Although covid is a big thing and did change & disrupt a lot of markets, and probably will have an impact in this cycle IMO saying any one thing causes a major market change is not an accurate way of looking at things.

4 years ago people were hearing about BTC hitting ATH in the $20k range
How many people started looking into it then? Going back to the big ATH numbers before that it was still easy to dismiss.
But $50k+ $1T+ market cap those make people notice.
ETFs, those also make people notice.
And so on.

-Dave

Actually a lot of people can continue to ignore BTC.  The same way they can continue to ignore the spread of any tech into anything.
30+ years ago there were many people who would not use debit or credit cards and businesses who would not take them
20+ years ago there were people / businesses that ignored the growth of the internet
10+ years ago there were people / businesses that ignored social media as a way of contacting clients & each other.
etc.

There are also people & businesses out there today who don't take CC don't have a website or email or a facebook page.
Some of them are doing quite wall.

If we are here, we are probably BTC enthusiasts and we see things a certain way. I know I do.
And for the most part, yeah not taking / using BTC is going to be a bad thing for a business more and more as time goes on.
But, when talking in absolutes keep in mind the fringe cases.

Why am I saying this? Mostly because while doing work for a client yesterday we were talking about the fact that BTC was hitting another ATH.
He only takes checks. No cash / credit / BTC or anything else. He is tech savvy but for simplicity only takes payment one way.
As he put it, any other form of payment takes more accounting and time and it's not worth the incremental increase in business, since he is strictly B2B.

We as a group tend to go out and convert people. Some people don't want to be converted and we have to accept that and move on. And not discard their views or the way they do things since it works for them. Fighting that will not look good for us a as group.

-Dave

And as a side note the biggest killer for the OP is going to be taxes.

I take him up on the offer. I win a large enough wager to generate a W2-G (income from gambling tax form) I take my winnings and leave. OP now has to cover a $3500 tax bill with the $3 I gave him for the bet.

There are probably dozens of other pitfalls but I see that as a big one.

-Dave

I would say that they are not fencing off a section of the pond, but dug a canal to a different pond.

I think this could go one of 2 ways. 1st is a 'medium' sized bank that wants to be a bit more aggressive in getting into the crypto market goes out and builds their own infrastructure and starts pushing it.
OR
One of the big players. BoA / Citi goes out to a company like Gemini and says "nice place, how much do you want for it" Here is your check, now replace all of your logos with ours.

If it all goes well they have bragging rights and the advantage of being the first to do it. If for whatever reason it does not, the medium sized bank licks their wounds and moves on. The big bank writes it off as a bad expense / investment and the company they bought just ceases to exist.

As Vikram Pandit said in the article you linked, it's going to happen. How will it happen is the question. I really only see those 2 options.

Well the distant 3rd is they partner with Gemini / Coinbase / etc. and just have portal, but banks for the most part REALLY don't want their (your) money flowing to other people, they want to keep it in house.

-Dave

From what I said last week about American Express and BTC: Everybody wants to do it. Nobody really wants to be 1st and fall on their face. Once someone takes the lead all will follow. But getting that 1st major institution out there is the issue.
Let the other guy make the mistakes with their time and money.

-Dave

Yes, what LoyceV said.

Also forgot to ask, did download and run the newer version of bitcioncore?

The older versions will not fully sync anymore, so if you just found an old computer with your wallet from 201X and turned it on and started to download the blockchain it's never going to sync.

And also take a look at LoyceV's topic here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4959742.0

-Dave

Or the wallet.dat is not from bitcoin but rather an alt.
The OP has not posted here since Aug 2015, if it's from then it's possible that is was from one the altcoins that were popping up all over the place.
sexjam did you look at a block explorer like NeuroticFish suggested?

-Dave

Title kind of says it all. Not sure if I want to sell it, not sure what it's worth.

Did a search have not seen any sold recently so I really have no price point.

Looks like there were only 70 made: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3230003 / https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4731555.0 so I am guessing it's worth a lot over the original cost.

One of the few expensive metal BTC pieces that I have since I mostly went after silver stuff.





-Dave

The 12 words are 128 bits of entropy, which is considered more then enough.
Obviously more words would make it more secure.
However, it is more likely to loose money due to carelessness / not keeping good security practices then it is to loose BTC due to someone randomly generating your seed phrase.

-Dave

Drifting a bit from when I started this a few weeks ago but I really find it funny (or perhaps a bit sad) that you have people on this forum who are screaming about privacy this and privacy that. Followed by, "When Te$la starts taking BTC again I am going to get myself one"
So you care about privacy but you are getting a vehicle that phones home and stores more data then Apple, Google and Microsoft combined.

One of many articles about it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

So outside of the crypto / finance / phone / PC areas of life, where else are we compromising our privacy and anonymity?
I'm starting to like my old motorcycle with the technology of a brick more and more.

-Dave

But the point is that if I were selling you unregistered real goods for cash. Say, gold coins. That same law applies.'

If I sell you a car, there is a record of sale, transfer of the VIN and some other stuff in which you could not really have to do it.

If I sell you a bag of diamonds there is not. If I sell you a few of top of the line gaming video cards at the moment there is not. If either one of these things happen, you are responsible for the same thing.

Just because nobody does it, does not mean that it should not be done by law.

