1.  Verstappen
2.  Russell
3.  Verstappen

I think that answering this question requires turning to data. We should see if the number of stock investors fell at interest in Bitcoin has been growing. I found a chart on the percentage of adult US population investing in stocks. It was the highest in 2007 at 65% and has been 60+ from 2000 till 2007, but after the recession it never hit 60% again. The lowest point was in 2014 and 2016, and over the last 6 years, the percentage slightly increased. So the interest fell before Bitcoin, clearly due to the economic crisis, and then increased since 2016, when Bitcoin has also been getting more attention.
Given that not all people have historically been stock investors by any measurement, there's room for growth both for stocks and for Bitcoin. It's not a competition, and interest in one doesn't directly draw people away from the other.

I think it's a recession thing, but honestly, it's a very rude move. If a company is strong and profitable, it should feel socially responsible for its workers and try to help them survive the recession rather than focus on how much money they can save if they fire people. Helping people out is not only the right thing to do morally, but also something that can help with the effect of the recession, help make it less significant. That's because when people get fired, their purchasing power plummets. Without purchasing power, they don't support the businesses they gave their money to in the past by buying food, entertainment or something else from them. This, in turn, leads to businesses struggling and firing more people, and all that deepens the negative effects of the recession.

World leaders certainly weren't the first ones to get into BTC. These were cryptography geeks, fans of Austrian school of economics, and soon enough, the black market dealers and customers. Moreover, there are educated people who are against Bitcoin, and rich people against Bitcoin as well.
IMO it is better to do some personal research and make informed decisions instead of just following some other people because they are rich and/or highly educated. People should rely on facts. For example, the op mentioned that to them all cryptos are the same, but there is an objective measurement that shows they are not the same at all and puts Bitcoin on top: market capitalization.

While there's thankfully no central authority on Bitcoin and thus opinions on a Bitcoin account don't mean that someone very important is feeling bearish, the account does have 5.6 million followers, which makes it quite significant in terms of influence. I found an article that explores the topic of the owner of the account and how the owner and authors of posts changed, as well as controversial tweets.
So we shouldn't take it any more seriously than a different Twitter account with a similar audience.

I'm happy that you have a friend who wanted to learn about Bitcoin and that you told him reasonable, not bullish, things. Long-term investment in Bitcoin is reasonable, but only if a person believes that previous patterns will continue to hold in the future and that Bitcoin will eventually recover from the current dip and restore its former glory. Of course, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that it won't happen because we don't know the future and the future does not necessarily repeat the past. I hope your friend realizes that as well.

Thanks for making the list. Causes for losing money on an exchange can differ: it can be a bankruptcy, security breach, an inside job, an exit scam, etc. It's also not always clear what actually happened, but the outcome of all these actions in the same: people lose their money. This should be a cautious lesson for everyone not to store money on exchanges and to only use them when necessary. If you need to use an exchange regularly, you should do your research and regularly withdraw profits (if you're a trader) from there as well. The FTX story wasn't good for the already bearish market, but I'm confident Bitcoin will recover from this.

Any company can go bankrupt, and IMO the risk is higher during the economic recession. If it's a good company, then it's perhaps less likely to fail and more likely to reimburse customers if it fails, but nobody is protected. I'm guessing that many thought "not your keys, not your coins" was a radical pro-Bitcoin statement because surely reputable companies do have all the money their clients gave them and nothing bad can happen. I hope the FTX situation will convince more people to store their own coins. I don't think Binance will go bankrupt, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. And why store coins there if you can just download Electrum and store your coins there, for free, without ever worrying that someone will take them away and then not give them back because this way nobody can take them away?

From other replies, I can see that it's unclear if the company actually implemented the feature because the news come from third parties and a Bitcoin payment option wasn't available to avikz. If they do implement it, it's good news, even though I'm not a fan of the Lightning network. My only question is why the thread name says that Bitcoin is going to the lower class. I assumed it would be some sort of social project, like a community kitchen or something like that, but it seems that the company is just a business. Being in South Africa doesn't translate into being lower class, IMO, as any country has some wealthier and poorer people, even if the standards can differ a lot from one place to another.

AFAIK, Bitcoin adoption is already pretty big in Nigeria, even though the authorities remain from vague to hostile. I assume it means that punishment is probably not reinforced (if it even exists in the legislation), so people can do their own thing while the government pretends it's keeping everything under control. But IMO the fact of needing to get rid of old banknotes fast just shows the inconvenience of physical money but won't necessarily push people toward Bitcoin. An obvious alternative is storing money in a bank account, and if people are looking for investments, they might be more interested in traditional markets like stocks instead of Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't the only way to proceed here.

I'm sorry for people who lost their money on FTX. This shows, once again, how important it is not to store any significant funds on an exchange, but I realize that it's hard for traders who rely on many buy/sell orders each day. I hope that FTX (unfortunately not Bankman-Fried himself, apparently) will be held accountable and that assets will be liquidated, giving the funds to the victims. And as for increasing oversight, it should be oversight of centralized services like online wallets and crypto exchanges, to ensure that customers are protected. It is the big guys who have to be held accountable, not regular crypto users. But I suppose that's not what the bill is about, right?

