There's no actual proof that Bitcoin is in bubble, if the price is increasing quickly, it doesn't mean that it's a bubble. Bitcoin is very different from traditional investments - it's unregulated, decentralized, permissionless, started trading from near-zero prices, trades 24/7 and aims to revolutionize the whole economy. It's incorrect to use traditional analysis for predicting Bitcoin's price. And when you check past forecasts, no one is even close to making any good predictions.

SegWit is an old news since it was successfully locked-in, the next thing that might boost Bitcoins price would be Lightning Network, but even this might be priced in already - if it's almost ready for deployment and this information has been leaked to whales. If you want to find some fundamentals for Bitcoins price, you should search for some information not yet known to general public - it can be rumors about development, governments adoptions, support from traditional investors or big companies, etc. Buy the rumors, sell the news.

Bitcoin's mining problem is decentralized - you need to find a hash for a new block with some amount of zeros, and since you have to include the hash of the previous block, this task is self-updating. The problem with alternative systems is that many of them require some central node that gives tasks - for example Raiblocks have centralized servers that acts validates all captchas. Similar thing with Gridcoin - it relies on BOINC servers, so it's not truly decentralized like Bitcoin. So, for human-based mining you need to create a system of tasks inside the network rules. Now, economically, the easier the task (like solving captcha or pressing like) - the lower the price of a coin would be, so you'll need some mechanism that adjust reward/dificulty to the processing power of the network. It's really hard to create such system and it's not even clear if it has any benefits over traditional mining.

Imo, fees are still manageable, you just need to be a bit smart to minimize them. If you are moving dozens or hundreds Bitcoins, than paying 1-3 mBTC fee shouldn't be a problem for you, and as for value transfer, this fee is much more lower than what fiat can offer. If you are doing small transactions, than you should setup a small online wallet for them, because online wallets feature batch transactions with fees around 10k satoshi per transaction. I personally use my Poloniex account for small transactions and when I'm depositing funds to it from other exchanges or services, I'm using altcoins to avoid Bitcoin fees. Of course storing coins online is bad for security, so you should only keep small amounts there.

Decreasing block time has the same effect as increasing block size - it bloats blockchain, requiring nodes to spend more resources, and it also has a downside of being less secure and stable, because its harder to keep the network in sync.



SegWit was required to enable offchain scaling solutions, it would be much harder or even impossible to implement something like Lithning Network on BCH chain. It's also very nice that offchain scaling aren't affecting main chain in any way - developers can safely experiment without risking whole $72 bn network, unlike with onchain scaling that require hardforks.

I think one of the reasons why journalists end their articles on cryptocurrency is because they try to present a balanced opinion, but because of their low competence on the subject, their arguments look rather stupid. But if I were writing some article for mainstream media, I'd also include some warning regarding risks of investing in cryptocurrencies, especially altcoins - people need to understand the technology they are about to invest in, we don't need any "dumb money" that destabilize the price with panic buys/sells and act chaotically in general. 

Replay protection means that chains are separated, like BTC and BCH. SegWit2x won't have it, so when you spend BTC or 2x coin, the same transaction might be broadcasted to the other chain. Although recently Jeff Garzik said he will add optional replay protection, so we might be able to spend forked coins without losing BTC. There are also methods to split your coins by yourself, by sending locked transactions, adjusting fees or using freshly mined coins. But dealing with 2x coin will probably be harder and riskier than BCH, so even fewer people will be dumping them while preserving their BTC.

Not exactly, premines and ICO's are what is actually the same as printing money, but forking is more complex. With forks, people who gain the most are whales, but they are usually concerned about privacy and safety, so they prefer to wait instead of dumping their forked coins asap. And to have a successful fork with some value, you need to build community support for it, by spreading information about it on blogs and social media and pumping its price after it's launched.

Every transaction is a data, so even if you somehow compress every transaction to be just one byte (which is unrealistic), there still won't be enough space in 1mb block to handle as much transactions as Visa. The solution is second layer scaling like Lightning Network - transactions happen offchain, so they are instant, with no fees (or extremely small fees) and don't burden main chain in any way. Right now there's no alternative to this, because our technology is limiting cryptocurrency transactions to just a few transactions per second - this is how much average PC can handle without slowing down too much.

If you think you are good at predicting prices, why not just do trading? With leverage you can multiply your profit/loss by a huge margin, and overall trading gives you much more flexibility - you can place different types of orders, use bots, cancel your orders at any time and so on. Sites that accept betting on currency are probably also taking some fees to form a house edge, like 1-2% of your winnings, while in trading fees are much lower - only around 0,15-0,25%.

