what i am wondering is that why do you think that also "altcoins" are in the same position as bitcoin?
there are lots of them and many will simply perish this year after their  dumps and will never go back up again. their drops wasn't because of some bubble or anything like that, their drops was due to the dumping step of their two step pump and dump.

but will they really do that?
that has always been the problem though. these services are rarely used for the benefit of users. next thing you know is that IRS is the biggest user of them trying to catch those that didn't pay their taxes so that they can make more money, while the real criminals like the hackers you mentioned are roaming freely.

again with this lunar year thing? bro, it is not a thing and it won't become one no matter how many times it is being repeated. it is the same false mentality as end of the year dump, tax deadline dump,... people aren't selling at any of these times and 10 years of history has already proven that. price has never declined because of any of these things but every year people start the same thing!

this seems to be an electrum server which is using the same phishing attack technique to warn you about the vulnerability and direct you to download the latest version to prevent it from happening in case you connected to a malicious server and saw the malicious message instead.

just ignore the message but upgrade your wallet by downloading it from the same place you always downloaded your wallet (electrum.org) and make sure to check its signature.

that is not the only way! there are literary hundreds of methods to use for brainwallet because there is no standard for it. for example you can perform multiple rounds of SHA256 on it. or this "password" you use can be the password of a PBKD2 with some iteration count and then derive a 32 byte result from it.

the real question is have you checked the signature of the file you downloaded? you may think the website was electrum.org but in fact it might have been a lookalike with a similar name but a fake website.

if you have the legit wallet then the only remaining possibility is that you might have some sort of malware on your computer that stole your seed or somehow you leaked it and that is how they accessed your funds.

bitcoin doesn't become scarce because someone lost some bitcoins they were holding. it is scarce because it has a low supply that is also capped. these losses will make it more scarce but they are not that big to even be considered. 26k is lost in 21 million.

the news has been around for a while now, if anybody wanted to panic sell they would have done it already. news and FUD are doing their job immediately not with a long delay!

then you would be changing your whole ideology!

i don't support any groups, i support proposals. if we start supporting "groups" then we are effectively centralizing bitcoin to that group. it doesn't matter who they are and what they have done so far.  you have to check the code itself.
i don't claim to be an expert though. but with little knowledge that i have i checked out different proposals regardless of who started them. to my understanding the hard fork to 8 MB (BCH) was the worst and SegWit fork was the best although it has its own downsides too.
additionally i do believe that a hard fork to increase the block size itself is requires. we may not need it now, as i said hopefully we get other things such as Schnorr before that but eventually it needs to happen.

i agree the possibility exists but my whole point is that you should not reject or accept any proposal based on who proposed it. if you start doing it then YOU are centralizing bitcoin to that group. in other words you should do:
- accept SegWit if you understand the implications of it, not because core team proposed it
- reject hard fork to X MB blocks if you understand the implications of it not because people you named here were pushing for it.

1. they, like many others, started selling before the drop began not after it. so if their sales were the real reason for drops then price should not have been able to rise above $6000 since that is about when they started selling or dumping if you want to call it that.

2. any person with half a brain doesn't dump on the market to crash the value of what he is trying to sell. instead they do whatever they can to get the most amount of money out of their sale which means selling in a way to prevent the crash. so blaming the crash on them is outright stupid. not to mention that usually these types of sale happen OTC not on exchanges which have a lot of headache for withdrawing large sums of money and then your bank would give you a lot of headache on the other end!

3. if we say Mt Gox was the reason for the drop then we are basically saying that $20k was not a bubble, and it didn't need to burst and we also have no explanation for the previous 4 or 5 similar bubbles that bitcoin had in the past 10 years because there was no Mt Gox selling in any of them!

- with all that said, their sales might have put some sell pressure on the market and contributed to the drop and the bear market but it was not the cause and it was not the biggest reason anyways.

i honestly don't understand how you made that conclusion based on the things you mentioned here!
basically you are saying that because the people who support a proposal might have been dishonest that makes the proposal bad! so technically if someday Roger Ver publicly announces that Segregated Witness is one of the best proposals of all time, you must dump bitcoin and get out because a dishonest person supported a certain proposal!
well that mentality doesn't make any sense to me.

with that said i still support the 2 MB hard fork aka the SegWit2x proposal and don't give a shit who started it. and am still against the exaggerated hard forks to much bigger blocks that BCH hard fork was proposing and similarly don't give a shit who started it.
and i do believe that eventually we have to also increase the block size if we want things such as LN to work. but before that we hopefully get other things such as Schnorr and signature aggregation to squeeze as much scaling as possible out of the current 4 MB block weight.

p.s. remember that you are only a newbie if you blindly follow a herd just because the social media tells you to. the code is law, the rest like reddit is just noise.

well most of them aren't even in US to want to comply with US laws. they come from Asian countries. and as you mentioned many of them even reject US citizens so asking for KYC becomes even shadier! besides we have already seen lots of KYC related documents that people submitted for the ICOs have been sold on the dark market.

