The price has risen largely because of ZIRP, over-bought stock markets and suppressed metal prices.
There is a lot of free capital lying around that is looking for returns.  They can't really get anything out of any other markets at the moment, so some started punting on Bitcoin.

The price went up due to those punts, then as the price went up, more people started investing. Basically that is where we are now.  The high price doesn't really help Bitcoin's function and Bitcoin doesn't really work as a currency and isn't needed as a store of value, so it is used speculatively.

Bittrex isn't a wallet it is an exchange.
You won't double your Bitcoin, you will have the same number of Bitcoin on the Bitcoin chain, and the same number of Bitcoin Gold on the Bitcoin Gold chain.

Any wallet where you have access to your private key is fine, you should be using a wallet like that anyway!

Do nothing and your coins are perfectly safe.
With Bitcoin Gold you can separate your Bitcoin and Bitcoin gold fairly easily, just send your bitcoin to a new bitcoin address, then send the bitcoin gold (that will have remained in your old address) to a Bitcoin Gold address.

With the Segwit 2x stuff, there is no replay protection. Don't move your coins after the segwit fork, or you could lose one of the coins. Assuming the chains grow at different speeds after the fork, you will be able to split them later, but it would be best to wait and see how and when you should move them. 

If for some reason you have to send coins soon afterwards, send the more expensive coin (most probably core coin) to a suitable more expensive coin wallet. At least you would only lose the cheaper of the coins!

Is there anywhere with a Bitcoin Gold price?
I guess it will be 0.0x BTC but it is interesting to me anyway as I think it would be a step back from the centralization that has been going on for years.

It looks like Sx2 coin will die, it falls between Cash and Core becoming fairly pointless, you either want bigger blocks or you don't.

Many complain that the governments of southern Europe can't control their economies properly because they are in the Euro that is largely controlled by Germany/France.
In the past their currency would devalue, and the debt that they had racked up would be worth less. They could also print money so couldn't ever go bust.

That is a problem in western Europe, can you imagine if Zimbabwe and Germany used the same currency? Governments would have to learn to live within their means! They don't want to do that.
Economic policy would basically go out of the window, I guess they couldn't even have a base rate, or inflation other than that decided by Satoshi years ago.

It would probably be a disaster for modern economies, maybe a disaster that needs to happen, but it would be similar to going back on the gold standard.

Given that Segwit addresses can't be signed either, I think airdrop or snapshot coins need to come up with another fair way to allow non-signable addresses to claim.

I had all my Bitcoin in a 2FA address in Electrum until May, because it was supposed to be safe, I didn't realise I was missing out on stuff like Bitcore.

It seems like this is the new craze, it used to be just making a coin, then make a token and now it is forking Bitcoin.
Given that Bitcoin Cash was quickly relegated to a 'big alt', I don't imagine that future forks will be any more sucessful.

I can see a few more forks, each being less successful than the last, until they are worthless.

It does speak to the character of the people involved in the whole business of Bitcoin how the NYA agreement was made and what has happened since.
As I see it: Segwit wasn't going to get deployed, it didn't have enough support.  Big blockers wanted bigger blocks rather than Segwit, Segwitters didn't really want big blocks.

So they all agree: we do Segwit, then we double the block size. That gets enough votes and Segwit goes live, then the segwitters decide that they don't want big blocks and they already have what they want, so stop voting for the block size increase.

Is that about right? Basically the Segwit guys are screwing over the big blockers by reneging on the deal now that their part is passed?

Regulation and tax are going to be the main future hurdles for Crypto.
Bitcoin could also be superceded by a better Crypto (something not yet released) or maybe even by a Government crypto.

My main worry would be that as Bitcoin rises, governments will start to realise that there is a currency in their country that they don't control.  They won't like that.  

Well for a start, you are obviously in a nice situation and it is a problem that I am sure many people would like to have!

I too have been thinking about this, though the number of Bitcoins I hold and the initial investment I made were probably much lower than yours.
I go onto Bitcoinity and set the chart to 6 months.  6 months ago the price was $1150 or so, and we were all fairly happy with that at the time.  I assume that $1150 isn't a high enough price for you to retire though.

