You don't have to wait until after the fork to decide whether to use a SegWit address.  SegWit was activated over two months ago now and yet, for some reason, the vast majority of users are still not using it.

The main advantage is the decrease in fees due to a decrease in the size of your transaction (in the eyes of legacy nodes).  As more people begin to use it, the fees begin to decrease further.

A problem is that there's not yet a standard for signing SegWit addresses, which makes verification difficult.

What we're missing is that this is by no means a trend.  When you have a country with many thousands of places that could potentially accept BTC, and they could decide to start accepting BTC at pretty much any time, it's not actually so great.

Awareness of BTC is high enough that a huge amount of the American population (and a fair amount worldwide) at least have some knowledge of Bitcoin, so the fact that we're still talking about one place at a time is actually not much good at all.

People are very cautious with their money so progress will be slow and steady, but this still doesn't justify the high price at all.

This is the point that makes no sense.  You're using this statistic to suggest that the bull market will continue for "a while".  But an increase in users just suggests that people are buying BTC now, not that they will in the future.

That kind of false logic is what drives people to buy in higher and higher into bull markets until eventually it crashes.

If anything, it suggests that the increase in users was so much quicker than usual that it could imply we're nearing the top of a bubble phase (desperation to buy in).

The precautions that services take to help prevent their customers from getting scammed are also getting somewhat better.  MyEtherWallet has added a banner at the top of their real website which tells you to avoid ever clicking on links from Slack or other platforms which scammers have been using to take people's funds.

Unfortunately, scams are an inevitable part of a decentralised system.  It forces people to take responsibility for their funds and be careful, which is part of sovereignty.

Ponzi schemes which accept BTC have existed for quite a long time, and they have been used to scam huge amounts of people over the last few years.  This increase in value has not affected them as much as the article claims.

No, because people aren't obliged to pay in order to own the token.  The developers typically fund their own projects.
Note that the upcoming hard fork was agreed to occur before Bitcoin Cash or "Bitcoin Gold" were devised (or certainly before they had agreed for it to happen).  It's not their responsibility that other developers have attempted hard forks before them.

I also wouldn't consider it "hijacking" - just developing a different version of software that people can choose to run or not to run based on their own thoughts.
In this case, that was not their intention.  Notably there is not going to be a premine in this fork, so the developers are not at an advantage to an ordinary Bitcoin holder.

Assuming that you mean you'd like to obtain physical cash, there are a two options that I can think of.

You could try trading with LocalBitcoins.  This is the most common method and involves either meeting up with someone in your local area in order to exchange your BTC for cash, or receiving cash in the mail if you can't find sellers in your area.

In my case, I use a BTC debit card to withdraw money into cash.  In doing this, you can hold BTC in a third party account and spend fiat at merchants, selling your BTC at the point of use.  You can also withdraw from ATMs (which I do on a fairly regular basis).

Debit cards often result in high fees and poor exchange rates, but they're very convenient and allow you to be flexible with the money, provided that you keep the bulk of your BTC in wallets that you control.

What are you, some kind of moron?  This is the most obviously sarcastic post I've seen in my life.

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It seems that LocalBitcoins is assuming that their users want to have their transactions confirmed as quickly as possible, which is why they're setting such high incoming fees.

I'm actually in favour of incoming fees in the right circumstances, because when you're dealing with a third party they're a useful way to prevent people from pushing up the services' fees when sending the coins out again, but the incoming fees should not be one uniform amount for everyone.

It would make more sense for LocalBitcoins to implement some kind of priority setting in your account in which both your incoming and outgoing fees are reduced.  Then they could group together a collection of low-priority transactions to stay professional with their users and allow people who want to trade smaller amounts to continue using LocalBitcoins.

Also important is that we're trying to measure BTC's support and justify the price by the number of people that sign up to exchanges, rather than by actual merchant support or other more useful metrics.

All it shows is the amount of hype, which is building up because we're most likely quite deep inside a bubble.  While this hype continues to build up, there will be a lot of new users and people who scramble to get in.
Why?  How does an increase in buyers affect the number of buyers in the future?

I would say that they're already "taking it seriously" enough to consider any potential applications of blockchain technology in financial services.

It's important to distinguish between taking BTC seriously (most of them already are, even if they don't like the speculative nature of it and they would rather preserve fiat currency), and liking it.
Pretty bold statement.  IMO that's extremely unlikely because fiat currencies are something which banks have control over. 

It's certainly not a reason for them to treat Bitcoin differently - if they were actually afraid of that happening, they would be far more hostile towards Bitcoin than they are now.  Compared to what they could be, I'd say they're fairly neutral right now.

Cash is the most common method, but a criminal certainly can pay for illegal goods with Bitcoin.  Most darknet market sellers accept payment in BTC.  Even though in most cases the criminal will know enough information about crime in their local area to pay for the drugs or guns with cash rather than converting it for a high fee, there may be cases in which there are inexperienced criminals looking for a means of searching for other criminals (via the Internet).

There may also be cases in which a criminal needs a way of sending money across the world rather than in their local area, and mailing huge amounts of cash across the world is somewhat more difficult than sending a BTC transaction.

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As for KYC, the last time I was at an ATM it was pretty much anonymous.  And daily limits become pretty much irrelevant if a user can stay anonymous, because the ATM doesn't know that it's the same user buying more BTC.

