in my opinion you should never encourage anybody to "invest" in bitcoin ever because bitcoin is not an investment. instead if you want to encourage someone then encourage them to start "using" bitcoin as a currency and if they liked it then they can get involved.

otherwise when you introduce bitcoin to others as an investment they eventually will end up wanting big profit in short time and finally lose money because of that mindset and in the end they never find out what bitcoin was.

unfortunately there is lots of FUD that has misled many people but i still don't believe that the majority of people in the world think that way. i believe that most people already know that bitcoin is not "illegal" or "used by hackers",... but the reason why they are not still getting involved with it is the volatility, the FUD about it "ending bad" and things like that, and the thought that bitcoin is complicated.

you usually can't change the opinion of those who think negative.

a while ago when Venezuela created their very own centralized cryptocurrency i said soon we will see other countries to follow. and now it is happening. although in this case i am interested to know HOW they are going to "boycott international sanctions" though? it is still going to be tough making a trade even if you use another means of "medium of exchange"

how this affects the cryptocurrency adoption depends on the country's approach. based on what i saw from Venezuela they started educating their people about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin so the bitcoin adoption also grew. so i guess we can say countries that take that approach can increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies in general also.

the approval of ETF can not have any negative impact, even the Futures markets didn't have a negative impact in my opinion despite what some people say.
it is all like an approval of bitcoin in first place and then it will attract more money into bitcoin. even if a small part of that money realizes the true nature of bitcoin (as a decentralized currency not just an investment) we can see a big growth in its future.

even its rejection wouldn't have a negative impact exactly. it would be a temporary drop in price only and nothing else. we never had ETF in the past 9+ years and if that doesn't change we wouldn't mind it one bit!

what some people do with a tool doesn't define the true usage of that tool. you can pick your tooth with a dagger but that doesn't make the dagger a toothpick!

some people will use bitcoin as an speculation tool like the millions of people around the world who are investing in Forex market and are using US dollar, Japanese Yen,... as speculation tools but that doesn't make USD, JPY,... any less of a currency.

i am sorry about your losses, i truly am. but by keeping your head in the sand while bag holding a bunch of useless altcoins you won't be able to make what you have already lost back.
what you need to do is start opening your eyes and seeing the reality of this market and then learn from the mistakes of your past instead of trying to spread laughable nonsense

a "decentralized" network is only as strong as its users, after all what is a decentralized network but a network run by the users? and when ETH users are like you who don't even know what ETH was created for and compare it with a currency, this network is doomed!

the profit that a bank gives you is a guaranteed profit that will always come even if it is a small amount.
but when you make an investment you are taking a big risk, sometimes bigger in some investments, so the profit that will come to you is not only not guaranteed but also it may end up in a big loss.

when it comes to cryptocurrencies this risk becomes even a bigger issue. specially for altcoins nowadays that are mostly pump and dump manipulation schemes.

- it is the mining effect. people are mining ETH with their GPUs so they tend to spend more money on running a heavy node.
- i can not believe that people run ETH full node with more than 1 TB blockchain and not run bitcoin node with a tiny (in comparison) 140 GB blockchain. they may be running other stripped off versions of it which would be like counting people using Electrum towards number of bitcoin nodes.
- there are more bitcoin nodes "linked to to institutions or organizations" because there are all kinds of groups involved with bitcoin while only users (speculators and home GPU miners) are involved with ethereum
- nodes being on data centers (aka being on cloud services like Amazon for instance) does not mean they are not run by individuals. many people like doing this. it is faster, easier and it doesn't need you to keep your PC running and you will be contributing to the network 24/7 this way.
- finally ETH is premined and all the decision making is centralized to Vitalik and his group. they proved it with their roll back which also broke Ether's immutability.

unfortunately it seems like people have forgotten that we are talking about bitcoin. a decentralized thing that was created so that we don't need banks, government, SEC, ETF, and all their centralization. it is funny that now we are getting excited about centralized entities entering bitcoin market and discuss whether bitcoin goes down if they decide not to enter!

