Article about this in the April 22, 2018 Wall St. journal. Seems to be back up and running with the creator out of jail.
He is trying to expand the geographic area where it is used.

This makes a strong case for use of crypto as a local currency for the under and un-banked.
Not sure it has much chance of increasing in value beyond standard inflation though

The price move seems to have started.

That's a great observation. Amazon and Google have the computing power to run a centralized network and might just do it to cut out the fees they pay Visa and Mastercard.

Bitcoin isn't really a payment system, it's pricing is too unstable and in the US every transaction triggers a taxable event (not sure about other jurisdictions). It is a store of value and a speculative investment. Everything I read from investor class people buying BTC says that are buying to hold for what they think will be significant price increases in the future. That's what people do with commodities, not what they do with a currency. It's what I'm doing. I bought a t-shirt for $30US in BTC earlier this year. It's now a >$100US t-shirt. Dumb move. Should have kept the BTC.

A real currency will have a stable value so people won't hesitate to use it for transactions. That makes it not so great an investment. If you hold real fiat currency over time (dollars, euros, yen, etc) it goes down in value because of inflation. I true digital currency would do the same. A lousy investment. I guess a digital currency that allows staking would get you a little transaction fee, but if that is you goal, put your fiat money in an interest bearing account and hope inflation doesn't exceed the interest rate.

I'm using it as well. It let me pick up some AVT after I missed out on the ICO. I will use it again to pick up other ERC tokens.
It is a little bit clunky compared to trading on an exchange, but the abiliaty to store tokens off the trading site is nice.
I like the idea of storing in a hardware wallet - need to get that going

I'm not so sure about Sia. Have you looked at how the system works? If you want to rent your hard drive, you have to post a price in Sia coin. If you ask for too much, your space won't get selected. The person renting your space has to purchase Sai coins to pay you. I suspect they will want to spend as little as possible on the tokens and give you as few tokens as possible for the service. The system is set up to drive down the cost of storage. I don't see how that can be good for the price of the token. just my opnion. I'm looking more into systems that come with a protocol - ETH, ADA, ARK and even Tezos.

Cardano: https://hackernoon.com/cardano-ethereum-and-neo-killer-or-overhyped-and-overpriced-8fcd5f8abcdf

It bounced pretty hard at $3000.
$3700 now.

Good article, thanks for sharing. He also points out that the change could result in wide adoption of the new chain, no progress on the legacy chain which dies and goes away and the "new" coin becoming de facto BTC:

If the 148 BTC chain gets more accumulated proof of work, it should be the only chain to survive, and the split would be over. All 148 BTC would then simply be bitcoins (BTC) again.

Given the cost of mining BTC, I suspect most miners will want to work on the chain with widest acceptance. There probably will be some hobby miners who keep the old chain going (like ETC) but most I think will want to go to a chain that is most widely accepted.

bump

ANT looks promising

Great point. I was also struck by the idea that people would accept some sort of digital token for their pay. When I do a job, I want cash.