Are you confusing the word paper money with fiat money in general? Paper money, like notes, do actually have a very important characteristic. It is not traceable and allows you to stay private and make transactions for goods and services you rather want to keep a secret. That can be many things, with lots of them having nothing to do with illegal activities. Fiat money in a bank account is probably the worst. Bitcoin, once your ID got attached to a Bitcoin address, is probably even worse than fiat in the bank account.

It does of course depend on your monthly income and probably the price and income level of the country you are from, but stacking up sats over time can definitely be a good alternative to large one time investments in many parts of the world. Sure, striving for a whole Bitcoin that way makes almost no sense at all, but it still allows people to not fully forego the opportunity to take part in the transition into a fully digital age.

There is popularity to be gained in taking on a stance against anything. You could also ask why there are still people who not only don't want to get vaccinated, but who also deny that Covid-19 even exists. Do all those people really believe that Covid doesn't exist? I bet no! Some do it does not exist, but some pretend to believe it does not exist because there is popularity gained from taking on that position in public. You can often see that by the extremes those positions are about (by the way, the same applies to those who believe that the world will die without Bitcoin). Covid deniers say Bill Gates wants chips in our bodies implanted with the vaccine. Anti-immigration people claim they are afraid that whole countries get slaughtered by the immigrants. Anti-cryptocurrency guys argue that our economy will fall victim to a big fat ponzi snowball imploding and to a global horde of criminals evading taxes and financing terrorism. Anti climate-change guys argue that climate-change produced by humanity is a lie even though 99.999999% of scientists around the world agree.

There is value in taking on any of these positions and often times those people who do it publicly on a large scale like a forum also monetize their opinion in the form of sold books, merchandise and other stuff.

I think we are good to go if we keep ourselves multi-perspectively informed, strive for a balanced opinion (which is not always possible as we are all individuals with subjective perceptions and sometimes stubbornness) and even try to see whether those extreme people have something useful to say from time to time. They are not wrong 100% of the time in most cases, even though it hurts to say that!

Indeed and the way he phrases that description also gets you thinking straight away that this technology is not only about Bitcoin alone, but about so many other things that could and probably should be organized the way he described it. Private property / digital private property is a concept that has its roots in so much academic research that the range of possible applications is almost inconceivable. It does become difficult though when externalizations like oracles come into play. That's why it is, as of yet, more suitable for digital property obviously. 

That is serious utopia. The advice is nice and cool and so on but how in the world should it be possible for the vast majority of people to hold a whole Bitcoin? That is just not doable for at least every single person that belongs to the set consisting of "total population - 21 million people". Statistically, chances are very low you'll ever hold a whole Bitcoin.

No publicly available stock or any sort of asset that could be purchased by literally every single person on planet earth has performed even close to what Bitcoin has achieved, at least not to my knowledge. Amazon went up like a 180 times or so ever since it went public. There was a very good reason for Google and Amazon to go through the roof over the last 18 months.
You can take a certain time window of Bitcoin and compare it to an outstandingly performing tech stock, but how much sense does that make? I would still say that people are bullish on Bitcoin. Amazon has had set backs of 25% from time to time, but over a longer time span than Bitcoin.

You say "a lot of tech stocks", just to afterwards mention "at least" two.

I am just asking myself whether you have ever been into any kind of markets before. How many assets do you know about that went up by over 50% within the matter of weeks, and up by hundreds of percentage points within a matter of months, and up by thousands of percentage points within a matter of a couple of years?

Is Bitcoin bullish? Give it a guess maybe!

It depends on the terms you agree upon. When someone was to borrow my an ounce of gold, I can agree with him on whether he should pay me back an ounce of gold in, say 12 months from now or whether I want the value in USD that the ounce of gold is worth today in 12 months from now. I don't think we will get to a point where Bitcoin loses its association with fiat currencies. I might be very well wrong of course, but I just don't see that happening in our life time. Maybe that's what's going to happen generations after us, but that would also mean Bitcoin becomes the ultimate reserve currencies for any currency in the world as there will definitely be many, man cryptocurrencies after all.

