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What makes me conclude that is that I see 'altcoins' lke Dash or even a tiny coin like NLG have more interesting news about innovation and adoption more often then BTC does.
Surely, a lot of altcoins receive a lot of attention because they are both marketed, and they are overall non-threatening by mainstream financial institutions in their current state of development. Only bitcoin is a meaningful kind of threat to mainstream financial institutions. There could be some bright side that bitcoin does not get more attention while it is still developing (and probably going to be activating seg wit which remains as an innovative matter that could have some bugs, possibly?).
Yeah, I would like the price of bitcoin to go up also, but I don't think that it hurts to have some patience, and I also don't think that bitcoin is really losing anything to the various alt coins, including market share. It remains very likely that many of the features of a variety of altcoins are going to be absorbed into bitcoin as side chains or whatever, and the innovations of those other coins does not really hurt the crypto space in getting more people involved who will likely gravitate towards bitcoin, if they do not become too jaded or butt hurt when they get screwed over by some of the alt coin pumping and dumping.
And I'm just generally amazed at how much time it takes to simply build a good wallet with features that people would want, like NFC payment and payment based on usernames instead of incomprehensible adresses.
Surely, this is technically beyond me to understand what exactly makes user interface easier and more elegant and more secure, etc. We know that there are various competing platforms, and overtime, bitcoin is likely going to become more and more easy to use, while maintaining its security.
There are a variety of people and companies working in the bitcoin space, and a lot of this work is done behind the scenes.. some of the innovations of the various companies that are working on bitcoin will come to fruition and become activated in bitcoin over time, and some will achieve mass adoption, but sometimes, also, we are not going to be able to identify which of those interfaces will become bitcoin's apple or bitcoin's google, or bitcoin's facebook.. time will tell, and I doubt that it helps to attempt to rush the good things, because it is what it is, and the good things will come with time... Bitcoin's foundations remain great, including a lot of the functionality that seems apparent in the following of the going live of seg wit.
Both graphs show an overall continued rise in the useage of bitcoin, and maybe there will be periods of apparent flatness, and maybe there is a bit of consolidation going on.. but really during periods of exponential growth, there also needs to be systems in place that can absorb new users.. and also ways to attempt to monetize various innovations in order that some of the companies feel that they can make money from new users (whether short term or long term preparations).
I don't see the rise you are talking about.
I think the rise is more noticable if you zoom out a bit. If you are only looking in shorter periods, then sometimes the rise is more difficult to see. And, like I already asserted, I doubt that bitcoin is really losing any kind of meaningful market share to altcoins.... Bitcoin remains the most secure and trusted of the crytpos, and the biggest threat to mainstream institutions because it can really stand on its own and to withstand various kinds of hacking attacks....
Many of the alts still have to experience hack attempts, and they are not much of a target when they have relatively lower market caps...
You're not good at distributing hopium, JJG =(
yeah.. sorry about that.
I try not to get too caught up in creating false expectations, because in the short-term I don't really have much of a clue about price etcetera, and I just keep buying as the price goes down and selling as the price goes up while continuing to attempt to accumulate more and more BTC with the funds that I had already invested. So, yeah sure, I do better if the price goes up, but I am not really in the business of creating false expectations... ... And, accordingly, maybe I was not the best person in the world to respond to your earlier request for "hopium."
For the theme of hopium, you know I really like the below-linked thread, even though Fakoury has not been posting too much lately in that thread (also, it seems that during times of bitcoin price stagnation, there is a whole hell of a lot less bitcoin posting in general)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-bullish-bitcoin-media-center-the-only-bullish-bitcoin-news-thread-1166428About the comparison between fiat and regular banking VS BTC and blockchain technology, of course I do not think the former is an alternative to the latter, concerning secure decentralized immutability. If I would, I wouldn't ask for more hopium. I'm disappointed that this great technology develops so slow, especially in the area of making it useable IRL. BTC should be more then a toy for forum libertarians and Chinese speculators.
I think that currently bitcoin is a lot more than what it is painted out to be, and if folks know about bitcoin (especially in the remittance world), they can really profit from saving fees... and yeah, as long as the foundation of bitcoin remains strong, various storage of value and remittance and capital control avoidance areas of bitcoin are going to continue to grow and to put upwards pressures on the price.
Thankfully some trolls have come out to play, that's usually a good sign, so thanks for that small amount of hopium.
I think that it cuts both ways, and surely sometimes the trolls are just nuisances and maybe even somewhat effective in despiriting people in their disinformation campaigns.