You seem to be suggesting that this is a positive move.  It might be good when governments are clear on their exact views on BTC, because it shows that their position is unlikely to get unreasonable or severe, but it's still a layer of inconvenience for people who want to get involved in BTC.

Regulation of exchanges can be quite annoying for users, especially when it requires serious invasion of privacy like questioning the usage of funds.
They can also be used in legal and legitimate markets.  Crime is just a side effect of a good monetary system.

You are not paying with Bitcoin.  You are holding Bitcoin in a third party wallet with a company that has the power to sell your Bitcoin for fiat money.

When you use your debit card at a merchant, TenX will spend fiat.  As soon as possible, they will sell your BTC for the amount of fiat that you spend (at a rate which they decide, usually a slightly worse rate than market rate so that they can make a profit), and they will subtract the amount of BTC that they sold from your balance.

So basically, it looks to the user like you're spending BTC, when in fact you're not.
They are intentionally vague about this, so they're probably giving you a bad exchange rate.  I personally use Xapo, and with them I can see their current exchange rate from my account at any time.

On normal Western home computers and normal Western Internet, it's still perfectly practical run full nodes.  It's not a significant problem yet IMO.  As long as people understand that full nodes are the way to retain a trustless wallet, they will continue to be fairly common alongside lightweight wallets for other purposes and some casual users.

The solutions are:

-Gradual onchain scaling (or rapid onchain scaling, depending on what you believe about the importance of full nodes), alongside common improvements in bandwidth and storage
-Efficiency improvements and optional onchain scaling solutions, such as SegWit
-Offchain solutions such as the Lightning Network.

Major BTC exchanges tend to have relatively high limits and the ability to raise those limits if you verify your identity very well and you contact them on the topic.

For example, GDAX accepts bank wires of $250,000.  You can also withdraw $10,000 per day and you can request higher withdrawal limits if necessary using an authorisation form.

You could trade large amounts on Gemini as well.

Occasionally, people will sell OTC if they find it particularly difficult to use these sites for any reason.  Especially the very rich people.

Yes, but major pools can support the SegWit2x chain at first, so that the legacy chain becomes inconvenient to use, which could help to push up the price of the new chain in the very short term.  Admittedly this would not have a lasting effect, but it's possible for much of that support to stay or for it to have a domino effect on further users.
I'm not sure I even believe that.  I strongly doubt that much of the money people have invested in BTC is invested with the intention of spending at merchants anymore.  Some of it is but I doubt it's the majority.

Looks like SegWit2x will be an alt, but a significant one which is accepted and sometimes supported by a variety of major services, so it'll at least not be irrelevant.

The chance of anyone's wallet generating them again is negligible, so as long as you don't use them again or tell anyone else to use them, they're pretty much gone.

TL;DR: yes.
Yes.
No.

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I was just clarifying with my previous post that you could choose to use the same seed in multiple wallets, and you would then be able to spend the same coins from both wallets.  But unless you make that choice, there is no connection between one wallet's seed and another wallet's seed.

The seed phrase is used to generate your public and private keys, which are linked to the addresses used to receive coins.
They could have.  You could choose to import your seed phrase from one wallet into another and use both wallets with the same seed if you wanted to.
Yes.
In theory, you could use the seed anywhere.  However, by doing so you would be exposing your coins to whatever you give the seed to.  That's why TREZOR recommends that you never type in your seed phrase anywhere on the Internet - because it's possible that an attacker could see it.  If you use your seed in a less secure wallet, your coins will be as safe as the weakest link, so to speak.
Yes.

Yes.  People spent billions of dollars orchestrating a massive market movement of several hundred dollars in an asset with a market cap of over $100,000,000,000.  Hilarious!

And they chose Halloween to do it too, a time that's known for joking around!

/s
What's the reason why it went anywhere above about $1000?  Minor pieces of news that are being used to justify a much more dramatic increase.  It's not like the transaction volume or even transaction capacity has increased that much, never mind actual adoption or usage by merchants.
It's surprising because at the same time somewhere out there a dog is on fire.

Well I suppose the most stable place it could get to is 0, because then there's no way for the price to go but up. 

For it to get relatively stable, it would have to go into a bear market and out of this bubble phase to a point at which most of the owners are relatively secure about the position.  In the last bear market (2015), this was around $200, and it was stable enough for a good year after that.

It's also possible that it would get stable if the price went up over a long and gradual rise.  However, this would require the price to be justified by genuine usage, otherwise it will always have the potential to continue being volatile and cause a lot of panic.

Even if it reaches that high, it might fluctuate similarly to how gold does - quite drastically, but over several years at a time.

Even if BTC's algorithm was ASIC-resistant, the vast majority of miners would be people who could afford huge investments in mining equipment, particularly in expensive GPUs in areas with low electricity.
I assume that by "developers" you mean "Bitcoin Core developers", because it's important to note that a significant number of people run clients other than the reference client.

However, this is entirely false.  If the Bitcoin Core client was altered in this way, people would have to choose to upgrade their client.  If people still run clients which involve having a max of 21 million coins and they continue the chain with a max of 21 million coins, there will still be a max of 21 million coins.
False.  Central bankers decide on the money supply, whereas what Bitcoin Core developers do (not that they have any intention of doing this), is ask people to support an increased money supply.  People could still choose to support the previous money supply and it would still exist.
There is a maximum block size to prevent more transactions from becoming a burden to full node users.  Miners are incentivised to reach the maximum block size with transaction fees.