Although it is possible, I really think it would be quite unfair for bcash to overtake ethererum from it's second place. Bcash is so overrated in my opinion, since there are far better coins out there with much more potencial than bcash has. The only reason why it is sitting on third place, it's because they are holding bitcoin name, and have Roger Ver promoting them all over the place, and probably pumping it as well. Just look at bgold, it went strait up to 5th place, right above LTC and Dash. The same thing will probably happen with bdiamond when it gets listed on coinmarketcap. We will see all BTC forks on top5, and this is not because they are good coins, it's just because they are forks of bitcoin and nothing else. I think this will stop eventually though.

Well I try to talk with my friends and family and I usually do my best to explain them the concept and then encourage them to start digging information by themselves. Lets not forget that we still don't know what will be the future of bitcoin, so I always advise them to really search for information so they can actually give me their own opinion about BTC, and we can have a good discussion about it. I got a few people interested, and some even invested, so I guess I'm doing my part.

In a near future I don't think I will have to do anything though, since bitcoin is starting to show up in well known TV-shows (like big bang theory, and Mr. Robot), so if people are curious, once they see these shows, they will look into it as well.

I'm not sure if it's a scam or not, but buying futures of a fork is always risky. A lot of users lost a huge amount of money because they decided to buy segwit2x futures, before the fork even happened. At least bdiamond already forked, but just like bgold they will probably took a while before we can claim or mine any coins. If they are ever released I will try to claim them, specially if they are traded closed to their futures price, but I would never buy bdiamond futures though. Actually I don't think anyone should by things they can get for free.

Decentralized exchanges are not new, and I think there a few for you to try, but they usually don't have to much liquidity because they are still not very popular. They all rely on blockchain so don't forget you will need to download and install a client in order to use them, and you can't just open an account on a website, like you would do with a normal centralized exchange. Finally, it's not very easy to trade tokens that exist outside the decentralized blockchain, at least not until atomic swaps get implemented.

As for a list of decentralized exchanges, you have Waves DEX, BitShares, NXT, Komodo. There are probably more, but these are the ones I've heard of.
I still find them to "difficult" so I haven't tried any one of them yet. If you decide to try them, let us know how it went.

I don't think this is true. I love poker, but I think online poker with crypto is facing a lot of difficulties and it's definitely not becoming popular at all. It's very hard to find tables with a lot of players, and as you can see from the reactions in this thread, there aren't many promotions around it, and that shows that casinos don't really care about their poker rooms because there isn't much demand for it.

It's almost impossible to prevent collusion, since normally there is no ID verification on these rooms, and it's easy to create multiple accounts and try to rig the game. Also, since there isn't to much competition, I think that possibility that sites might use bots, is way higher than what you would find in fiat poker.

Micro payments are a necessity in my opinion, specially for poor countries of course, and I really think that crypto will have a word to say regarding this subject. Micro payments are not new, and they usually fail because of the transaction costs associated with them, that usually make them impractical, but with the emerge of crypto they might see a new light. I don't think the blockchain will help on this, at least not until side chains are available.
IOTA on the other hand, seems to be doing well in this field, since their transactions have no fees associated. DAGs are still very recent, so let's see how they perform in this field.

I don't think so. When we saw the China ban on ICOs and the suspension of exchanges, we had a major drop in bitcoin and then it recovered but I don't think they were the ones buying it. I actually think that we only saw the Chinese citizens swapping from Chinese exchanges to Japanese ones. So most of the bitcoins probably stayed in the same hands. I don't think the Chinese government likes to speculate, and although I like bitcoin, and I hope they will have a future, in the end that's what I doing. I'm speculating, even though I hold more than what I trade, but it's still speculation.

Their ban was real, and they might accept them again so they can try to "control" them, and at least get some taxes out of it, but I don't think they like them, and that they are buying them for profit. They really want them to fail.

Of course not, why would you ever do that? Well if you want to day trade, then you need to be looking at charts all day during your trades, but if you are not doing that, then there is no reason to look at it's price so often. Bitcoin and crypto in general are so volatile, that looking at it's price over and over again, is way to stressful. I do check them with some regularity, to see if we got new all time highs, but I perfectly conformable with it's price drops as well, so I only do it out of curiosity, and it doesn't stress me.

