the biggest threat to bitcoin has always been people who don't understand what a decentralized censorship resistant currency means while thinking what the government says about bitcoin matters.

there are 3 phases of effects of COVID-19 on bitcoin.

1. initially since the world economy wasn't hit by the pandemic, there was no panic and price was rising. there were no effects.

2. when the pandemic effects were felt on the economy and traditional assets started to dump, a big FUD campaign started to pull bitcoin price down too. there was a lot of panic and bitcoin price went down for a short time.

3. the pandemic effects on the economy keeps growing and now we have the inflation effects too thanks to all the fiat the governments have been printing. but since the FUD effects ended and panic went away bitcoin went back to normal rises that it had in phase 1 and while the economy is still in a lot of trouble bitcoin keeps rising.

immediately after reaching the ATH there will probably be a correction as there are many people who have that as their "sell target" for reasons that i never understand.

then after a while when the correction was done and these people were out, we will see the rise continue and a very similar pattern to January 2017 will start as price keeps setting new records every month at while the space between the two records keep decreasing until we reach a bubble probably by the end of 2021 near $500k.

they are giving free new shitcoin (an upcoming fork to double the coins) to anyone who owns the XRP shitcoin and have been advertising prices like the one you have "heard" to get more newbies into giving up their money and help the pump just before they dump all their stash on these newbies who would lose a lot of money.

that is what i guessed too and i think this way of thinking is because the media doesn't report that much about the development in Asian countries most probably because they are too lazy to translate stuff to English and also because they want to publish "fancier" stuff that can get them more viewers.
as for ICOs as far as i can remember a lot of different countries banned ICOs after the huge number of people they scammed.

this is not something we can ever know or measure. a whale can easily split his coin between multiple addresses which would look like the number of addresses with a lot of coins are decreasing or may look like he is selling but it is not what is happening in reality.

do you have any data to back this up or is it your personal guess?
i am curious because i still see bitcoin grow all around the world the same as before, in Asia or any other continent.

there is a problem with this statement since you are saying the entire 2017 which is a whole year. most of 2017 was actually very predictable and price went from around $800 if i am not mistaken to $20k. the only unpredictable or less predictable period was the last month.

just the other day a friend came to me asking about some lie he had heard about how bitcoin is going to start dropping down to $1000 soon, in fact they had given him exact date and price
i simply redirected him to this site, in fact i have been recommending this page to a lot of people in real life lately specially those newbies who have heard some FUD which surprisingly seem to be a widespread these days.

another good thing about being self-employed is that you have a much better job security than an employed person because it is all in your control and it is a lot more predictable than being employed by a company for example that can fire you (for example for downsizing) or just go under. but i agree that it is harder and is not for everyone.

i think you may be confusing some terminology here. there is a difference between having no job (jobless) and being self-employed. the examples you mentioned in OP such as freelancer are self-employed not jobless.

the only people who are truly "jobless" are the bums living under a bridge or the millionaire kiddos who are living off their parents money.

it depends mostly on what the regulation is. cryptocurrency is regulated in almost every country in the world including US and bitcoin is thriving more than even, more so in countries with regulations such as Japan.

if new regulations were put forth by US the same thing that happened in certain states after they added silly license requirements (i believe it was bit-license or something similar to this name), the businesses migrate outside of the jurisdiction of that stupid regulation.

with the growing crypto industry, that is in the trillions of dollars at this point and with the strained US economy exit of this much money and businesses is not desired.

that is easier said than done. also breaking the previous ATH is not the important part, forming a stable and strong support level above the previous ATH is the important thing to keep an eye on.

what we most probably will have is breaking the previous ATH followed by a lot of spread out panic sells and panic buys that could bring the price up and down around that ATH level multiple times before we go above it and stay there.

