The rise in interest in US, do you consider it an advantage or disadvantage? Can that improve the value of bitcoin considering your $2000 predicted price by the end of the year

You are confusing something here

As much as I discard technical analysis as a viable way for predicting and evaluating future price behavior, I still can't help noting that just one lower high after a few consecutive higher lows mid-to-long term (basically, 250-750-550-1100-750-1300-950) doesn't tell us anything. Strictly speaking, we haven't yet made a new lower high, since we barely touched the support level at 900 dollars per coin (i.e. the support there hasn't yet been broken), and right now we are mostly trading sideways. In fact, we may well yet make a new higher high in the coming weeks (that would be an ATH, obviously). Other than that, the price may go below 900 dollars (say, down to 600 dollars), but it just means that you may be buying up all the way down (personally, that's what I'm prepared to do myself)

Well, there's 2 possibilities that I can envision right now (there may be more)

#1:) You have big companies, lets say Blockstream, that provides a 'blockstream' channel... so if I want to send a payment to Bob, and we both have a channel with Blockstream, we could do it through them.

#2:) You have some kind of smart wallet that automatically accepts third party requests on your behalf , and it handles all the details so you do not have to trust them, and if one of those third parties happens to be an unscrupulous character, well you can certain easily claim plausible deniability just as if some anonmymous person was downloading a torrent...all the wallet sees is an IP address.  Obviously we want to stay private, get more privacy, not less.

EDIT:  If we cannot describe exactly how scenario #2 is going to be implemented (and we can't describe another scenario), then the alternative is that you are going to be using a big company (like Blockstream) cough paypal2.0 cough and relying on them to transact.  so.... i am wondering how deeply people who are really excited about LN have thought this through and would like to hear others' thoughts.

I think by this coming months bitcoin would be stable at price ranges 900$-1300$ and will move up and down between these price range. After that there will be two possible outcomes. It will either be a dump to below 900$ which is very likely to happen if there will be a news that will bring price down to that price. If not, The other possible outcome is a pump to above 1300$ which I think won't happen unless the debate between Bitcoin Unlimited and Segwit is resolved.

The top line is that it is a winning strategy overall

If you sell your bitcoins today, you are likely set to lose tomorrow (by letting go a good chance to get rich really quick). On the other hand, if you buy bitcoins now, you will take an opportunity and use the FUD behind the BU split against BU itself and to your advantage by buying low. If the old Bitcoin fails, you will have the new Bitcoin in absolutely the same amount, if the new one fails, you will have the old one which thereby proves its strength, might and power. So getting rid of bitcoins would be a losing strategy while acquiring more is seemingly a winning one whatever way the events are going to unfold in the future. Just keep your bitcoins in your personal wallet so that no one could steal this opportunity from you

Frankie, that wasn't my understanding of how LN works (not saying i'm right .cause im just
learning how this is all supposed to work...) but the point is: if Alice already has a channel
with Bob , I dont need to open a channel with Bob myself cause i can just go through Alice.

What am I missing, or why are we not on the same page here?

A known scam wouldn't become the third cryptocurrency. Or it could, if it was in months, but DASH has been there for three years. I like when people in crypto community just make their suggestions about scams, based on nothing

Absolutely.

Blockstream is the most obvious culprit here...but its possible BU is controlled opposition.

I always liked the idea of just removing the blocksize limit:  Keep in mind that when Satoshi
put in the 1mb, the average block size was 1kb... yep 1000 times smaller.

At this point, I'd be happy as a peach if everyone just got behind a hardfork to 32mb or 8mb.

No. Hal convinced Satoshi to add a 1MB maxblocksize limit as an anti-spam measure. This in an era where most blocks were less than 1KB in size (1000x smaller than the limit), and most transactions carried no transaction fee.

Thank you for your questions. I didn't trade regularly, because earlier I did only long-term trades. But nevertheless, I have traded for 4 years already. I don't know whether you consider it important, but I bought some eth on the pre-sale to sell them at 20$ in November, I guess. Because I saw the potential in Ethereum. And the primary goal of my channel is not about trading, this is about my thoughts and ideas, including thoughts about trading and prices, speculation lol. For example, just a while ago I wrote a short note, why DASH could be a big deal. Check it out.

As a long-term investment, dash seems to be appropriate. Because if we want to use cryptocurrency(cc) in future to pay for commodities and goods, the means should be fast. Bitcoin transactions are long, 30 minutes. That's awful, nobody wants to stay at the cashier desk for 30 minutes! That's why dash or ethereum with instant transactions should be prevalent. But dash is only about money. Ethereum is also something else. I see it like this

Well, that's a whole load of wrong "thinking" they're doing (and I don't believe it. That's what jonald & trolls say, but they can only be thinking something completely different)

The devs cannot decide the blocksize without taking the users with them, it's that simple. External devs have tried to convince users to accept 2MB blocksize increases twice (XT & Classic), and no-one followed them. That demonstrates that the users are ultimately in charge, whatever the devs propose.

I admire your objectivity in this whole thing.  Most people (including myself) tend to get polarized to a position and then start to look for evidence to support their position while ignoring/denying evidence to the contrary.

BU is not an attack on core devs, so much as it is an end-around of the braindead policy of not doing a simple increase to maxblocksize. Last year even. Core devs get to set their own policy. But core is not the entirety of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is permissionless. BU has exactly as much authority as does core. Core devs can also be left bereft when the majority decides bigger blocks are what is needed now.

In the end, the market will determine the direction Bitcoin turns - toward core, BU, another, or on the path of status quo.

look, divide and conquer is the oldest scheme in the book and could very well be going on.

But a lot of times one of the groups being conquered really did nothing wrong and is
being attacked and another group are useful idiots who are doing the attacking.  Think about it.

are you talking about OP or me?

Calm down jonald, we know your dream is dead and all, but there's no need to lash out at people telling you facts you wished were not true



You do not support on-chain scaling, you support on-chain capacity increases.

And because you think and behave as if blocksize increases are the only method of improving transaction capacity that exist, your views on the matter are null and void. You're blinkered, you are compulsive-obsessive about the blocksize, and nothing else.
 


And I suppose BU's attitude of "attack the BTC chain till it's face is in the dirt" demonstrates how much they value free and open competition, or how much they care?

nah, my guess is that this "resistance" around $1000 is just a mentality thing with this particular price. it has been like this before too in a smaller scale. people find it a good target to sell at because it is a round number in USD market.

What evidence do you have as to their preponderance?

I agree with the sentiment that bitcoin is being held back by criminals who use it. But I expect they are a minority, particularly from an economic standpoint. A thousand two-bit scammers don't possess the economic clout of a Barry Silbert or Cesare Wences (sp?), or the small army of geeks and libertarians that first embraced and continue to embrace bitcoin.