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Most likely BCH has nothing to do with this crash - it has anemic trading and exchange volumes vs. Bitcoin/Ethereum/Ripple and this altcoin alone couldn't have caused the crash. The truth is very few know what really happened but they remain silent. This might be tangentially related but only tangentially. Another possibility is that someone(s) has dumped a lot of crypto-currency on to the market and there's only enough money to keep the exchange rate.

I'm saying BTC isn't really down on any timescale that counts.

It's odd how timescales of up to 6 months suddenly don't count, and BTC speculators have suddenly become buy-and-hold investors praising Saint Warren Buffett. It's especially odd considering BTC is touted as a currency, and thus should have a relatively stable value.

2018 counts, oh great pumper of snake oil. It counts bigly.

It is plausible that an attack could be made by renting cpus for a couple hours for a few million bucks

It isn't plausible. Bitcoin mining leaders do it by dedicated hardware. Assuming your plan is renting general purpose GPUs on a computing cluster

Maximum Bitcoin Total Bitcoin Hashrate is 43EH/s https://blockchain.info/es/cha... (E stands for Exa = 10^18) For a 51% attack, starting from 0, you'd need to add another 43EH/s to the pool. The Nvidia Tesla S2070 has a hash rate of 749.23

You'd need to rent 57 Gigas of GPUs plus all the infrastructure to manage that. For context the third largest supercomputer has 18K of GPUs https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I don't know if that amount of GPUs exists in the world, but if it does, the renting price hour is 70 cents / hour per GPU https://www.theregister.co.uk/... So you need an investment of 40 Trillion dollars if my math is ok Current bitcoin market cap is 130 Billions. https://charts.bitcoin.com/cha...

Renting specialized mining hardware is also not viable. Suppose there are enough miners available at renting for a 51% attack (which there aren't). By renting that hardware you're just displacing the demand for renting miners, so more miners are purchased to be added to the renting farms. You won't be able to rent miners fast enough to achieve the 51% attack. It's not like you'd have that amount waiting for you just for an hour.

According to Business Insider Poland, the Narodowy Bank Polski spent around 91,000 zloty ($27,300) on a marketing campaign designed to attack the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies.

Um, what's that, like $27,300 / $10,386 = 2.6... BTC.

Though I believe too that it is in a bubble I believe bitcoin is too well known to drop to zero value. Instead, it is quite likely that it will become the equivalent of penny stock -

Nope. Bitcoin transactions aren't free. Would you buy penny stocks if the transaction fees were several dollars?

https://news.bitcoin.com/analy...

The North American Bitcoin Conference, is no longer taking bitcoin.

https://charts.bitcoin.com/cha...
$19,192.70 on december 16
$12,618.93 on december 31

Yeah all countries with access to cheap hydroelectric as well as cold outdoors temperatures.

Canada: https://news.bitcoin.com/quebe...

Funny, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is based in Hong Kong as is Binance and he's talking in this interview about post-Beijing ban of cryptocurrencies. Hong Kong is NOT China. Now, I know to most ignorant Westerners like you, China/Hong Kong/Taiwan/South Korea/Thailand is all "Asia" and all "China", but the reality is that Hong Kong is NOT China. Hong Kong has its own laws, legal system, passports, visas, currency, language (Cantonese - not officially supported in China), and they even drive on the wrong side of the road.

Likewise, Bitfinex is a brand of iFinex. And who is iFinex? Well, iFinexis a British Virgin Islands company and operates out of Hong Kong. And what did we just cover above? HONG KONG IS NOT CHINA. Different laws, different currencies, different passports (for example, no Visa needed for an HK citizen to come to the US; one required for a Chinese national, and a Chinese national needs a special visa to go to Hong Kong), etc. Neither Bitfinex nor Ninance are based in China. Period. Full Stop.

Who's talking out of their ass? I welcome your apology.

Have you ever consider that maybe Full Block, Replace by fee, Segwit and LN are new things that got added and create the problem? Bitcoin Cash is not a new idea, it's not a new concept, it's the same old thing as described in the original white paper. That's why the name is the same. Bitcoin Cash IS Bitcoin. Bitcoin core is trying new stuff that don't work. We see it right now! More reading: https://www.bitcoin.com/info/w...

Every time I look at this chart I think: "Tulip bulbs"...

