Currently the network is topping out at about 450,000 Confirmed Transactions Per Day or 5 transactions a per second. (some websites report higher figures for the tps but this is the average over a day)

Visa can handle around 2000 transactions per second.

What I would do if I was the almighty supreme Bitcoin overlord would be to decrease the block time from 10 minutes down to 1 minute.

Also reduce the block reward by a factor of 10 to keep the coin supply rate exactly the same.

I would then increase the block size to 2 MB or 4MB.

That would still only give the network about 100 - 200 Transactions per second but it would probably be enough to tide the network over for a couple of years atleast.

That should be enough time to get the Lightning networks and atomic swaps up and running.

If you combine Lightning network with atomic swaps you would essentially come up with a kind of chain lightning that could go across block-chains as needed in times of network stress (such as we just had).

Unfortunately a plan as radical as this would never be accepted by the miners nor the community and so it will remain in fantasy land until the network grinds to a slow crawl for a few weeks.. then someone might be bold enough to do something about the problem.

One can only dream.

I’d also add that you should also identify your version of a blue chip (in my case it’s ETH). The thing you’ve researched and know is sound, and would bet your entire trading stack on if someone put a gun to your head.

I have thought for cryptodecades (so like 1 year) that ETH was, and continues to be, undervalued relative to the market. Hence it’s my personal blue chip.

Given that the first thing people want to do when panicking is to “sell back to fiat”, you’ll note that lots of your funds are usually only convertible to another crypto on most exchanges. So regardless of what you want to do, you basically cannot make it home to fiat quickly. What to do?

Instead of panicking - either hold fast in what you’ve got OR retreat but retreat to something YOUVE done research on and think is blue chip (for some it’s BTC, others it’s NEO, others it’s VeChain, others it’s some combo, etc etc). That way even when “everything is going down”, if you took a few moonshots and they look terrible, you at least always KNOW where intermediate homebase is. If you haven’t thought of this stuff yet, well you should have, but thankfully Reddit’s community has vetted certain names over and over again and for all the flack people here get, there actually ARE decent and great traders on this site. If you’re invested and panicking and are a noob and don’t know the above names, get to work here and see which one of the names you like.

And, if you do do such a thing and retreat, I’d suggest just hanging on for a bit in that position. If your blue chip is getting hammered — well that’s just what sometimes happens in crypto, and a correction back up will occur because the underlying cryptofundamentals are, relatively speaking, good. Also, note the overall marketcap - cryptoblues usually only get hammered when the ENTIRE marketcap is going down. And if that’s happening, remember that history has recently shown that 100-200 billion dollar swings in the overall MC happen quite readily.

Not rocket science but I feel today newbies might be nervous. Keep your heads in the game. As someone here once said, it takes balls of steel to create wealth - and those balls are only necessary when the market is going DOWN, not up.

market cap != total value.

I think you are also comparing circulating money to bitcoins that would mostly be in short-term deposits on exchanges and a lot of bitcoins are lost forever.

I wouldn't mind buying coins and managing wallets for other people for a living. I mean that sincerely, like not ripping them off in the process at all. I'm sure many people get too busy to buy a coin they want and store it.

Well, in simple terms a currency will only go as far as its usability. If companies hop onto bitcoin and other various cryptos (for many, many reasons they will in the future) this becomes a typical currency. What makes it different is the fact that its capped, so no government can step in and deflate the currency by pumping more of it into the economy. As long as people trust and use it, it will keep soaring higher and higher. Of course there will always be those to HODL forever just like people with USD, but they'll make a lot more in the long run than any USD inflation will get you. So, if people value it as real currency it becomes supply and demand.

Governments fear competition for power. Mayer Rothschild once famously said: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws"

Or perhaps you remember the golden rule “he who has the money makes the rules”.

In either case, the creation of a competing currency that was meant to be used in the place of the US Dollar, is not something they want to see.

It is difficult to separate the Federal Reserve from the US Government in this instance. Some conspiracy theorists have even suggested the Bitcoin is a US Government creation meant to replace the US Dollar. I have no evidence for or against that theory. But given the creator of Bitcoin has never been found, one has to think it’s a distant possibility.

