This is exactly where Bitcoin has the biggest impact - the poor countries where rampaging inflation is burdening people's lives and the economic environment is "caged" by a corrupt government.
Also hat $185mm is just what has been run through the Paxful platform. You can imagine that a lot more has been transacted f2f and through other channels.

Well... that's quite an interesting story --> maybe more suitable for the gambling section of the forum, yet I doubt that he got that lucky.
But yes, Bitcoin is very powerful and as you said it can literally save lives through the high portability and its digital properties.

I'm curious though... how he managed to buy $1M worth of Bitcoin with cash? Found some local p2p sellers?

Not just them, but most of them designed solely to attract eye balls, but then when you actually stress them a little you'll see the fragile infrastructure.
Put that into contrast with Bitcoin - a state-of-the-art cryptocurrency who has been going strong for 13 years already with no hacks and continuous development.

That's a really fine illustration!

Everyone is going to the feast, but few go to the funeral...or something along those lines. Remember, the ones who stand their ground and do not perish during the bear markets are the leaders of the bull market.

As OP stated bear markets are for building - that means as the price is lower more people are attracted to the asset --> at least to try the technology and not necessarily to get rich, but the latter certainly plays its role.

I think regulation is needed for crypto assets as that will not only provide investors' a safer environment that will give them confidence that their funds are in good hands, but will also open the doorway for more institutional investors.

Regulation does not necessarily mean monitoring of every transaction, but instead I see it as tighter rules for centralized exchanges and lenders like Celsius, BlockFi, etc.
For example I personally don't feel safe giving out personal data to an exchange that is not regulated (monitored). Moreover I don't know what are they doing with the funds in their accounts.
Again, regulation does not mean protection from market volatility, but from bankruptcy, poor capital management and so on.

Bitcoin does not need to become a stable coin.

What it needs is to be accepted as a global mainstream currency. For that to happen we still have quite a road in front of us.

Just by saying stable you're probably referring to a currency that is stable in report to another one. Bitcoin hasn't been created to be an asset, but instead become a global p2p network where people do not need to depend on a middle men if they want to make a transaction.

Easy to say, but hard to implement. Productivity raises in a linear fashion, while economic cycles are much faster/violent.


Source: Ray Dalio debt curve

Under the current financial system all we can do is to hope that the state will apply the correct monetary and fiscal policies while we reduce the credit in the economy.

There are traders who just monitor or execute trades at bigger firms. Those positions are more suited to be called "jobs".
If you make a statistic of what percentage of these "full time traders on binance futures" are on the green or even stand at the breakeven point you will be astonished.

Very few people take the time to develop the skills required to be a proficient trader. That translates into a consistently profitable trader.

Man, gambling is a losing game for the player as long the house has an edge and you're playing long-term. No matter what strategy you use the odds are still against you.
You can have a bigger bag of money --> you will still lose the whole bag if you play long enough. That's pure math/statistics.

But hey, each strategy has its own thrill.

The thing is you can't purchase many things with Bitcoin at the moment because only a few countries in the world have declared it a legal tender. You see... people don't want an asset that does not produce them money, protect their money, nor they can use as a payment method. So as long as Bitcoin is not a mainstream currency accepted directly by merchants and not through a payment processor that quickly converts it into fiat price will be important. What is price anyway? --> The equivalent in other instrument/asset that you can get from other market participants.

Wasabi Wallet Review

Download process
Very fast and straight forward. It took me less than 2 minutes to navigate to the website, download and install the wallet – very convenient. The application pops up on the desktop and all you have to do is to double-click and you’re all ready to experience the Wasabi experience (sounds like I’m an ambassador, but this is just my style of writing)

Branding & Functionalities
The branding of the wallet backed by its functionalities really appeals to those who are concerned about their privacy. We should all be if you ask me.

Wallet initialization



Suggestion: As a nice little addition I suggest adding the possibility of sliding back & forth between the above presentation of wallet’s features.

It is a little confusing that on the website it is specified that users shouldn’t pay coordinator fees while on the prompts this is not specified:



Terms & Conditions Review
Not overly complicated with legal jargon. It was quite easy to read and understand. I took the time to go through it thoroughly and no phrases raised up question marks regarding their commitment to keep privacy as a top priority.

