You are totally correct, I agree fully. It is not because Bitcoin is appreciating in value that is why it will become the base value holder for the entire future of world commerce. The price appreciation is just the market recognizing over time that Bitcoin is a standalone system outside of the world of central banking and finance capable of final settlement without concern for borders, apolitical and neutral, permissionless and nearly frictionless, open for transactions 24/7/365 and with open markets every second of the day with a bid and an ask in practically every currency pair, free from government manipulation and debasement. (PS did you know that the stock market is open 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, or 32.5 hours per week, ie - open only (7x24=168) 32.5/168, just under 20% of the time, not including holidays or circuit breaks. That means every year of Bitcoin trading is actually 5+ years of stock market trading)

The problem with comparing Bitcoin to the massive list of companies/commodities/currencies that have shot way up before coming crashing back down is, how many of those experienced massive drawdowns, were left for dead, and then they rose again to even higher levels than ever thought possible before? Its crashed, and I mean CRASHED, about a dozen times with 80% or more drawdowns -- curiously though, always at higher lows. And here we are somehow, scraping $50k a coin, 900 Billion dollars worth of value created out of uhhh - a bit of ingenious code and a transparent ledger.

The question you must ask yourself is, why? Why does it not die? It has every reason to! No other example comes to mind of anything coming back from the dead once, let alone multiple times.

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Bitcoin is a protocol layer on top of which the application layer rests. The only comparable example is TCP/IP - otherwise known as, the internet. The internet digitized and democratized information- it is now in the same power as you and I as someone with access to the world's best minds to find out whatever we want at the absolute cost of ZERO. Bitcoin is the digitization of money, it is the democratization of money. Today only the privileged in first world countries can have access to bank accounts, credit cards, checkbooks... To send a wire internationally you can pay $35 and wait a couple of days, that is if the country you are sending to is a country your country is down with and the amount of money does not raise any eyebrows in compliance departments.

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But we are now in the process of seeing the transformation that will allow any person anywhere the ability to send money unfettered, without questions, without unreasonable fees, nearly instantaneously, from Istanbul to Venezuela if that is where their family members live, on a Saturday, at 11PM, and the person receiving it is not charged extortion fees, or bullied, or marked, or followed, or known to have received any value whatever.

How much is something like that worth?

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So in the end if price is all you see, there is a reason for it, it is the iceberg under the surface that you are not seeing, this irresistible, unstoppable force that has been released into the world without hope of curtailing it no matter how much those who control the money supply might try.

And that is because Bitcoin, without firing a single round and without spilling a drop of blood, has forever placed beyond the reach of man the ability to manipulate and control the money. It is a voluntary system with clearly defined unchangeable rules (21M BTC, Nodes, Proof of Work, Difficulty adjustment, permissionless, non-sovereign, neutral, Supply schedule set in stone for the next hundreds of years) that if you would like to participate in, you are more than welcome to. If you decide you don't like it, you may sell it and leave. And without a CEO, marketing team, or coercion to transact in it as in FIAT, it has made people believe in it to the point of it being today one of the top 15 companies/ commodities/currencies with the highest of market caps, and it is the only one that looks bent on rising the ranks faster than any of the others. And for the first time in its history the macro external outlook has made it look by comparison, FOR THE FIRST TIME, as a desirable place to park value by those with value to park, accumulating enough liquidity to interest public companies. Validation for the thesis subtly embedded in the first block, ambitious and ridiculous in its scope and imagination, PLAYING OUT IN REAL TIME, earning respect in the eyes of the most serious of capital allocators.

And isn't it interesting that as the price appreciates, it actually becomes more useful and valuable, a better network, more reachable to bigger and bigger entities? It is the world's most fine-tuned positive feedback loop ever witnessed. Created by someone (anonymous of course, how else!) who understood this needed to be a public utility (as in water or electricity) and never cashed in on their deca-Billions! IS YOUR MIND BLOWN YET

Bitcoin is in the envious position of having time on its side. Everything else feels like it is borrowing against the future at ever-steepening costs to attempt to keep the charade going for another day. Short term gain, long term pain. Every decision at a corporate and government level today is made with the short term in mind, without paying a lick of mind to the long term. Bitcoin just mines another block. And another one. Miners keep dedicating to it more hashpower. It gets stronger and more secure. Monetary policy automatically tightens every 210,000 blocks/ approx every 4 years. Price rises. And the loop goes on.

