Things are really not looking good for SegWit2x camp - they keep losing their signatories while node count remains almost the same and ridiculously small - even Bitcoin Cash has much more nodes. If miners will decide to fall in with their plan, they are very likely to just waste their power on mining near-useless coin not accepted by anyone. So far it's even unclear if any exchange would want to list is, considering all the problems with replay protection. But I welcome this fork as just like the FUD from China, this is another test for Bitcoin, and after passing it Bitcoin will be stronger, as it will be proven on practice that Bitcoin is truly resilient.

Chinese traders got burnt? I think it's quite the opposite, they were the first to get info about upcoming announcement regarding exchanges, so they shorted Bitcoin while it was at $4,500. Panic sellers below $4,000 are the ones who lost money, especially those who sold at the dip - and I'm sure it wasn't the Chinese, as they are not new to this kind of manipulation. But it will be harder to repeat it in the future, since people are learning their lessons and understand that hodling is much better strategy than panicking.

To get access to Bitcoins you need to know corresponding private keys, and usually they are stored in special wallet files or printed on paper wallet. So it really depends on how that person was storing them - the easiest case if there is a paper wallet or a flash drive with unencrypted wallet file or a piece of paper with a wallet seed written on it. All this allows to easily recover bitcoins. But usually wallet file in encrypted, so you would have to crack it, which will depend on how strong the password was. But in the future (20-30 years from now), the AES cypher might be easily broken, so recovering bitcoins from wallet files will become viable. But aside from that, there's no methods to recover bitcoins, because there's no central authority to appeal to. And also, it's not a problem, because bitcoin can be split into 100 000 000 units, so there's no shortage of money supply.

Hacking non-mining nodes won't enable a 51% attack, you'd need to hack specifically mining nodes, which is obviously much harder. But some of your concerns are valid, because hacked full nodes can still be used for different attacks, just not as serious as the 51% attack. But I think it's very unrealistic, if there were some major vulnerabilities in popular closed-source OS's, our whole economy would start falling apart. For example, when there was a wave of ransomware attacks, it was mostly old Win XP that were affected, and still it was quite damaging. The other problem is that governments together with software companies could develop backdoors specifically for Bitcoin, but this could start a huge legal issues.

It is commonly thought that Satoshi had decided to create Bitcoin as a response to 2008 financial crysis, and also there were attempts to create independent cryptographic currency since the 90s. But Bitcoin is much more than an anti-government project - it is the first decentralized financial system, which goes far beyond everyone could imagine. If you are familiar with Austrian Economic School and works of Friedrich Hayek, you may know that he was proposing denationalization of money by giving all control to private businesses and removing any regulations. But Bitcoin took it one step further, as Bitcoin is governed by both the code and its users, so there is no central point of failure. So, I think Bitcoin is needed regardless of political system, i.e. even if governments and banks were 100% honest, I would still be pro-Bitcoin.

For example, you have an address with 2 Bitcoins, you broadcast transaction that sends 1 Bitcoin to Alice, but then Alice just broadcasts the same transaction again to steal your second coin. This transaction will be valid as long as the amount is lower or equal to the balance of an address. The reason why this is works is because in your model when addresses are like accounts, there is no way to distinguish different coins, so every address has to be used only once for sending. This would create a lot of problem for those who use static addresses, like services that have deposit addresses for their customers or people who accept donations.

This sounds quite like some conspiracy theory and in real life it's a bit more complicated than that. For example, governments like China and Banks like JP Morgan operate with billions of dollars, so it doesn't make much sense for them to manipulate smaller market, since it's not that much profitable. Also, if someone will find out they are involved in Bitcoin directly, it may hurt their business/economy, since many people think about Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat. But it's certain that information about exchange closure has leaked to some traders before it was announced publicly, so some traders where able to profit from shorting Bitcoin. But with Bitcoin anything is possible, may governments and banks already own some significant sums just to be ready in case it will become global currency.

I personally don't trust that much in technical analysis, because it's more of a tool for predicting price solely on the past movements, while ignoring the fact that the price is usually moved by some events. For example, there won't be any dip to $2,800 without China's ban. But 2014-2015 market seems like an anomaly to me, there is no good explanation why the price was so low, Mt.Gox was just an exchange and not part of the Bitcoin protocol, so probably it has something to do with China having the largest share of trading volume and rumors that it can be banned at any time. So in this light we can see current rally as a product of legalization effort in developed countries like Japan, Korea and the US, while the Chinese influence has been diminishing.

When it comes to the future of Bitcoin, many people first think about the price or its adoption rate, but I think that there's one thing that is more important - the state of its technology. Even though Bitcoin functions flawlessly, there is still a lot of space for improvement, especially in fields like scaling and privacy and smart contracts. I really hope that we will see major improvements in next years to make Bitcoin look even more attractive to users. Also its important to have apps that utilize Bitcoin - decentralized markets, exchanges, tipping services, charity foundations, etc. The sum of all those things will be the driving force behind Bitcoins price, so if you want it to go higher, ask yourself how you can join the growing Bitcoin economy.

The most important thing for me is to set realistic goals. When I see that some group of people with no background promise to revolutionize and disrupt some big industry and connect billions of people, it sounds extremely suspicious. Also it's important to explain in depth how your project will work and why it is good, rather than just spamming buzzwords like decentralized, distributed, blockchain, tokenize and so on. And in the best case scenario you would have some working prototype to present before potential investors to prove that you are able to deliver your project.

