This kind of predictions is mostly based on past performance, people were pretty conservative in 2016 and 2017, even when it was rallying in 7-8k range, but after it skyrocketed to 20k we've started hearing lots of 5 to 6 figure predictions. For me it's clear that this is just speculation, not even an attempt to make some sorat of analysis, just "the new ATH will be  2-5 times bigger that the current ATH".

Now, I think there's very good chance that Bitcoin will hit $50K and $100K and even more at some day, but it's very hard to predict when exactly it will happen. There's always a possibility of long bear market, or slowing down of the price rise and so on.  Bitcoin was always unpredictable in the past, and it will keeping being that way for a long time.

There's like 0.0000000000000001% chance that Apocalypse will happen, so the rest 99.9999999999999999% of a time Bitcoin is store of value, and in many things it's better than gold. You can store billions of dollars worth of coins in your mind by memorizing your mnemonic seed, or hide it inside a book or something. It's impossible to transfer same amounts of wealth in gold or cash across the border privately.

Bitcoin is also way cheaper for transferring wealth from person to person across the globe, even when fees are high, it's still worth it to pay $50 to send millions to any country in the world, and in just 10-20 minutes. Wire transfers or gold can't do that.

When done correctly, Bitcoin can be theftproof, there are ways to very effectively hide your private keys so no one will able to get them without your permission. Gold and cash be stolen from a safe, can be seized by the government from your bank, etc.

Typical corporate propaganda that tries to promote blockchain and downplay Bitcoin at the same time. In reality there was no "blockchain technology" when Bitcoin was created by Satoshi, he simply named Bitcoin's database that way. And this way of keeping database is not revolutionary on its own, Bitcoin's protocol has many other crucial parts like networks of nodes and PoW mining. Without those parts "blockchain" is just a database with cryptographic commitment scheme, and it's wrong to say that blockchain is the heart of Bitcoin, all parts are equally important and make Bitcoin decentralized, something which can't be said about all those corporate blockchains.

People who say that Bitcoin is outdated are just repeating the words of altcoin marketers who make those claims in order to promote their own coin. They are making promises of millions of transactions per second, claim to be "blockchain 3.0" and promise to change the whole world, and in contrast describe Bitcoin as slow, old and inefficient. But anyone who understands the technology behind cryptocurrency sees that those altcoins are nothing more than vaporware, at best they have barely stable testnet without any features that were claimed, but most projects don't even have that. They're also extremely centralized and some projects have just 20-30 nodes in their network - these systems just can't be viewed as cryptocurrency. Bitcoin on the other hand is doing extremely well, it has survived many attacks and continues to get upgrades and has very realistic goals. So, to answer your question, many investors trust in Bitcoin's technology over altcoins. This created a reputation of stable and reliable coin, something that can't be said about altcoins.

Well, newbies need to be reminded that quantum computers are still very far away from becoming a threat, if you check Technical Discussions board, there's a threat about quantum computers almost every week, with the same question like: "I've heard quantum computer can hack Bitcoin is that true?". It should become a common knowledge that quantum computers won't pose a threat to Bitcoin and cryptography in general in the near future.

1. Some countries might try something like that, but its pretty useless, because anyone can create as many wallets as they want and as many addresses as they want.

2. That's what most governments will do, they will demand cryptocurrency users to store and provide all their transaction history.

3. -

4. There won't be any global strike force, each country that choose to regulate crypto will have their own.

5. Not necessary, they might just task existing regulators with it.

Awareness and carefulness can protect users from common threats, but they can't protect even the most experienced users from zero-day vulnerabilities. For example, nowadays almost every site uses Javascript, and hackers can use it for attacking visitors, so you can get hacked by simply visiting a site. A few months ago there was a vulnerability in popular Bitcoin wallet that allowed malicious sites to steal coins from unsecured wallets. Javascript could also be used to execute Spectre and Meltdown exploits. So, for this and some other reasons, people should avoid storing big amounts of coins on their online machines, it's just an unnecessary risk.

This question is way too hypothetical, as fee market is one of the important parts of Bitcoin protocol. The reason why we have fees in the first place is because block space is limited, in fact it's extremely limited, and fees represent the price of that space. If you'd try to install some socialist-style fees that take into account the transacted amount, miners will have zero reason to include small transactions, they will keep including highest fee transactions as usual, so nothing will change, maybe aside from tx fee increasing for the rich. If you'd try to make some rule that miners have to include some amount of smaller transactions, it will be just a random lottery, which will be quite frustrating for users. They'll have to wait for weeks or months to get their small transaction get included randomly.

Lightning Network is the most optimal solution for transaction fees, there's no point in trying to invent some rules, the best way to improve something is to make its technology better.

In the long run is doesn't really matter. Think about Amazon or PayPal, did they suffer from the dotcom bubble companies that drew so much investor money away from them? At that time yes, but now they are so huge that it would make very little difference if they got more investments in their early days. Money is not the only resource, time and talented people are also needed for a project to succeed, and you can't really buy them with money. Maybe Bitcoin would be a bit higher now is there were no altcoins on the market, but its technology would be the same. And if all people who work on altcoins decided to work on Bitcoin instead, it would also see only small increases in productivity, because the most important work is cutting-edge research and inventing.

