There are 453 contributors to bitcoin repository on github, and they are free to contribute to whatever other projects they want. It's quite possible that some of them will contribute or already contributed to Bcash. But if by "Core developers" you mean people like Greg Maxwell, Wladimir J. van der Laan, Luke Dashjr, than the answer is no - they have their own vision, and they will be working on it no matter what is the price and hashpower of Bitcoin and its forks.

Wrong, owners of bitcoins influence community consensus by trading in open market and determnining what chain is the most valuable and deserves the most resources in a form of PoW. Companies like Coinbase and BitPay don't represent the will of their customers, but they can force their decision on them, since they control the private keys. When it comes to forks with no replay protection, it becomes especially dangerous, because it will for sure make many people lose their coins on both chains.

Bitcoin.org is an informational resource about Bitcoin, altcoins don't belong there, and BitPay just turned into altcoin service. Also, BitPay are dishonest with their customers, they are not telling them that using this new software will lead to a loss of coins on previous version.




There is very few btc1 nodes, if 2x fork happened today, 90% of miners would be mining invalid blocks that would be rejected by Bitcoin's network. It would be a disaster for everyone - transactions will stop, miners will waste electricity on useless blocks. The price will crash, making mining less profitable even after miners return to the main chain. Right now 2x looks more like a bluff than some realistic improvement proposal.

All those experts are using technical analysis (if they use any analysis at all), which many people believe isn't very reliable. Also, traditional traders just can't comprehend the idea of something growing at high rates, so screaming "bubble" is like a natural response for them. Also, there are lots of FUDsters who are shilling for Bcash or other altcoin, and overall Bitcoin was always surrounded by FUD from different sides. This doesn't mean that it can't crash, but there are no educated arguments why it should crash.

Basically, every full node of Bitcoin network is doing the same work as any other payment processor like Visa or Mastercard - validating and keeping record of transactions. The difference is that those companies have powerful servers, while Bitcoin users have their home computers. Satoshi thought that computer technology and demand for Bitcoin's capacity will be growing hand-to-hand, so when more people will want to send bitcoins, Bitcoin users will have more powerful computers to process new transactions. He was clearly wrong, because even now it would be very burdensome to process higher amounts of transaction on your home computer. Also, he didn't take into account the fact that demand for transactions will be also growing, as more people are joining global economy, and as people move away from cash.

Look at BCH from technical point of view - does it have any innovation? The answer is no, there were coins with big blocks since the time people started making altcoins. Does it have any roadmap or team of well-known and skilled developers? No, BCH is just a copy-paste, anyone could have done it before, the only reason it gains some traction is because Bitmain and Ver have invested in marketing, paid shills, propaganda, FUD to get some attention for their coin. In the long run it's not sustainable, Bitcoin will have network stability and well-tested improvements, while most alts will be just a fuel for pump-and-dump schemes.

Half of Bcash volume comes from Korea - https://i.imgur.com/PkZ91b9.png

Korean exchanges act like proxy, because seasoned exchanges like Bittrex or Polo would probably leak who is pumping this coin or report it to authorities. Or maybe some very dirty money are involved. Also, Bitcoin's price is relatively stable, so this is not some natural migration from BTC to BCH. There will be no flippening, people who are buying BCH this high are likely to get burned, and in a year no one will care about this useless clone.

Bitcoin's future is decided via trading on open market, people who are confident in Bitcoin buy and hodl, people who doubt and prefer alternative implementations like SegWit2x or Bcash should sell their BTC and buy their altcoin. Alternatively, some people just hodl or sell both coins. This trading process decides what coin is the most profitable to mine at the moment, and the chain with most PoW is the most secure.

Making poll on a forum is useless, since it doesn't take into account amount of coins users hold. So, you could slightly improve it by requiring people to sign a message to vote. But still it won't mean much, because you'd need a few millions worth of coin-votes to make some prediction, which you won't realistically find here. Also, people can just lie about their intentions.


There was no agreement between "sides", all NYA signatories are just miners and companies from Barry Silbert group. No Bitcoin devs, no Bitcoin users.

This is a very good point, Bitcoin is different from traditional assets in many ways. First, it has started from almost zero value, unlike stocks that have IPO's. Since starting points are very different for Bitcoin and traditional assets, it is less correct to compare their growth rate in plain percentages. Also, Bitcoin is unique asset, because it's the first ever attempt to introduce new type of economy, were transactions are trustless, so it's logical to expect that Bitcoin can outperform any other traditional asset, since they represent only some fraction of economy. Overall, people are so used to small changes on traditional markets, that they automatically assume that if it grows too fast and too much, then it must be a bubble.