in a sense no. the "value" of bitcoin will not increase this way, but its "price" against fiat will.
think of it this way, when Venezuelan currency tanked the US dollar didn't gain value but the price of US dollar went up in Venezuela. that is the same with bitcoin versus other currencies like US dollar. when US dollar value tanks, the price of bitcoin will go up against US dollar but that doesn't mean bitcoin has gained value.

in another sense when bitcoin price rises it attracts a lot of attention and that has always led to increased adoption. with that increased demand the value will also go up.

in conclusion when the inflationary fiat currencies like USD lose their value slowly but surely, the deflationary currency called bitcoin gains value. or moons if you will.

when a merchant gives discount, they cut their costs to increase their profit margin then shrink the amount of profit a little so that the customer has to pay less.
you are asking others to pay you money so that you can make more money while giving small discounts!!! that makes no sense.

one way of cutting cost is for those who cut taxes when using bitcoin since bitcoin payment in some countries isn't subject to any taxation (only buying/selling bitcoin does). additionally there is no additional cost that comes with using credit cards and similar payment methods so the profit is already bigger than fiat payments.

yes and some day in the future, maybe tomorrow or maybe a couple of years from now you try to spend your tether and you see the network doesn't exist anymore. then you open their website and see 3 letters saying "F" "B" "I" shut them down.

even if this method was desired a better bitcoin-ier way would be to use the cryptography option that bitcoin already offers.
the goal is to make two outputs, one to the owner and one to the one who claims the reward. that is the very definition of SIGHASH_SINGLE. you sign the input and the corresponding output of it (the fist output since there is only one input) and set the amount of it to the (total input value - tx fee - reward) then the person claiming the reward simply adds the new output equal to (reward) amount and then submits it to the block.

i don't think Google can do anything about this type of scam applications on their platform because the apps aren't manually audited and there is nothing obvious about the scam that could be automatically detected so their system can't catch them.
like many other things it is up to the user to spend 5 seconds and do some research to figure out whether the app is malicious or not.

you should take another look at the charts. by the end of 2017 price was going up $11000 in 20 days (150%). right now we barely see 10% rise.

we've already seen some spikes but nothing like 2017 mainly because this rise is not like the rise in 2017.

sorry but that is nonsense.
you need to check out history again.
the fees went up pretty much at the beginning of 2017 and by mid 2017 it was at the ATH of fee while price was still at $2k-$4k and remained high until end of 2017 and even continued in 2018.
if price were to fall because of high fees it had to drop after reaching $5k and never went any higher to $20k.

bitcoin is the decentralized currency that you can use globally without needing any third party. it was never promised to be cheap. although i agree that fees should not be high.

another nonsense.
there are a couple of million ASICs currently mining bitcoin that produce this much hashrate. some miners have more than one and there are farms so it means there is at least a million bitcoin miners that are spread around the globe. if you can't see decentralization in that then you are blind.

another nonsense part here is that miners don't set the fees, the users do in a competition for the scarce block space.

no because as we already know the crash had nothing to do with high fees.

the shift from traditional assets to bitcoin has been happening for some time now. when you see the news of it hit the media that is when you know that the shift has become too big to ignore since so far they have been pretty much ignoring bitcoin thinking it will go away if they do so. but as it was expected, bitcoin is growing stronger every day as its adoption all around the globe increases. all because what bitcoin offers is one of a kind and can not be found anywhere else.

but how are you sure?
you are using a wallet that to my understanding from the research i did is closed source. so you have no way whatsoever to know if your funds are safe and not being broadcasted to the wallet creators or worse.

it is very interesting that for the past couple of weeks i keep hearing pretty much the same news that someone is either saying something positive about bitcoin or are changing their previous stance. but the more interesting part is that all of those that i have seen were "hedge fund managers".

these hedge fund companies may be receiving a lot of request these days from their investors to buy bitcoin or diversify into bitcoin as bitcoin has proven to be so strong and most importantly an excellent hedge against the strained economy while other assets such as stocks will be struggling in the coming years.