The fundamentals for SegWit1X (BTC) are deteriorating. Average transaction cost has broken above $20, and the median above $14, making it almost as expensive to transact as a bank wire. This, just as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has added nuclear fuel in the form of futures trading to a market that is already blasting off at way beyond record speed, on the eve of the holiday season when families will be gathered around their Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s dinner tables and the local family “crypto-expert” will be bragging about how much money he’s made in just a few weeks.

If BTC doesn’t collapse by New Year’s, it will probably go even higher into 2018 as the subject will be the holiday talk of nearly every family in the Western World, in a market that operates 24/7, inspiring other reluctant family members to buy in as well. If this doesn’t scare you, then you should probably stand up to charging rhinoceros for a living. In this case though, we all lack the depth perception necessary to determine when the rhinoceros will actually hit. We’re all just sitting there looking at it run towards us thinking how awesome and fearless we are.

Heck, it feels like I just covered this yesterday, when in fact it was just one month ago, and BTC was below $6,000 at the time. It’s tripled since then. Yawn. But at current transaction costs, BTC is not the least bit conducive to retail transactions or anything at all close to it. Even those who use BTC debit cards are probably no longer able to use them, since in most cases the wallet providing the service sells your BTC for you and charges you the mining fee. If you can’t use it in small transactions, you can only sell in humongous chunks, which means when people want to get out, we may see an insane traffic jam triggering a breakdown of mining equipment and worse.

But it gets more ominous. The average transaction value as of December 11th is (!) $120,000. The median value is over $1,000, which means there are some enormous players out there selling millions of dollars in BTC at a time. At this point there is enough enthusiasm to absorb all that selling, but it won’t always be that way. How long will there be enough enthusiasm? Think of it this way: