The current system of international money transfer through SWIFT is too much of a hassle. Sometimes the payments gets delayed by up to a week, and on rare occasions, the transactions are lost without any trace. That is one of the reasons why the banks are experimenting with new technology such as Blockchain.

What about the altcoin rise during April/May? If you had invested BTC10 in Ether three months back, then your stash will be worth BTC100 right now. Not satisfied with the returns? I can sweeten it even further. Suppose you had invested in Ripple instead of Ether. Your stash will be worth around BTC200 now.

Reaching $5,000 per coin actually doesn't require much of an effort. Even if Bitcoin re-captures the previous crypto-coin market share of 80%, then $5K can be easily achieved (if the crypto market cap remains constant). And there is a strong chance of that happening, once the uncertainties surrounding the fork are removed.

I had already mentioned this in another thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1984456.msg19797383#msg19797383

But it is scary. Imagine some Bitcoin millionaire with thousands of coins suddenly passing away. No one else knows about the private keys and all the coins will be lost for ever. It is tragic, as that money could have been used to educate thousands of children, or to provide food for hungry people.

Unreal money? Unreal money is something which doesn't have any use. There are a lot of examples, but "hell money" of China comes to my mind. But Bitcoin is not unreal. It is real money. It is having a monetary value, and you can purchase a lot of things using Bitcoin.

This is very interesting news. If Barclays ventures in to the Bitcoin sector, then it can be mutually beneficial for both the parties. There is a good chance that in the next 4-5 years Bitcoin will overtake other payment gateways such as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. Those who jump in early will reap the maximum gains.

Perhaps Ashok Vaswani has decided that he doesn't want to go down in the history books as a sore loser like George Bell.

Still 35 days to go. For a currency which is just 8-years old, 35 days is a lot of time. And a lot can happen during this time. There are a number of possibilities, which I don't want to discuss here. I can only say one thing. There is no considerable upswing in the trade volumes, which means that the major investors are not selling their coins.

OMG! I was about to withdraw $10 from my Microworkers account (through Skrill), and I was planning to purchase Bitcoins from Paxful using that amount. Now I have to think twice before using this site. And $10 is a very big amount for me.  

This is a very sensitive subject. Right now I am not much bothered about it, since my holdings are quite small. But in future, if my holdings get bigger in size, then I need to think about it. Perhaps I will transfer all my coins to a paper-wallet, and then take the printout of the private keys and keep them in some bank locker.

It is still not a 100% certainty. More like 90% right now. I checked Coin Dance, and they are still showing 86.8% support for SegWit2X. But this is just "intention" or "support". We don't know whether this support level will remain at the time of implementation. Also, there is a chance that some bug may be found with the SegWit2X code.

So the net transaction fee has increased by as much as 100x during the last few months. Only the miners are profiting out of this, with everyone else losing out. Hopefully things will be sorted out by August.

I have also noticed this. Whenever the BTC prices go down by 2% or 3%, the altcoin prices do down as much as 10% or 15%. For example, according to coinmarketcap, BTC is down by 4% during the last 24 hours. But during the same period, ETH is down by 12% and XRP is down by 9%. This shows the extreme dependence which these coins have on Bitcoin.

That happened with most of the crypto-currencies. If you remember, in 2010, the price of Bitcoin was just around $0.001 per coin (as per the exchange rates from New Liberty Standard, the only Bitcoin exchange of that time). The rates went up to $0.10 per coin later that year and in 2013 BTC attained a peak valuation of $1,230 per coin. The increase was even higher than that with Ether.

I believe that it is still too early to jump in to such conclusions. Look at the last 4-5 days. The exchange rates have declined by almost 5% and a lot of short-term investors have lost their money. But the big deal is on August 1. No one is sure how the hard/soft fork is going to impact the Bitcoin exchange rates. A lot of uncertainty is there.

A stable price will aid in popularizing the crypto-currency. Right now, many of the merchants are hesitant to accept Bitcoin, due to its volatility. And since confirmations take 2-3 hours sometimes, this volatility can create a lot of issues. If the exchange rates become stable, then a lot more merchants and websites will be ready to accept payments in Bitcoin.

Yeah... this happens all the time. Crypto-currencies are highly volatile, at least when compared to the other investment assets such as equities, mutual funds, bullion and real estate. And that is their attractiveness. You can either gain big or loss big. A single trade can make you a billionaire, and if you are unlucky then you can become a beggar in a single day. 

No.. the maximum I got is around 20% to 25% (and lost all of that in other trades). How can anyone even get 100x profits? Only those who had invested in Ethereum or Ripple many years ago can boast of that sort of returns. Ethereum was trading at around $0.95 in January 2016. It went up to almost $400 per coin and now it is trading at around $280 per coin.

Blockfolio is good for tracking the crypto-investments. I have installed Blockfolio in my Xiaomi mobile, but it is quite frustrating that there is no desktop version of this App. I can open it only in my mobile. It is not possible to track the investments from my laptop. Is there any free App or service, which can be used in both Laptop and mobile?

As far as I know BTC-e doesn't require any ID verification, irrespective of the amount of coins you trade. Also, they have been around since 2011, and I believe that it is one of the most reliable and trustworthy exchange sites. But I don't understand the second part of your post. How can you say that Ether is more anonymous than Bitcoin?

It is quite simple, isn't it. If the demand is high enough, then the prices will increase. Now if you ask me what triggers this demand, then it gets more difficult. Increase in the number of users can be one reason. Another reason can be investment by the big players. But the most important trigger can be increase in the number of exchanges and shopping sites which accept this coin.