Bitcoin here it comes, price rise & fork..

Bitcoin here it comes.

Here we go again on the next rise, to where? If we follow the history of Bitcoin, we will see that we are riding what looks like a next wave of adoption and value absorption.

The price is hitting $6643AUD ($5191USD) and looks strong at the moment, with a $600+ increase in the last day. this is a significant amount overnight. Look back on past price spikes and consolidations, it looks like this next surge will push over $6000 USD soon with a pull back before November with the coming contentious hard fork. Who knows though there might be a bull run all the way through to the contentious hard fork right? The market is fantastically volatile and that is the attraction to the digital asset space 20% spikes overnight, exponential growth curves and some catastrophic pump and dump project/ scams. There is so much contention in this technology space as rival development projects jocky for market share and dominance. The exciting thing about this space is that it is contemporary and dynamic. The digital asset space has so many value propositions and world changing ideas that the promise that these markets show are really what will lead us into the space age.. 

So where to from here with the blockchain market cap hitting approx $161 Billion, I believe that there will be broader adoption. Not only of Bitcoin, but of other digital assets, I believe the next big scale adoption will be Ethereum, namely because of the current market cap, 'second mover' advantage, block time and use case.

The other blockchain assets after this are all VERY close behind with HUGE volatility, there will be many changes in the top 20 as the use cases and propositions develop and show promise or become obsolete. There are many value propositions and a large variety of use cases, from, privacy assets to platform and everywhere in between.

I currently see all of these digital assets as both stores of value, currencies and more rolled into one. The promise of blockchain is huge and the scope of this technology is wide.  

The variety of functions and utility that these digital assets currently provide and will provide is what I find really exciting.

The ability to make a payment for things in the range of tenths or hundredths of a cent now, true micro payments.. Instantaneous global exchanges of value.. Functionality built into value tokens that will be interchangeable between different blockchain assets, digitised widgets that are used as fuel, this I find fascinating. For example using gas for transactions to run, enabling a interesting functionality to computational restrictions other than just energy. The new world of the future, this IOT, will make use of and in fact require blockchain as one of it's backbone technologies. 

This global, transfer of value across markets, people and things will really accelerate innovation and business. I believe for the maximum benefit in a society, that this should be encouraged, via, local government support or via non interference. There are many incumbent industries that are going to find it very hard to compete unless they adopt blockchain and evolve with the coming tsunami of blockchain innovation. 

With all that said what about bitcoin and its price. On my mind is centrally what will happen during this contentious hard fork and more importantly after? 

I personally am of the opinion that this is the best thing for the ecosystem and that the more forks that spin off the better as this will only amplify the value of the legacy chain or the dominant tech/ philosophical scaling sweet spot. However there is so much nasty business going on with this hard fork that there is the possibility of serious damage the ecosystem.

I believe as a market mechanism the alt coins will see increased growth as value seeks to preserve itself. The alts will absorb hope along with money, the reality is however that not all these alts are going to survive. The tech is in such early stages that will be many projects that moon and even more projects will  that will fail. 

I'll be looking at privacy in an upcoming blog, so till then, happy Bitcoin-ing..