that was another ETF that was declined (the Winklevoss brothers ETF) which is different from this hyped up ETF that is upcoming and is not yet decided. this one is proposed by SolidX and another one that i have forgotten. if these hyped up ones were rejected then price would have seen a bigger drop.

and regarding that last statement, there are a lot of  reasons for the price to go up but they are all forgotten because people have been blinded by the ETF hype!

they are using the need for regulation as an excuse to postpone adoption of bitcoin because they have noticed that they (the banks of India) have been losing their dominance over the market to bitcoin that is now being adopted by a large number of people in India.
in my opinion that is where all this drama over there is coming from and because of that, it won't go away that easily.

if i recall correctly this poll was conducted back in 2017 which was in the middle of the heat of the rises. so obviously when you asked any investor whether they wanted to own bitcoin they would have said yes. it is in fact surprising that the percentage is low but understandable at the same time because bitcoin adoption is still so low that it can be considered non existent! not to mention all the FUD that keeps trying to push investors away.

i dislike formulating things like this. the market is not something you can simplify by categorizing it based on emotion or lack thereof. we are not robots so we have emotions and we can not get rid of them. but in the market what makes a trader successful and another a failure is that experience. the experienced trader knows what to do under different circumstances while the inexperienced newbie has no idea what to do and loses money. the good news is the newbie can turn into an expert only if he uses his brain and tries to gain experience.

by the way that was a very long wall of text which you could basically say in a couple of lines!

the same way you invest in anything else without getting scammed.

for example there are people selling fake gold coins with the same looks as real coins with the same price. what do you do about it?
it is simple you go buy bitcoin (or anything else for that matter) from trusted places. in this case a trusted exchange like Coinbase, Kraken,... and you also educate yourself so that you know what to look for, what is a real bitcoin wallet, ....

there is a big difference between an investor being skeptical about an investment and thinking it is dead and some idiot on the internet who keeps telling everyone else that investment is dead while he is hoarding the same thing in his pockets with a lot of money during the small dip that it had.

this is a known thing actually. and i have also warned about it before. these ICOs that are asking for KYC are not really doing it because of doing KYC stuff, they are in fact mining identities and will most probably sell it to earn even more money from their useless token creation process.

it doesn't stop at ICOs either. the unregulated exchanges that ask for KYC are the same thing too.

no, you have noticed it wrong. in fact quite the opposite is true meaning when bitcoin price rises up (specially during fast rises where price goes up a lot) altcoins drop the hardest.

but of course since they are all being traded mainly with bitcoin when bitcoin goes up they show signs of rise in their USD value but in reality they are declining harder against BTC.
for example bitcoin goes up 10%, altcoins drop against bitcoin but it won't be as big and since they are against BTC their USD price rises 3% so you think they have risen.

the thing is, there has never been a "altcoins following BTC bull market" time ever! last year was one of the most misleading times in cryptocurrency market history because everything was like now meaning bitcoin was rising and altcoins were falling but then the scaling drama started which was followed by the biggest spam attacks against bitcoin in the history of it.
that meant fees going high and altcoins gaining some excuse to advertise themselves as cheap and fast.
have you forgotten "Dash will replace bitcoin" "ETH will replace bitcoin" .... ads that we kept seeing last year? ads get more investors, more investors pumps the prices and bubbles form up but they are not sustainable. that was the reason for the rise of altcoins alongside bitcoin.

bitcoin.org is co-owned by theymos and cobra and the source of the whole website is available on github and any change goes through a similar process as the changes to bitcoin. and it is not just one person making the decisions or merging the changes.

at the end of the day people need to realize that bitcoin.org, bitcoin.com,... are just websites which will have a certain level of centralization. bitcoin is the decentralized protocol that they need to understand and adopt and so far they have made the right choice regardless of all the propaganda of bitcoin.com