I'm not sure what the op means by 'officially' used. There are just some major things Bitcoin is used for, but I don't think there's data with the distribution of this usage. Bitcoin is used as an investment, so people hodl it for a long time with an intention to gain profit this way because of the price increasing over time. It's also used for trading, which is regular buying and selling of Bitcoin with an intention of profiting from short-term price fluctuations. It's also used as money, and some people buy things paying directly in Bitcoin. I think these are the main ways Bitcoin is used, so even if the price stabilizes, Bitcoin will still remain relevant as money.

Op, I'm sorry that even great replies by others in this thread didn't convince your friend. It's next to impossible to change someone's mind when they're already feeling strong about it. However, you could try to go from afar and focus on the things which you both agree with. It can be that fiat has its issues, such as constant devaluation which can also lead to hyperinflation if it gets out of control. Or that banks are not great because they charge you for keeping your money, and they track every transaction you make. Then you can go to Bitcoin offering not a perfect and fully adopted solution, but a chance to do things differently. With Bitcoin, a person can be fully in charge of one's money, and Bitcoin's limited supply means that there's no constant devaluation going on. Only then you can present some examples, such as that Tesla now accepts Bitcoin as payment for cars, or that there are various places all over the world where one can pay with Bitcoin.

The problem of scalability is very real and cannot simply be ignored. However, as others pointed out, it's not ignored and some solutions are offered to reduce the fees and make it easier for Blockchain to deal transactions more efficiently (or have fewer transactions). Apart from the solutions that were already mentioned, there are less obvious things which I believe could nevertheless be effective to combat high fees. One of them is allowing zero-confirmation transactions for small sums of money (and these transactions can be sent with very low fees because of no urgency of the confirmation), and another is to use altcoins along with Bitcoin for transactions (if we're talking about them becoming means of payment), so that there's a smaller load on Bitcoin Blockchain.

The price has grown unbelievably, that's true. But why the central bank of central banks phrase, what does it mean? I'm not sure how I feel about such a comparison because Bitcoin is nothing like a central bank. It's decentralized, the supply is limited, there's no single entity in control of the distribution of money, the price is not regulated by anyone. I just don't understand how a type of money can be compared to an institution. And if you mean that Bitcoin will beat the central banks, I also have to disagree with you because while Bitcoin is very impressive and massive in its own way, the reliance of people on fiat and banks is IMO too strong for Bitcoin to be able to replace them.

I think that the word 'mad' is very unclear. There are people with various disorders that make some of their functioning more different from that of other people. And also people call someone mad when they don't understand the logic behind someone's actions or think that this person's decisions are too risky. It is also true that a person who isn't, for instance, neurotypical, can succeed at some things better because of seeing the problem differently and offering creative solutions. And a person can be genius at one thing, but have mental struggles with other things (take John Nash as an example; he had schizophrenia but was also a genius mathematician and got a Nobel Prize in Economics)
You're saying it's a trend, but could you provide some links to see how it really looks like?

I think that the bank doesn't want people to use cryptos, and that's natural. After all, cryptos show how people can make financial transactions without a bank, and how they can be fully in control of their money. However, I still don't think that the Central Bank is authorized to introduce a legally binding ban of cryptocurrencies. What they can do is make statements and close bank accounts, but it has to be either the government (and the Minister of Finance seems to be on it already) or the Parliament to introduce the legislation which would actually regulate cryptocurrencies. So now the bank is backing from the initial statement because it cannot enforce a ban, and also because it wouldn't want to fall out of favor of the Minister of Finance who said they'd be looking for a way to regulate cryptos rather than ban them.

That's an interesting question, and I actually think it's possible to make reasonable estimates. For instance, Jack Dorsey's first post on Twitter was recently sold for $2.9 million. Twitter is way more popular than Bitcointalk or Bitcoin, so I think the price for Satoshi's tweet would be definitely lower than that. Twitter has around 192 million users. According to these estimates, a number of people using Bitcoin is 106 million. The difference is actually not as big as I thought it would be, but I think that the amount of users can be taken to make an estimate of popularity and thus financial interest in the first post, so I'd say the post would be sold for around $1.5 million. But of course, the auction would be in BTC, so the amount in BTC would be around 27 bitcoins.

I think there are important nuances to be made here. For instance, while Bitcoin is scarce, and it is related to its price growing over time, merely being scarce is not enough to be of interest to people. On the other hand, something can be way more abundant but generate more income and cost more per item. Imagine a famous author who writes a great book, sells the book at $15 per item and sells 2 million copies. And then there's a writer wannabe who writes a boring book, prints 1000 copies and sells the book at $5 per item. His book isn't popular, so he doesn't even sell 1000 copies of it, whereas the first author sells 2 million books and has another million of them in print. It's clear here that the wannabe's book is way more scarce than the book of the popular author, and yet the prices for his books don't rise and are actually lower than those for the books by the popular author, even though the 'supply' is lower for the wannabe author. The point is, scarcity doesn't guarantee the price rising because if there's low demand for a scarce resource, its value isn't going to rise.

Bitcoin is already overhyped and there are problems with transaction fees. I think Ethereum is a perfect platform for NFTs because it's more flexible than Bitcoin and is very useful for smart contracts. So no wonder that ICOs in 2017 and NFTs nowadays turn to Ethereum because that's what this platform is good for. I don't really get how NFTs became so popular and why people are willing to pay so much money just to be able to say that they're owners of some digital art. However, it's a good way to support gifted creators, and it's an unexpected use case of blockchain technology, so I don't mind them. Ethereum is a platform for smart contracts, Bitcoin is a crypto you can pay with or store your wealth in.