Of course because tulips and decentralised digital currency are exactly the same thing.

of course there is once again no shortage of people telling me this is completely sustainable and will go on forever.

Where are these people? I read a bit about Cryptocurrency, and I've never seen anyone ever say that.
What they do say is that decentralised currency is disruptive, and in a currency market worth trillions, so the potential market of such a technology is in the trillions of dollars. BTC is currently about $300B MCAP, so if you follow the logic there is more room for growth.

But go back to tulips if that is more your level...

"Rational"? Really? I do not think it means what you think it means.

Every time I look at this chart I think: "Tulip bulbs"... of course there is once again no shortage of people telling me this is completely sustainable and will go on forever.

JP Morgan's CEO referred to bitcoin as a fraud, and made reference to tulips (the first recorded bubble).

After that, they bought 3M euro worth of XBT note shares(bitcoin.com). They were toying with the price to buy cheap. They obviously see this as a threat. But they're still getting in the game. And you believe in them.

Stability of Bitcoin? I can't see where it was stable...

Problem: Appearance of no non-cash payment methods being available
Solution: Zcash (Bitcoin-like alternative with Zero-Knowledge Proofs; Immune to whitelisting/greylisting/fascistlisting)

Snowden: Anonymous ‘Zcash’ Could Solve Bitcoin Surveillance Risks

There's actually a really easy way, steal some BTC from some ridiculously insecure mechanism like a brain wallet, then go to a carder forum and buy someone else's credit card. Then you can buy all the drugs, pr0n, and other crap you like, and someone else will get prosecuted for it.

>> And the miners have flatly rejected it, out of concerns for Bitcoin XT's path of overcentralizing Bitcoin.

Take a look at this open letter from Sam Cole (CEO of KNC Miner) that came out today.
https://forum.bitcoin.com/bitc...

Bram Cohen might be smart about distributed systems (bittorrent), but he's no expert on financial markets. The post you linked to was half a year ago, and it's painful to see just how wrong he was. The proof is all around us; take a look at the most recent blocks in the chain if you don't believe me. I work for a company that's a leader in bitcoin and blockchain technology. The transaction demand is getting too large, and the result isn't an uptick in the fee market, it will become too slow to be viable for businesses (and consumers) to transact. I deal with the fallout of small blocks everyday. The issue is real.

Thanks for pointing out Coinbase's position on BIP101. I didn't read that article previously. Realize that they're saying that it's the best proposal so far, not that they think it's the right way to go.

The major problem is that devs and experts see two different futures for bitcoin: the first camp wants to see it grow and possibly become more mainstream, and the other wants it to stay the fun little project that it has been. Are you in the latter camp?

What does "a leader in bitcoin and blockchain technology" mean?
What does it mean to be "a leader in bitcoin" (or possibly "a leader in bitcoin technology")?
What does it mean to be "a leader in blockchain technology"?

Hint - it means fucking nothing.

Everything else you're whining about is simply horseshit. If businesses want to use Bitcoin and want their shit processed quickly they can pay a (very small) fee to do so. Bitcoin isn't a free lunch, and it's not supposed to be. Actual USERS of Bitcoin are perfectly fine waiting minutes to hours for a transaction because traditional payment processors can take days or weeks before things are truly settled and confirmed.

>> And the miners have flatly rejected it, out of concerns for Bitcoin XT's path of overcentralizing Bitcoin.

Take a look at this open letter from Sam Cole (CEO of KNC Miner) that came out today.
https://forum.bitcoin.com/bitc...

Bram Cohen might be smart about distributed systems (bittorrent), but he's no expert on financial markets. The post you linked to was half a year ago, and it's painful to see just how wrong he was. The proof is all around us; take a look at the most recent blocks in the chain if you don't believe me. I work for a company that's a leader in bitcoin and blockchain technology. The transaction demand is getting too large, and the result isn't an uptick in the fee market, it will become too slow to be viable for businesses (and consumers) to transact. I deal with the fallout of small blocks everyday. The issue is real.

Thanks for pointing out Coinbase's position on BIP101. I didn't read that article previously. Realize that they're saying that it's the best proposal so far, not that they think it's the right way to go.

The major problem is that devs and experts see two different futures for bitcoin: the first camp wants to see it grow and possibly become more mainstream, and the other wants it to stay the fun little project that it has been. Are you in the latter camp?