I am surprised that you claim to have this affiliation but have not once mentioned anything about "verifying the signature of the downloaded files" which is the most important part, even more important than downloading from the official website (electrum.org). in fact it doesn't matter where you download them from as long as you verify them with the real PGP public key of the real developer.

as for the server, i think it is a bad move specially since there is no guarantee people are connecting to that server anyways since there are quite a lot of them available.

you are obviously advertising your own website here so your opinion here is not an opinion, it is an ad.
and not to mention that these services are also risky if not riskier than the custodial exchanges such as Binance that you mentioned here. they can also scam people and take their money specially those new ones with little to no history!
besides none of these are for "TRADING". so your statement doesn't even make sense for most people who will read it because they want to trade not to do a one time conversion between their coins.

the ICO's KYC has never had anything to do with regulations and laws. in all cases they were adding the KYC as a buzzword to fool people into thinking their useless token is better than other useless tokens just because the lie and convince you they are "regulated". and then they all sell your KYC related documents which you gave them on the dark markets and earn some more money from it.

that is true.
and that is happening. which is why the price has been going up solidly and staying up. why do you think a decentralized digital currency is worth more than three thousand dollars?

lesser extent in this context means a percentage so negligible that is is not even worth talking about. specially since you are talking about bitcoin (a non-anon coin) not some anon coin like monero. so i don't even know why you brought this up here!

no it was not. both years were good years with 2017 being one of the best and not because of price but because of the adoption growth that we had. you seem to have forgotten the fact that we took at least 10 big steps in adoption whereas normally 1, 1.5 step per year is taken.
need i remind you of countries such as Japan and their adoption of bitcoin as a legal way of payment?

so you just explained the thing that has been going on from day on and is still going on!
watch the altcoin market and you will see the bullshit coins every day!

again you are repeating the same thing. they are still accepting anon coins such as monero in dark net, just like before. bitcoin's usage is still the same tiny negligible amount also by those who haven't yet figured out bitcoin is not anonymous.

that is already happening, you just have to stop hanging out in dark net markets and start hanging out in real world where legal infrastructure has been built and has been working for a long time

i don't bother with clicking on this link to see what new bullshit they are weaving. we have already received proof that Mt Gox and their sale had nothing to do with the price drop. and their representative already claimed that they started selling a very long time before the drops even began. in fact they started selling while price was still going up.
so any article that is still making claims otherwise is just bullshitting and forgetting to read the concrete facts that have already came out a long time ago.

nothing about a 85% drop is normal, as it wasn't normal to rise >100% in one month in the last month of 2017. and just because someone experienced previous similar drops, it doesn't make the newer ones "normal" in my opinion.

with that said, it is pretty much the same as previous times, if that's what you are asking. we had a solid rise which created a lot of hype and attracted a lot of global attention which eventually led to a huge bubble at $20k and like other times, this bubble caused a long bear market.
and similar to all those times, bitcoin is still bitcoin and is constantly improving and its adoption is still growing. so to answer your other question, price at 2021 should be much higher than this. and by then we will have seen another new ATH for sure and will probably be in a similar situation as these days after the bubble burst but at a higher price, maybe $60k this time.

it is easy to make as long as the exchanges have an API call function that has the ability to give you the orders in the sell order book. then it is just a matter of making the call and then adding the values, you may not even have to multiply anything since many of them do report it in both BTC and USD.
additionally, for the lazies, you can just open the exchange webpage and look at the charts, most of them have an order book chart which shows a V like chart representing the total amounts inside the order books.

but since there is no point in doing something like that, nobody is going to do it ever. you have to do it yourself if you want to know that value. as @squatter mentioned the market is dynamic, when the price starts rising that is the time when a lot of orders will start being placed. not to mention that many will sell at the market price without even placing an order so you don't see them in the order book now.

your arguments are flawed.
you are basically saying that just because the educational system is not good we should put our kids to work instead of letting them be educated!

it is like saying we should throw someone who doesn't know how to swim into the ocean filled with sharks and hope he doesn't die just because the swim instructors that you know of are pretty bad at teaching how to swim!

you can't prevent people from sending you bitcoin. but you can prevent your wallet from spending it.
it can work either by having an option in your wallet that allows you to freeze certain transaction outputs (which is called "coins" sometimes) or it can even go as far as not even showing the output in your wallet. something like blocking a number in your cell phone from calling it, that  doesn't prevent the number from calling you but it stops your phone from ringing and bothering you!