Back to crypto currencies. Why would they be an issue for a Government?

For one, taxes. If you could earn money in something that has value but isn’t reported via the normal W2, that would mean the Government was losing out on income. Governments HATE to lose out on tax income. The same goes for buying and selling, such transactions would not be taxable or even traceable.

Another example is the ability to manipulate the currency. This is a famous one for the Fed. If they lose their control over money creation, then they lose the ability to tighten or loosen market conditions. They also loose the ability to provide liquidity for bail outs to banks and wall street.

The only other items I can think of that worry the Government so much is precious metal. They have gone to great lengths to keep the gold and silver price managed. While they could try the same thing with crypto, it would be far easier to simply outlaw the exchanges and any monetary transfers that don’t meet specific criteria.

The value of bitcoin is all in our minds, just like any currency. It's only valuable because we both agree that it is.

Aubrey de Grey has some pretty interesting thoughts on the subject.

De Grey's research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), a collection of proposed techniques to rejuvenate the human body and stop aging. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage.

As far that mathematics exist, also Bitcoin will exist. Those 2 things can't just disappear... because are deep in our world. even here typing/posting, the math is doing what it have to do, bits, 0 and 1. Same with Bitcoin.

Gold:

Monetry value = scarce, fungible, decent medium of exchange, potential unit of account.

Utility value = good at making physical jewlery (malleable)

Bitcoin:

Monetary value = scarce, fungible, excellent medium of exchange, potential unit of account.

Utility value = ability to record data in a global immutable encodable ledger (single source of truth)

For the people who understand golds potential but discount bitcoins. Realise that in an increasingly globalised and digital world, immutable uncorruptable record keeping is much more valuable than the ability to make jewlery.

If you can afford to lose the principal, then you might make the investment. It's a thought experiment: will you lose sleep over it when the value halves? This question only you can answer for yourself.

No one knows for sure what will happen with bitcoin and her price. There are no guarantees, just indicators. The indicators seem to point upwards, but anything is possible.

Just make sure that you take proper precautions on where to store your coin.

They are only slowing down the inevitable.

A blockchain is a decentralized network with a memory.

Bitcoin provides some anonymity but it’s up to bitcoiners where they want to be on the spectrum from fully anonymous to fully identified.

Bitcoin transactions provide some clues which could be combined with other information to de-anonymize a user if they are not careful.

99% or more of the ads were scams, shitcoins and shitty ICOs, so I can kinda understand why they did it.

I wish they would just spend more resources on weeding out all the bad actors instead of a blanket ban on crypto though.

1) only play with money you can afford to lose.

2) NEVER EVER make a buy or sell that is triggered by a feeling of 'not wanting to miss out on a sudden development'. also known as fomo: fear of missing out. Invariably, you will make bad decisions if you do.

3) never buy on a sudden upswing. Especially if you don't know why it's swinging up. You may be buying into a hype curve triggered by other people's fomo. When that happens, you'll lose big in the correction that follows. The one exception is if you see a spike and then also find a good reason. When segwit was finally locked in for bitcoin, all the uncertainty ended and the price shot up for a very good reason. Jumping on that train can be a good decision.

4) when you finally take a profit and sell, walk away. Don't keep looking at the price. If you do and you see it going beyond the sell price, you may be tempted to jump in again and take a bit more profit. Not only do you pay 2 extra transaction fees, but you will also risk buying into an overshoot which corrects 2 minutes later, and you lose the profits you realized 5 minutes earlier.

5) understand that by playing carefully and with consideration, you may actually miss an occasional coin suddenly increasing in price. that is not to be helped. However, it also means that you are not making a lot of blind gambles that will cost you a lot of money.

6) do some research, and only buy into projects for which you actually understand the purpose and which you believe may work in real life. a coin needs more than fanboys shills to be valuable long term.

7) be very carefull when buying during a time period when there is a lot of euphoria and all coins are going strong. If the entire market is going strong, all coins do well, even the shitty ones

8 ) learn to recognize pump and dump cycles and avoid them. the saying in poker is: if you don't know who the sucker is, it's you. don't be the sucker.

