I don´t think that this is the likely outcome. Bitcoin is rather going to be
used as an asset in order to preserve and increase the purchasing
power of your wealth than as a real currency. The immutability of the Bitcoin
blockchain is suited really well for this kind of use.

I envision a future where people store their wealth in assets like Bitcoin while still
mainly transacting in government-issued currencies, which are not
blockchain based.

I´m not so sure about this. Most Bitcoin ATMs that I have seen
are not exactly transparent about the fees that they charge.
Instead of displaying in red letters that you are paying a 6 %
fee to cover the costs of the operator and the BTC transaction, they
simply give you a worse rate that includes the fee.
By doing this, a newcomer may be completely unaware that he
is getting screwed by an uncompetitive rate.

Professional buyers surely don´t use these ATMs, because why would
you want to pay a 6 % premium when you can buy Bitcoin at an exchange
like Bitstamp for 0.25 % in fees.

I think it is too early to call this a trend. The BTC price may have
crossed the 7000 $ barrier, but it isn´t clear whether it will be able
to stay at these levels at all (in fact BTC dropped to ~6950 $ right now).

It is entirely possible that this was just a small price rise to squeeze some shorts
on BitMEX or Bitfinex. In my opinion it is pretty suspicious that we always see these
price increases just when short positions are reaching pretty high levels at these
platforms.

The ETF decision at the end of September is about a Bitcoin ETF
that is actually backed by Bitcoins and not based on BTC futures or
another Bitcoin derivative. In this regard therefore the corresponding
application is different to all previous Bitcoin ETF applications.

Having said that I still think that they are going to postpone the decision
until February. And then they will probably deny it as everyone expects.

I have a hard time believing that the meeting will change anything with regards to
the ETH price. The price is simply doomed, because of all the ICO teams that are sitting
on a ton of ETH that they want to convert to fiat or to Bitcoin.

ICOs like Tezos have earned the ETH equivalent of hundreds of millions
of $ and they would like to get rid of it. Even if the ETH devs pull
off a miracle and solve one of the many problems that Ethereum is facing, the
amount of ICOs that are looking to cash out will stop any substantial price increase
from happening.

I recall that some gambling operators were reluctant to
switch to the bech32 address format, because this would
make the tracking of transactions easier for the blockchain
analytics companies.

E.g. if only one popular gambling site uses bech32 addresses and
a player only deposits to gambling websites from his preferred exchange,
it could be easy to identify the addresses of the gambling operator, which
would enable conclusions about the transaction activity of other users of
the gambling site.

This problem would obviously be solved if enough gambling websites
start to use the bech32 address format.

The chart that you posted shows the price development of Gold
before and after the introduction of Gold ETFs. There won´t be an ETF for XRB
ever therefore it is highly laughable that you try to compare these charts.

We won´t even see a Bitcoin ETF for years and XRB is way too unknown
to be the base for financial products like an ETF.

As I already pointed out I somewhat agree with most of your claims, but
you should really stop posting the bolded sentence. After all you have repeated it
dozens of times now while being the main person, who calls BetKing a scam.

Betting volume at BetKing has actually picked up since Dean started running the leaderboard
promotions. However, right now the website seems to be down and I´m just getting
a Cloudflare error message:

Nonetheless this system doesn´t work in various situations.
E.g. you can broadcast a closing transaction if you don´t like how
the counterparty behaves, but it is possible that the main layer is too
congested for it to go through at the time or you don´t have the necessary liquid
funds for a transaction fee that ensures a fast confirmation.

If the main layer is too congested and you are in the situation where you
want to close a channel unilaterally, you are screwed.

You can´t. Before the ICO when PRC and BetKing were still running
on a bankroll that everyone could invest in the current bankroll was always
visible. This isn´t the case anymore and therefore you would probably
have to ask Dean about the current size of the bankroll.

My estimation of at least 500 BTC was just based on an educated
guess based on "industry standards" and the current max win (the
max win is still displayed at the site as actmyname pointed out).

Maybe you underestimate Mr. Cosby.
He could show some remorse and give up the private keys to the corresponding
wallets that contain the BTC equivalent of 5M $.

This amount matches the BTC amount reported by the media and all
creditors and the court are happy.

