earn interest on your Bitcoin savings.

Surely the attacks are not on blockchains or Bitcoin, but on computers running vulnerable Microsoft software.

I don't think they should use the name Bitcoin. It confuses things in the minds of consumers.

I don't understand why they are called forks either. Surely thy come into existence by copying the Bitcoin blockchain, and then building a new chain from a specified height. This would appear to be a parallel chain with a premined section awarded to existing Bitcoin owners. It isn't a fork in the existing chain.

It sounds as if you are being set up as the patsy.

Why would you support it if they are ashamed to be associated with it?

I don't think Bitcoin is going to be the only crypto in the world following the end of fiat. We can see a number of government initiatives appearing. Royal Mail Gold for example, and it's difficult to see the direction that the gold backed Renminbi will take. The venezuelan "petro" may never get off the ground. Also, I believe that some of the parallel coins will survive ( what others call forks. ). SDRs willbe used for inter government transfers.

What a strange comment - should Supermarkets be allowed to buy food to sell on at a profit? How about all those people buying Bitcoin, and saving them.

What really annoys me about domain names is when a great name is registered, and somebody puts a Mickey Mouse site on it. and they won't sell it for proper development.

It takes a lot of time and skill to find decent domain names. Would you spend 3 hours looking through lists, and not buying anything?

Please don't try to embed videos or large images. If we are out and about and tethered to a mobile, it runs away with our data allowances.