So, how is cryptocurrency trading is different from traditional trading, like penny stock trading or currency trading? It would be logical to include cryptocurrency trading addiction treatments in some centers that focus on general trading addiction, but this center tries to portray cryptocurrency trading as some sort of gambling, which is really strange. Maybe this whole is just an attempt to smear cryptocurrencies, as people like Warren Buffet like to tell that they are just gambling.

1. The difficulty will start gradually dropping, meaning less powerful miners will become profitable. Eventually you will even be able to mine with GPU and CPU if there will be no miners for too long.

2. Without mining there's no new blocks, so no new transaction will be able to get confirmed.

3. Bitcoin will still have network of nodes and each node keeps the whole blockchain history. So even if miners will leave, Bitcoin will not be destroyed, it will be "paused" and will resume as normal as soon as someone will start mining again. To truly destroy Bitcoin you'd need to erase the blockchain file from all computers that have it.

With Bitcoin it's kinda different, it's true that when fees have skyrocketed it was felt as a disruption by many, but transactions were still predictable, you could have looked at the state of mempool and adjust your fee to have almost 100% to get your transaction confirmed in next block. It's different from Visa when it just glitches and there's absolutely nothing you can do, for some individuals it can mean huge loses while with Bitcoin they would just have to pay higher fee. So, in a sense, Bitcoin has never failed like Visa (aside from some early days bugs) and there's very few scenarios where it can fail like that.

It could have been investing if at least some projects succeeded and fulfilled their promises of their tokens generating profit, but I've never heard about it happening. I've tried to do some research on succesful ICO's, and all I've got was stories like "this ICO have gathered millions one year ago and it hasn't officially failed yet". I don't think even Ethereum can be considered successful, it has increased in value by some giant amount since its ICO, but it still lacks in functionality and no one is seriously using smart contracts. If it will continue to be like this, it will just die in the long run.

It's a huge exaggeration that it will somehow kill Bitcoin or cause any significant damage to its reputation, but I agree that it's a negative tendency and people should avoid it. It's okay to call out ignorant Bitcoin critics who use false arguments, but "nocoiner" is a poor term, since it's so easily misunderstood as shaming for not owning Bitcoin. Maybe it's better to call them "anti-coiners" or come up with some other name for them, to stress out that they don't understand Bitcoin and hate it for some wrong reasons.

Why bother with all these fluctuations if you can just buy Bitcoin at any time and then just hodl it for years and stop worrying and wasting your time on trying to predict the future. Sure, trading can bring you better profits if you are good at it, but it requires knowledge, skill, intelligence, practice, access to insider info and so on - you can't be a good trader by asking advices on forums. People here are much more likely to make bullish predictions because it's what they want to see, very few users here are professional traders or analysts.

All these people who gather funds through ICO's hold zero responsibility, projects that don't deliver on their promises should also be viewed as scams, because they either intentionally set unrealistic goals or just don't try hard enough, and in the end just put the money in their pockets. These kind of projects would have little chance of getting any funds through traditional means, but with ICO's investors are just throwing money at everything that pops up and has a website and whitepaper. When more people were realize that there's actually no successful projects  that started as an ICO, token/altcoin market will crash and ICO will become a synonym for "scam" in everyone's mind.

First, Russia is not "crypto-progressive", in fact their government was very critical towards cryptocurrencies in the recent years, and many officials were calling for bans. It may be possible that they will actually ban most cryptocurrencies in the future and will only allow "tame"  cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.

There will be no massive adoption or use during the world cup, people would still be using fiat because it will be more convenient and faster. Cryptocurrencies are accepted only in few places, users need to usually wait at least a few minutes to get confirmations, merchants might be afraid about volatility and unclear legal status and so on - there are many obstacles and the benefits are not worth it for most people.

Governments and banks are sending mixed signals about cryptocurrency, some praise it and even try to adopt it, other are carefully waiting, some say that it's still immature, and some just bash it. It's also different from country to country, with some countries have already banned cryptocurrencies. I think banks tend to be more hostile because it directly threatens their business, while other institutions don't feel that way. If all of them really wanted to go to war against crypto, it would be globally banned and this forum would be in the deepweb. We're still far from real war, and maybe it will never happen.

This is very interesting in the light of "Satoshi owns 1 million coins" myth that is being brought up so often . It seems like Satoshi was against concentration of big amounts of coins in one hands, so this might mean 2 things:

1. Satoshi didn't mine any disproportionate amounts of coins, there were many early miners that we don't know about.

2. Satoshi did mine big amounts of early coins, but he destroyed them or don't plan to spend them in any way.

Taxation is theft. "But who will build the roads" argument is really old and dumb, people are not some stupid monkeys who can't figure out things if no one guides them, there's nothing that can not be done privately and through voluntary cooperation (which is the same as privately). Roads, military, science and so on - all of it can and is done privately around the world. Government is exactly why Bitcoin was invented - you can't trust people with power and believe that they will do as they've promised, and even well-meaning leaders do stupid mistakes that cost billions. Just like Bitcoin have decentralized economy, some day people will decentralize power to the point when every individual will be independent from others.