I used to see this all the time when a sort of co-workers family had side business dealing in wholesale used pinball / video games. People would try to hand them cash, and they would ask for check / CC instead just to avoid dealing with the reporting. They finally put up a sign in the office that said. "The games take cash, we only take credit cards" And that was 20+ years ago. It's not even that people were avoiding taxes, it's just that arcades had a lot of cash and it's was easier for them to let someone else deal with the paperwork.

-Dave

But that does not make for good scare headlines.
What is also interesting is that cash and similar instruments have had reporting requirements for a very long time.
Someone hands your business $10000 for something you do have reporting obligations. This is just putting BTC / crypto in the same pile as cash.

-Dave

Why Google? I would like to think any wallet could do it with some back end work.

What I envision is you have 'X' number of devices when you create the wallet.
When you setup that spend wallet you give it all the phone #s of the other wallets and / or some other device id information for push.

The 'spend' wallet has code in it that requires a push alert or SMS code before signing.
When it goes to sign a transaction, it either sends out a mass text or contacts a server that does a push notification to all the other listed wallets.
All it needs to sign (or show the private keys / seed) is a yes response from one of the other devices.

You don't have to use their server to do the push if you are OK with SMS.
You don't have to use SMS if you just want to use their server, and in an ideal world it's open source so you could setup your own server.

Banks have done this for YEARS with CC processing. Citibank (at least I think it's Citi could be BoA) has corporate card settings where you can spend up to X without others getting notified. At Y dollars certain people get a text / email / alert. And at Z dollars the transaction will not be processes till someone hits the green button marked OK. XYZ are all editable by corporate accounting.

Why not the same here? Why get big brother involved?

-Dave

I would not trust my parents to do it either. BUT, at a guess we are both 'older' and we would be the parents and our parents would be the grandparents.

Makes you wonder if there is a need for something like linked mobile wallets.
The other phones / tablets would need to be connected with the app running in the background all the time.
Person A tries to spend. Everyone else gets a popup that they tried to send a transaction approve Y / N

Zero privacy and subject to needing data / ability to send receive SMS but an interesting concept.
For the really paranoid parents / employers you could geo tag where the sender is.

As far as I know nothing like that exists, but might be an interesting thing to see if people would want it.

-Dave

And that is the issue. We all know 1xbit is a scam.
Just about everyone here on the forum knows they are a scam.

There were people who have been on the forum for a while who were still scammed by them and people from all the over internet are still being scammed.
No matter how many scam reports there are here.
BUT....
The hands off 'we don't moderate scams' attitude may make the mods / theymos life easier.
It may even make certain other parts of running this forum easier if it comes to defending it in a legal setting.
SO...
This means that in one section there are pages of people saying they got ripped off by them.
In another there are pages saying they are a good casino.

So yeah, this means that those scam reports are worthless to a certain extent.

As for the tokens / altcoins / telegram giveaways / etc.
Yeah, short of nuking them all there is nothing that is going to change since everyone wants some of that magic free internet money.

-Dave

Electrum 2fa will work with the 2fa part being on the parents phone. Note 2fa not sperate multisig.
There are some custodial wallets that will allow for this, they need a Google Authenticator to send which does not need to be on the same phone.

They wont know how much their kid is spending, but they have to ask to spend it. And they will immediately see the transaction.

--------------
I might get flack for this but I think although the idea is good, the reason they want it is bad.
You are teaching the kid who wants the candy (or whatever) that there is a 2nd layer of security with BTC that in the real world is not there.

If you give your kid $20 allowance a week in cash and they loose that $20 bill it's gone, and they learned to protect their money.
Now you are just showing them that mom and dad are going to protect their BTC. That's not the way the world works.
Just my view, feel free to think I'm an ass about it.

-Dave

Some links:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59166017
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-03/mayor-elect-eric-adams-to-explore-nyc-coin-similar-to-miami-s

He is a very tech business friendly guy in genera from the Bloomberg article:

Gemini is based out of NYC as are a few other BTC startups.

Although with the Bit License some people see NY in general as tough to do crypto business in. Others like it since it does level the playing field a bit. But either way it's good to see more politicians embrace BTC. And Mayor Elect Adams is going to be running the most populated city in the USA so there are going to be a lot of people who hear his message.

-Dave

Need a little more information then that. Like how much, where the merchant is and what currency (USD, Euro, AUD, etc.) and is it recurring or a one time thing.

Keep in mind for US purchases you can get Visa / MC giftcards here for BTC 
https://www.egifter.com/giftcards?type=All&search=visa

For other countries / parts of the world you can look here:
https://www.coinsbee.com/en/PCS-bitcoin

-Dave

I think the largest I ever routed was in the low 30k range. Most of mine seem to be in the 1500 sat or lower range.
On the other hand I have under 150 failed routing attempts combined since the beginning of the year.

Guess it's just what other nodes we are connected to and how much is in the channels.

That or nobody loves me :-(

Will be interesting to see what other people have seen with their nodes.

-Dave

As vv181 said the best way to try is to just plug it in and test.

That camera looks like one of 1000 generic ones out there, so even if it does not work getting the drivers will not be difficult. It should be supported by the UVC drivers: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UVC so if they were not installed when you setup the system you can still get them easily from a reputable source.

-Dave