Bitcoin incentivizes holding so it may be extremely hard to buy any big portion of total amount of bitcoins. Right now you can go to exchanges and buy some thousands of coins from their order books, but it will drive the price higher and higher and people may decide to hold instead of selling, since price rises might only reassure investors that Bitcoin is going to be worth hundreds of thousands of USD in the future. So, if Bitcoin's marketcap is 95 billions it doesn't mean that you can buy all bitcoins with that sum. Next point is, on a technical level it doesn't matter how much coins do you own - 1 BTC, 0.0001 BTC or 16 million BTC - the network is governed by code so everyone play by the same rules. Money, be it BTC or fiat can allow you to influence the price and by it you could influence mining, but you can never get any direct control over the network - it was designed to withstand such attacks.

I think with Bitcoin there are two types of price moves - short term speculative ones, like the one we witnessed when China closed exchanges - this is caused by speculators overreacting to some events, while the whales and average hodlers mostly ignore them; and then there are some long term forces that influence the price for a long period - like the crash of Mt. Gox or current bullishness of mainstream attention. On practice it can be extremely hard to predict how exactly the market would react to some events in the long run, so it's hard to say what exactly will happen with Bitcoin in the if altcoins will fail. But it's almost certain that there will be some wild speculation for a few days when the alts will start crashing.

What makes dotcom and altcoins different is that altcoins and ico's are direct derivatives of Bitcoin, and they are mostly traded against it or Ethereum. This means that if they are in a bubble and this bubble will burst, people will just sell them for BTC and ETH without any direct influence on Bitcoin's price. Bitcoin is still volatile and can be sensible to some events, so it might dip for a short term, but there's no fundamental reason why failure of altcoins would damage Bitcoin in long term.

Now, about the roots of dotcom and altcoins. Dotcom bursted because the technology wasn't there yet, so most dotcom companies were not able to deliver their promises - and this can easily repeat with altcoins, since the blockchain technology is also very young still and might not be ready to implement visions of developers. The other problem is scams - many projects are simply luring investors and not doing any development. Both of these factors combined with overoptimistic investors can cause a bubble, so it's quite likely that altcoins and ICO's will burst. Maybe some coordinated crackdown from regulators would be the trigger for it.

But Bitcoin will survive because it has delivered all its promises from the start, so when you are investing in Bitcoin you are getting exactly what you've paid for and not some promise of a future value - this is one of the main difference between Bitcoin and most altcoins.

There's no way a crackdown on ICO's and altcoins could have resulted in Bitcoin rising by 32%. For Bitcoin's price to rise, someone has to buy with fiat currency - this would increase its USD value. But anything that happens on crypto markets can only have some indirect effect on Bitcoins price. If there is negative news regarding altcoins, people will sell them for BTC, which will cause their prices to drop, but Bitcoin's BTC value will remain the same. The two scenarios that lead to BTC price increase are the following: someone sell their altcoins for fiat and then use this fiat to buy BTC - but this doesn't make much sense, because you would have to pay trading fees twice instead of paying fees once with direct altcoin to BTC trade; and the other scenario is that people who were about to invest their fiat in ICO's/altcoins would decide to invest in BTC instead, but it's unlikely that amount of such money was high enough to push the price to current levels. So, this explanation in general is not very realistic.

If the bull run will keep on going, it's very likely that Bitcoin will reach $10,000... but only in the next year. Because of SegWit2x, the market will be cautious in November, so there will be only December left for a next stage of the bull run, and without some streak of incredibly good news it's hard to imagine Bitcoin doubling in price in just one month. But something like $7,000 sounds more possible, since that would be around 38% gain from current price - but it would still require some awesome news like adoption by some big companies, legalization by governments, Lightning Network, etc.

It's really not a hard thing to predict that Bitcoin will reach some price, especially if it's not far from current price. The real challenge is to predict when exactly it will happen as well as predicting dips, their depth and time. This is what matters in professional trading. Predictions like "Bitcoin will reach X" are kinda useless without any additional information. Is X a local top or will Bitcoin keep growing more after that? Will there be any tips and dips on the road to X? The answers to questions like that can bring some profit if answered correctly, but so far analysts are failing to reliably predict anything.

There's basically two types of Bitcoin haters. The first type is the people who don't understand it and since Bitcoin is growing quickly, they reach conclusion that it must be a ponzi scheme, so in their mind they are doing a good thing by trying to warn others. This is your typical commenters on social media, journalists, economists and experts. The second type is the people who understand it and don't like its decentralized design - they see it as competitor to governments and banks, and in their mind people should be controlled by those organizations for some reason. This is your typical bankers, governments officials and their apologists.

So far neither of upcoming forks look like "free money". Exchanges seem to not give Bitcoin Gold much attention in their statements - a sign that the value of this coin might turn out to be really small. SegWit2x still unclear with their replay protection, and without replay protection exchanges might have a hard time listing and doing operations with it. Also it can be risky to buy BTC with the only goal of getting forks, because if BTC will correct now, the combined price might still be lower. It's certainly possible that some traders buying BTC to get forks, but I'm not sure if it's the main reason behind the recent surge in price.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory and if you'll think more about it it won't sound very plausible. First, you can't just create value out of thin air, making a fork is extremely easy, it's just a copypaste job with a few small tweaks - any programmer can do it. This means that the starting value of a forked coin is near-zero - to start creating value you first need to invest money into advertising - hire paid shills to promote your fork on social media, place some articles, twitter bots, etc. etc. Then you have to spend your BTC on pumping your fork on exchanges - otherwise it will get dumped to zero quickly. Also don't forget that there are many other people who hold BTC and can profit from selling both BTC and forks from your pump attempts. So, it's quite a risky business with not really high returns.

That's a really dumb statement to say that cryptocurrencies are known for being liquid - even those that can theoretically can process 30 or 50 transactions per second are nothing in comparison to something like Visa. It's also wrong that Bitcoin is scales the worst of all coins - with SegWit it's maximial capacity is on the level of many altcoins. And it's a lie that Bitcoin is so limited because the technology is old - the limit was installed long ago for a very valid security reasons. The person who wrote this article has very poor understanding of how Bitcoin works.

So far it's mostly just some very wild rumors and I see at least a few reasons why there won't be any "government cryptocurrency" anytime soon. First - it doesn't scale well, so they won't release it to population, second - it may hurt the image of their fiat currencies, third - governments may not like networks where every participants have full access to logs of all other users.
But lets imagine that some government would actually issue their own crypto - if this will be some centralized systems, than it would just be a digital fiat and most people would understand that it's completely different from Bitcoin. If it will be a real decentralized cryptocurrency, than it would just be an altcoin, and for buying/selling people almost always prefer Bitcoin over any altcoin.

Decentralized applications are still in their early days, which means that they may have some critical vulnerabilities - the failure of the DAO would be the best example of it. So, right now I wouldn't trust any big amounts of money to a decentralized exchange. Also, it's unclear to me how exactly are decentralized exchanges are going to operate with fiat, since fiat is under complete control of banks and payment processors. I know that there are many operating crypto to crypto exchanges, but crypto to fiat is what is really important, since it's the link to mainstream financial worlds, while altcoins are mostly just speculative tokens with zero real use.

All or almost all exchanges made their statements regarding BCH many days before Auguest 1st, so there was plenty of time to prepare. The advantage of storing your coins on exchange was not clear before the august 1st and many people viewed it as unnecessary risk. But forks can be different from each other and it is also unclear now whether it's a good idea to store your coins on exchange during SegWit2x fork - this is why I created this thread, so traders can share their opinions.




People were angry not because they didn't get free coins, but because they were unable to sell their free coins on closed market when the price was pumped just as soon as the trading started. Specifically, the price reached as high as 0.25 BTC or even more (I don't remember exactly), but when deposits were opened, the price crashed to 0.07-0.09.

Bitcoin cash failed to get user adoption for the same reason why any other altcoin failed to get adoption - it's extremely hard to get momentum. People are adopting currencies that are already growing in popularity, for users it would mean that they will be able to spend their currency in many places, for merchants it would mean more customers. So, when a currency has a very small user bases, it's more inconvenient than beneficial to adopt it. The other reason why Bitcoin is better than altcoins is stability - Bitcoin network is very reliable and it's secured by the most PoW of all coins, while many altcoins still require testing and their small network are much easier to attack, which makes it risky to move huge amounts of value to them.

The general procedure for any fork is to move your BTC to a new wallet after the fork and import private keys or seed from the old wallet to a forked client installed on a separate machine - be very careful when you are installing new wallets, since there will be a lot of malware, so always verify the source.
Generally, people want to own BTC before the fork, so altcoins will fall in price, but then very quickly recover right after the fork.

Right, basing investment decisions on personal anecdotes, sounds very intelligent and professional. If you look at the current bull run that last for close to two years now, you'll notice that a lot of growth was happening in a very quick spikes, which means that it was caused by small groups of investors deciding to make big buys - if it was "cleaning ladies" who were behind this rally, the chart would be more smooth. And it's a lie that Bitcoin can't deliver on its promises, it has promised decentralized permissionless payment system and that's exactly what we have for 8 years already - Satoshi didn't say that transactions will be instant and free and that it will process million transactions per second.

You could convince some people to buy Bitcoin by using argument from original posts or the ones mentioned in replies above, but I don't see any reason why we should preach Bitcoin to the masses. It already has it's own uses like cheap global transactions, secure private store of value, high investment returns, but those who need those properties are not your everyday folk - they working in finance and already know and use Bitcoin. The truth is, Bitcoin as a currency might not be ready for everyday folk - in can't handle enough transactions, it's not accepted everywhere, its legal status is not completely defined, you have to be experienced user to use it. You can advice it as an investment, but again, it's always better to understand the thing you are about to invest into, otherwise you can make wrong decisions.

The common advice for a fork is to move your money away from any online wallet and store it safely in your own wallet. And this is in fact a really good advice, because it's always safer to store your coins by yourself. But after August 1st some people who followed this advice started making angry posts about how they regret listening to it because they missed on an opportunity to sell their BCH coins while the markets were closed for deposits for that coin. This showed that holding your money on exchange is a risk that also has a potential reward - immediate access to a closed market for a forked coin.

So, I'm curious to ask traders two things:

1. Did you hold your BTC on exchange on August 1st?
2. Are you going to hold on exchange during Bitcoin Gold fork and during SegWit2x fork?

Your choices can be broken into two options - store it online and get your forks sorted out for you - no need to install any software, import keys or seeds, etc., as long as your online service will support both chains after the fork, and if you are storing them on exchange, you might be able to trade your coins asap. Or you can store it offline and be sure that your coins won't get lost for whatever reason or stolen. So, the answer to your question would be to answer what are you valuing more - convenience or security?

Bitcoin is not a company, so it's not really correct to compare its marketcap with marketcaps of stocks - they have different mechanisms for price forming, so it's more correct to compare Bitcoin's marketcap with marketcaps of other similar assets - commodities and currencies, and in this case Bitcoin would look really small. Now, returning to banks from OP - they easily beat Bitcoin in other indicators - they hold billions to trillions in assets and process more transactions in both numbers and value. However, this shouldn't sound discouraging, in fact it means that people value decentralization and financial freedom extremely high.