I agree with the advice of others that it's best to transfer the funds. I'd not likely that anyone would access them somehow, unless you had your passphrase written somewhere where you stored the hardware wallet, and it's possible that whoever finds the wallet will find the phrase (and/or password). However, and especially if the sum is significant for you, it's not so hard to just create a new Electrum wallet, and transfer funds from your recovered wallet (restored via passphrase) to the new one with a new passphrase. Better safe than sorry.

Bitcoin is already more or less a standard in a sense that other cryptos are often traded in pairs with it, and the situation on the crypto market is largely defined by how good or bad Bitcoin is doing. But if you mean a standard in a sense that cryptos should be backed by Bitcoin literally, then there isn't enough BTC to go buy, and BTC itself is very volatile to be considered for this role. I also don't see why anyone would need an altcoin allegedly backed by Bitcoin if one can simply use Bitcoin itself.

I do believe that alien life probably exists, including intelligent one, because it simply doesn't make any sense that in the vast universe we'd be the only ones. But I think that, unfortunately, humanity is not ready as a whole for first contact. We still have occasional genocides and systemic racism even among humans. Anything new will be perceived largely as a threat and not as something deserving human rights because of our xenophobia. We have serious hostilities and sometimes wars between countries because apparently not everyone gets that imperialism is over (I'm looking at you, Russia). So if we meet someone now, governments, armies and many others will blow it if not commit a terrible crime.
But let's imagine that somehow we do achieve a lot of moral progress within our lifetimes and we meet intelligent aliens. Who's to say they'll have money as a concept? Or an idea of exchanging things for other things? They can be a society that simply takes and gives what it can and needs, without the idea of property or a medium of exchange. And certainly, explaining to an alien race that we're giving them something that they can't touch and it looks just like numbers and other symbols on a screen but it's actually valuable is likely to cause misunderstandings. So it's just not a good start (barter IMO is a good start), but eventually it can be quite good because at least it's money that isn't controlled by any our government.

If many people are unbanked in Mexico, it probably means they have limited financial literacy, understanding of financial security, and things like that. So if Bitcoin is just legalized, I don't think they'd care to try using it, and those who will are likely to make costly mistakes. I support legalization, but it doesn't necessarily lead to high adoption rates because work should be done to familiarize people with Bitcoin, how it works, what to watch out for, how to not lose access to one's wallet (and not to get your money stolen) etc. One senator is insignificant to make a big policy change like this, so I guess we'll see how much support she gets.

The poll is still fresh, so not many people responded, but I am happy to see that so far the vast majority is hodlers. I tend to hodl as well, especially during the bear market. I only sell if I absolutely have to due to some financial circumstances. To be honest, though, I try to maintain a similar behaviour during the bull market as well, although I can sell a bit more if the price is quite good and I know I'll need this fiat at some point this month, for instance.
As for those who sold now, I don't get it. You've probably acquired these coins at a higher price, so you sold at a loss. And there's no guarantee that the price will fall significantly below $20k. So you might then end up buying at a higher price because of realizing the market's moving up, which will lead to even more losses. It's best to sit tight and wait it out.

What a coincidence! I've been just writing up a presentation on laws of logic and issues with them, and one of them is the law of identity, which is true only with certain limitations that we're talking about something in the same respect and of the same time. When 1 BTC = 1 BTC is presented, it's a simple identity of logic, A=A. However, it is only true when we're talking about 1 BTC in the same respect (in this case, purely as one unit of the Bitcoin currency) and at the same time (which also helps to fix the issue with the price, as the price changes over time). Each time I see it, I also tend to write that this is incorrect because of the purchasing power of Bitcoin that changes over time, and the disregard of this purchasing power is unforgivable if we're considering Bitcoin as a currency. So good job, op, I agree with your point.

I think you did a good thing. You taught them about a good wallet, something easy to use and also secure. You also told them how to sign a message, which is not something everyone knows how to do.
As for private keys, that's indeed not so easy to decide on, as a passphrase can be forgotten if you don't have a very good memory, storing it online isn't safe, and writing it down on a piece of paper is probably alright if you're at home, but when you're in class where everyone's doing it, it can be weird and feel unsafe. If it was an introduction into basics of using Bitcoin, I think it was a good one.