UI Analysis
First of all I am a little bit confused about the gradient lines when having no transaction in my wallet. It looks like something might still be loading.
I like that I can very easily disable CoinJoin if I don’t want to use it from the Wallet settings just by one-click. And even more privacy settings are available in the left toolbar like changing themes and some other privacy settings. I particularly dig the discreet mode. There are times when I want to use my wallet, but there are other people in the room. Most of the time I don’t want them to take a peek at my balance.



I’m getting a warning in the wallet and I am not sure why. It looks like the “backend” is not connected, whatever that might mean.
EDIT: This problem got solved just by waiting a little bit more.



Suggestion: I like that we can label transactions when we ask the wallet for a receiving address, but I don’t understand why it is mandatory to enter it. Sometimes I just want a one of my bitcoin addresses without specifying from who I receive them.

Search feature – I find this feature extremely useful, especially if I want to delete a wallet and/or access the data folder of the application. I tested the wallet recovery option so I only had to delete the “.json” file from the ‘wallets’ folder and then quickly recover the wallet by providing the recovery phrase.

Wallet list – I dig the way wallets are displayed on the left side of the wallet and the animations when transitioning between them. Smooth & simple!

Transactions
The most practical test --> transactions handling. For the purpose of this test I have used the Bitcoin mainnet. I have sent a transaction from a segwit address with an insignificant fee of a few cents to a well-known online casino. Everything went smoothly. I also made a withdrawal from the casino to another address – no issues here.

CoinJoin Review
Created a new wallet on the Bitcoin testnet to try the CoinJoin feature. I have selected the optimization for speed.

1st test
- It took some time for the wallet to find peers. However, once I started the CoinJoin it took about 5 hours for my coins to become fully private (100%).
- Starting balance: 0.0007 BTC
- Ending balance: 0.00008 BTC (~ - 0.00062 BTC)
- The CoinJoin process was indeed uneconomical as warned by the wallet. That is why Wasabi recommends to perform a CoinJoin when you have at least 0.01 BTC in your wallet. However I’m not really sure why Bitcoin left my wallet in so many transactions. I see both transactions labeled as CoinJoin and simple outgoing transactions that I haven’t made manually. This is a bit confusing to be honest. I’m going to try Coinjoining again with a balance of around 0.005 and re-test the feature.



2nd test
- Managed to load my wallet with 0.0259 TBTC from different faucets. Now my goal was to make them all private so I started the CoinJoin process with the "Maximize speed" setting activated
- Starting balance: 0.02590404 BTC
- Ending balance: 0.02477675 BTC (~ - 0.00112729 BTC)
- The CoinJoin process was performed in 69 transactions and 0.00112729 BTC was charged as mining fees --> not sure if coordinator fees were included in that. Anyways that amounts to ~4.35% of the sum coinjoined. That is quite decent taking into account that I optimized for speed, not cost.
- TIME: in ~4 hours the coinjoin process was finished



CPU Utilization
It looks like the wallet is a bit CPU intensive, but not exaggerated. It constantly uses around 10-20%. I suspect this is due to tor implementation. To be mentioned that this is also mentioned in the Wasabi FAQ: “No, Wasabi and CoinJoin features require considerable computational power, not currently replicable on a smartphone.”

Wallet Recovery

Steps:
1)   Delete the .json file from the wallets’ folder of the application.
2)   Close and re-open the Wasabi application.
3)   Select the Wallet Recovery option.
4)   Provided the 12 recovery words and the password associated with the wallet.
5)   Wait until the Bitcoin network data is downloaded and processed --> it took around 1 hour for the wallet to get sync’ed.

