Can one talk behind your back? No! Even if intentionally avoiding to mention your name! 
The two software is different with pluses and minuses on both sides. It doesn't make it bad (and you don't have to feel "defeated" either). I mentioned it so OP can choose knowing all that.

While I also believe that the chances for Bitcoin go to 0 tend to 0, I think that you should be aware that:
1. You should not invest by what random people over internet say.
2. You should invest only money you afford to lose. I mean that you have to think it well and have a plan for the cases (likely or not) that Bitcoin falls big. Maybe not to 0, but maybe 10k? Will you panic-sell or not?
3. You wrote "primarily in bitcoin". Keep in mind that bitcoin is a risky investment (big price fluctuations in both directions) and altcoins are even riskier.

All in all, while in theory your plan looks good, think it over a couple of times and do by your own decision.

Exactly that's what we discuss. A notifier for only mentions and quotes. Exactly for leaving the option to not miss the info addressed to you. If such a notifier is in use, the threads don't really need to be watched any longer. Nothing weird imho.



I just remembered and I'll use this space for it: from my use it seems like the telegram notifier will also tell you if a post was changed and your name is in the changed post; the less annoying one seems to be missing those. It's not something that happens often, but it did happen to me today.

Just a small clarification may be needed.
Afaik in many places/countries full KYC is mandatory only above certain amounts. So the only mandatory part may the phone number, which can be a prepaid number; in various countries you don't need ID for it.



Most do have cameras not hidden at all, but their primary use is to capture your identity if you hit the ATM with a sledgehammer 
Plus, the ATMs are in closed spaces and nowadays one needs a mask to enter closed spaces (in most countries), making the camera useless.

You're right and I apologize for that.



Indeed. The thing is that with the current code there's a maximum size that can be added to the blockchain. The 1 TB / 5 years was not reached yet, else we would be some 2.2 TB now. And although 2.2 TB may look a bit big for a download or as space locked on your HDD, is not that expensive or difficult to download, right?



I expect that the not-so-great current use of LN and the fact that many make only smaller short lived channels may make current calculations not the much correct. (but yeah, I know that I may be wrong)
That's why I said "well thought channels". And increased on-chain fees will make people think twice if they make their own LN channels for each 1 or 10 small transactions or use one on-chain tx and move some funds into a service's wallet, using LN from there. I know that this hurts decentralization big, but this is how I see LN work. If we don't like this, then indeed we need other solutions, including bigger blocks, bigger chain size, better handling of that size...
But for now the only problem I see is that LN is under-used and still labeled as "beta".

I'm a newbie too on Telegram, but afaik only Telegram itself knows your phone number. Everybody else will get/know an user name, exactly like on Twitter or here on Bitcointalk.



It's not just a name I thought of. It's the reason I'm using it. Big thank you for implementing and offering it for us to use it.

We are still far from the point (although it's years, not decades), but.. let's see what the hardware brings too in that time, OK?



Indeed, second layer channels do need on-chain operations. I knew that. But we don't know yet how big will be the need to open and close channels. Well thought channels will not need closing because they'll keep carrying transactions in both directions. Am I missing something there?

That's correct indeed.



Imho it's a one-time operation and you basically just leave it running. I know that people don't have enough patience though. I don't know how good or bad Pi performs as node though.



This is the part where I can tell "please don't count on that". Since off-chain can bring the heavy load, I think that it's normal for on-chain remain restricted (may need a better word here, I am thinking at block size only, no other restriction) and expensive. If we don't do that we may end up with miners leaving when the block rewards get too small.

That's good. And I would have loved to see you start with that. There are plenty of people on this forum trying to spread FUD on various topics, including this one, and one of the methods seems to be by asking "innocent questions" like this.



Smaller blockchain would mean less information is stored and from what I know all the information there is important, or some sort of compression for storage and transfer. But compression would bring no real benefit (HDD is cheap, remember?) and it would mean a need for more computational power here and there (while some run nodes on Raspberry Pi today) and would mean identical data size to be transferred after the initial sync ends.



I am not familiar with Mina, but the Google cloud part doesn't look much reassuring  


It's as simple: underlying hardware is advancing, getting bigger and cheaper, hence if this is not a big problem now, it should also not be in the future.


It's interesting that we both thought on compression. But I don't think that it can make that much of a difference...
And yes, I agree that the size can scare the users. But on the other hand those who need 1h for sync at each start don't matter that much for decentralization, right? The users we need would keep their nodes running closer to 24/7...

