Bitcoin Has Been Fully Co-Opted by Blockstream.
Artist's representation of "the Bitcoin scam, 2017".
Bitcoin is going nowhere on fundamentals. Further investment is coming almost entirely from expectations of future gains.
Throw a dart at CoinMarketCap and you'll hit a cryptocurrency with better technical design and a less toxic community. The real-world energy cost required to mine a Bitcoin has gotten a bit ludicrous, rendering claims of true economic efficiency exaggerated at best.
Even that old, perennially manipulated chestnut, Gold, is starting to look a lot less "obsolete", compared to Bitcoin, than it did 2 years ago. Note that, similar to Bitcoin, Gold is practically infinitely divisible and could be set at really almost any price to serve its function...just like Bitcoin.
At least Mansa Musa can't fork the GLD protocol to make literal shit-coins.
New money continues to flow in, but only because it has no idea that what it thinks it is buying (the oldest coin with the most reliable and established developers/fundamentals) is now helmed by by the enemies of the original developers, while resting mostly on network-effect alone, and is rapidly digging its own grave with all the resources it can muster.
If only some genius had warned us before we agreed to a moronic contract (NYA) wherein the other party only had to "possibly deliver performance in 3 months if they felt like it."
Anyone who tells (or told) you that SegWit is (or would be) good should immediately be relegated to, at best, a person who understands next to nothing about blockchain technology, and at worst, a disinformation agent or troll. Anyone who did not predict this extremely obvious, game-theory result of renigging on the NYA should never be considered a resource on cryptocurrency, game theory, human behavior, or predictions of really any kind.
Try to move Bitcoin anywhere, and you'll quickly see recent fees have crested $9. This is nearly 1/3 the cost of a bank wire, with none of the fraud protection, insurance, or user-friendliness. Confirmation times of multiple hours remain the norm, making Bitcoin impractical for any point of sale puchase fathomable. Recently, it's been only a few hours faster than my bank wires, which are generally processed by 10am next business day.
Despite all these inarguable facts, Bitcoin has gone straight up, roughly doubling (again) in the last 3 months.
It's too bad no luminaries spoke up to identify Seg-Wit as the Trojan Horse it is/was.
All I can say is, that's what Tech Stocks did....and Real Estate did...and Bitconnect did is doing...
There's no way to reliably predict short-term price movement. Bitcoin could continue to go straight up, in either real or nominal terms.
However, there is simply nothing under this rally anymore. Caution is advised!
FYI this is about where we are on Bitconnect, too. Keep buying it, you morons, and I'll have another juicy I-told-you-so to write about.
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Sources: Reddit, r/BTC, Google, Mark Bevand, IEA, SRSRocco, ZeroHedge
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