it is because there is a lot of demand for "speculation" about bitcoin but so little number of people who can actually speculate bitcoin and even less (probably zero) of those who are willing to share their speculation with others. so the news sites have to come up with these types of random guesses based on any random news they come up with.

but in early days (like the first month) there was barely anyone even aware of bitcoin let alone mining it so we can be sure that most if not all of the blocks of those days were mined by Satoshi so it can't be for obfuscation.

there is no way to know for sure if this was automated.

in other words you need a digital signature from those keys! LOL
otherwise creating a code snipped creating transactions and sending them out and then storing them in a wallet.dat file only takes 5 minutes and I can do it right now if you like.

as long as you don't confuse my selling with losing faith I have to say I have sold bitcoin but only I have done it when I knew a correction is coming or a bubble is bursting and I did it mainly to have liquid fiat in hand to buy back in the dip and increase my bitcoin stash. the goal has always been to be "1 in a million" anyways and I am still sticking to it.

I am always surprised to see this from very old members. you expect this attitude from newcomers because they haven't seen the same thing repeated before but not from those who have seen the same trend at least 2 times in the past.

when you are making an investment you should consider the risks and rewards. that can happen by analyzing the potentials of the asset you are investing in and your speculation of the long term movements of it. basically you put a lot of effort in coming up with a plan to buy and sell at different times and with predecided amounts.
then comes the risks, which is when you made a mistake or something unexpected happens. in your case the mistake was selling at a wrong price because you were affected by the FUD in the media. there is nothing wrong with that. but your biggest mistake was staying inert after you made the mistake instead of attempting to correct it. which would have been as easy as buying back.

why do you guys keep feeding the trolls? the first reply by exstasie  was more than enough. the more you feed him the more he is going to create alt-accounts and post his crap here. just let his topics die since mods don't remove them.

don't let the term "physical bitcoin" fool you. that is a poor choice of words to explain something that is doing something entirely different. a better term which describes them is "Collectibles" which why the board on bitcointalk is also called that: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=217.0

so if you start making actual "physical bitcoin" as a physical form of a currency and sell them using ATMs then you are planning for failure from the start because nobody is going to use them. all you can do is to produce limited number of them with a cool design and sell them to those who like collecting rare stuff!

it is too soon to talk about effects of an event that has not yet happened and also it is too far away (a year in the future). so far with the previous halvings the price rise had two steps. the hyped up step was the first which happened only about 1 to 2 months before the halving which subsided and the bubble of it burst before the halving itself. the second phase is what comes next which is the REAL effects due to reduced block reward (new supply) which is a nice rally but only after the halving.

I have heard of some stock brokenrs that had the option to let people use their bitcoins to buy stocks from them. although I find it very weird because if you consider bitcoin as an investment you are going to be using it as a diversification to your portfolio which should contain stocks and bitcoin alongside each other not use one to buy the other.

this is not possible unless with secret contracts worth large sums of money between the mining farm operators and individual investors that also happens with solid legal contracts.
anything else, like what you see online is a Ponzi scheme trying to scam people using the name of "mining farm".

if we are talking about the same roller coaster pattern then the ATH that we are predicting is the top of a bubble just like the previous 5-7 bubbles that we already had. and in none of them we could predict how high it will go because it is uncharted territory and it lacks resistances while has a big inflow of money from FOMOing investors.
with that said, $100k in my opinion is a good guess and I have made the same guess myself too but it can be anywhere from $50k to $500k really. the $500k is because each time there is a bigger bubble because of a bigger demand increase and more hype compared to previous times.

as a rule of thumb whenever you see an article posted on a website that is new and you haven't heard of it before, you should be 100% sure that it is unreliable and low quality. specially whenever it is being advertised by new rank members although exceptions apply.

in this case this is one of those low quality articles that is mostly imagination of a kid who is getting paid to create these articles so they come up with anything they can put a interesting looking title on it and release it.

the internet is filled with self proclaimed experts who are spamming the internet with their nonsense. in some extreme cases you can see their predictions are all over the place! there was actually one idiot on this forum (who is banned now) who used to one day predict bitcoin going to the moon and the next day predict the exact opposite.
and sometimes the desperate news sites like coinpedia fish them out of the crap they are in and advertise their nonsense as a real "speculation".

using network fees as an indicator is the same thing as using google trends as an indicator. in both cases you are using the effect to predict the cause which is impossible. it would be like wanting to predict the weather (like for example if it is going to rain tomorrow) by looking for wet streets and then predict that since streets are wet then it must rain! but in fact you are too late to predicting anything.
in this case fees go up because the price goes up or down not the other way around. so even if you used it as an indicator, by that time it would already be too late and you will be looking at the history not predicting the future.

that has always been the case during bear markets. people tend to not spend their bitcoins when price is falling and on the contrary when price is rising (the bull market like what we had in 2017) they are more willing to spend it because of the price rise.
for example if you check BitPay's annual stats report you can see in their monthly charts that the ATH of people spending money through their services (which means buying things from merchants with bitcoin) coincides with ATH of price.

if this is actually the case here, then they shouldn't call them "experts" because 90% of them are simply copying code from each other and have little to no understanding of programming. in fact most of the altcoins, specially the tokens, are created by people who read some step by step walk through explaining how they could copy code!!!

I have faced the same problems both in paying others and wanting to be paid by others and I have to say this has nothing to do with "industry maturing" or anything, the problem you are facing is with the other party and their unwillingness to accept the payment method you are offering them.
for example PayPal has been around for many years and it is mature but if you were to offer PayPal to many people around the world they will not accept it because they don't want to and you can't change that not with time nor with anything else.

OP disappears because he doesn't have to do anything else. he puts the FUD up and then for a couple of days (in this case 24 hours) people keep his FUD on top of this board as is with this case so he achieves his goals of spreading it.

I don't think at this point Lightning Network has any reasonable effects on size of the mempool and scaling of bitcoin because the 3 main usage of bitcoin that shape up majority of transactions are
1) from traders moving funds to and from exchanges
2) gamblers gambling with their bitcoins
3) mixers that basically spam the blockchain
and neither of these use LN yet.

other use cases exist (like micropayments you mentioned) but their percentage is so small that it is negligible at this point.

I think this is a bit old, I remember reading about this a couple of months ago which mainly became popular after the Binance hack. I don't know if this is a new firm making the same estimate or not though. in any case the problem with that estimation is that they are not taking into consideration the amount that exchanges scammed themselves and called it a "hack". which is why it is so huge. many of the exchange hack cases were inside jobs or the exchange faking the hack anyways.
besides the total amount that individual users lost because of "malware", etc is so much smaller than this.

the statement is missing a small part which is: "a cashless society .... that we fully own and control....". they are not going to let people throw them away and go to bitcoin since they can not control or own bitcoin thanks to its decentralized nature. so their goal is to have more centralization introduced into the system which they can increase their control and prolong their life some more without becoming obsolete this fast because they fell behind the technologies and the advances that the world is making.

you should compare both good things and bad things about Libra that can be brought upon bitcoin and then say whether the total result is good for bitcoin or bad for it.
in my opinion it is very bad because the only good thing is that it might introduce more people (unintentionally) to bitcoin and increase bitcoin's popularity and adoption but at the same time it can also spread a lot of FUD and misinformation about bitcoin and mislead people even more make them think wrong things about bitcoin. for example they started calling bitcoin a high risk investment only and advertise their own crap as a currency while never mentioning how centralized and censorable it is.