I would argue that Bitcoin money is in fact more real. The reason being that inflation can destroy over night what you thought has some value to you the day before. We have seen that with hyperinflation where people needed millions or even billions to buy a loaf of bread. That is one going to happen when Bitcoin completely fails, gets hacked or attacked in such a way that trust will be fully destroyed. Other than that Bitcoin is indeed more real than money in the bank.

The first system of its kind that is without any kind of reservations or limits open to everyone. We have heard the sentence so often from politicians that stuff is being done in the name of the people for the people, but that doesn't quite come across like that or can be perceived as such considering the effects many policies have. With Bitcoin this changed quite a bit although the fees are kind of a limitation for some places in the world to really participate in the system to their benefit. That has to change as well.

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Why would side-channel attacks be far more expensive? I get the point that it requires a lot more expertise, but once you have the expertise, I don't think it is that expensive is it? Of course, it does depend on the type of side-channel attack, but what about this one?

"https://hackaday.com/2019/09/13/side-channel-attack-shows-vulnerabilities-of-cryptocurrency-wallets/"

You could argue it is expensive to set up, but once it is set up you could use it for as long as it is feasible.

I doubt anonymity is the reason why people use Bitcoin as Bitcoin isn't anonymous. You should know that by now! If they were really looking for anonymity, they would rather use Monero or any other coin with anonymity tech implemented.

We shouldn't rule out the possibility that Bitcoin can be manipulated, it could be as well of course. Rich people could bribe the miners, just one example. Bitcoin is still important because it offers anyone an exit option from the system he or she is currently residing in. That alone has tremendous value and means competition to nation states.

Bitcoin's market cap would have to be so huge that it could act as a unit of account, seriously, probably at least 10 or 20x from where we are. If you value stuff in Bitcoin, you are also running into the threat of prices getting manipulated by whales. Bitcoin won't exist alone, there will be other currencies that it somehow relates to, hence there is always room for manipulation.

It still describes very well the point that banning something for your citizens which will turn into a major global decentralized network must be a temporary move. How are you going to explain to your citizens that they are not supposed to participate in an otherwise open network that is used by all other people around the globe? While this was for communication, it was quite the same.

Now it is about exchanging value in a decentralized way, so it will be even harder for governments to keep up their bans.

I think valuing it against Bitcoin probably won't work. Maybe it could be a basket of cryptocurrency, but since Bitcoin is so volatile and we have no tools for monetary policy to stabilize it, valuing things against Bitcoin is unconceivable at the moment. As with gold, I doubt that Bitcoin will ever lose its volatility. It will become less volatile, but still too volatile to be the only crypto that goods and services are valued against.

I wouldn't say it was only governments who wanted a centralized currency. In fact for as long as we didn't have reliable technology, having a banking system with centralized issuance of currency and regulatory oversight was the best we could get. We didn't have an alternative and for the time being it worked just fine in many countries. Now that we have the alternative a real discussion and learning process was set free and it shows that decentralized systems can have very strong advantages over centralized systems. As for the title of this thread, yes, the money in the bank doesn't exist while the Bitcoin you have to private key are indeed there. They can't magically disappear or be created out of thin air. 

I wonder, how do hackers attack you if they don't know you? They do need some data first about you don't they? As long as you don't fall for traps, don't click infected links or share specific information about your IP address, is there any way for them to blindly identify and attack you?

Banks started out similarly. It was not like they were the safest place to store your money right from the beginning. There was accounting fraud in the early days and even today. There was forgery and theft and so on. Over time they developed into a safe place with supervision from yet another institution, namely auditing. Bitcoin will need development on many fronts, and in particular when it comes to wallet practicability and security. Give it some time and we will see more and more people feel comfortable enough to take the risk that then might still be left.