There's a false dichotomy that Bitcoin can be either investment or currency, in fact it can easily be both - you save Bitcoins to preserve and increase their value, but also spend them when you really want to. Fiat value is actually irrelevant, because the market value of Bitcoin will keep growing, no matter in what it will be measured - gold, dollars, goods, oil, etc. If you will only spend Bitcoins directly, you will notice that prices in Bitcoins will be going down - from BTCs to mBTCs to thousands of satoshis. Right now fiat is just very useful tool for measuring value, so people care about Bitcoin's price.

I don't see any reasons for national cryptocurrency - if it will have in-built mechanisms for regulation and centralization, than it won't be as attractive as the real cryptocurrencies, since it won't have any of its defining features. If on the contrary it will be a full decentralized cryptocurrency, than why would people switch to it if Bitcoin and some popular alts are working just fine? I think governments that are interested in cryptocurrencies should just adopt Bitcoin. Would be much better if the whole world agreed on one single coin.

The shills are very much real both here and on reddit and other social media. There's a very clear pattern for anti-Core posters - most of them have 1-2 weeks old accounts, then there's a smaller amount of bought accounts - determined by finding large gaps in activity and sudden change in posting style. The number of genuine users with anti-Core position who regularly join discussions is very-very small - around 10-15 profiles on this forum. It's pretty obvious that there's ongoing paid shill campaign against Core and pro-Bcash, pro-SegWit2x. I recommend ignoring fresh/suspicious shill accounts to avoid feeding the trolls.

This situation is very interesting - if BitPay will treat 2x coin as real Bitcoin and recognize its price as the price of real Bitcoin, than they will open themselves to a "fork attack" - people who will split their coins will pay to them with 2x coin and will effectively double the value of their coins. This might be a huge loss for BitPay, since they will have less value than they are giving to their users in fiat, because exchange rates on open markets for 2x coin will be much lower than for the real Bitcoin. Sooner or later, even 2x supporters will have to recognize their chain as an altcoin.

This sounds really good and promising, but we are years away from times when Bitcoin will be accepted by every merchant. Today you might find some places in big cities that accept Bitcoin, but most of the time you will have to exchange BTC for local currency. And when Bitcoin will reach mass adoption, governments will have all sorts of regulations regarding it - you'll have to tell how much Bitcoins you own when you cross the border, pay taxes and fees. It might be cheaper than current fiat system, but not absolutely free.

I'm not sure that there is any rational explanation to why they are intentionally mining empty/smaller blocks. If they are protesting against SegWit/try to pump BCH, than they are losing a good amount of BTC in fees while not achieving anything - BTC price is relatively stable, no one is seriously adopting BCH, as it's just a coin for FUDing, mining manipulation and pump & dumping. If they are trying to pump fees, they are probably still in loss, since their competitors who mine full blocks benefit more from this. So, either there's some hidden motive, or it's ASICboost in action, or they have some faulty software.

If running Bitcoin node was expensive, then only big companies could afford it, and Bitcoin would basically be Visa with cryptography - no centralized, permissioned, mutable payment system. There were dozens systems like that - ecash, e-gold, Liberty Reserve, etc. They all failed because it just doesn't work - either the system is decentralized or it will get taken down by government sooner or later.

Bitcoin wasn't designed to be anonymous at the first place, Bitcoin was created and is valuable now because of its decentralization. Installing anonymity protocols similar to Monero or Zcash would dramatically affect decentralization, since they need much more resources to process transactions, which would cause most of the nodes to quit. Lithning Network might positively affect privacy, since transactions are happening off-chain, but it won't be a complete solution, since large flows of money might still be traceable.

Bitcoin is supposed to be resistant to any attacks, otherwise it wouldn't be able to work properly and won't have any significant value. Mining empty blocks - for whatever reasons, can be considered as "transaction withholding attack", and the network has mechanisms to deal with it - since this causes fees to go higher, honest miners are getting much more profit, and are able to afford more hashpower later, thus decreasing profits of attackers even further and even putting them in loss because of increased difficulty. We shouldn't take any actions like forking, banning Antpool, etc. The system will reach new equilibrium soon.

It's already regulated - you have to pay taxes when you sell it with profit, popular exchanges follow KYC/AML laws, transactions are being monitored and some of them get traced. The important thing is that Bitcoin should never be regulated from within - we must always check if proposed changes affect decentralization and reject everything that will make Bitcoin more centralized. So far it work, and Bitcoin users have a total freedom of what to do with their coins - either comply with government regulation or avoid them by using unregulated services.