EUR 18,000
kryptonomous

Thanks for sharing it here, but I think it'll probably get moved to some other board like Politics and Society. Today's a good day, with Kherson finally being liberated.
As for the donations, I wonder why they didn't add the crypto button for the drone fleet, as generally, United24 accepts donations in crypto donations in Bitcoin, Ethereum and several other currencies, albeit via a payment processing system, not directly onto a Bitcoin address. Even their Army of Drones page has a crypto option. I hope the fleet page will get this button as well.

If we're talking about Bitcoin as money, then the fact of it losing value should not be of high concern. After all, most fiat loses value over time, and sometimes inflation goes over the top and a currency loses a very big chunk of its value. If Bitcoin more or less stabilizes at $17k for years, for example, it would be perfectly suitable to be money. I think Bitcoin will recover, so it can be a good long-term investment opportunity. I also believe that the price spikes and bear markets might not be as strong in the future, allowing for a more stable environment that can help to use Bitcoin as money.
I don't believe Bitcoin will replace fiat any time soon. Maybe it appeared too early for its time, when people aren't ready for decentralization yet. But it will still have a prominent place and provide an alternative to standard means of payment as well as standard investment options.

Bitcoin is an important idea, that has been implemented. It shows that money doesn't have to be issued by the government, that online transactions don't have to go through an intermediary, that no regulating authority that works on stabilizing the price and working on supply is needed. This is a big transformation of the idea of money, and it happened largely thanks to Bitcoin. As for how big it is in terms of direct impact, it depends on a society, I think. In some countries, Bitcoin is more popular, in some it is barely known. In some cases, it's used as money, in others it's used as an investment or as something to gather international donations in. But let's remember that Bitcoin can't fix the global economy or solve difficult issues. It shows that something out of the ordinary is possible, and it can empower some people. But it's not a magical fix for everything.

Thank you for this reminder. To me, crypto exchanges being hacked never meant anything regarding Bitcoin. These are centralized services, and when they are hacked or if they scam people, that has nothing to do with the security of Bitcoin. On the contrary, it shows precisely why Bitcoin security is important, why storing your own coins in a non-custodial wallet is important. As for ponzis and ICOs, they also have little to do with Bitcoin, so the pain for losing money in them shouldn't be translated into hate for Bitcoin. Regulations and bans are different in this regard, but they also affect only some people and regions, not Bitcoin as such, so they are highly unlikely to bring its death.

If investing against only means investing and waiting till that time, and if 2024 is fully included, then I agree that it's a pretty reasonable strategy. The current price is low. It can get even lower, but it's low enough now for nice profits in the future. Maybe Bitcoin will recover in 2023, but it's not unthinkable if it stays quite low throughout the year. But I believe it's reasonable to expect Bitcoin's full recovery to the previous ATH within more than two years from now. There's no guarantee it will happen, but given that 2022 has been a time of low pricing, I find it unlikely that Bitcoin remains low for 3 full years.

I hope that something close to the current price or perhaps 10% less will be the bottom, but of course Bitcoin can go lower than that, and stay low for months. There's nothing to guarantee Bitcoin's pump by the end of the year, either. December 2021 was the time of Bitcoin falling from $56k to $46k. December 2020 was the time of rising from $19k to $28k. December 2019 was uneventful as Bitcoin kind of remained in a dip between $6k+ and below $8k. In 2018 Bitcoin fell from $4k to $3k but recovered to $4k by the end of the month. Bottom line is, Bitcoin behaves very differently in December depending on a year, so I don't see why this time we'd be graced with a jump.

I haven't been following crypto exchange news lately, but I agree with the op that there's always a risk there. Less reputable exchanges can have bad security and get robbed or perform an exit scam. More reputable exchanges might still face issues due to mismanagement of funds or a security breach. On top of that, there are increasingly new and new KYC requirements for those who want to use crypto exchanges. Meanwhile, it's quite easy to just install Electrum wallet, generate a seed, create a password if a person wants an extra albeit probably unnecessary layer of protection and be the sole owner of one's coins, no KYC or anything else required.

On what grounds is 2022 the worst year in crypto history? Yes, Bitcoin went down even more, and yes, some will lose hope and will sell, and then invest again when the price is $50k. If you don't believe in Bitcoin and that it will recover, I don't think you should invest in it. After all, there's always a risk that it won't recover, and then people lose money.
But in terms of the worst year, I don't think 2022 qualifies. Even in recent history, look at 2019. Bitcoin was below $5k for the first three months, then between $5k and $10k till June, and then occasionally $11k but largely around $9k for the rest of the year, which then finished at $7k.
In 2022, Bitcoin was at $45k at the beginning, then largely above $40k till April, and then fell to $20k by June but experienced occasional growth up to $24k in August.
In any case, I don't think anything particularly worrisome is happening. I plan to hodl through the bear market and sell occasionally when/if I need money.