Shouldn't it be much easier for e-commerce and online platforms to integrate BTC payments than brick-and-mortar stores?  After all, the need for confirmations and the fact that expensive items are much better to buy with BTC makes online retailers far better for accepting BTC transactions.
I don't know how many stores there are in Japan, but with a population of over 120 million people, I would consider 4,500 a pretty small amount and certainly not "mass adoption".

It's also not like BTC is being used for every payment in these stores either.
I don't see where this figure is coming from and it seems very unlikely that it would happen that quickly, considering that BTC has been regulated in Japan since April.

On the floor?  I strongly doubt that you owned any cryptocurrencies before the start of this year, because if you had, you would understand that most cryptocurrencies still have a very unusually high price.

This is more apparent in altcoins than anywhere else, since BTC dominance is still unusually low with only a small amount of interesting projects.  With the banning of ICOs in China, it's become an even worse time to attempt buying altcoins.

You can't just expect to invest in any old crap and get profit instantly.

Goldman Sachs were predicting it would go to $8000 or so at a peak.  It seems quite reasonable to suggest that an asset which has increased in price by eight times since the start of the year could be in a bubble.
Can you halt with the conspiracy theories?  Goldman Sachs has been largely very positive about BTC and there's no reasonable evidence that even JP Morgan was involved in market manipulation (it was one of their clients).

His thoughts here are perfectly reasonable.  He's suggesting that the idea of Bitcoin is reasonable, and part of the reason why people are buying into Bitcoin is enthusiasm for the idea, but that Bitcoin isn't the only form of "consensus money" that could ever exist.

Reasons why this is happening:

-SegWit2x cancelled, resulting in most supporters of larger blocks moving over to Bitcoin Cash
-A lot of people in BTC were hoping for "free money" from the fork which they can't get, thus decreasing the price of Bitcoin somewhat
-Bitcoin Cash is having a high-consensus hard fork soon in which they will introduce some upgrades.

Nothing to do with some inane conspiracy theory.

A lot of very old newbie accounts and a variety of other accounts have been hacked since then.

You should change the password to your Bitcointalk account.  If you used the same password for your email account as your Bitcointalk account, you should consider changing the password for that as well because a hacker could find out your email address.

If you need any more info, try reading theymos' post from the time of the hack.

You're saying that you saw SegWit as an "opportunity to trade" but SegWit is not a separate coin.  SegWit was activated on Bitcoin's mainnet about two to three months ago and is gradually being used by major services.  It implements a new transaction format in which witness data is separated from the transaction and is not seen by legacy nodes, thus raising the effective block size without a hard fork.

Your wording implies that you still don't know what SegWit is, even after losing your money.
I'm guessing you were trying to trade futures for the potential hard fork SegWit2x, which has now crashed as the fork is unlikely to occur.  I'm sorry for your loss.
You seem to have a gambling problem.  You shouldn't be loaning money to spend on risky investments.

IMO, you should stop dealing with crypto altogether, to avoid the risk of ever digging yourself deeper into a financial hole.  I doubt that you have the emotional maturity for dealing with it.

Multibit is no longer maintained and is therefore buggy.  You'll want to get your coins out of there as soon as possible.

If you're having problems sending with them, try exporting your private keys into a different wallet where you can spend your coins.

Note:  when making a post, you don't have to make it a poll.  You can click on "new topic" instead of "post new poll" and make it significantly less annoying.

They've sometimes been known for buggy software and in the past for poor fee estimation.  In general, their features lag behind a tad.  However, you can access a seed phrase from your wallet, so if kept safely you should be able to access your funds if something were to go wrong.

You could try a multisignature online wallet like BitGo or Green Address.  The way that this works is you need 2 signatures to access your wallet out of three.  You have two devices which can be used to access your wallet, and the service holds the third.  This way, you are protected if:

-You lose access to one of your devices; or
-The service no longer wants you to access your funds.

Green Address even offers an option of having an nLocktime transaction in which your funds are sent to a wallet you control after a certain amount of time.  This way you are protected in almost all circumstances.
Exodus is a software wallet.

Couldn't you ask less specific information, such as the person's state? 

I know that asking for a zip code is relatively normal on online surveys, and I personally filled it out, but you might cut off a reasonable slice of your audience if they're privacy-orientated people (and those sorts of people may be more or less likely to believe other things on your survey as well).

I also thought that the "disadvantages" section was very brief and missed a lot of more relevant disadvantages (practical transaction capacity or the likelihood of mining pool centralisation, for example).

I don't know.  Sometimes the lack of any meaningful event can have a similar effect to a negative effect, especially when the price has multiplied by several times with few new developments to justify it.

The longer the price stays up without any useful developments reacting to it, the more afraid I am that the bubble's going to pop.  Meanwhile, I've sold most of my BTC and I'm most comfortable being out of the whole situation.
In a bubble.  Some people may phrase it incorrectly, but it is in a bubble.  Entirely distinct from being a bubble, which would imply that being a bubble is the only function that it could ever have.

They can only do that if you choose to use an online wallet service involving gmail as a means of logging in.

