There is nothing anarchist about Bitcoin. In fact Bitcoin is the most governed system in the world. There are tens of thousands of law enforcement with zero corruption or possibility of corruption called full nodes that are watching this system 24/7 to keep it healthy and clean of any corruption.
Bitcoin was also not created to "demolish" payment system. But instead to create a non-corruptible global money as an alternative to the existing corrupted systems.

If the traffic cop that is supposed to enforce the law is corrupt (eg. pulls you over for no reason and accepts bribes), you don't demolish the entire police department. Even if the whole department is corrupt, you still don't demolish it. Instead you remove the corruption and install an alternative in its stead.

The whole text you shared is just pretty words but empty and meaningless underneath. Complaining about US regime's corruption while you vote for them and pay their salary makes no sense! Specially when it comes from someone who is (or was) part of that corrupt system.

You should look into bitcoin's testnet for things like this, so that you can use coins that have no value and can be acquired freely (eg. from a faucet) so losing them (in case of a bug) is not going to cost you anything. You'd also move your test transaction to testnet instead of mainnet (ie. less spam).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet

Unless we see a solid signal by breaking $17k resistance it remains very hard to predict the market. But there is a good chance that we are going to see a very boring market in the first week or two of January since this is just the start of the year and markets are still cold and in their winter sleep. After that we can look at the world economy to decide which direction is more likely to go.

"Digital dollar" has existed long before bitcoin did in centralized form and it is not going to change. Each time you use Paypal, credit cards, internet banking, online payments, etc. you are using digital dollar! It does not fall under the same category as bitcoin simply because it is centralized and because of that talking about "threats" is like comparing apples and oranges.

That's pathetically low for a centralized payment system.

There is no such thing as a reputable centralized exchange. There are only centralized exchanges that haven't gone under or run away yet.
Another negative thing about news like this is that usually the payment processors sell the cryptocurrency they receive right away and pay the merchant with fiat. This means they aren't really receiving cryptocurrency, they receive fiat.
The only positive thing is for users who want to pay with cryptocurrency and now they can.

Generally speaking you should never hold more fiat than you need (eg. emergency funds for an emergency situation). After you deduct your expenses, however much fiat you are left with you should invest in something that can be considered a store of value while trying to diversify as much as you can.
In my opinion it doesn't matter how much your income is and how much interest rate your bank gives you, you still need to invest your fiat into something better.

Bitcoin, gold and real estate are the best choices in my experience. Things like stocks depend a lot on the economy and could crash hard while the risk of the same scenario is lower in those 3 markets I mentioned (it is not zero though).

I was mainly talking about the crazy weather in US but Europe despite seeing a higher temperature overall is experiencing below zero degrees too. For example on Tuesday when I made that post London had seen the -2 degrees the night before. And of course the Nordic countries and some in Eastern Europe are cold as balls by default.

People should seriously stop repeating this FUD whether it was created by Russia or EU.
Whether EU temperatures drop to -50 or go up to +50 the energy crisis is still very real and the industries that shut down already and the businesses that were forced into insolvency are also very real. The money they are constantly printing that will cause high inflation in long term is also very real. The recession that has also influenced bitcoin price is very real too.

I have no idea what you mean by "xor scheme" but security of your wallet depends on how you use it. For example if you have a 15-of-15 multi-sig wallet but you store all 15 keys in one place that can be compromised all at once (eg. on your online PC), you don't really have any security. Compare that with a simple single-sig wallet that you keep on an air-gap PC that is encrypted.

A single-sig wallet can be safe enough if the user puts a little effort in. A multi-sig setup can provide additional security if the user needs it as long as the keys are created and stored separately and all in secure environments. A 2-of-3 setup is better than 2-of-2 because the third key is used as a failsafe in case any of the first two keys were lost.
But when you use muti-sig, you are increasing the size of your transaction hence paying higher fees for each transaction you want to make. Of course you can always use Taproot and pubkey aggregation but there still is not user friendly way of doing that.

It should be an air-gap system not just any laptop that you only use for cryptocurrency wallets. That means no internet, network cable, Bluetooth, USB disks,...
That means for beginners it is best if they buy a hardware wallet if they know they can't create a secure cold storage on their own.

Nobody should have a "crypto portfolio" since that makes no sense to buy things that are useless, get dumped in long term and are guaranteed to dump each time bitcoin has a major fall or rise.
This is specially true for beginners who you want to target, they should not buy any altcoins at all!

They won't and should not because to do so requires working with blockchain analysis companies which exist to invade people's privacy and to deanonymize bitcoin transactions, this goes against the very reason the mixer exists.

