57'

It's important to think about these things, and 32 thousand more deaths than average in the mildest winter is still significant. What the chart doesn't and can't project, though, it how many people will die in Ukraine, as Russia is heavily targeting critical infrastructure which can lead to lack of heating and people freezing because of that. Moreover, I would consider the extra deaths to be due to Russia's war because this is the reason of the energy crisis, after all (as the Economist article also seems to do, by the way). The model is assuming things, though. The article says that normally, energy price changes did not contribute to death changes, but they assume this time will be different because of a huge energy price change. We'll see if that will be true.

It's good to hear that there will be a special authority from now on to oversee the crypto-friendly policies of El Salvador and evaluate their efficiency. I think it shows a more serious approach than when the president just decides to purchase some BTC or remind people about Bitcoin on Twitter. This could help work on a coherent strategy, analyse downsides and correct previous approaches. If they make a state mining farm using clean energy in El Salvador, that could be pretty interesting as well, and something for this new office to assess in advance and plan out.

I don't keep money on the exchanges because there's no need to do that if you aren't a trader  (choosing a non-custodial wallet isn't that hard), but I understand why people would do that. We live in the world full of authorities, and people are used by now to storing money in their bank accounts, where the money isn't really theirs but is managed in hopefully a good way by the company. So it's natural to look for something like a crypto bank, a reputable company, and rely on them. If you have troubles with your exchange account, you can contact support, restore access to your account (if you lost it). If it's a non-custodial wallet, it's your sole responsibility to keep your money safe, but also ensure you don't lock yourself out of the wallet. So why not relieve oneself from responsibility and then blame someone else if things go wrong?

27'

The price was only a few hundred dollars, but many thought that after Bitcoin hit $1k and fell, it would never go that high again. And investing in 2015, people would have to wait patiently for at least a year to see any profit and at least for two years to see major gains. Not selling at the first sign of improvement, not panic selling in 2018 later would have both been very difficult.
IMO, while the times of such low prices are over, there are still times when there's a great opportunity to buy Bitcoin. Such as right now, for instance, when the price is only a quarter of what it used to be, and given that with every bull market Bitcoin goes higher, that means it's reasonable to expect more than 4x profit in the next bull run if one invests now. And it can be more than that, I don't see why Bitcoin can't reach $160k, for example, bringing a 10x profit.

18'

Birth decline can be worse in some places and nearly nonexistent in others. Migration, as the article duly notes, can help with the labor shortage, so there's finally a good argument against the misguided anti-immigration rhetoric. I personally think that all should be welcome if they wish to relocate, and it's in the interest of those states that welcome immigrants to find them jobs and basic living opportunities. I've seen a lot of research that in the vast majority of cases, such investments pay off, so it's not only ethically but also economically desirable.
Not to mention a couple of positive things the article mentioned, such as fewer births indicating more opportunities for women being available and workers now having more leverage over employers due to labor shortage.

I don't think there's a major risk of adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender due to volatility specifically. If a country's own fiat currency is strong and stable, people will continue using fiat and appreciate its stability even more, looking at Bitcoin. If a currency is in a very bad situation already, Bitcoin can become a viable alternative, but since fiat is rarely more volatile than Bitcoin,  man might prefer their imperfect fiat. Letting people legally use Bitcoin doesn't mean that they'll do it. And risks for the state and businesses can be mediated by instantly or very regularly exchanging all BTC payments for fiat, which might actually strengthen the fiat currency as well.

Forcing KYC upon everyone and obliging exchanges to store all transactions for 5 years sound harsh. Not to mention that the legal choice for people in Uzbekistan is limited to two platforms... I guess it's not surprising, coming from an authoritarian regime, that they want to restrict and control their citizens, but still. Maybe you're right that a VPN can help avoid the requirements, though.
If only these two exchanges are legal, does it mean that storing coins in a noncustodial wallet and performing transactions directly from one address to another is illegal, or do the requirements apply only to exchanging currencies? I'm asking because the op says from the beginning of next year, only transactions on licensed exchanges are legal.

I am not interested in having my own business. It means responsibility over other people (employees), moral dilemmas related to it and to running a business successfully, you can both profit and lose money despite working hard on it, etc. When you're employed, you can expect a regular payment for what you do (you usually aren't losing money this way), and if you work at several places part-time, you can be pretty independent. Also, the conditions of work and how much freedom you have at your work depends on a place, but it can be pretty good if it's a reasonable boss, flexible schedule or even online work.
Also, a person can be self-employed, which is neither a business nor working for someone else. In the end, I think it's probably the best, but it does come with some risks and implications.