Well we all know some of the Pros if bitcoins ever managed to become a global currency. It would be imune to inflation, it's decentralized, it's secure, it's easy to use and it doesn't require the use of banks, giving you the complete control over your money. As for the cons, it's hard to tell, because we don't know what could go wrong. Having a fixed limit of coins and being decentralized, although it's a good thing, it could also be used to generate panic, but this are just conspiracies theories. If BTC was a global currency, and somehow the biggest holders of BTC decided to unite themselves, they could probably be able to manipulate the market if they wanted to. Also if a major flaw was ever encountered in the code, it would generate global chaos.
None of these things are likely to happen, but I guess the major con of BTC as a global currency, is that if it ever went wrong for some reason, it would end up being a catastrophe for global economy.

I guess that these things wouldn't happen with USD. Since it's manipulated by banks and governments, and exists for so long, a global catastrophe is unlikely to happen. This is probably it's biggest Pro. We kind of know what to expect from USD. As for the cons, is that dollars allow banks to have a monopoly over money, and that doesn't look good. If bitcoin ever succeeds and avoids any major problem, then it would way better than fiat.

I don't even know why you are asking us what to do with your bitcoins. As far as I'm concerned you've done better than the majority of us, given the amount you have started with, and the number of coins you now have. Maybe you didn't have anything to lose back then, and now you see that you've accumulated some decent wealth and you are now afraid of losing it. If this is true, then I would say you should hold it.

If you think you can keep your shit together now that you would be trading at a different level, then you should continue to do what you have been doing all this time because apparently you are making good decisions.

I know bitcoins are limited, but don't forget there is a halve in the reward miners get every four years (the next one is 2020), so with these halves and with the increase in difficulty, we will not see bitcoin hitting it's cap anytime soon. At least I wont see it in my lifetime for sure. Given this, the price of bitcoin should keep growing as long as the demand is larger than the supply. Once both things get stable, then we should see the price getting some stability as well. Also don't forget that there could be a point where BTC just gets to expensive, regardless if the bitcoins ar all mined or not. When this happens, we should also get a lot of stability in it's price. I guess this could happen probably in 5 to 10 years, and this is when the bitcoins will get interesting, because we will be able to use them as a alternate payment method.

I try to keep myself updated when it comes to crypto, and I follow this forum, youtube channels and some crypto dedicated sites, and I didn't cross along with any sort of information that supports your claim. Where did you heard about that? I know bitcoin futures is coming, but is not live yet, and the next step should be ETF's but right now, there is no official institutional channels that accept crypto. Can you tell us what is your source?

I really think it doesn't work like that. If you want to use your money, it doesn't matter where you have deposited it. You will have to declare it, tell where it came from and pay your taxes. So the only regulations you need to care about, are the ones of the country you are in, and want to spend your money. I'm not an expert of course, but I really think that's the way it works. I don't know where you are from, but from what I know, most countries in Europe still don't have any well defined laws about bitcoin, so if you keep it low you don't have to declare anything. If you normally go over 10K or 15K, then you will have to explain where that money came form, and you will pay taxes.

I really like etherdelta, I completely in favor of decentralized exchanges, and I actually think we need more of these. It's not just about being able to trade ERC20 the tokens, it's actually about trading any currency without the need to hod your funds in an exchange, which means that you won't put your money at risk. It's a lot harder to be hacked or get your coins stolen like this. They still need to evolve a little though. The site is quite slow sometimes, and although it has enough liquidity for me, it's still far from being an options for big traders.

I think that's perfectly normal. Gold is well known for hundreds of years, and although it is still a good and stable store of value source, it's not easy to be used by most people. People already know gold, so they don't really need to search for it, and only big investors actually purchase it as an investment. Most of us don't really have enough money to buy it, and pay the fees needed to keep it safe in a gold storage facility or bank or anything like that.

As for bitcoin, it's relatively recent, so as people hear about it, they begun to google it to get more information. Hopefully those searching for it, will understand that this is a real great opportunity to invest for the future, and much easier to do than to invest in gold.