Afterwards Mr. Cosby secretly sells off his remaining BTC whenever he needs some fiat,
because he obviously bought way more than 5M$ of BTC and just spread this
rumor in order to downplay the true extent of his BTC holdings.

Personally, I don´t really like this news, because Mr. Cosby will be filthy rich
when BTC hits higher price levels. I can think of persons that would be more deserving
of that kind of unprecedented wealth than him.

I thought exactly the same when I read the article.
All it takes is one guy that reports a bogus number and the other
"media outlets" spread the misinformation.

Most so called cryptocurrency journalists didn´t even know
Bitcoin when MtGox was still operational and therefore it doesn´t really
come as a surprise that they have no clue about the MtGox
business.

The problem with coins like BNB and KCS is that exchanges can lose popularity
(e.g. people gravitate towards a new superior exchange). If that happens,
you are stuck with useless coins that are tied to an exchange that is no
longer successful.

Just take a look at the best altcoin exchanges from a few years ago. Most
of them are either dead or have a fraction of their former popularity. The most
popular exchanges of today like Binance weren´t even around back then.
I would stay far away from these exchange coins unless you are a heavy trader at the
exchange and you intend to profit from the reduced fees.

If I understand the situation correctly, we are talking
about different government agencies here.

Bitcoin futures were approved by the CTFC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission)
while the BTC ETF applications are subject to approval by the SEC (Securities and Exchange
Commission).

Therefore they don´t necessarily follow the same strategy.
Besides, futures and ETFs serve a very different purpose for
potential investors. I´d argue that these products aren´t
really comparable (e.g. the hedging of other positions / holdings
is a major reason for the use of futures while an ETF isn´t
really suitable for hedging).

This is impossible. Any potential upside of the ETH price
is limited by the huge amount of ICOs that are sitting on a ton
of ETH that they want to convert to BTC or to fiat. If ETH would
rise 100 $, the price increase would cause many ICO teams to
get rid of additional parts of their ICO proceeds.

Some ICOs are sitting on the ETH equivalent of hundreds of
millions of $ and they are looking to sell. There is no way that
ETH can have a sustainable price increase.

This could actually turn out to be really good for Bitmain.

Let´s remember that after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork the combined
value of BTC + BCH was higher than the BTC value before the fork.

If we assume that the combined value of the two (or are there even
more?) BCH forks will be bigger than the current BCH value, this
could be a real windfall for them. Of course they control enough coins to dump
the chain that they prefer less into oblivion.

I don´t think that get rich quick noobs are the main demographic that is
rooting for an ETF approval. An ETF approval would also be a great chance
for some of the early adopters, who are sitting on a ton of coins to get rid of
big parts of their holdings.

I´m thinking about people like the Winklevoss twins, who have allegedly
never sold a single one of their Bitcoins (they have bought a space flight with
BTC, but this isn´t directly selling).

I thought that it is already drastically cheaper than centralized solutions right now.

From the Sia website:


I wasn´t thinking about a single hotel, but rather about the big hotel companies that own
hundreds of hotels (e.g. Radisson Blu). But after reading your reply I have to admit that even in
this scenario there isn´t really a need for thousands of nodes to compute that contract.

I´ll post here again when if I come up with a better idea. Coming up with useful
applications for smart contracts is incredibly hard in any case (even though all
the companies in the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance seem to disagree with me for now).

I think the BTC market needs to mature until something like this is possible.

Let´s imagine that Chelsea is buying a player for the BTC equivalent of 60M GBP.
They wouldn´t even be able to acquire 60M in BTC without huge losses due to slippage.
If they would make an OTC deal, they can also expect to get a rate that is worse than the
spot price.

Additionally, UK banks are not particularly fond of cryptocurrencies and I assume
that most Premier League clubs also use English banks. This might change in the future,
but right now I regard this as a pipe dream.

This is wrong in my opinion. Ethereum has many issues that are unrelated
to its initial distribution.

E.g. the size of the Ethereum blockchain. It has already crossed the 1 Terabyte mark
and is growing everyday. This leads to an increased centralization, because it
gets increasingly difficult for average people to download the full blockchain simply
due to the disk space requirements.

And this is just one of many other problems.