I think that progressive taxation and universal basic income are great ideas. If someone is just getting by, taxes should be low for this person because the money they give to the state can make a difference for them. If people are quite well-off, they should pay more because they already live a comfortable life, and it's not like they don't use public services (they use roads, they probably used public education, medicine or something like that, they rely on the safety and judicial system provided by the state etc.). If  a person is very rich, then giving more to society makes even more sense. This person won't really benefit from this money, but there are those who will. And there are services that will benefit as well. Also, chances are, this person is either wealthy because of some family legacy stuff (which also leads to better opportunities because of people you meet through family that can help you get rich) or because of paving their own way in a certain community (which means that this community had people who recognized their talent, potential or appreciated their product or whatever, and that also justifies giving back). Not to mention the moral commitment to help those in need, those who were less fortunate. And unemployment is usually NOT because of a good social support system; it's when people WANT to work, but the job market doesn't have enough demand for them to work.

I agree with the op that youth is important, and making them more educated means ensuring a better future. If there are many people like you in Nigeria, I think your country has a bright future.
I'm really happy you got a chance to talk about Bitcoin to college students.
Transactions of Bitcoin CAN be traced, as SatoPrincess pointed out as well, so I believe you meant that the ID of a person is not in them.
As for $2-5 investments, though, I honestly think they're not viable. Often the transaction fee will be half of that, many exchanges won't allow selling such small amounts for fiat, and even if Bitcoin grows tenfold, you're left with almost nothing, just like you started.

I must say that due to very low odds of winning the lottery, I find the story hard to believe. Unless, of course, he bought so many tickets that his odds of winning were very high, but if he earns money doing construction work, then it's unlikely he has hundreds of thousands to spend on gambling. Not to mention the part about friends wanting to kill him. But yeah, Bitcoin can be used to hide wealth if one does it right. My thought is also that if he likes physical gambling, storing the money in Bitcoin might be a way of avoiding gambling because physical casinos rarely accept BTC.

12) Yair Rodriguez
11) Amanda Lemos
10) Li Jingliang
9) Su Mudaerji
8 ) Shane Burgos
7) Lauren Murphy
6) Punahele Soriano
5) Jack Shore
4) Bill Algeo
3) Da-un Jung
2) Dwight Grant
1) Jessica Penne

Match 12 Total Strikes 80

I think this is just a list of relatively good news (plus speculations on neutral things), and then the op is downplaying them. I agree that neither Bitcoin adoption by some companies nor recognition as a legal tender did not bring mass adoption of Bitcoin, so if some expected it, they were wrong. But these are still factors contributing to the growth, not decline, of Bitcoin. Just not enough growth to ensure that the bear market never comes again. It does nothing to prove that the current bear market is any different from previous ones, that it will be the end of the market or anything like that.

Ah, I remember ICOs back in the days, some of them were about using blockchain to fight counterfeit things and clothes. I thought all projects like that eventually died off, but apparently some didn't. I am not sure Blockchain is the most efficient thing for that, but I guess it can be used to access a blockchain record and confirm the item with some unique identifier.
Blockchain used to seem applicable to tons of things, but I think a very limited number of industries even tested out applicability in practice. There were experiments with blockchain voting and ticket sales, for example, but even these didn't really get widespread.

I am sorry for what's going on in Sri Lanka. Covid is a nightmare for a country that relies heavily on tourism, and I remember how frightened people were about the terrorist attacks in churches right before that. And then there are those credit schemes from China which seem cool but are very harmful to countries that take them in the end. There was also a crop failure which contributed to the crisis. So apart from objective conditions, there was a big mismanagement of a bad situation that made it much worse. I really hope some more qualified people will come and at least partially fix the situation. I applaud the protesters and their success.

