There are 2 topics currently on my mind. They are Ethereum as a primary currency for payments and the Bitcoin Private fork to be implemented by Zclassic.
First, the state of the market today:
Ethereum & Ether
I have always liked ether, and its rise from $8 to $50 was what ultimately made me go starry eyed about crypto currency. I am very optimistic about the value of ether for 2018. I think that many of the DAPPs that have had ICOs and have been in development during 2017 will be coming online and beginning to have utility. However, I believe that until Raiden or some other form of payment channels is implemented for commonly used transaction, the actual dapp usage will be hamstrung.
This is speculation, but i think that a significant amount of transaction volume for almost all of the major POW chains is basically just due to transactions between mining pools and miners. The conversion of this commonly recurring payment is a great use for payment channels and would alleviate large amounts of transactions on the network.
Ultimately I think that as both lightning network and Raiden ramp up, btc and ETH will resume their dominance with eth being the primary transaction currency and BTC remaining a store of value and the best way to "unbank" the banked.
Zclassic and Bitcoin Private
First , as a I understand it, Zclassic is a fork of Zcash that has eliminated the founders fee.
http://zclassic.org/
The lead developer has had what I think is a genius idea to fork Zclassic and Bitcoin at the same time onto a new chain called bitcoin private. This fork will basically airdrop Bitcoin Private into any wallet that holds Bitcoin or Zclassic. THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of this fork if you ask me, its its privacy potential. Currently it is not official, but there remains a chance that the bitcoin private coin will only utilize z transactions, Transactions using zk-snarks) which mean they would all be completely anonymous. I am not sure if this is even possible, but if it is, this would be the strongest privacy chain in existence, possibly even stronger than Monero, which is my current favorite privacy centric coin.
Here are the FAQ about the fork from a reddit thread for those interested:
Thanks for reading,
Leave comments, discussion or questions in the comments and as always, any upvotes are appreciated.
-libertyhound
I think the zcl btc airdrop will open up a whole new area of scammy forks that try to get you to buy a crappy coin before the fork and use the network effects of bitcoin to add value. I do not put zcl in this camp but I see the righting on the wall.