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.

So, I'm sure many of you have seen tipsters on this section, in your Twitter, in chatrooms and some other places - it's the people who suggest you to place bets on certain picks in sports. And maybe some of you have asked yourself a question - why they are doing it? Why they are giving us advises how to win money absolutely for free - and by doing this they decrease their own profit, since the winning pool grows bigger as people follow their tips. Can anyone explain this?

First, I think the only real candidate for reserve cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, as it has the most PoW and the most responsible team of developers who hold security as their prime value- any other coin would be extremely risky in this situation. If Bitcoin will get mass adopted, I'm sure that governments will start using it as a reserve currency or asset, but until then it still would be a quite risky move and governments usually try to avoid risking when it comes to economy. Right now Bitcoin's legal status is not fully defined in most countries, so there's some risk of it getting outlawed in some parts of the world and this can discourage many governments from adopting Bitcoin as their reserve currency, not to mention all other potential risks that can make Bitcoin crash. But converting 5-10% of a countries reserves to Bitcoin might be a smart thing to do, since it can make a huge returns in a couple of years, not to mention a longer terms like 10-20 years. And the other cool thing about Bitcoin is that it's public, so it's impossible to steal from a treasury without everyone immediately knowing about it, so countries who suffer from corruption might benefit from Bitcoin.

It really depends on what do you exactly mean by saying "represent Bitcoin". If you mean who will represent the interests of Bitcoin users in parliament, then you can find at least a few MP's who are pro-crypto in almost any country. On a purely technical level, Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol and it can't be regulated from within and no one can represent it as its owner - even Bitcoin developers. If Bitcoin users and services will be subject to regulations, they will have to represent themselves, there will be no intermediaries.
It may be possible to secretly earn Bitcoin, but as soon as you start spending it in huge amounts, it will attract attention from tax authorities. And public blockchain can make the job much easier than investigating cash sometimes.

To lose a race would mean to have  less hahspower than competitors, and there are two possibilities:

If new nodes are losing, then they are mining on a minority chain and those miners would be able to send their reward coins only to other updated nodes. If they want to switch to the longest chain, they have to downgrade their software.

If old nodes are losing, they would be constantly try to mine invalid blocks on top of the longest chain mined by new nodes, which is seen as valid to them. This means that there's no growing alternative chain and old nodes have to upgrade their clients if they want to switch to the longest chain.

SegWit was developed by Bitcoin Core as a softfork and it has already been activated and working successfully for a couple of months already. SegWit2x is a hardfork planned to launch in November and developed by Jeff Garzik with support from miners and big businesses - since it's a hard fork, there won't be any mining race, it wouldn't matter how many miners will switch to SegWit2x, because the original chain will keep working as long as at least someone is mining it.

I think it's really hard to tell why exactly is Bitcoin rising so fast, because that would be equal to answering the question why some people bought it recently and you can never tell for sure unless they will answer it themselves. So, usually explanations for price changes are just pure speculation without any real evidence.


1. Bets on digital-currency dividend

Some people may follow this thinking, believing that it will be similar to Bcash outcome, but others might decide that this fork will be different, that combined value would be the same or lower.

2. China bitcoin exchanges

Rumors about legalizations of exchanges were around for a long time already, and I'm pretty sure they were priced in long before we started hearing them, because the crash caused by exchange closure was extremely short and the price returned to pre-crash levels quickly.

3. Amazon.com speculation

Those aren't even rumors, just an opinion of some blogger, clearly not enough to move the market.

4. FOMO

FOMO is always countered by fear of correction, and the higher you go the bigger is that fear, there must be some pretty good reason for going beyound previous ATH by more than 10% in just a few hours.

5. Wall Street attention

I'd say it's the most reasonable explanation - someone with big pockets just placed their bet on Bitcoin.

I think by this time most people have learned that if there's no strong community support, then a fork is nothing more but a pump and dump scheme - it happened with XT and Classic, it is happening right now with Bcash and will happen with all upcoming fork. Altcoins can only be as successful as their underlying technology and if you will look at all the forks, they are just mindless copypastes with a few tweaks, and they only get attention because they have "Bitcoin" in their name, but this attention is very short lived. No fork can come even close to competing with Bitcoin unless it proposes some really valuable changes.

This sudden surge is a great example of volatility and unpredictability of Bitcoin market. If you would tell people just 2 days ago that Bitcoin would touch $5,920 tomorrow, no one would take you seriously, yet it just happened. If you would check all the technical analysis articles with their lines and curves drawn over charts, I'm pretty sure you won't find anything that suggest the current price. Some people already post their regrets about selling at around $5,000 which seemed like the top for them - a remainder that selling Bitcoin can be just as risky as buying. I think there's really no way to reliably predict stuff like that, so traders should always keep in their mind that even the wildest scenarios are possible with Bitcoin.

I think many people, especially member of Bitcoin community, give Jamie Dimon and other persons like him way too much attention - you can see his name get mentioned very frequently since the last month, redditors post memes with him almost every day and many articles mention him. But why this is happening? This man has absolutely zero influence over Bitcoin, he's not an expert cryptographer or network developer, he's not an economist who writes scientific papers, so he can't constructively criticize Bitcoin - he can just voice his emotional opinion same as countless other naysayers, and I think we shouldn't waste our time on trying to prove them wrong.