You know that not having any strong leader, could also mean that bitcoin will be stronger than any of those companies. Bitcoin is trying to solve the centralization problem around fiat, and in order to that, it needs to be decentralized. Bitcoin was built for the community and is evolving as a community. If it succeeds the way it is now, it will evolve inside real democracy and team work, and that might end up being it's true strength. If it was centralized it was easy to shut it down. You just needed to go after the one person running it. Since bitcoin doesn't work like that, you can't really shut down it's development, can you?

As for the "wars", you saw what happen with segwit2x. The community proved to be mature enough to solve disagreements for the well being of the network. That was a sign of strength and not weakness.

In my opinion, I don't think altcoins are in bad shape at all. Things like the tether or bitconnect problems might shake the trust in alts a little, but they are still doing fine. Just look at the recent increase of price in dash, ether, monero, IOTA, and why not bcash. Traders just keep swapping from crypto to crypto, based on different news regarding each project, and of course, based on what is happening to the market, because pumps are common and a lot of people try to take a quick advantage from those things.

If you look at coinmarketcap, bitcoin dominance is quite stable at 56%, so bitcoin and all the other alts are actually increasing, and not just BTC.

I think you made a good point here. If governments try to ban bitcoin or make it illegal, people can still try to use it underground anyway, and they will spend a lot more time and money, trying to catch those who are using it illegally. If they just regulate it, to make it harder to use it for illegal activities, like they try to do with fiat already, then they will be able to get tax revenues for those that have no intentions of doing any illegal things with it, and just want to use it because they find it convenient.

I don't think bitcoin will ever die from the hands of governments, so we should be safe on that matter.

Bitcoin and and bcash have completely different views for the future. Bitcoin is evolving as a digital commodity, and bcash is just trying to pursuit the new payment method option. Bitcoin is way ahead of every other cryptocoin out there, if we talk about the digital commodity path. Institutional money is cumming to the market, so bitcoin is on it's way to become a new asset in Wall Street. No other coin is getting any attention from big investors, like BTC is. Except for maybe ethereum, but for completely different reasons, since ether works more as a platform to invest in "start ups".

As for bcash, like I said, is completely focused in being a form of payment, so it's not really competing with bitcoin. Is actually competing with dash, or monero, and to be honest I would prefer any of these two in comparison to bcsh. So for me, the only reason we see bcash this high, when we compare it to dash for example, is because it is taking advantage of the "bitcoin name".

As for technology, it is ahead of bitcoin right now, in terms of transactions, but again that is not important for BTC right now, because it is evolving as "digital gold" and not a payment option. In the future, the Lightning network will be a much better option for scalability than the block increase, so bcash will continue to struggle, and BTC will be able to move as a well establish digital asset, to a form of payment.

For me, this is the reason why bcash is not king, and never will be, and I still think it will probably fail as a form of payment, when compared to the other options out there.

I don't really think that the tether hack should work as warning for bitcoin users and investors. I'm not going to talk about if investing in bitcoin is risky, neither if it is a bubble or not, but it just has nothing to do with tether. For me tether has flaws since the beginning and I would not put my money into it.

To start, I think tether is dead right from the start. There is no way that the US Government will let a third party company issue a crypto currency that is backed by it's fiat currency. Tether wants to mimic US dollar, and eventually the US government will say that is illegal, and that only banks can do that (specially now that there are countries that are issuing it's own versions of a cryptocurrency, that will of course be backed by banks and not any other kind of private companies)
So for me, investing in tether was always a bad option. Tether is also centralized, so it's of course vulnerable to hacks, like the one we saw recently.

Where does this all relate to bitcoin? Honestly I don't know. Of course that any crisis top crypcoins suffer, affect bitcoin somehow, because it affects peoples trust. We did saw it's price go down to $7800, but it recover just as fast, because bitcoin is does not share tether flaws.

As for hacks, I don't think the blockchain itself can be hacked, but we can lose our coins if we keep them on centralized exchanges, or if our pc wallets get attacked, but again that is not a bitcoin problem, is a problem with all the other systems that are still not up to bitcoin security.