To pick up the philosophy that a significant amount of people around here claim to have, have a look at this thread.  Basically, given that it's a risky asset, trading frequently is often considered to be worse than simply buying and holding.

Most people around here are not experienced traders, and it's quite important to be self-aware of that by avoiding day trading and other short-term trading.

However, not all of them actually do that, and end up panic selling after investing more than they could afford to lose or being afraid for their money.

Personally, I think I'm willing to hodl as well, seeing as I haven't bought any at these higher prices.  But I can't guarantee how I'll react when it actually happens.

Because:

-The price has risen extremely dramatically since the start of the year, with an increase from approximately $1,000 to over $10,000.

-This price increase is not backed by the merchant adoption that BTC users previously focused on - rather, BTC is being touted as a "store of value".  This is fine in itself, but without functioning well as a currency as well, the "store of value" aspect is primarily kept alive by first mover advantage, which doesn't tend to last forever.

-Traders in many crypto-related spaces have become euphoric and are assuming that the price will continue rising exponentially, which is a dangerous assumption to have in such a risky asset.  This is very common during speculative bubbles.
I disagree.  BTC is still relatively early in its development phase and has a long way to go.  I don't think that it'll fail, but I don't think that more speculators are going to make it any better.

Yep.  It's no different for you to send to a SegWit address as it would be for you to send to a legacy address.
No, but P2SH (Pay to Script Hash) addresses begin with a 3.

If the address begins with a 1, it's definitely a legacy address, and if it starts with a 3, it's either a SegWit address or it's using one of the other uses of P2SH addresses (namely multisig).

People are finding arbitrary comparisons over and over again just to suit them.

If the BTC ever passes that point, you'll find some other arbitrary comparison to try and claim that the BTC price should get higher than it already is - the reality is that in (likely) bubbles, the price is not rational and it doesn't have to stick to or follow specific percentages.

That's the case all the time, but it's even less predictable in a bubble.  If you've bought in late, at least justify it properly.

That was never one of the core aims.  Read through the whitepaper.
This is assuming that everything which rises dramatically in price must continue rising until there is literally no money left that could possibly fuel it.

What you're missing is that a significant amount of people will continue to be skeptical or uninterested, and some people will be scared away, considering it more likely to be a bubble if the price rises higher.  If we went by your logic, pretty much everything would be worth loads.
A Ponzi scheme involves a central authority gaining money by accepting investments into a central platform and then distributing money to earlier investors.  A speculative asset and a Ponzi scheme are entirely different, and it would be ridiculous to conflate the two terms.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-19/ecb-proposes-end-deposit-protection

If you want to read the full paper, it's here.
If it does, I suspect it'll happen over a long and gradual transition period taking several years, and I suspect that they'll try their best to keep it quiet.

People still have the misconception that central banks create the majority of money in a country when it's actually made by retail banks, so they could hold the misconception that their deposits are insured for a long time.
I doubt it'll have that much effect for now.

A huge amount of BTC travels to and from exchanges, hence why the trading volume is around $7,000,000,000.

Since BTC is somewhat scarce and not inflationary, plus the fact that it can be used internationally and has nothing to peg down the price, the number of people that actually use it as a currency seems to be insignificant and the number of merchants that accept it is also insignificant.

Comparing BTC's market cap to a fiat currency's market cap is unreasonable, because fiat currencies aren't hoarded so much.

The PoW system is used by most other major cryptos as well, and equally secure implementations of PoS systems and other systems are nowhere to be found as of yet.
Most major alts (the ones which aren't designed primarily for pump and dumps) can be traded on some of the available exchanges against USD. 
This could be a huge problem for taxation and it would require more complex KYC procedures for those who only want to trade crypto.  Many of these people would prefer to stay anonymous or pseudonymous.

It's a lot more effort trading directly with fiat.

This is the first time I've seen this prediction.  I'm pretty sure that BTC holders don't "generally agree" about this. 

I also don't see why you assume that Wall Street will act in the specific way that you expect them to.  They have quite varied views on BTC and eve the ones that believe BTC is in a bubble wouldn't necessarily short it.
Because they don't think the same thing that you've said.  It's perfectly possible that it could cause the price to rise, depending on who gets involved.

It's also possible that more people would get involved out of curiosity if BTC is introduced to more regulated and mainstream financial markets.

Not really the same, because stocks and bonds can't be sent in the same decentralised and pseudonymous way that BTC can. 