Yes, a block that violates new rules is rejected by updated nodes, this means that updated nodes would not include it in their blockchain and new mining nodes won't build on top of it, but old nodes would see that block as valid so it may cause a chain split. So, a softfork is kinda like a hashrate war - whoever has more hashpower can build the longest chain, if new nodes win then old nodes would automatically accept their chain as valid because it's backwards compatible, but if old nodes win new does will just reject it and keep mining on the shorter chain. SegWit was a softwork and it got activated smoothly because majority of hashpower mined SegWit blocks so there was no chain splits.

Bitcoin attracts masses and masses is exactly want to you want for a currency - the more people use it, the more successful it becomes. Even without scaling Bitcoin is worth a lot, it's the first ever and also the most and stable decentralized payment system - it's a huge achievment on its own and there are many possible use cases for it beyond just a currency, many people see it and they keep investing. But also it's not so bad with the scaling as it may seem - Lightning Network would be like a second birth for Bitcoin and will allow it to compete with traditional payment systems for the first time. This can be another reasons for the current rally.

People come to both gambling and trading in search for easy money, but just as the odds are stacked against players in casino, the odds are also stacked against newbie traders on the markets. On wild unregulated crypto markets you will be playing a zero-sum game against people with more experience, more money, more influence and access to insider information. This can be much worse than a 1% house edge of a casino. And it's not very hard to profit from trading if you go for long-term positions, but it won't profitable enough to live off it. But when it comes to frequent trading than it becomes much more harder as the price is always so unpredictable in short term.

The government is not going to ask us if we want to have Bitcoin regulated or outlawed - there is no official representative, no Bitcoin CEO, no Bitcoin citizens that could vote - regulations are going to happen regardless of what community wants. But everyone will have a choice - either to comply with regulations, pay your taxes, reveal your identity or use Bitcoin on gray markets. Bitcoin is like cash of the Internet - you are free to spend it however you like and no one can block your transactions unless you are using online wallets.

This statement was very ambiguous, basically he said that cryptocurrencies will not be banned but will be regulated, but he didn't specify how exactly they will be regulated. Maybe they will be allowed only with government permissions and users would have to report all they transactions. Maybe they will just apply usual taxes and KYC and that will be it. He was also talking about "digital currencies" and not only Bitcoin - it means that different currencies might get a different treating. But either way it's a very weak news, China didn't manage to crash Bitcoin and they have majority of miners and a strong economy - Russia has neither, so their influence on crypto is very small.

How can Bitcoin retake its place as king of crypto if it never lose its title at the first place? Bitcoin was always number one by market cap, and what's more important it was always number one by influence - Bitcoin price moves always caused some effects in altcoin markets, showing that altcoins are still not ready to be a fully-independent currencies. It doesn't matter now what's the market share of Bitcoin - 80%, 50% or 30%, almost all altcoins are just hype and empty promises while Bitcoin is the real thing that works.

It seems like miners and some companies decided to play the role of a government and dictate their will to all Bitcoin users. They seem to not understand that they are not in position to dictate anything - people can always switch to other services or just wait, it is they - miners and companies who need us, the users, because we are bringing them profit. The more reasonable explanation for what is exactly going on would be to assume that it's a bluff, that S2X will install full replay protection so companies can actually support coins on both chains and then they will hope that users would start switching because 2x chain would be faster due to more hashpower.

It's a rumor that around 1 million bitcoins are owned by Satoshi - it might not be entirely true, maybe those early coins are spread between a few early miners or maybe even Satoshi himself can be a group of people. And Satoshi totally deserve those money - he started the crypto revolution, and in my mind great people deserve great reward. To try and take Satoshi's money from him would be a blatant thievery and against everything that Bitcoin stands for. And I think that if one day Satoshi will use his coins, he will use if for something good - maybe he will use it to fund some new decentralized project, or start donating it to someone in need.

This article is either a FUD or written by someone who didn't read the proposed law. The proposed law is very positive towards cryptocurrencies, it is stated that cryptocurrencies can't and shouldn't be banned because it's not true that they are only used by criminals. Authors see a great potential for Ukrainian economy with the use of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The law itself is very short so it's obvious that it requires some additional work, but the key points are:

1. Mining is allowed, miners can mine whatever they want, they have to pay taxes on their profit.

2. Cryptocurrency can be used as money to buy goods and services or exchanged for other currencies.

3. All users of cryptocurrency are solely responsible for their safety.

4. Cryptocurrency exchanges must follow KYC policies and pay taxes.

So, when it was said that National Bank was tasked with regulating cryptocurrencies, it means that it will acting with accordance to this law and not do whatever they please.

Bitcoin price was growing significantly for more than a year already, so mainstream media started covering it more and more and that made many people in financial world to start voicing their opinion about Bitcoin. There can be many reasons why exactly they are doing it- may they feel that Bitcoin is a threat, maybe they just want to get some attention from the media, maybe they want to try to manipulate the market. But I think that people who seriously consider investing in Bitcoin should form their own opinion by studying Bitcoin themselves instead of listening to others.

Well, lets use some common sense. The article in the original posts cites Russia Today and Reuters as their source and post their links:

https://www.rt.com/news/406269-cryptocurrency-risks-terrorism-putin/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-cenbank-bitcoin/russia-turns-cold-on-crypto-currencies-idUSKBN1CF0RF

Now, what sources are cited in that article from bitcoin.com that you believe is true? The answer is, there are no sources.

So, what we have here is that Putin went on the record and said Bitcoin is bad and then some writer from Ver's site made a fictional article about Putin endorsing Bitcoin.

 Why? I don't know