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That's a really good article and I agree with a lot of it. Here I was just trying to quantify the short term effects (and sentiment) we might see from segwit activation while staying out of the political/technical arguments for/against it. But I'm aware there are some big issues!

I have to remind myself that the market doesn't always care about these kind of fundamentals, and even when it does, it's always late to the party. Your analysis is probably more immediately contemporary.

PS - Followed you btw, solid comments.

So true. Markets can have a very short term view as participants chase the quick buck. Lot of that going on in the crypto space at the moment and a LOT of totally uninformed speculators who think they can just read a chart and ignore the driving fundamentals (it does my head in!).

Segwit will be GREAT.....until it isn't. Whether it's the miners conspiring to make an unverified transaction, failure of the Lightning Network or failure to scale properly, the realisation will come at some point and that realisation may even be the sort of black swan to cause a Mt Gox type market event.

But, lets hope for the best and plan for the worst. There is no perfect solution so the game is more about lesser evils and identifying and mitigating their risks than anything else.

You said it. I didn't used to feel uncomfortable holding Bitcoin as the denominator for all my trades, but I'm diversifying more these days.

It's hard not to when it is basically THE crypto used in all the alt coin trading pairs. That might change when SegWit2x forks, but we will need new trading pair options that don't involve BTC soon.

I wonder what that will end up being, Bitcoin cash or Eth I guess.

Maybe. In the long run I'd love to see BTS or EOS get the gig, not just because of performance but they both promise a lot of relevant features.

Short term I think Tether USDT might get the gig. Polo and Bittrex already use it extensively so if BTC gets messy it might not be a big shift to list everything in USDT until one of the Bitcoins reasserts dominance.