To me, it's obvious that Bitcoin's killer app would be Lightning Network or other second-layer scaling solutions. Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency is essentially a digital gold (which is already a huge achievement!), because it's inherently expensive to move (because every participant has to store and validate every transaction ever made), just like real gold. Solutions that will enable instant and cheap/free transaction will really turn cryptocurrencies into viable currencies and competitors of payment systems like Visa.

He wasn't contributing to Bitcoin repo on github - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

SegWit2x is a fork from Bitcoin on github - https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin

Basically, instead of making proposals and discussing it with Bitcoin developers, he just created his own project, and also named it "Bitcoin".



All those forks (XT, BU, Classic, Bcash, etc.) are essentially coming from the same people, who are only interested in quick buck, and don't care about long-term stability of Bitcoin network.

You are missing the fact that SegWit2x has no replay protection, it aims to take "Bitcoin" name from Core, and it's backed by more than 90% of miners and some big companies. This is much more serious than Bcash altcoin which had zero effect on Bitcoin's network. There are so many things that can go wrong with this kind of fork, so it's very reasonable that next version of Core client will be automatically banning SegWit2x peers. If this fork will happen, and it will get significant miner support, we will see serious dips in short term. But I believe that after some weeks or months of trading, everything will go back to normal.
So, yes, you are right - HODL on, gentlemen.

The drama was never officially over, it just started losing attention because everyone went crazy about the price. But to me this is far more important, because in November some group of businesses and miners will launch a hardfork with the same name as Bitcoin, in attempt to confuse unexperienced users. So, removal of Jeff Garzik from bitcoin repo would be justified even if he was an active contributor, but he wasn't active for the last few years, so it's not a big loss for Bitcoin Core development.

Very often I see people asking here if governments and banks are going to destroy crypto, because it aims to replace them.

But what if governments and banks can benefit from Bitcoin too? Here's a few cases that I can think about.

Just like US military invented Tor for their own use, cryptocurrencies can be used by agencies like CIA for their own purposes. They can secretly fund opposition in other countries, as well as fund private companies, researchers and political figures.

Bitcoin can be used as universal global money, it's much cheaper to store and transact than gold. Many countries are unhappy with financial hegemony of USD, and Bitcoin can easily solve this problem (although centralization if mining around China can be slightly problematic).

Banks can offer their customers better privacy via cryptocurrencies.

Thoughts?

This sensationalist clickbait article doesn't compare cryptomarket with dotcom bubble for example, they literally called Bitcoin's market "tulip mania". Which is obviously wrong, because Bitcoin is a solid, working technology, that has been around for 8 years and used by millions of people. As for ICO's and alts, they are probably in bubble, because they are essentially credits - developers sell promises to investors, with no guarantees that they can or will deliver them. Even if alts bubble will burst, it won't affect Bitcoin significantly.

That's the problem with trading, everyone have access to the same information - they can read charts and analyze them with some techniques, and when majority of people act similarly, trading becomes random and close to gambling. If you make correct prediction, you gain profit, if you were wrong, you lose money. The real people with advantage are those who have insider information or huge sums to manipulate the market.
This is why most common advice is to just hodl. If Bitcoin's technology will succeed, we will become wealthy in 10 years, if not, at least we won't lose much.

They are already trying, but for me it looks like just an experiment and attempt to look cool. Blockchain was designed to be decentralized and permissionless, if you remove those properties, you end up with a very inefficient database without any unique benefits. And government-issued cryptocurrency will be just as useless - even if they ban Bitcoin and other crypto, most people won't use statist coins. At least in Bitcoin you are paying high transaction fees for your financial freedom.

It's really-really wrong to compare marketcap of company with marketcap of commodity/currency. Especially if you try to compare Bitcoin with some payment processors. Most of the time, PayPal is better than Bitcoin for transactions, because of lower fees, faster time and their network handles around 150 transactions per second, while Bitcoin processes only 3.5 transactions per second. Bitcoin right now is mostly used as investment instrument, so it's better to compare it with other assets.

This is a solid advice, and it can be generalized as "don't gamble if you are in an altered level on consciousness". Gambling can be very risky and you might lose all available money within a few minutes or even seconds, so it's a bad idea to gamble even if you are just sleepy, tired or depressed. If you ever regretted gambling because your mind was clouded, you can install some custom authentication for gambling sites that you visit to remind yourself to gamble responsibly.

When Bitcoin was at $200 for 2 years, people were saying that it's dead, but now everyone suddenly became Bitcoin believers and decentralization advocates after the price crossed $4,000. And there were no significant changes to Bitcoin, aside from SegWit. It seems like most experts don't have their own strong opinion on Bitcoin's technology, and simply base their views on current Bitcoin's price.


There are scams in Bitcoin's ecosystem too, but you can choose from many escrows, so it's much better than centralized payment systems.