It's both a dump and a dip, because the price has dropped quickly, around 25-30% in one day, but it also recovered to a new level, which is lower than the previous stable $4,300-4,500 zone, but still higher than where we were before the start of this SegWit rally. Right now the market is very uncertain, because the price might return to the growth trend, or may drop further. Right now there seem to be many interested parties, and we have all kinds of rumors and news every day - some parties want to embrace Bitcoin, others want to regulate and restrict it, some even call it  a "fraud". But whatever is happening, Bitcoin is getting attention, and it's good, because more people will be joining the market soon.

I have a feeling that some people from traditional finance markets are using Bitcoin to influence their own positions on said markets, because in eyes of many people Bitcoin and fiat are mortal enemies. So, people who are deeply into fiat, like Jamie Dimon are trying to sink Bitcoin because they believe it might strengthen their position on fiat markets, while people like Tom Lee are supporting Bitcoin because they want fiat markets to go down. But I personally think that Bitcoin should be more often viewed as an independent project that doesn't need fiat to fail in order to succeed. I think the most likely outcome in the future is that both Bitcoin and fiat will be present in our lives in some proportion.

Buying the dip is sure a very smart strategy, but dips happen for many reasons and its important to distinguiqsh them. For example, the recent dip to around $2,800 was caused by overspeculation and panic in reaction to China news - so in order to buy this dip, one should have predicted these news and buy at a very short window, since the price rebounded in the next day. Then there are other types of dips - caused by pure speculation on the price, like the recent drop from $5,000 to $4,500 - they are more common, but you have to wait for them for a long time and risk to miss out on opportunity. There's also a third scenario - something catastrophic happens and Bitcoin will crash to the ground. This is extremely unlikely and no one will be able to tell when is the bottom. So, in general, buying dips is extremely hard, and you need some luck to catch them, so for less experienced people it's better to just buy and hodl for years and not worry about the price.

I can't agree with your statement for multiple reasons. First, it has only been 17 years of this century, and we don't know what else will be introduced in the future - there are so many possible breakthrough technologies like AI, space travel, fusion power and so on, so it will be to out grandchildren to say what was the invention of century. The invention of 20th century was without a doubt the Internet, because it has radically changed lives of almost all people around the globe, but we don't know yet if Bitcoin will be able to do so - it's not entirely clear if mass adoption will be reached or how much people will be actively using Bitcoin.

First, Bitcoin hasn't been banned in China, only exchanges. I think the main reason for that is that they don't want money escape the country, so they shouldn't be against mining, since it just generates money. And even if they ban it and force close all mines, it won't kill Bitcoin as new mines will appear around the world in places with cheap electricity, and if miners will be allowed to sell their hardware, there won't be a long delay before the process will start. And even in worst case, if China would seize all equipment, they won't be able to kill Bitcoin, because 51% attack can only double spend coins they own and paralyze the network, but they can't spend coins they don't own. And it's not hard to change PoW to deal with this attack.

I think by now most people who were into Bitcoin for at least a year or two have learn to just hodl and never panic sell. Sometimes they trade with a fraction of their coins just to get a bit of profit and hedge against possible drops. And hodling is actually the wise choice because unlike some other investments like gold or other precious metals, because Bitcoin still has uncovered potential - in case it will reach mass adoption, the price will be ten to hundred times higher than now, so the risk of missing out on this opportunity due to panic or leaving early can be quite big.

The term investment implies that you have to buy something and sell later for a profit, but actually there are many ways to profit in trading, so it's better to say instrument rather than investment. And Bitcoin is actually a very interesting financial intrument if you'll compare it with traditional integuments, because it's totally unregulated, but also quite big so it's not very easy to manipulate it. Unregulated markets also allow traders to use very high leverages, and combined with natural volatility it can be one of the best assets for day trading.

To me it was always obvious that Social Security Number is extremely weak method of authentication, since you have to trust that organization that use it won't fall victim to some data breach. I'm sure that in the future it will be replaced by some system based on public key cryptography, similar to how sites on the Internet can be verified via SSL. And the whole credit system can sometimes be very flawed and lead to economic crisises, which is actually one of the reasons why Bitcoin was created. Also, Bitcoin has very own authentication system, as users can sign messages with their Bitcoin addresses, to prove that they own it and all corresponding coins.

It's quite possible, since China already has the technology to block certain sites effectively filtering Internet traffic. This would lead to a harder price drop, as it's much harsher than banning exchanges themselves, but Bitcoin was designed to operate in very hard conditions, including nation-wide bans. Such ban would never be able to cut the whole country from the Bitcoin network, because even one link is enough to keep Chinese users in sync with the rest of the world.

Bitcoin is still in its early days, so naturally it will pass farm beyond $5,000 but the only question is when it will happen. Maybe there will be some delays caused by events similar to recent China's exchange closure, or maybe we will have a new explosive rally in a next few months. For example, the Lightning Network might trigger a huge bull run if it will open Bitcoin to new markets that require transactions with near-zero fees. And in any case, Bitcoins performance is much higher than performance of any traditional asset on the market.