9) look at the long term prices and use baselines, triangles and fibonaci and try to think of what you think the correct value to buy is. with some basic effort you can figure it out and set the buy order and walk away.

10) Do NOT try to play the game of buying and selling dips. buy dips if you want to play that game, but don't sell with the idea of buying back shortly after to game the dip. this is a good recipe for disaster. If you were holding NEO 2 days ago when it was 0.0039 BTC and sold with the idea of buying back at 0.0033, you'd be cursing yourself badly now that it shot up to 0.0064

11) when buying, don't just look at the timeline, also look at the order book. If you see big sell walls that are not balanced by buy walls, it may be better to wait for the price to drop some more.

12) doing the things above takes time and consideration. you will miss out from time to time by waiting to long, but you will also not make catastrophic errors. Also long as your positions are string, you can continue to keep playing the game.

I highly highly recommend the Ledger Nano S Hardware wallet. It holds up to 5 different cryptocurrency slots, swap in/out with over 20 cryptos without losing anything, and it's the most secure cold storage hardware wallet solution on the market right now. Never had a problem with it, works flawlessly. I actually have 2 for redundancy.

As long as we are sharing guesses, here's mine: Satoshi Nakamoto is dead, killed in a mundane event like a car crash. We will never know his identity.

And we don't need to. His legacy is enough.

What the media label "bubble" could also be called a "price discovery ". What is happening now has never happened before. Although bitcoin mimics the stock market very closely, it isn't actually the same thing. And as bitcoin hasn't gone through an entire market cycle as yet, who knows what the real price may be?

It could be worth $100 or $7 million. Nobody knows for sure and we won't know for a few years. It will continue to crash and recover stronger because the market cap is still very puny by comparison with the share market. There is tons of room to grow, so hold on to your hat...

Currencies come in two basic forms: commodity money and fiat money.

Commodity money is as valuable as the material it's made of. A pound of iron is worth whatever it costs to buy one pound of iron. Pearls, precious stones, gold, salt... It's basically a somewhat valuable material in a form that makes it easy to trade. It's basically bartering, but the payment is in something easier to work with than the goods and services themselves.

The problem with this is that is that people will have different ideas of the value of something. Iron might be a great commodity for payment in one place, but so rare, or so common elsewhere that it just doesn't work. Sometimes, the value isn't so much in its utility as in its desirability, as with gold. Some peoples treated gold as less valuable than e.g. flint or slate, which had more utility to them. Today, most money isn't commodity money.

TL;DR: Commodity money is money made of something valuable, or valuable things used as money.

Fiat money is money that has value because someone, a bank or government, said it has. Sometimes, it's used to represent a specific amount (a gold or silver standard) or a specific percentage of a total. These are both susceptible to changes in the price of that commodity internationally, and to gains or losses of the bank or government's total amount of that commodity.

Then there's the additional printing of money, which cuts into the value of all money of that currency. If the idea is to keep the money representative of the gold/silver/whatever standard, you have to print more money when the price goes up or when you get more of whatever your currency is based on; and destroy money when the price goes down or when you lose some of that stuff. But you can also print more money to pay the bills, without actually having actual backing for that extra money. Because the economy today is based on business and trade far more than actual commodities, it's hard to figure out how much money you can print and keep the value of the currency right.

TL;DR: Fiat money is money that isn't valuable in itself, but everyone treats it that way because it represents something valuable.

The problem is that banks and governments want to have control of their money themselves rather than rely on some other government to handle it. There are places in the world where the government is so unstable that they prefer to use other nations' currencies instead, and there are places where many states or nations have joined together into an economic union and share a single currency. So we might soon have a single currency.

The reason we have so many is that the economic theory behind currency has developed over thousands of years, but humans have been so spread out over the planet that everyone kind of developed their own version. We never needed just a single one. As convenient as it would be today, nations would argue about who'd be in charge of it, what the printing policies would be, what it would be backed by, and things like that. A single currency would put the whole world under the control of whomever controls that currency, which is a bad thing.