This is actually the opposite of KYC because it's p2p trading and you can easily remain anonymous. It's quite a different risk even though it looks similar, because with KYC your information is at risk, and the information may later lead to attacks, but with physical meeting you are immediately at risk.

I doubt that miners have any mechanism to artificially raise fees to keep being profitable, after all if they could, what would stop them from doing it right now even while there are coinbase rewards?

I think Satoshi originally hoped that blocks will be larger, so a bigger number of transactions with smaller fees would net the same reward as fewer transactions but with larger fees. As for how would Bitcoin be viable - either LN will be succesfull and the onchain fees will be like service fee for using LN, or Bitcoin will just be a store of value and people will only do large transactions where fees are not as noticeable.

For some people it is, especially those that are bad with technology or bad at keeping order. But I would say volatility is the #1 reason why Bitcoin fails to achieve wide adoption as a payment method, people don't want to hold a currency that can lose its value suddenly. It's similar for a store of value use - people don't want to invest in something that is not guaranteed to grow.

Yet another proof that altcoins are building a centralized system similar to banking, and it has none of the properties of so-called "blockchain technology". No decentralization, no full control of funds, no immutability and censorship resistance. If they can freeze stolen coins, they can also freeze coins when government tells them to.

Bitcoins can't be frozen and returned back, so you have to mitigate the risks as best as you can, but you also can be sure that only you control your money.

We aren't that far from really low rewards, like 0.4 BTC per block. Will the price be 8 times higher by that time? It's easy to say "yes" if you extrapolate the past performance, but extrapolating the past performance is wrong, there is no asset in this world that grows at the same rate forever. Sooner or later Bitcoin's growth will slow down and will stop compensating for the halvenings. So the effect of lower block reward on mining will happen in our lifetime. The reward will be zero in 2140 but it will become very low way before that.

I don't know how these barcodes are created, but if they can be crafted to decode as arbitrary data, then it should be no problem to take any image, including your own photo, and turn it into a barcode that scans as an address.

But if you want to use facial recognition to derive an address from your face id, then it won't work, because an address is derived from a private key, not from some other data, and if you derive your private key from your face, than anyone who sees you will be able to steal the coins from that address.

There are so many dangers, and not just the scammers but also hackers, physical attacks and just accidental loss; any of that can happen even to experienced users, so it's quite hard to teach some newbie how to avoid all the dangers for sure. There's a big risk that if they will get involved with Bitcoin and do lose it somehow, they will blame it all on you no matter what. This is a lose-lose situation - if you don't teach them you could have prevented some situations, but if you do and they still lose, they will blame you. So it's best to make it clear at the beginning that their coins is theirs and only theirs responsibility and that the risk is considerable.

You can't say that they forgot about Bitcoin's original use if they never cared about it to begin with. And the fact that for a lot of people Bitcoin is only an investment means that those people could and most likely would dump it in the future if Bitcoin stops performing well. I doubt we can convince them to hodl no matter what and believe in financial revolution. They are investors, not idealists.

Virtual machine is not a replacement for a dedicated device, it's likely better than just running a hot wallet on an online machine, but still it's quite vulnerable.

I'm not afraid that telling about my setup will make it easier for any attackers to hack me, because this is a very common setup, I read a guide about it many years ago, and it was a common advice back then.

And I doubt that anything of what I said will make someone try harder - hackers actually prefer to go for soft targets instead of wasting their time on low success chance attempts.

This is a factor that people often overlook when it comes to judging others for their mistakes. People often say that those who misstep are stupid or uneducated, but people in severe emotional states could easily lose their critical thinking and caution. That's why scammers often prey on those who are most vulnerable.

To counter this people need to have action plans for emergencies, and make preparations for emergencies before they happen so that if the time comes, they just execute it without having to make decisions. In Bitcoin this means asking yourself "what would I do if I lose my backup?".

I have a feeling that when this minor bullish momentum will run out of steam, the direction will get reversed and we'll start testing the current support levels. If it will happen soon, it will be $34k, if later than it will be higher levels. I would love to sell a larger bullish trend, but historical precedents tell us that the market does not turn fully bullish before the halvening but rather after it. And every time we think "this time it will be different" - it doesn't.

I don't use hardware wallet because I use cold storage setup with my ancient PC that runs live Linux and is not used for anything else and is never connected to the Internet. I transfer transaction in via USB stick and out by scanning a QR code on watch-only wallet. It's very unlikely that there is a malware that can bypass all these obstacles and that I will encounter this malware somehow.

There has been a lot of periods when fees where high, which is kinda bad for a payment system, because it makes it unreliable. So it's better to assume the worst case and just accept that onchain transactions are expensive.

And by design they will be getting more expensive, because blockspace is quite limited and can't be expanded to satisfy all demand. Plus miners will have to have fees as main source of reward in the future when block reward will get too small.

You can't avoid scammers, you will encounter them all the time. Sometimes they will approach you, sometimes you will find their offers. What you need is avoid dealing with them, and for that there's a simple principle - if an offer is good, and all that is required is for you to send them your money, then it's likely a scam. That's it - don't send your money to strangers on the Internet if you don't want to get scammed.

It's easier said than done. You never know if a price fall is the bear market or just a correction. In the last cycle Bitcoin reached $60k and than crashed to $30k and then went to the ATH of $69k. Those who sold when it was on a road to $30k thought that they will buy back at a lower price, but the price bounced back and all they achieved was realizing their loss.

Also, you're using an extreme example of buying at ATH. ATH lasted only for a day or two. Most people bought way below that.

You are comparing Bitcoin's age to human years, while instead you should be comparing it with recent emerging technologies. And those technologies go from infancy to mainstream in 10 years or so. Bitcoin is already mainstream in terms of awareness - most potential users have already heard about it, but chose not to adopt it. I seriously doubt they will suddenly change their mind about Bitcoin without any sort of event that could force them to do so, like a global hyperinflation which is quite unlikely. I personally believe Bitcoin has entered its adoption plateau and not a lot of new people will be buying their first Bitcoin each year.

For a physical attack a lot more information is required other than the fact that someone is involved with Bitcoin. Physical attack is a big risk for the attacker because they can get caught, the victim can fight back and the legal punishment is much harder than for something like sending a malware in email. So the attackers likely use additional info, if they can't identify potential victim's wallets, they stalk them on social media or in real life to assess the victim's wealth. This is where keeping low profile would help.

I'm not saying that KYC is not a problem, put it's only a part of a larger picture in terms of physical attacks.

If we want a world were everyone is using Bitcoin, then how will we deal with the fact that merely owning Bitcoin puts a target on your back for robbers?

I doubt that the victims were found by attackers through a leaked KYC database or something like that, most likely they bragged on social networks about their wealth. KYC database, especially without link to victim's Bitcoin addresses, is not enough to target someone, but it could be a start.

What I think when I read such news is that Bitcoiners need to invest in their physical security - have decent house alarms, armored doors, weapons for self-defense, etc.

This is the unintended consequence of allowing too much features with bitcoin scripting, which was already very limited, but still not limited enough to allow only the intended financial transactions. I would really like to see a patch that disables the possibility of having any sort of tokens on Bitcoin network, but we all know how hard it is to change something in Bitcoin, so we'll have to just adapt to it.

Ordinals or whatever are just using the scarce block space which drives the fees up. The fees would be high anyway because of how limited the blockspace is.

Currently the fees are high because there's a lot of market activity, which means a lot of coins moving in, out and between exchanges. And I would expect the fees to get even higher when the big bull run starts, we could totally see $10-20 per transaction.