saying bitcoin is better or real estate is better is idiotic because they are not comparable.

first of all the market is not the same in all areas and not the same in all countries. in some countries and in some areas you can find real estate that is such a good investment that you can make a lot of profit from. for instance i know of an area close to where i live which grow in popularity and the real estate value has more than doubled there in less than 6 months. unfortunately i did not have any money at the time otherwise i would have invested.

secondly bitcoin is a new technology and that means two things: high profit and high risk. it is not all rises and always profits. there is also risks with that high profit and that is a risk that may not be available in many other markets. at least not as high.

you either haven't actually been involved in bitcoin for more than 1 year or you have never actually looked at the price before this because this stability phases are not that rare. they actually happen often in bitcoin.  the biggest one that i can remember which was also recent was the one we had in 2015 which lasted months at the bottom exactly like this before the rise began.

being us-stable is the only reason why traders can make profit! otherwise if prices were stable then there would have been no profit to be made. for instance if you buy something now for $1 and a month from now that thing is still worth $1 you made no profit. but if it is unstable and reaches $2 then you can double your money.

however you should not confuse being un-stable with pump and dumps and unpredictability. being unpredictable is what nobody wants because it leads to losses. and the manipulation that we see among altcoins is one of the biggest reasons for it.

i believe that eventually we will see majority of countries in the world do the same thing as Japan did last year and adopt bitcoin with ease but unfortunately this may take a couple of years since there is still a lot of resistance against adoption of something decentralized.
we are on a good path though. with most advanced countries already showing positivity towards bitcoin.

in my experience it is hard to say because this market is still pretty small and very manipulated. and that makes everything near impossible to analyze including the investor sentiment.
for example time and time again we have seen altcoins that had no reason to rise, go up a lot because someone was pumping them and that pump changed the sentiment to buy because many investors are well aware of the situation and want to join in and make the quick profit.

what you say is only concerning the very short term fluctuations not the overall movement. for instance it is possible to see a drop but only a drop that lasts less than an hour not a drop that can actually last!
as for panic sellers, they are almost gone. if they were really "controlling" the market now then price shouldn't have been this stable in first place!

whoever boasts about his earning (generally speaking not only bitcoin trading related) is always lying. because you will never find someone who is advertising their financial situation to others if there is no benefit in it for them.

in case of traders, only those idiots who think if another newbie idiot falls for their nonsense and buys bitcoin they can make profit  and if they don't they will lose everything!

why would you even think about a person such as McAfee? he is more like a twitter troll who made profit from ICO scams that he promoted and the altcoins he pumped. he has not contributed anything at all to this world apart from hyping and making money from it like a parasite.

a contribution is either like Satoshi who created this whole thing or like A. Antonopoulos who has been educating people for years.

would people really trust a Blockchain.com's hardware wallet?
i wouldn't trust it to be honest. they have a bad track record of nasty bugs like the one where they were using random.org for generating a random number for the internal cryptography.

that is why we keep on insisting bitcoin is a "currency" and that is why Satoshi created bitcoin as a currency. otherwise all of this means nothing and bitcoin becomes useless if it stops being a currency!
for now it is ok that the adoption is not yet  enough for it to be widely considered as a currency but the goal should always be that. so that you can transfer bitcoin with this low fee and then the other party don't worry about "exchanging to fiat" since he already has something better than fiat which he can SPEND.

it is partly coincidence because the halvings (less bitcoin being mined) happens with the constant growth of demand and it is in fact the demand that is pushing the price up not the supply (mined coin and how much of it).
in other words bitcoin is not going to be scarcer because of halving. supply is constantly growing so there is more bitcoin every 10 minutes on average!

that is not the biggest problem, the biggest problem is the centralization of this coin and the full control that the Ripple labs has over everything that is happening in that cryptocurrency from the development to transactions and keys.
and this articles seems more like an advertisement for XRP rather than being a legit argument specially since it is using mostly false or exaggerated statements about bitcoin.

no, only because you are alone in this!

since bitcoin is a decentralized system, any kind of change for bitcoin will require consensus of the majority of this system. and when it comes to things like "rebranding" bitcoin, you are the only one who thinks it is a good idea so it won't happen ever.

maybe, but i believe as soon as these exchanges do something like that, they sign their own death warrant and make another new exchange huge.
for example you can look at the case of Bittrex and Binance. last year bittrex was one of the biggest exchanges with near #1 volume, overnight bittrex changed its rules and forced KYC. people left it for a brand new exchange at the time (Binance) and now Binance is #1.
if this trend goes on, centralized exchange of crypto-crypto will die and decentralized way will replace it.

despite what people think, Tether is the worst altcoin of all times with the highest risk. but 99% of the time whenever you read something about it online it is posted purely to spread FUD and nothing else. and majority of them aren't even good FUD! they are the dumb ones. and i think they are one of the reasons why Tether got this big! because they hide the real issues with their nonsense which people eventually figure out and when they do they think the real issues were just as nonsense!

people seriously need to learn how to read a news first. specially news sites like the one OP owns. then they should spread the same thing! this is turning into a very serious issue. they don't have any idea what words mean and then they start a new site and intentionally or unknowingly create nonsense!
in this case the central bank of Zambian only issued a warning. there is no illegality, and it is talking about "legal tender" which Franky explained above.

i strongly disagree because of the type of majority of these scams.
for example the biggest plague is the plague of ICO scams, Ponzi schemes, and other way-too-obvious-scams that always makes you think why people would even fall for them in first place.
regulations and "law" won't change this. the problem is people themselves, their greediness combined with their idiocy creates this opportunity for scammers to rip them off!

trading sideways is also ending though. last time we had a major rise and fall seems to be a long time ago! now we are left with more stability and the rise and falls are much smaller now.
i think the "sentiment" is more of a confused and stay away sentiment with most people giving up on bitcoin which has historically been a good sign of reversal.

but didn't they start working on their own government backed cryptocurrency about a year ago? i remember distinctly reading that there was an Indian coin coming with their government behind it. and this was about the time the drama in India over bitcoin started and bitcoin price over there shoot up to about 40% higher than USD markets!

this article is mostly advertising that "company" there may not even be 25000 online stores to accept anything in first place either since the source website is not a known one and specially since OP is just advertising his own website to generate traffic i wouldn't take this type of news seriously.
news sites like this have a track record of "creating news".