Bitcoin Surges Past $400

That's the point, though. You're looking at it as a speculative investment, and proceeding accordingly, which is good. The OP is admonishing people to not treat bitcoin like a standard bank account (which is all too easy to do), but rather in the same terms as you already do.

I just don't get how people convert these specialized things that may help some companies sometimes into widespread hysteria, where every company feels like they have to go all in. Companies regularly take their basically-fine hardware offline so they can start renting the same or worse from Amazon, because then they can tell people that they're "in the cloud". I know one company that used to have all their stuff running on hardware and working pretty much fine. They switched to "the cloud" because they thought it was cool. They now pay Amazon the amount of money it'd take to re-buy all the hardware that used to run their site each and every month.

I should figure this out because if I can see one of these trends coming and time it right I could make a lot of money.

The developers are still arguing about the 1MB blocksize limit. Currently bitcoin is limited to a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (~60k transactions per day). This figure was derived assuming the smallest possible transaction size but of course real transactions are larger and the practical maximum is only about 2-3 transactions per second (~20k transactions per day). This should have been a pretty easy limit to change, it's just a #define in the code. But some core developers are against it and we're deadlocked and have been this way for at least a year.

There is an alternative client called bitcoinxt, this supports larger blocksizes but has literally no support among either the miners or chinese exchanges which are driving the rally. (See https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-block-sizes-e047bc9f830 for a summary.)

A number of DoS attacks on the bitcoin network: some based on spamming lots of fee paying transactions, some based on retransmitting slightly modified versions of existing transactions, have rendered it practically inoperable for days on end. The fee paying attack isn't terribly expensive, costing only a few tens of thousands of dollars per day, while the "malleability" attack costs literally nothing other than an internet connection. There hasn't been any significant progress on solutions for either of these problems.

The bitcoiner response to this is that you shouldn't have been affected by either of these if you used the right client or paid the right fees, but imperfect clients and fixed fees are a reality of the bitcoin ecosystem so I don't see how wishing them away changes anything.

One of bitcoin's biggest advantages was supposed to be the ability to quickly react to changing circumstances by modifying the protocol. Recent events have shown this is pretty much impossible: too many people are too heavily invested in its current form, and they want no risks and hence no change. Techniques which supposedly allow risk free changes (called sidechains) still have a long way to go before we can be convinced they work as intended. Besides they're not even fully implemented on the bitcoin testnet, let alone real bitcoin.

Overall, even if people are buying into the "blockchain" tech, it doesn't seem to me that they would be interested in bitcoin itself because of the problems I've outlined. I think the safe money is still on this being a repeat of the Willybot/Mt Gox fiasco where the exchange operator used nonexistent dollars to buy bitcoin and drive the price higher. Other people were sucked in by the uptrend and they ended up with nonexistent bitcoin/dollars which they weren't able to withdraw from the exchange.

Lightning will require entirely new wallets to be created for it, and those wallets will be very complicated. It's a multi-year project at most.

The reality is that Bitcoin will fall apart if too much load is placed on it, and it's getting closer to its (entirely arbitrary) 1mb scale ceiling too fast for comfort.