That's one of the major problems with an online wallet - they're reliant on the safety of the users' device as well as requiring a significant amount of trust in a third party service (sometimes even allowing them access to private keys).  An attacker with a keylogger could control your coins quite easily.
Those two things are entirely unrelated.  You are relying on the security of a third party service.  It's not related to Bitcoin's security, only the way in which you decide to store your coins.

Regardless, two-factor authentication is vulnerable to a 5-dollar wrench attack.  A thief could attack you and demand to know your code.  Even though it's secure about online hackers, there are a variety of other possible methods for theft.

This is a contentious hard fork of the Bitcoin Core client to alter the base block size limit to 2MB.  This could also be intepreted as altering the max block weight to 8000000 due to SegWit having been activated on Bitcoin's main net around 2-3 months ago.
This hard fork has no replay protection, meaning that a lay user may find difficulty sending Bitcoin soon after the fork.  Furthermore, it has been planned for three months and supported by some major companies.

Finally, the new chain would prefer to be called BTC, which complicates things as it leaves confusion as to which chain is regarded as "Bitcoin".  The general perception of the market (based on futures prices and the majority of Bitcoin services) is that the old chain will remain being called Bitcoin, but there may be a significant amount of network disruption around the time of the fork.
People are afraid of dealing with the fork, so they're hoping to basically run away.

Not exactly a normal poll or study.  Even though a lot of people may have said a dollar, they could easily edit it to show almost everyone saying that if it's just a YouTube video.

Personally, instead of trying to make my point this way, I would ask people three questions:

1. Do you know what the value of 1 BTC is?
2. Do you believe that the value of BTC is justified?
2. Are you aware of how to buy and sell BTC?

Which would result in a similar understanding of the general public's knowledge about BTC, without the sensationalism.

They're mentioning a miner who became wealthy.  It seems like common sense that if a miner or investor does something profitable in BTC, its profitability is proportionate to the amount of money that they put in.  That's pretty much the case in every investment.

If BTC was regarded as a "wealth distribution system", it would be a pretty horrible system.  That would just be a "make everybody rich system".

Actually, I'd argue that BTC's current state is resulting in an uneven wealth distribution system.  Increases in price can result in whales (who usually get in earlier) exponentially getting wealthier, especially if they're capable of manipulating the market.

In the case of mining, having more money allows you to have more efficient facilities, which in turn results in greater profits proportionately to the money you invested.

The number of small retailers is pretty low.  The difference is that they don't have a huge amount of resources to consider it, so their acceptance of BTC is somewhat experimental and they don't expect huge amounts of customers to be paying with it.

There's also the fact that BTC users are quite specific audiences, so very general audiences like Amazon may not be interested enough for it.  A VPN provider or porn site is more likely to accept BTC than Amazon or another major retailer.

As for adoption, I'd say it was happening more when the price was lower.  We're still mentioning the addition of one retailer at a time rather than giving general statistics or information.

---

If you really need to use those major services, you could try converting BTC to gift cards or using indirect systems like Purse.

Nearer the start of this year, BTC's dominance in terms of market cap was as high as 85%.  Then, with very little increase in actual innovation or interest, alts flew up to a ridiculous extent in comparison with BTC.

There's no reason why they should go back to that place, but considering how rabidly insane some speculators are, it could well happen.

Regardless, alts' market caps tend to fly up much more easily on low volume, which allows manipulation to take over these bubbles, especially in the smaller coins.  So the market caps aren't too comparable in the first place.

The main problem for settlements is exchanging.  They're obviously wanting to receive the money as fiat, which means that they would have to find a way to convert large amounts of fiat money into BTC and then back into fiat on the other end, which could be expensive and tiresome.

Volatility could also take quite a chunk into their fiat, especially since BTC has been very volatile over the last few weeks or so.

Bitcoin transactions for settlement are largely useful for people who are genuinely interested in continuing to hold BTC.  For example, this transaction of around 200,000 BTC comes to mind.

I saw an email from Coinbase a while ago claiming that they would regard the original chain to be "BTC".  But other statements from them imply that they will let hashrate decide or do a variety of other unnecessary things.

Considering the experiences that most people also have with their customer support, I wouldn't want to be holding my coins in Coinbase if something goes wrong.

Personally, I'm going to keep holding coins in my TREZOR and see how it pans out of the next couple of months. 

Replay attacks aren't a concern for me because I don't spend coins all that often and I'm prepared to wait for a while until a solution is found.  I also read through this article which gave me a fairly reasonable explanation of what I would have to do if I had no easier choices, so I'm feeling safest this way.

You can keep convincing yourself that bankers are all the same person, but they're not.  It's not like Blankfein was brutally insulting BTC last week or something.

I'm fairly convinced that Dimon won't ever be joining.  His mentality is going to stay just about the same.
Pretty bold statement to make based on no evidence except recent price increases.

This is what technical analysis does to people.  It makes them believe all sorts of crazy things about the long-term based on arbitrary patterns that they observe when they look at a chart.  Then when they mention how they came at their ridiculous value, people who are less knowledgeable in the subject sometimes get caught up in believing that it's reasonable.
If you admire McAfee's personality, I suspect you've never heard of him before.  He's an utter moron.
Right, so if someone rich says something bearish their opinions are irrelevant, but if they say something bullish then they're relevant?