if someone has something to say they will always come out like a normal human being and say it. in other words if McAfee really had slightest clue who the real Satoshi is, he would have already said something in the past many years!

but when someone has nothing to say and have no idea what they are talking about they turn into a weasel and try to manipulate and prolong their shenanigans because that is how they can gain attention, by being vague and giving promises they can not and will not deliver.

even without reading the links i can tell you that a big company like Amazon who has been asked to add bitcoin payment options to their platforms and have been refusing it so far is not going to change their mind without a fuss overnight and they will definitely not start with Lightning Network.
reading the links it is obvious that this was a clever way of advertising that service that has nothing to do with Amazon.

what you are talking about is "adoption of bitcoin" which has nothing to do with "improvement of bitcoin". these two are complete different things.

and the answer is obviously yes! in a society that every business and service is regulated and is functioning according to the laws, obviously bitcoin adoption is going to be hastened if the "law" is positive towards bitcoin.
we have already seen many examples of it, like the 2017 regulations in Japan which contributed greatly to the rise towards $20k and that was just a small sign of mass adoption.

you have to have been very lucky to have bought bitcoin in that very short time when price was near the ATH because it was indeed short and the number of "new" people who came into bitcoin is a handful.

as for what to do, you must have had a reason for holding those coins this long. if not then you must have found a reason. and if not then it is not too late to start making up your mind, try researching more about what bitcoin is and see if you can find those "reasons" why bitcoin is a lot more valuable than these silly prices. and if you can't then just sell and say goodbye.

bitcoin has been undervalued by a lot for some time now, not just because some traders think it is undervalued but because it is below the real intrinsic value of bitcoin and has been kept there artificially by the market manipulators who have spent millions to push the price down there and keep it there for accumulation of cheaper coins. basically the fall below $6k gave them twice the buying power since the value halved!

as for the rise and how much it will be worth, it is not possible to predict that but we know the facts which are the limited and small supply of only 21 million (maximum) and the fact that so far the adoption has been below 1% while it is still growing.
so this "analyst"'s prediction about price is extremely low because he is basically predicting a price a little higher than $50k which is a lot lower than the real possibility which is around $1 million.

if the traders were actually bullish then we would have also seen bullish movements. so you are wrong. majority of traders are confused or are accumulating. that is why price is slowly rising instead of big rises.
additionally ETFs are not needed for bitcoin to rise as they were not needed for the rise in the past 10 years. besides the chances of a US ETF is nearly zero at this point while other ETFs in other countries have been running for a while now.

FOMO has different degrees, like pretty much everything else! it doesn't have to be a 1 million percentage rise to be considered a FOMO
for example what we had when price surged upwards to $5500 recently was a good example of a moderate size FOMO where people who were waiting for a bigger drop gave it up and jumped on board of the ongoing rise because they didn't want to miss out and end up paying ~70% more than the bottom.

Tom Lee literary invented the misery index for bitcoin to justify his speculations which mostly were wrong in the past specifically during 2018 which he insisted on setting a new ATH by the end of that year which was clearly impossible although he didn't want to accept it.
now he is doing the same thing although this time he is at least going with the market instead of against it like in 2018 since price is already rising.

first of all that picture is from 2011 (8 years ago!) and it is not reliable. secondly it is reporting the "average" electricity cost not the exact one. in many countries there is a wide range of electricity cost, in some places it is very cheap while in other places inside the same country it can be extremely higher. so you can't really decide based on that!

as i have speculated at the time of certain forks, they have influenced the market and price of bitcoin in some certain cases but they were never a significant force to be considered affecting the final result. so generally speaking i have to say no, without these forkcoins price would have taken pretty much the same route that it took in the past couple of years.

however in certain cases like the BSV fork which was a severe attack against bitcoin, the price fell below $6k because of that fork so if it never existed price might not have fallen and not falling meant accumulation phase would have ended sooner and rise started sooner too. and as a result the current price would have been higher.

^^ calling it "theft" is just branding it with a false description if you ask me. and this has nothing to do with theft. this is all about the fact that nobody should be allowed to make decisions about other people's funds in bitcoin. if we allow that to happen, then it won't stop there. next thing you know people would start wanting their money back when they lost it in some scam, there will be roll back forks all around us and immutability of bitcoin is going to be a historical feature.

the "bullish momentum" has been present not because price didn't go to the price you guesses ($4900) but because of the strong buy support that is behind it otherwise $4900 is not really a significant price level to change anything from the current trend even if it was reached.

that is the question that you will always ask and there is never any answers for it and yet you have to ask it.
the only thing that can be done is "speculation"! meaning when price is at $X you start analyzing and try to predict whether there is any chance of more drops or not. and you have to do that ON YOUR OWN instead of reading what other FUDsters are saying about price drops to dumb levels like $2000!
then if you came up with a low chance, then that price is the bottom and you should buy with confidence.

all i see is the same growth in bitcoin and the interest among "investors" that is increasing. then we have this newly found phenomenon that new "fund manager" companies are popping up where they encourage newbie investors to pour their money into cryptocurrencies (all not just bitcoin) and they themselves have no interest in bitcoin and not just that, they only want to make money by being that "middle man" where they make money even if the real newbie investor lost money!

a cycle is only a cycle and worth having it under observation and act on it only if it repeats multiple times. so far the bear market was somewhat similar to the bear market of 2013-2014. and even if the rise follows the same pattern as 2015-2017 it still wouldn't be a cycle because it is the FIRST time that happens whereas bitcoin has been around for 10 years and it had at least 12 major bubbles which shaped up "cycles" that only occurred once.

with that said i am still fascinated by the current trend and how it sometimes mimics the past.

it is exactly because of this reason that whenever someone asks me about how bitcoin is "generated" and generally about technical stuff, i refuse to answer them and instead ask them to tell me how other things they use daily work. for example i ask them how an ATM machine encrypts the communication with the bank and how it reads the data from the cards,...
people are usually weird only when it comes to bitcoin just because it is new. we have to tell them that they don't have to know the technical details to use bitcoin just like they don't know how 90% of things they use every day work and still they enjoy using them.

LN is growing fast but unfortunately the biggest problem with lightning network is going to be the high fees of bitcoin's on-chain transctions and as long as they remain high the second layer can not gain traction either. what we are seeing these days is mostly the enthusiasts running LN nodes and making payments for small stuff based on what i have seen. what we need is lower fees on chain and then more real adoption of LN by big businesses so that we can see it pick up.

he is doing what "he should do", he is being evasive and whenever the subject rises he throws everyone off the subject but going off topic, because what he wants to do is to scam people and rob the real Satoshi from his identity and abuse it to fill his pockets. someone needs to sue him for identity fraud!

i think he might have messed up by posting how many times the price went up as in "went up 3x" instead of percentage for the next 3.
$300 to $900 -> 3x
$900 to $3600 -> 4x

have you tried one of those sources which allows you to export the data in JSON or CSV format? i think bitcoincharts.com had that option. then you can do a better analysis on the raw data yourself.

i am not sure what "non-custodial" exchanges exactly mean but if it is about you being in control of your funds not the exchange then it makes sense for them to gain traction since anonymity was never as important as having control and having some privacy.