As a native speaker, surely you're aware that words can have multiple meanings, and 'crash' is no exception to this rule. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, one of these meanings is 'to fail', and the following example of usage is suggested in the dictionary:
So it's not just us non-native speakers using the word in a wrong way.
And I also disagree with the part about the price decreasing because of the whales. For instance, the price crashed on March 13, 2020, due to WHO announcing the pandemic, so various events can lead to the price changing.

I think a chance of Bitcoin being banned by the government largely depends on the following factors: how democratic the country is, how widespread the usage of cryptos is and how many influential politicians and entrepreneurs use cryptos. The US is a strong democracy, crypto business is blooming, and crypto usage there is high, so there's a very small chance of cryptos getting banned there. But less democratic countries, such as China, can bad cryptos even if there's high interest to them among the population. So it depends on the country and the circumstances.

The website was loading for about 10 seconds in Chrome for me, which is way longer than usual but better than what others said about the website not loading at all.
It also needs some improvements when it comes to grammar and phrasing. For instance, the paragraph about the website says the following:
Oh, and while it's the 'About' page of the website, it says '/#contact' in the link.
When registering, there's no button to agree with the Terms and Conditions, and I couldn't find them on the website at all.
Good luck!

If you deposited money onto a website but didn't like the minimum bets and low RTP on slots, I don't understand why you deposited a few hundred dollars on this website once again, but that's in the past and doesn't require a discussion.
They have the right to make whichever minimum bet they see fit, and you can simply choose a website which offers different conditions. So while these changes with minimum bets sound shady and the support's responses are rude, it's not technically scam. Since Nitrogenbetting is owned by Nitrogensports, you can try to contact them on Bitcointalk as well.

10)  Francis Ngannou
9)  Vicente Luque 
8 )  Sean O'Malley
7)  Miranda Maverick
6)  Khama Worthy
5)  Alonzo Menifield
4)  Abubakar Nurmagomedov
3)  Michal Oleksiejczuk
2)  Shane Young
1)  Marc-Andre Barriault

109 total strikes

Litecoin has been around for 10 years, so it's an old and reputable cryptocurrency which people closely associate with Bitcoin. It's not a rival of Bitcoin, it's just a friendly modification that was by Bitcoin's side for all these years. So I think that Litecoin will always be a popular choice for those who support Bitcoin but are open to trying something else if it helps with the fees, for instance. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, is clearly a rival of Bitcoin, and its creation threatened Bitcoin from the very beginning, putting its integrity at risk and splitting the community into believers and non-believers. So people who support Bitcoin aren't very likely to turn to Bitcoin Cash, while they can be quite open to Litecoin.

They simply cannot. If there's rapid increasing interest to buy cryptos, they'll skyrocket in value, and it would cost more and more to actually purchase a significant amount of it. Moreover, 'central bankers' aren't some unified entity which can direct all the efforts on cryptos, so there's no consolidated power here to actually make a difference. Finally, there's no motivation for banks to help out their biggest rivals which are decentralized cryptocurrencies. It's impossible to take them fully under control, and even trying to do that requires tons of resources which literally nobody in the world possesses.

I think there might be some people who know who Satoshi is, but they're not going to tell anyone because they respect Satoshi's right to stay anonymous. I don't think that any of these people are in any way related to the Simpsons show production, and those who made the episode surely just meant it as a joke. As for the general and popular thing about Simpsons predicting stuff, I agree with those who argue that they didn't. They've made tons of episodes about a world that is generally not so different from ours. So no wonder there were some similarities there. There's a good South Park episode about the Simpsons which effectively communicates the point that they did so much stuff that it's hard to find something they didn't do.

Do you mean that this person owns a car which she uses to provide taxi services to people, and this is her main source of income, but she wants to sell the car for BTC? I'm pro-Bitcoin, but I think it's a terrible idea. One should never put survival at risk when investing money. And how much can that car be worth? If she loses a job and gets Bitcoin, she will have to then spend Bitcoin slowly on basic survival needs, and if the price falls, she'll spend this money very fast. If she's a popular taxi driver, but she wants to get in on Bitcoin, why not just accept BTC as payment for her driving services? This way she'd be able to both hold a job and slowly accumulate some BTC.
Buying Bitcoin at such a high price is very risky, and depriving oneself of the main source of income for that is potentially life-ruining.
If she's tired of her job, however, she can first try to secure a different one, and then sell the car for BTC. It's just that there must always be a backup plan in case Bitcoin goes down, and having a source of income is crucial.

It's nice that there are some companies becoming open to Bitcoin as a payment method in 2021, but they are not enough to boost mass adoption. It all sounds great as separate positive news, and yet it's still baby steps if we compare it with the global economy. A few hotel groups, some shops, cafés and airlines accept Bitcoin, but they are not making up a big part of the market in their areas, so for a person who uses some shops and websites on a regular basis it still means that if you want to pay with BTC, you have to try hard to find places that sell what you want and accept cryptos.

Magazines have to adapt to survive and stay relevant. I think it's great that Time is doing its best and embracing new technologies. Auctioning 3 covers as well as accepting cryptos for subscriptions clearly shows that they're trying hard to remain interesting to the audience.
However, I didn't see the list of cryptos which are going to be accepted as payment, so it's hard to say whether these will be decentralized ones like Bitcoin or perhaps they mean some centralized tokens. And if it's about Bitcoin and similar ones, I think that with the current transaction fees and normally cheap subscription fees, it just doesn't make sense to pay with BTC, so it will only remind everyone of the big problem of Blockchain scalability once again.