There's nothing in Bitcoin itself (its design or how it operates) that makes other coins follow it on the market. I see why you might think so, observing how Bitcoin goes down and so do major cryptos and vice versa, but that's correlation, not causation. Bitcoin is the biggest coin by market capitalization and by reputation (the scope of people trusting it rather than other coins). So if it goes down, it can be viewed by many as a signal of something wrong being with the market, so they sell other coins as well. If it goes up, they start buying other coins in the hope that they'll go up as well. A self-fulfilling prophecy, basically, at least most of the time. Sometimes there can be events concerning the whole market, such as trading restrictions, major exchange hacks or a global event that is likely to disrupt the global economy (like the pandemic).
The above point it just to add to the trading pairs reason, outlined by others in the thread.

Gold's scarcity is largely assumed than a proven fact, which is why sometimes is can lead to unpleasant surprises, at least locally if not globally. For example, there used to be inflation which occurred in Western Europe in 16-17th centuries, which is attributed largely to large influx of gold from Spanish colonization missions. As for our times, there've been reports on Uganda's huge gold deposits that, if confirmed, would more than double current amounts of refined gold.
Also, proof of work is technically true, but it's necessarily harmful to the environment and local communities, whereas Bitcoin mining's ecological impact depends on the sources of energy.
That being said, Bitcoin is way less stable than gold, and I think gold is often associated with certain safety and stability that Bitcoin does not possess.

I agree with the op that the crucial part is demand. While it might seem in the bubble of this forum that Bitcoin is very well-known, so many people have been using it for years and things like that, let's not forget that only up to 2% of the population use Bitcoin, so it's very far from being highly adopted, and we're still, regardless of how much publicity Bitcoin got over the years, are at early stage of adoption if we assume Bitcoin will become as widespread as smartphones or the Internet.
As for the news, they can affect short-term Bitcoin trends, but I don't think they are a significant case of Bitcoin's overall growth over time. Also, I think the media largely publish what would be relevant for their audience, so if they cover Bitcoin, it's also about the demand for such coverage and is thus covered by the first cause.

Given that the op emphasized that the question is not about the price but about something like Bitcoin stopping to exist, I think it's an unlikely hypothetical situation. If we just woke up tomorrow, and there's no BTC, it would be at the top of the news, people would probably panic sell all their other cryptos (at least, the majority would), fearing that a similar fate awaits the rest of them, and many would be devastated, but for the vast majority of the world (who never used Bitcoin), it won't mean anything. If there's a reasonable explanation why it falls (apocalypse and the Internet is down or a breakthrough of quantum computing making Bitcoin keys a thing you can get with new computing power), then the effects would depend on what exactly happened, whether other cryptos survived, and are the cryptos the biggest concern at a given point in time.

I am trying to understand how independence of nations is related to Russia's war against Ukraine, but I must say I am struggling. You're saying China, US under Trump, and Russia are strong Nations, which fascist globalists want to weaken? Well that just shows lack of knowledge of what fascism is. Bitcoin is against central power, it's against the idea that one thing is strong and the rest are weak. Russia is an imperialist state which has precisely the ideology of being strong and thus entitled to take over smaller nations which have their own national ideas and agendas. This is not a good idea for Bitcoin either. It's the opposite of freedom, the opposite of democracy, the opposite of decentralization. If we have 3 centers, it's still centralization, and it's better if we have a multitude of countries, a diversity of policies and attitudes in the world. Oh, and while Putin is sort of not against Bitcoin, Trump, with his America first shit, was not crypto-friendly because with America first comes the USD first. And China is not crypto-friendly either because Bitcoin is a challenge for a state that seeks total control.
Ukraine, on the other hand, is a crypto-friendly country (more crypto-friendly than Russia) with a roadmap of becoming even more pro-crypto in the future. And what Russia is doing is trying to stop that (and many other things an independent Ukraine can be) from happening.

I looked at her LinkedIn profile, and she seems quite qualified for the job because she's been doing crypto-related work for years, including working on Bitcoin Mempool for the last year. I guess we'll see what sort of suggestions she makes as she gets more accustomed to the role, I think it's too early to judge on preliminary ideas that she outlined. As for the gender thing, yeah, of course it's cool to not care about gender, but it's also good that she's a woman because things like that empower other women to see that they can also do something like that.