Think to bitcoins like they'd be physical coins in your hand (if you bought them). And then think again to your questions.
Basically:
1. If you want to not sell, the only way to get some interest is to give your coins to a custodian service. They won't be in your hand any longer and that's quite a big risk.
2. Interest is again something a custodian business may give and every business has its own rules. I don't know how those services will run when Bitcoin will reach 1M.
3. If you want to cash in the initial investment you either sell some of the coins, either get money from [1] or [2]. But if you are not careful enough you can easily end up without any interest and also with your coins lost/stolen.

Not your keys, not your coins. Keep your coins safe in a cold storage or hardware wallet and sell some small % of them now and then when the price gets really high. Imho that's the proper way to do it although it means that your stash will decrease in time (as number of BTC/Sat)

Sorry, but I have bad news for you. Tx fee is not related to the amount of coins transacted. One can easily pay for 100 BTC transferred less than another for 0.001 BTC. The tx size in bytes is the one that matters and I find in nowhere in your equation.
"So basically"... all you wrote is completely off and worthless.

This is a pretty risky advice. I started by journey with altcoins exactly because I thought that Bitcoin is expensive. It was a mistake.
Although altcoins do have good moments now and then, they are less predictable than bitcoin. Even the big, established ones.
So my advice(*) is to buy bitcoin, even if it's 0.001 and afterwards, if you really want to, buy some alts too, just like you'd buy lottery tickets. Some may bring (sooner or later) jackpot, but most won't.

(*) For everybody, I said "my advice is to buy" and this needs clearing up: don't take my advice just like that, it's not a financial advice. Invest your money as you think it's better, don't just follow what random people say on the internet.

This silliness keeps coming out now and then. If you are genuinely interested, why didn't you search a little on the forum?
As calculated here, it takes at least 5 years for each 1 TB in the blockchain. And 1 TB of HDD is cheap and gets cheaper by every year passing.
Then, you should know that a node needs to download big amount of data only at the first sync, until it's catching up. Afterward the stress on the internet connection is not that big. And internet, again, is evolving to larger bandwidth and cheaper.
So... do you see any real problem? Cause I don't.

I'm not sure that he's upset and hostile actually. I think that he just finds it (oddly) funny to play with people's feelings when Bitcoin price is going down. That's all.
You may want to read this post and some of the ones after it on the similar thread on 30k for 10 days.

I usually keep getting notified for a while (in most threads) until I decide it's enough. Sometimes it's hours, sometimes it's days. Of course, in the less active threads I might forget though now and then...
It's not easy to decide when you want it to stop...


There are the Telegram notifiers (merit and mention too), there's LoyceV much less annoying notifier too where you just visit a page to see if you were mentioned or quoted... the tools do exist even if not part of the forum software.

It doesn't even matter if one is trading or not, or maybe holding and watching the charts now and then. Remembering -at least now and then - to be "grateful for today", can remind you to be a bit more humble, to take a deep breath and get to a better mindset, which will help you do better in whatever you do and stress yourself less when looking to the charts (if it's the case).

All in all, it's a good reminder.
Thanks OP!

While I agree completely that Google is not good for privacy, I'd say that my statement was not about how good, bad or evil google (and its search) is, it was more to bring the news that Bitcointalk gets indexed a bit better again. And since most users do search with Google, this should be a good news.

Some update on the situation.

Since this thread was made, I've switched from Google (which I've used basically since its inception) to DuckDuckGo, which was sometimes better, sometimes worse.
Today I've been searching (with DuckDuckGo) for something I knew it's on bitcointalk, still DuckDuckGo didn't find it for me.
I thought "what if?" and I tried with google this time and it worked. Surprise-surprise.

So I came back to this topic and clicked on Greg's example in the starting post. First page didn't return the correct page, but after clicking the
"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." link it has returned the "missing topic" (as the second result!).

I find it an improvement - not the best, but still closer to what should be - hence I thought it worth telling.

Exactly.

One thing I'd add is that if OP also doesn't want to link various buys to each other and to the wallet with all his coins, he may also want to use coins from different addresses in his wallet, ideally from not linked inputs.
If the seller is OK with that, mixed coins are the easiest route, obviously.

Clearly. I also have in my spam folder a mail with the subject "wait 3 confirmation 0.01747342BTC" which doesn't make sense since I didn't send nor had to receive that amount of money that day.
And since it's fishy, it can stay very good unopened in the spam folder 
However, keep in mind that the subject may be different, but the idea is probably the same: phishing or malware. Beware.