It is difficult to say they are lost just because they havent been moved for a long time. They could be in cold storage that can be transferred anytime.
On the other hand, it is certain many bitcoin in the early days are lost forever, so maybe a wild guess is 1/2 of the four million is lost.

One thing for sure is that during the pump, people cannot spread rumors about china banning bitcoin anymore.
In the past how many times have such rumors lead to major dump of bitcoin?

You are still early adopter, because only 0.5% of the population are in bitcoin in the planet. Imaging what would happen when that number turns 5% or even 50%

Day by day, more people come to join the BTC, plus some the Bitcoin future in this December, so average joe can put their funds to invest in bitcoin without going through exchanges.
I guess a lot of people see the potential before the Bitcoin future is live, and they cannot wait to jump in the train.

BTC is better than gold in many ways.
Compared with bitcoin, Gold is outdated.
Although both of them has scarcity, liquidity and fungibility, Bitcoin has much better transferability and divisibility compared with gold.
You cannot carry 100Kg of gold in the street and it is difficult to divide the gold.

There are no official fork, but there will be a lot of unofficial forks as it is the trend of gold, diamond, silver, ......

Whether selling bitcoin is foolish or not is not because of the forks. The forks may have a bad effect to bitcoin in the short term, but in the long term it makes bitcoin even stronger.
The question is is it foolish to sell bitcoin now or hodl?

Based on what I read, if the Lightning Network is in position, the transaction fees in the bitcoin side chains will be greatly reduced. Not sure how long it takes to implement the LN.. Hopefully not too late as Bitcoin user base is growing fast these days

With everybody dumping BTG, it is not a good time to sell now. It is best to wait for a pump in BTG and then sell it.

It may go down temporarily, but it will boost up more sturdy. The past few years has proved this trend. Now it is still in its early adoption stage.

Well written article, it is nice to see the estimate of 45 million people world wide are adopter of bitcoin, 0.64% of total population in the world.
If this number multiply by 15 times to 10% of total population, it would be huge

500k means 50 time increase at the current price. I am really not sure about it, I believe 100k is highly possible, but you cannot under estimate the power of Bitcoin.
Anything is possible here.

You can either buy Bitcoin ASIC miner to mine bitcoin, or build high end GPU mining rig to mine Altcoin and exchange it for bitcoin in exchanges. You can go to the Bitcoin mining section or altcoin mining section of this forum for more information, or just google it.

According to the current trend, it may break 10k in one or two days, so before November 2017 it will go above 10k.

Perhaps someday in the future when quantum computer is well developed, its high calculation capability will make bitcoin less secure. But you never know when it will be developed to that stage, 10 years or 100 years. By that time Bitcoin may already take quantum computer into consideration and limit it.

Compared with bitcoin, Gold is outdated.
Although both of them has scarcity, liquidity and fungibility, Bitcoin has much better transferability and divisibility compared with gold.
You cannot carry 100Kg of gold in the street and it is difficult to divide the gold.

You have localbitcoin, why do you choose craigslist?
There are a lot of scams in Craigslist, not just bitcoin, many people get scammed by transferring money via paypal, bank transfer etc.

It is highly possible, if bitcoin continues to grow wild like this. The reason is that bitcoin has hurt the interest of FIAT. They will put much regulation on bitcoin and I hope they will not ban bitcoin entirely. If so, there will be a large correction on bitcoin.

It is not worth it to mine with mobile phone or tablet. The performance is much lower than high end desktop graphics cards, perhaps hundreds of times lower, not to mention the Bitcoin ASIC miners. You may not get any share with your mobile phone. Now the only way to profit in bitcoin mining is Bitcoin ASIC miner.

Bitcoin gold, bitcoin diamond, bitcoin silver, bitcoin platinum, bitcoin copper, bitcoin titanium, etc. I guess this may be the current trend to replace the ICO.
Luckly I believe it will not harm Bitcoin itself much, because these forks will not take people's bitcoin away as long as he or she do not invest in these forks.