I imagine blockchain analysis methods are like a scoring system. There is of course a lot of things that are considered and analyzed but when the transaction checks all the boxes it has a higher chance of addresses being linked compared to a case where it doesn't (like having different address types among its outputs or round amounts, etc.). This is also why using it alone and like this makes no sense.

One method that blockchain analyzers use is to create the link between input and output addresses that are of the same type and consider it less likely for different types to be linked. Using a different type of address among the outputs could be an attempt at throwing chain analyzers off.
Of course on its own and on such a high profile transaction, it is a weird thing to do...

Usually predicting bitcoin in a year is a hard task, this year it is specifically tough because of the situation with the global economy. Bitcoin doesn't follow any other markets but it is definitely negatively affected by the economy specially by "recession". Everyone is already predicting more recession[1] on top of what we've seen so far and when it is accompanied by inflation, bitcoin can't have a bull market. So that option is out.

I personally don't see any more dumps coming anytime soon so that option is out too, but that's unless nothing big and negative takes place like another major exchange getting hacked or another country (like Taiwan) being invaded, etc.

For the time being, I'll continue taking advantage of the reverse bubble and continue accumulating.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/02/third-of-world-economy-to-hit-recession-in-2023-imf-head-warns

Those who are brand new to this world must never start with any of the altcoins otherwise they will expose themselves to a whole lot of high risk situations that will result it lots of losses too. Just stick to bitcoin, learn how it works and how you should store bitcoin safely and how you should use it for transfer money.
Then if you liked this world you have to first study pump and dumps before getting started on altcoins!

When we talk about Qatar we should not forget that it is a tiny country that is surrounded on all sides (ie ground access) by Arab nations that have bad relationship with Qatar and it was not so long ago that they basically sanctioned Qatar and this country was seeing its end and would not have existed if it weren't for the only non-Arab country in their vicinity north of Persian Gulf called Iran.
So they need things like FIFA world cup or selling LNG to Europe so that they can ensure their long term survival by increasing their relations with the outside world in a place where they are still surrounded like before.
Even if the FIFA thing weren't profitable for them on paper, it had tremendous amount of benefits for Qatar for sure.

The recession is caused by the huge rise in energy prices which is only partially because of Russian sanctions. There are a lot of other reasons that led to these recession that includes the incompetence of governments in keeping the economy healthy specially after the pandemic started and they decided to print enormous amount of money out of thin air!

I don't think we can see any major war between military superpowers in the world. The only possibility is more proxy wars like Ukraine vs Russia, Taiwan vs China or Azerbaijan/Saudi vs Iran. And of course more cold wars.
Any direct war between these superpowers and NATO would escalate into a global nuclear war that could lead to extinction of human race.

I wish we see less speculators adopt bitcoin who want to make a quick (fiat) profit and get out. I wish to instead see more people adopt bitcoin who want financial sovereignty.

If you mean bitcoin's "inflation rate", I don't think halving is going to change anything about bitcoin to put it side by side with gold. They don't fall into the same category regarding age, spendability, adoption scale or even supply cap (gold isn't as limited as bitcoin).
If you mean the global inflation rate, your question makes more sense since inflation will always push people towards converting their fiat to something that is a better store of value. Both gold and bitcoin are good options for that.

With or without the inventor of Bitcoin, it can never be regulated because it goes against its principles of being decentralized. However, centralized services like exchanges will be built on top of bitcoin and will be regulated.

I don't think their position is going to change until mass adoption (which we aren't even close to).

The real question is if you want to commit a crime and evade taxes, of course the taxation itself depends on the country you live in since the laws about what is taxed and how depends a lot on your country. But also remember that the government doesn't tax your payments, they tax your business. In other words it doesn't matter how you receive payment (credit card, hard cash, bitcoin or monero) in the end you are still running a centralized service inside the regulations with a license (hopefully!).

This way of thinking is exactly why there are very few "millionaires" around. You are thinking of gaming a system (the faucet) that was not supposed to be used that way to earn peanuts! This is while there were (as there are today) lots of better ways to honestly earn a much larger amount of bitcoin. For example you could have turned your computer on and used your CPU to mine a single block to earn 50 bitcoins as the reward! Or even you could have spent $100 to buy 2000 bitcoins!

Well your in initial post is very misleading then, it sounds like you just jumped in following someone else without doing your own research.

Anybody should do some research on their own and see what bitcoin is, not just look at the charts and see the price going up and see some rich guy has bitcoin and follow them.
Bitcoin is the only decentralized currency in the world that can not be censored or sanctioned. You don't need a middleman to send, receive or hold bitcoin which means no one's hand is in your pocket when you use bitcoin but your own! It has a limited supply so we can say that bitcoin is the only existing money in the world too (everything else we have like dollar is currency not money).