Hypothetically, it seems that it's not hard to make an exchange that will be safe for its users. You need very strong security to resist hacking attempts, but also you need to NOT MESS with the money of customers. No reinvesting the money, experimenting, funding some projects etc. with what people think it owned by them and is in their wallets. How to make profit and cover the running costs, then? Ads on the platform, trading fees, withdrawal fees.
In such scenario, an exchange cannot go bankrupt (or, rather, it can eventually, but there will be no victims among the customers because all of them can withdraw their money at any point.
In practice, there should always be room for doubt that a centralized service is not doing anything funny and is operating it a very honest way. After all, not your keys, not your coins. So I'd stick to using exchanges only when necessary, not hodling there, and using only the most trusted exchanges like Binance.

We have some examples of famous CEOs, so we can get the general idea of consequences, but there would have also been some differences for Satoshi.
Take Vitalik Buterin. He is a human being, a person you can see and read about. AFAIK, he still plays a decisive role in the development of Ethereum (choosing the direction, major changes and stuff), unlike the development of Bitcoin, which I believe is more decentralized and cooperative because the founder is not there and CEO of Bitcoin is not a thing. Also, as any person, he has opinions. For example, he opposes Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian war, which means people who support Russia are probably angry with him. He is also a very well-known figure, so he probably needs to be mindful of his surroundings, perhaps have a personal bodyguard and good security at home.
Satoshi can be expected to have faced similar matters: central role in development, opinions which some support and others oppose, security and publicity issues. On top of that, Satoshi, I believe, could face legal action because of being the first one who created a cryptocurrency and because of most certainly not paying taxes for their BTC. Plus, the publicity would be worse because Bitcoin is more popular that Ethereum and appeared earlier than Ethereum.

The article mentions a paper which wasn't even peer-reviewed and that argues that gold is better for banks to avoid sanctions anyway. So it seems that the motivation to have some BTC for central banks isn't high. Moreover, sanctions, as the Politico article mentions as well, don't always work and might not work as effectively as intended most of the time.
The Satoshi quote by the op is beautiful, but the idea of buying BTC before the banks do it isn't really viable, as it's not like we can ban them from buying it, and given high liquidity of Bitcoin, there wll always be enough willing to sell (and thus enough options for banks to buy BTC), it's just a question of price.

16', England

I agree that financial crimes must be punished, but I don't think that letting the victims suffer from losses and spending taxpayer money on keeping convicts in prisons is the way to do it. Instead, the focus should be on paying back the money to victims and then some to the state, IMO.
It's also truly sad that people still fall for ponzi schemes so much, and I believe it's largely due to lack of financial literacy that they (we) should've received at school but didn't. But the focus shouldn't be that it was a crypto project. It was a scam, organized in a well-known way of scams.

I'm Ukrainian, and to me the world does seem to have hit a rough patch over the next few years. I've been watching the Peripheral lately, and there's a concept of Jackpot there as a series of very bad events that just hit Earth in 21st century (mainly man-made or heavily affected by human behaviour), causing a huge change in human civilization, and it feels like we might be experiencing the start of Jackpot from the beginning of 2020 as well. I hope that's not the case, and that this period will be over in a few years, after which we'll have decades of relative stability, so I don't think we should be concerned with the apocalypse. I also agree with the op that in case it does happen, money won't matter (including Bitcoin).
The problem of answering the question is mainly because 'apocalypse' is a vague term and people have attribute different meaning to it. Is a third of the world population dying an apocalypse? Is relative peace and continued global cooperation of a half of current population an apocalypse?
If we're thinking in the line of collapse of the Internet and globalization, then I think Bitcoin won't survive that. But if that doesn't happen, it can continue to exist and perhaps even be in demand in a world after a major catastrophe (or a set of those).

There have been different experiments, such as Blockchain voting, Blockchain for ticket verifications and similar. In many cases, it seems that moving to Blockchain is not easy and isn't worth it, which is why non-crypto blockchain projects didn't become a huge thing. Moreover, let's not forget that with Bitcoin, people have the freedom of storing their own coins and of participating in the market as they fee fit. With other ideas like the op's replacing politicians for deciding tax distributions, it can get tricky. If we try to make decisions somehow automatic and not controlled by anyone, we can get into a dystopia pretty fast and to a situation where humans aren't in control. If the idea is that people will have an equal say in such matters, then it's worthy of exploration but it's sort of like voting, and IMO there's a difference before regular people and professionals for a good reason (most people don't understand how taxes work, which industry needs how much of them, so that nothing critical for society collapses, and the majority might even vote to have no taxes altogether without realizing the consequences).
Bitcoin can't fix the world, but it makes a significant contribution to showing that more financial freedom that could have previously been imagined is possible. Reimagining other areas can lead to good results, good alternatives. But maybe not with Blockchain.

I believe the op's expectations of $30-40 by the middle of next year are reasonable, as well as the eventual $100k target. There is no guarantee that this will happen, but it's realistic, given that the bear market has been going on for a while and more than 6 months from now is a big amount of time.
I do also agree with buwaytress that spenders matter because they legitimize Bitcoin as money, show that it is used this way. So we should never tell people who want to spend BTC (not panic sell BTC) during the bear market that they shouldn't.
But hodling instead of panic selling is a good advice.

72'