With this scenario as laid before you, in the long term, how does this all play out from here?

Bitcoin in the end, is an unalienable right. Like water. Like electricity. Like the internet, arguably.

because... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. And that includes freedom of monetary opression. For every human being on the planet, INDISCRIMINATELY, let freedom ring.

Please do it.

Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.  A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.

The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think.  A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact).  Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction.  Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.  That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

Satoshi Nakamoto

First and foremost, provide a signature of the following quoted message, which is verifiable at https://tools.bitcoin.com/verify-message/ or https://reinproject.org/bitcoin-signature-tool/#verify or https://tools.qz.sg/

How is bitcoin network going to be strengthen? All they can do is to buy more miners and mine out of China. Bitcoin network is already strengthened. If miners increase, the network will also be strengthened.

The security of the Bitcoin network has been criticized on several occasions, but the flagship cryptocurrency remains unscathed. However, innovations continue and crypto industry leaders are now supporting an initiative from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) that seeks to enhance the bitcoin network’s security.

Dubbed the “Bitcoin Software and Security Effort,” the open-source initiative will promote research that strengthens the Bitcoin network’s defenses. The efforts are being backed by crypto industry leaders like Gemini’s Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and major European digital asset manager, CoinShares.

In its blog post the DCI outline that Bitcoin’s growth from an “obscure cryptographic toy” to a robust network that “secures on the order of $1 [trillion] of value” was the result of millions of hours invested into developing the blockchain network by open-source developers.

To support this initiative, Coinshares has announced a $500,000 donation to the project. The company’s chief executive Jean-Marie Mognetti has urged other crypto companies to follow.

    “As a beneficiary of the work of hundreds of developers who secure, upgrade, and maintain the open-source protocols that underlie the Bitcoin network and the applications built on top of it, we believe for-profit firms in the digital asset industry have an obligation to fund independent, neutral development efforts and research that advances the mutual interest of all ecosystem participants.”

The four-year research and development program expects to “harden the Bitcoin network and steward the industry’s commitment to funding open-source software,” the announcement added. A part of the post reads:

    “The objective of DCI’s new program is to contribute neutral, expert resources to improving the robustness of the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin’s security is foundational to the underlying technology’s continued evolution, as well as the broad realization of the public-good promises of digital currencies.”

The announcement outlined various issues that MIT seeks to address. Some of these include sustaining a senior team of Bitcoin developers, exploring new programming languages, and pre-emptive investigations against possible attacks.

MIT has also stressed that the network’s security must be strengthened, citing increasing adoption, noting the various challenges associated with coordinating a decentralized network:

    “Unlike traditional assets, Bitcoin is software running on a decentralized network. Bitcoin’s security is predicated on the accuracy and robustness of the software and hardware running it, and the actions of those participating in the network.”

Risks amplify

Previously, DCI researcher James Lovejoy has voiced concerns regarding the risks of a 51% attack. He believes the changes of a bad actor capturing a majority share of nodes and controlling the bitcoin network could be much more plausible than previously thought. Hence, he has stressed the need for active blockchain monitoring:

    “You need an active observer to be monitoring the network to check whether or not an attack occurs.”

    “Up until now, we’ve been reliant on victims to tell us about whether they’ve been attacked. As you can imagine, if this results in insolvency or a loss of user funds, victims are often not super interested in revealing when an attack has taken place,” he added.

It is not the answer.

You can format your disk, reinstall your OS but it can not save you when you connect your device to the Internent and more unsafely if you visit adult websites or blindly click and open any given links from strangers or from anyone else.

You can not format your device every day.

I store my bitcoin in Electrum on an offline device. I only connect it to the Internet when I spend my bitcoin.

This is really really unlikely to happen but just to answer this as a rhetorical question:

I would.  Because even if bitcoin becomes stable and unmoving in USD price, I personally would still take advantage of bitcoin's censorship-resistant and "true ownership" characteristics that I can't have with fiat money(besides physical cash).

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OP, I'm waiting for an answer ... I say 'no major government will BAN Bitcoin in the near future.' Any amount. Escrow somebody?