Security
The wallet is privacy-focused, but I think it would be a killing combination if you can upgrade its security and this is also a branding suggestion --> “Wasabi – security and privacy at its finest” or something around those lines
o   2FA Authentication – this is really essential – also I would like to be able to place limits on the amount of transactions per day I can make without using 2FA. (sometimes I prefer speed over security), plus this security feature will limit my loss if someone get a hold of my wallet's password.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Conclusion: For normal Bitcoin transactions the wallet is excelent, but you need to be careful about activating CoinJoin by mistake if your focus is stacking sats and not privacy. But hey, Wasabi has been created for the privacy-concerned audience in mind. So you might want to opt for a simpler wallet and not that CPU-intensive if you’re not interested in keeping your transactions private. My opinion is that if you’re dealing with higher amounts of Bitcoin (>0.01 BTC) a 0.3% fee for anonymity is really a cheap price to pay. Just as a side-note I noticed on Github that @nopara is one of their main developers (making most of the commits). He is well recognized for his work on Bitcoin privacy.

Is that a year you actually calculated or you just wrote a year that passed your mind in the moment?

Many things can happen with Bitcoin and in the crypto space in 3 years. Is it really wise to project a medium-term limitation (significant rebound whatever that means for you) to the price of BTC which is known for both spectacular surges and drawdowns?

Once you default into the mode of thinking that:
1) You don't have a crystal ball.
2) That means you can't predict the tops and bottoms in a market with so many market participants with so many different interests
- You will realize that the market only offers opportunities. If you purchased BTC at $30k, instead of $20k it might be not ideal, but you understand that you have no control on that. However it is better to purchase an asset that you can consider cheap at higher price than to not purchase it at all.

You could argue that every asset value in this world is driven by demand. In other words prices go up when there are more buy orders than sell orders for a certain price.

However there are other factors which determine the increase of Bitcoin's demand which I think is worth investigating for an investor and user of the cryptocurrency. But I think most of the demand is generated by people who are considering BTC as a reliable store-of-value instrument.

The thing is that to log a few hours of trading a day. each day you have to sacrifice something else.  So I think a useful question to ask yourself is what are you willing to sacrifice to find out IF you can make it in trading?

In 5 years with a few hours per day you can become a master in many things. It is mostly a matter of choice.

“Individuals must basically stack their crypto through the soon-coming bitcoinblack secure wallet app or web app, and are instantly committed to spending their crypto with the best conversion rates and high breakpoints.”

Even if a card is emitted in partnership with VISA, that is no reason to automatically define it as legit and safe. Also it remains to be seen what "best conversion rates" actually mean. Visa is not that good when it comes exchange rates. For example even at fx rates you need to pay something like 3.5%.

It is all about mindset. Investing is not a social game. Do your own diligence and come with your own decision and strategy. Do not buy and sell based on emotions generated by price fluctuations. That's the worst game you can play. You can include sentimental analysis of the market in your strategy, but do not make decisions on your own emotions.

Remember why you have chosen to buy and hold BTC in the first place.

Gambling is at its core a social activity. This is how it was created, but with all the flashy designs of the online casinos this might not be the case anymore. People still feel the adrenaline shot even if they are betting on a computer and having other people cheering them on.

Yes, the adrenaline and the hope of making a lot of money releases dopamine. As the user plays more he will be more and more addicted, no matter if the people around them gamble or not. Of course that the social pressure will affect his desire to play, but an addicted person might also find refuge in gambling from social situations where he is seen as an addicted gambler.

Don't source loans for risky endeavours within your family. I'll tell you from experience that most of the time this will end up bad for your relationships.
You do know that 10% APR will cut your loan in half after 5 years?

Even if Bitcoin in 2 years you will still only make a 80% profit --> that is 40%/year with quite some risk on your side. What if Bitcoin does not double in 2 years? Can you digest the loss and service the debt burden? In other words you need to have a contingency plan. If you can't easily cover the loan rates from your income, then you should redo the math.

Also keep in mind that you don't need to own one whole Bitcoin in order to profit from a potential market appreciation. 0.01 is enough if that's what you can afford at the moment. Don't stretch yourself too much or you're gonna get burned.

"Flowing with the market" is like traders name trading "in the zone". Of course that trading Bitcoin can yield you good profits, but how do you know where to buy and where to sell? What are you looking for in the market? If you can't cover these sentences in a few concrete sentences you do not have a strategy. Instead you are blindly purchasing where it "feels right". This can work and will give you states of euphoria, but don't be fooled by this. One time you will go bust and ask yourself what happened.

But one strategy could be "Buy randomly and hodl long term". It has worked in the past but there is uncertainty if it is going to work again in the future.