I don't think that the UK government really considers crime conducted with BTC to be as huge a threat as they claim - if anything the threat may be decreasing, because small-scale criminals can often find the fees annoying (as you can tell on darknet markets and related forums).

They should really be focused specifically on taxation, but instead they're pretending that crime is a huge factor in their decision.  Even though it may play some part, I think that the prominence of P2P trading and the use of cash makes this a futile battle.

The GDP of a country is not comparable to the market cap.

A large amount of countries' GDP is made up of goods and services that are used over a relatively short timeframe and produced repeatedly.

Market cap is not suitable for measuring the total value of BTC, and it's pretty much impossible to get a good valuation so it makes sense to just ignore this kind of article altogether.

How long you've used the address for is irrelevant.

If I understand correctly, you can only import seeds into the Ledger, so if you have your private key written down as a single string (which is the most likely case) then you won't be able to export your private key directly into the Ledger.

You could try exporting your private key into blockchain.info or another trustworthy place, and then sending the coins to your Ledger.

Yes.
Pretty bold statement to make.  But you can't get any statistics about that - because mining is decentralised.  Sure, miners are loud, but my point is that in general it's a futile battle for a government to have, expending resources to get people who aren't ultimately wasting any money, and expending a lot of resources trying to get the people who do it on a smaller scale.

It would also really piss people off, because it's basically stealing their investment into those miners by forcibly shutting it down.  Shutting down exchanges, on the other hand, isn't a huge threat to people's investments unless people's coins get stolen from the exchanges.

Quite funny that they unconsciously referred to how this is unlikely to last:
The Internet two decades ago (the Internet's period of introduction to the mainstream) may have "created" a lot of jobs, but they were temporary and unstable jobs created by the hype.

Some of these jobs will fall through as soon as hype around specific areas starts to die out.  This applies to customer support jobs as well as jobs in experimental areas of crypto like newer services.

Trading relies on centralised platforms.  By regulating Bitcoin exchanges, what they're really doing is pressuring websites to abide by specific regulations (or to close down) - this is easy, because it's just a website, not a decentralised network.

Mining, on the other hand, is decentralised.  By "banning" mining, they would be banning something which could happen in any home anywhere without their knowledge, so it would be a very ineffective law.

Also, since electricity is cheap there, it's actually beneficial for the Chinese economy as a lot of miners make significant profits from it there.

By attempting to ban mining, they would be basically banning people from making a potentially profitable investment, and not even succeeding in doing that.  So it seems very unlikely that they would ban mining.

I agree.  Bitcoin's emphasis on financial sovereignty makes it very important for people to be trading real BTC at all times and to withdraw it very easily at will to a wallet that they control.

It's also a problem because it could cause significant price manipulation, since there's not a lot to prevent the BTC price from being manipulated.

It could also make speculators who are joining in quite late into the BTC market speculate even more feverishly than before.

Because they would rake in some fairly hefty exchange fees from listing it.

Provided that an exchange wouldn't completely destroy their reputation by listing something (they wouldn't by listing BTC) they have a very clear incentive for listing whatever people are willing to trade.  It doesn't necessarily prove that BTC is doing better or that the price will remain high.

This incentive is strengthened by the fact that BTC has a very high trading volume and it could potentially be easy to manipulate the price with huge amounts of money (on their exchange).

EDIT: for now, they're offering it for free.  But I suspect that'll only be the case for as long as they want to stay extremely competitive, so that they can get frequent customers to begin charging later.

A hardware wallet is one good option, yes, but you could always go for a paper wallet.

Your decision should primarily be based on how significant the price of a hardware wallet is relative to your total investment.  There's no need to spend an excessive amount on a hardware wallet if a paper wallet is very easy and viable for you.
It's almost certainly safe, because it's open source code and thousands of users have the ability to review that code.

I don't know.  They only need just enough demand to get listed on an exchange, and then you have hoards of emotionally unstable new investors waiting to hop into any new pump that comes their way.

Often even very poorly thought-out forks could end up doing pretty well.

There are only slight differences in the code, and these differences certainly don't warrant being called "Bitcoin" since they're not really trying to become as significant as the current main chain at this point.

BTC users' victim complex is really tiring to see over and over again.

From the economists' perspectives, BTC is simply not suitable for the world's finances.  Considering that BTC can currently only handle a few transactions per second, they're certainly right.

Sure, the practicality could change in the future and the general basis of BTC is very sound, but the economists only need to observe what they're seeing right now.

They don't have to act as big, evil establishment figures all the time.