What is causing the mempool congestion? Has there been a recent difficulty adjustment for either Bch or btc?

Thanks for any info. 

Can anyone explain how the cme futures work. I didn't know anything about futures before this and i seem to be reading conflicting information on them.

The CNBC guy in the following link seems to be saying i would buy a contact at the current price and could set a SL and TP. It's done on 5 coins so any up or down is multiplied by 5. This to me is exactly the same as a cfd with 5x leverage. Is this not the case?

https://www.c[Suspicious link removed]m/2017/12/15/bitcoin-futures-are-about-to-get-another-big-boost.html


The other explanation i've seen is that i would agree to pay a certain amount for a bitcoin in the future. So say the current price is $20,000. I would agree that at the end of the month i would pay $22,000 for a bitcoin. If the price is $24,000 on this date i would make $2,000 and the person on the other side of the contract who is shorting bitcoin would lose $2,000.

At fork.lol it's currently saying it's 1.04 more profitable to mine BCH than BTC.

How can this be when BTC is 6 times the price of BCH. Does this mean BCH miners will be producing blocks about 6 times faster than on the BTC chain?

https://fork.lol/

I see blocks are still being mined albeit rather slowly on the BCH blockchain. Does anyone know why it's being mined at all seeing as it's much less profitable than BTC atm? Is it the BCH hardcore supporters determined to keep it going in the hope it will make them money long term?

I've read the BCH hard fork is attempting to sort the daa problem where by blocks are being created much to quickly which will result in the next block halving reward change happening way before BTC. This would result in nobody mining it.

I'm assuming then the idea is to make it so blocks are created at a more even and steady pace i.e 1 block every 10 minutes. Will this not be a new problem for BCH though. If blocks are created at roughly the same rate as BTC blocks why would anyone mine it when it's value is so much lower?

How is the initial price determined for any coin which splits from BTC? Is it just a case of people get their coin then stick it on an exchange and see what people are willing to pay for it?

Coinmarketcap.com is currently showing futures for B2X at $1,850. Presumably this could influence the initial price people are willing to buy/sell B2X?

Is it correct saying that on the 1st August BTC was upgraded to segwit1x
and the split off chain known as Bitcoin cash was given a 2mb increase
to its block size (but didn't get the segwit1x upgrade)?
 
Also for the coming November fork is it correct that BTC which now has segwit1x
will not change and the split off coin B2x (or whatever it will be called)
will be given the segwit2x upgrade? So B2x would now have the extra space
on the block given by segwit1x and also increase to a 2mb block size given
by segwit2x.