yes, I consider bitcoin as a very good investment with a huge potential of growth and an unbelievable return. BUT your "friend's parents" should not invest in bitcoin, in fact I have always discouraged people like that from investing in bitcoin because they won't have a good time in it because of its volatility and also because of the huge amount of FUD that is out there against bitcoin.
I obviously have time and have spent enough of it studying bitcoin to know what is FUD and what is not and more importantly to know that potential I mentioned above. but most others don't. and not knowing that for them means making bad decisions, panic selling and a lot of losses in a volatile market.

imagine for example if they bought in January when price was $6k (which was the best time to enter as an investor) but the drop to $3k and the follow up FUD would make any of them to sell their coins at a big loss of half their capital. obviously I could tell it is nonsense and $6k was a good entry point but a newcomer with no information will never be able to do it.

I don't know about OP but from many similar cases that I have seen so far, those who look for "hash160" and "balance" are trying to find a private key with balance. basically they are searching the 2^256 private key space to find one and steal its balance! obviously waste of their time.
with a little search you can find this question be asked here almost every months.

in a perfect world where we had other real projects, that would have made sense. but what we have is pump and dumps and creation of hundreds of new coins in a short time span since it doesn't cost anything and the reward is high! so if the bitcoin dominance fell to 20% in reality is shows that the number of pages on coinmarketcap.com has grown from the current ~25 pages (100 coin per page) to 70 pages.

if you want to see the ream "bitcoin dominance" and determined whether it was actually lowered or if it is still 100%, then look what happens to altcoins as soon as bitcoin price starts to make a move! look where the money goes and how it flees the altcoin market. that should give you a pretty good idea where the real dominance is at

you might want to explain a little bit next time in your website about why I should give a damn about what someone who I have never even heard of before says about bitcoin!

in a way that is stating the obvious!
you always want to invest your money instead of putting it in your mattress or in a bank! and you want to diversify your investment into multiple assets. that is not an argument about why bitcoin in an investment though!

well the buyers can simply do a quick google search and find reviews of the merchants that they are trying to use. specially when it is a website that is selling mining hardware! when you find negative reviews or in this case nothing at all (since it is apparently brand new) that should raise some red flags for you to not use them.

since this website has the word "antminer" in it, you can contact the real company's website (https://www.bitmain.com/) and ask whether they have any kind of affiliation with antminerusa.com, this site may simply be abusing their brand name to scam people.

the protection that you as a buyer could use is an escrow which at its simplest way can be a 2 of 2 multi signature address between you and the merchant but the best way is to use a third party who has no stakes with either side and do a 2 of 3 multi sig.

sorry, bitcoin transactions are not reversible.

well the "hard facts" (pun intended) is that if you believed in 1% of the things you posted here, you wouldn't have wasted your time jumping through the hoops of creating a new account on bitcointalk and posting this nonsense here!

for instance I believe ETH is a worthless crap but I would never waste my time going on an ethereum forum, opening up a new account and shoving my opinion down their throats! simply because I know it is crap, I stay away from it and never waste my time with it

that is exactly the definition of decentralized exchanges (not through Linux command of course).

basically to do what you asked here, you want to create a peer to peer network that any user can come and meet other users (aka peers), connect to them and trade. it is a little bit complicated but doable because such system follows the same principles of bitcoin peer to peer network.
in order to make the trade/exchange there are things such as multi signatures, hashed locktime contracts, and some other smart contracts on bitcoin that you can use to ensure security and prevent fraud by either party.
there already are some projects that have implemented these things such as Decentralized Exchanges in general, the Atomic Swap technology, and also the Lightning Network technology.

the first thing you need to do is to make up your mind whether you want to talk about cryptocurrency in general or bitcoin. because things are very different and you can't use one strategy and goal for the other.

that is a very bad strategy in my opinion because it is incomplete.
you MUST speculate while you ALSO set percentage targets for yourself to cash out. in fact you can not place those percentages based on your liking! like saying I like making 100% profit so I will sell at 100% profit!!! that doesn't make any sense and it will never end well because you would be gambling.
instead you should speculate and see if 100% profit is even possible and then set it as your target. it is like a ladder you can't skip the first important steps and want to jump up to the final step!

at any time there are dozens of people who are making random price guesses about bitcoin. part of them are predicting higher prices while the other part is predicting lower prices and majority of them are always wrong because they make emotional guesses instead of analytical speculations.
2 years ago saying price will hit $10k meant they were wrong because price hit $20k 2 years ago
and saying it will hit $100k was the common thing that hyped up people were repeating because they were caught up in the bubble mania not because they saw the true potential of bitcoin.