There is no real reason why the price couldn't fall back to $1150, hopefully it won't, but really it could. So you have to ask yourself how you will feel/cope if that does happen.  I guess for you it wouldn't be a tragedy, but it would mean that you would have to work/save for a longer time before retiring.  If your goal is to retire with the amount you have now, I don't really see much downside to doing that.  Or you could sell some of your Bitcoin, and leave some for speculation based on how much you can save in the time you have until retirement (I wouldn't want a large amount in shares now with the ATHs there)

My plan was and remains to sell when I feel that the price is high. I won't get rich from Bitcoin, but I have gone from having not much saings, to having a fairly good amount of savings.  I want to keep some skin in the Bitcoin game though, incase the price really does end up being $100k or whatever people like to predict. So I sell on occasion, and I do not buy at these prices. I am in profit and the only way that I can end up not in profit is by buying high.  If in 6 months the price is back where it was 6 months ago, and I bought at $5700, I could find myself having hardly any savings again, which would have negated the whole Bitcoin rise we are enjoying now.

Sorry for the long, rambling answer!

You were trading, oh that sucks for you (other than that you have $84k!)
As a trader you have to accept the rises and falls, you thought it was a good time to sell at about $5000, so why do you think it is a good time to buy at $5550?

I also sold a small amount a few days ago, but obviously shouldn't have in retrospect.  You can't know what the market will do, so you just have to accept what has happened and look at the situation afresh and decide based on the current price and your feelings/analysis whether you should buy, hold, wait or sell.

I think we can all agree that in the short term the lack of an airdrop this month hasn't helped the price at all!
I think it would be best to get the airdrops out of the way, so that it isn't an 'airdrop coin', rather it becomes a currency in it's own right.

I guess I won't get my way though and the pumps and dumps will continue when the next airdrop comes around.

Well I didn't forget about this thread, for some reason it stuck with me.
45 days after this thread was made would be October 19th, so another week yet.

I'll be keeping my eyes out again for that.

Love it, the floor is the price that was first breached about 1h ago!
I am happy that the price is up, I wonder if the next step is $7000 as the charts have suggested.

Can you imagine if the stock markets start to fall, this could get crazy then.

Bitsend is doing very well at the moment!  They have weekly airdrops and they aren't massive amounts, but the price has doubled recently, meaning they give out $10 a week, and will be giving out free money until 2019!

I don't think Airdrops with lots of conditions attached are true airdrops.  If it is Bitcoin related, then ok, but having to hold X of some crapcoin isn't a real airdrop if you ask me, rather just a pump of an Alt.
It's even better when they announce that the point for counting for the airdrop is in the past, so no one can game the system.

I wouldn't really include the last couple of crashes as crashes (even though in normal terms they are huge huge crashes).
Because Bitcoin is so volatile, a 30% move can happen in hours and be recovered from just as quickly.

The real crashes were after the $30, $276 and $1200 peaks. They were longer lasting and deeper.  If we have another fall like that, then $1000 could be tested in the next year or 2.
It is depressing going through those phases, just look at the Bitcoin move on netflix to see how people felt after a year of falling prices.

I don't think we will get too close to $3381 in the next week or so.
The price is treading water at the moment, $4000 seems to be the ceiling, with only occasional moves about it.  $3650 now could easily be $4000 again later today with the crazy swings we have been seeing over the last months.

I expect a fall, but not yet.

So you mean a South African Supermarket doesn't accept bitcoin, and probably won't in the near future?
Wow, thanks for this update!

Sometimes the fees are far to high for Bitcoin to be used as a currency anyway. And will they accept zero confirmation transactions? For online shopping it might be ok, but in store it won't work.

It only adjusts slowly though. Look at Bitcoin Cash when it split off, it took quite a long time before it got back to 10 minutes per block.
China is a powerhouse in mining, if they are banned it would be a nightmare for Bitcoin short term.

If it is banned, I can imagine other countries doing the same at some point too. If bitcoin got so big that it threatened national currencies, they could just ban mining. Even western countries could just slap a big tax on it, that would end that.

You mean going into debt to buy bitcoin?
If you do, then the price might fall, then you won't have the funds to pay back the credit.

Or you pay back slowly over time, then end up paying lots of interest.  It isn't just Bitcoin that is bad to buy on credit cards, everything is bad if you don't pay it off at the end of the month.