I believe that the market now is mostly driven upwards by people who has no idea about the capacity problems. Mainstream media reports on Bitcoin seldom covers this aspect - it's usually implicitly expected that Bitcoin will become the de-facto payment rails of the society, in the meanwhile the actual usability value of Bitcoin is falling.
Currently it's lightning that is touted as the silver bullet to solve capacity problems, whenever people start adopting lightning we will again be able to buy coffee for Bitcoins. I'm fairly pessimistic on that - so far it's fairly unproved technology. I hope I'm proved wrong though. Anyway, fact is that Bitcoin has no medium-term plans for how to deal with the capacity crisis, and there are no long-term plans covering medium-sized transactions (and this includes settling lightning channels!).
I am also slightly sceptical about the lighting network how many people are even using segwit addresses at this point?
Lightning is a much worse beast than segwit - with segwit, no network effect is needed, people can set up segwit wallets and interoperate with the existing network without problems (except the new-style segwit addresses are not supported by all wallets).
I must admit I don't have full overview of lightning, but it's my understanding that bitcoins locked in the lightning network can only be sent to other participants in the lightning network (or one can try to close the lightning channel, but that's a slow process), and if a person has a wallet that doesn't support lightning, then of course he can neither receive nor send lightning funds.
From what I understand you need to setup a watcher node to make sure there is no double spending going on, if you spot a double spend then a same amount of bitcoins that where locked into the channel become yours.
As all this is happening off chain the risk of double spends is very high as the transactions only get written to the blockchain once the channel is closed.
I feel like that's a pretty good summary. At best lightning is 12 months away and that's a long time for alts/bch to do some real damage to btc. When I got into this space I was not excited about the price, I was excited to have the ability to invest/trade/interact worldwide without restrictions.
The utility IS the value and it's being destroyed day by day. Each time a new merchant drops btc and adopts bch another nail goes into the coffin.
Bitcoin will implode on itself. One of these other coins will improve before bitcoin and take over the market one day. Bitcoin has too many issues currently and i dont believe they will all get solved. I’m riding the price for now, waiting for the next break through. Litecoin is doing exceptional currently,but i dont believe it is the cure-all or replacement fo bitcoin in the long run but it could be in the short term
While LTC might be a good alternative now, that won't last. LTC is only good since it has less adoption than BTC. Even the creator of LTC has a vision where BTC and LTC go down the same path together, so diversifying to LTC is not any longterm play.
I'm looking at coins going in another direction, like BCH for example. At least with that coin you know the vision and that's a vision I can get behind
But will it take over BTC?
I don't believe so