I just want to point out that these shorts only prove that there still are a lot of people who are stuck in the mentality of 2018 and the bear market thinking it should not be over even though it has been over for months. and lets not forget that all this time that we were rising, each time price went up and slowed down, the number of shorts skyrocketed because of exactly what I said above. but price still continued going upwards.
for example recently someone was arguing that having this many shorts means we won't go above $10k and it shows a big drop coming, then we shot above $10k and it didn't even stop there!

your mistake is that you think US dollar is giving value to bitcoin! whereas just like anything else bitcoin has its own value measured only in fiat  currencies because that is what we use to measure literary everything else. so if US dollar were to crash, then bitcoin value against US dollar should rise up equal to the amount of the crash.
similarly when bitcoin is worth 1 in dollar and 10 in another fiat currency, if that fiat value tanks and has half its value then bitcoin should be 20 in that other currency. as an example you can look at the fiat currencies that tanked over the past year and how bitcoin went up against each of them.

PayPal is as regulated as any other payment processor, credit card company, banks,... can be regulated but that is not a reason for why or why not adopt bitcoin for them. I believe they will first create their own cryptocurrency just like what Facebook did and will try to compete but fail in a very short time (like less than 3 years) and then they will all eventually do that because that is the direction in which the world is going with or without them.

it depends on how you define "peak". you certainly can not compare the recent price rise ($12kish) with the ATH of 2017 ($20k). the former is a simple rise with a peak that followed by a small correction, as expected; but the latter was a big ass bubble followed by a bubble burst as expected.
if you are a day trader then the recent $12k+ was a peak for you and you should have sold and then bought back right away as the correction occurred at ~10% lower price. if you are not a day trader then you should never even think about small corrections like this. we are in a bull market and you should aim for the next bubble which is probably around $100k.

mining difficulty and its cost are not the factors deciding the price, they never have been and never will be.

bitcoin dominance is not rising, it has always been up but the problem is that people started to come up with crazy numbers to measure bitcoin's dominance where in fact the only thing they were really doing was showing the altcoin bubble so that number was showing the size of that altcoin bubble so far and as that bubble burst and altcoins get dumped and many of them in fact die, that number increases showing the shrinkage of that bubble.
otherwise so far in the past 10 years bitcoin has been the only dominating cryptocurrency in this market that everyone wants and focuses on. everything else has always been short term fancies.

we can't be sure about it until we see it actually released. usually these things tend to disappoint us. and not to mention that finding actual experts who understand bitcoin and are willing to spend their time explaining it takes time which for some reason these films seem to skip.
for instance if they use Andereas Antanopolis then it will be worth watching but if they stick to nonsense speculation and price rise and falls then it would be a waste of time.

I don't think so. maybe some help for bitcoin price but altcoins are on their own trajectory moving with pump and dumps.

the "next" stop is going to be $20,000 because we can only predict the next stop not the final price stop that can only be guessed to be around $1 million maybe more. but the "next" stop is easily to predict and that is the previous ATH which has proven to become the next resistance every time we go to a bubble, then correct with a big bear market and recover back to it.
then after it breaks which can take a couple of months or at least a dozen tries, we can see price stop at $40k first and then move towards the $100k which is most probably the next bubble.

the "effing hell" that is going on is a big ass rally that has kick started the bull market this year and has been going on for a couple of months already. your problem is that you were asleep all this time or probably fooled by the FUD that were telling you to wait for the price to go down to $1000, then you waited for it to happen but since it never did you panic bought way too late when bitcoin was starting to get reach for a correction. now you are stuck and confused.

now instead of panicking you should start looking at the mistakes you have made over the past 6 months instead of only focusing on the past 3 days. that way you may learn something and be more successful over the coming years where the same thing repeats over and over.

no the "crypto" downward trend is not temporary, most of the altcoins are going to remain on this downtrend until the reach their graves and disappear from the market. many of others will continued getting dumped for some more time before they reverse and see a pump or two and then drop significantly and die like the rest of them.

the bitcoin on the other hand doesn't have a downtrend anymore. the downtrend stopped about 6 months ago and what you are seeing in the past couple of days is an "upward" movement, don't let the small drop fool you, it was a simple correction.

try opening that .asc file (the electrum-3.3.6.exe.asc file) with a text editor like your notepad on windows and see if you can open it or if it is corrupted because although I am not familiar with Kleopatra but the error message seems like saying the file is corrupted. in which case download the signature file again from electrum.org.

if that didn't work, it might be a bug in Kleopatra, try using one of the popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu to verify the files, having a Linux will also come in handy for other usages.

"saving" means that you save your money instead of spending it on things that are unnecessary. for example instead of wasting money you put it aside. you need to have some savings for emergencies. then what you do with the money that you saved up is when the investment comes in.
specially since most investments (like stocks,...) require a larger sum of money so you have to first save up to invest in them and for the investment to make sense.
so they are not mutually exclusive, thy come together and complete each other and you cant say one is better than the other.