On a side note, do you think the 2mb block increase with segwit will be enough of a change to effectively get people to shift chains?
SegWit is not a 2 MB block size increase. With SegWit, the blocks can actually theoretically go as high as 4 MB, but only if it's filled up with very signature-heavy transactions. People that have analyzed SegWit claims the extra capacity will be somewhere between 1.2x and 1.7x when all transactions are segwit transactions. So far a mere 0.65% of the transactions are segwit transactions. No, the block size increase with SegWit is not at all enough, it's too late, too slow and too little. SegWit2X at the other hand, will give enough capacity to last well into 2018, perhaps all the way to 2019.
Lightning technology is cool, but I believe we'll be in 2019 before it has the necessary outreach - and by then, there is a high risk that virtually all payments are going through some very few big hubs. Lightning is no silver bullet, it's important to keep in mind that it takes two on-chain transactions to open a payment channel, and the channel should be closed as well. Lightning will work very well with microtransactions, I believe it will open up a lot of new use-cases (as well as re-open a lot of use-cases that was possible when the bitcoin fees were lower). We'll see a lot of transactions on the lightning network, but this is mostly new traffic, it's not going to replace the ordinary bitcoin traffic.
I have been wrong before ... but a well-functioning Bitcoin with SegWit and 1 MB base block size, I don't see it happening.
It's no validation, but bitcoin has hit new highs this morning, as bitcoin cash dropped about 7%.
I was selling my Bitcoin Cash very early. I believe the current price is artificially high.
This has nothing to do with the technical details. Whatever Bitcoin can do, there exist alts that can do the same thing better - bitcoin wouldn't be the king of the hill if it was only the technical details that mattered. Bitcoin has three things going for it, it's the network effect, the brand name and (arguably) the strong security offered by miners. Bitcoin Cash has none of those. Still, it is a worthy contender to Litecoin.