This is exactly why I think of bitcoin as a pyramid scheme. Early adopters buy some entrance into the system (via mining or currency purchase) and then focus on recruiting more people to drive up their purchased value.

I think one day you'll look back and regret this post. Its still an early adopters phase.

Recent transaction sent $160m, the fee was $0.70, it was confirmed within minutes.

Not sure what to say if you can't see value there

It would be more accurate to say, that a recent transaction sent $160M worth of Bitcoin. Tomorrow that might only be worth $150M, who knows?

I guess I'm not a multi millionaire who needs to transfer that kind of money? What exactly are people buying with bitcoin that cannot be done with standard currencies? Unless it offers some radical access to process or markets standard currencies do not, I just can't see the point.

I'm sure the parties involved in transferring $160M via an anonymous and untraceable currency had perfectly legitimate reasons for doing so /s.

Wasn't anonymous OR untraceable, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that we all know about it and can see it on the public blockchain.

Ok, then who has the money now?

Wasn't anonymous or untraceable.

Oh, well, if there is no perceived use case for you, then there must not be any use cases, even though someone just pointed out a very specific and valuable use case. That's logical.

Have you used a bank lately? Tried moving money and buying some stocks? Tell me how long that takes from money leaving your account to settlement.

Three days in Australia, and that's enforced by ASIC not the bank. Moving money is instant though, unless it's to a credit union which can take around 24 hours or so.

I'm also from Australia and moving money is not instant between different banks. Crypto settlement is instant.

This "fork" is really just the evolution of the main chain, that's all. It'll have more claim to the Bitcoin name than the "core" Bitcoin with small blocks. Keeping the transaction history is sort of the entire point.

That's somewhat orthogonal to my point - these forks are conjuring money out of thin air for those who already hold the currency.

But can you use this forked version, and normal BTC interchangeably?

It's better to think of it as a hard forked upgrade. Normal BTC won't exist in any meaningful manner after this fork. Just like other coins hardfork all the time to upgrade. The previous chain could still exist if you wanted to run it, but no one does.

Losing anywhere near 90% hashrate means that chain of Bitcoin has no point in being called Bitcoin anymore.