The comparison to gold is primarily as store of value...

Gold is not used as a medium of exchange or currency... and in the same way bitcoin doesn't need to be used for payments... it can grow tremendously from here just with the current narrative of being the world's first and best digital store of value.

Agreed. Blockchain analytics software and it's ability to cluster transactions and figure out new ways to link transactions and wallets to identities is also improving drastically whereas this field didn't even exist a few years back.

That being said, it is still possible to stay anonymous but takes increasingly more effort.

We have broken key levels (40k) for the first time since the May downturn... there is much hope of a renewed bull --hopefully there won't be any new FUD to hamper it in the coming weeks.

This is generally how markets work, those with deeper pockets who can withstand downturns will force out the smaller players who can't. This is why the argument that "invest in crypto with money that you can afford to lose" has some validity.

The OP's post deals with the crooks of the problem with bitcoin as a currency: you need stability in the value of a currency before being able to price things in that currency... the current levels of volatility doesn't allow this. The best we can do is to have a price in USD and another in bitcoin that would be updated frequently based on market volatility.

We can see that those services that accept bitcoin currently are doing this because there would be no other way: they have USD pricing, and give the option of paying with bitcoin... when you try to pay with bitcoin their payment processor gives an equivalent BTC price that would change based on the market.

Despite the recent frustration Elon has received from the crypto community for causing the environmental FUD, outside of crypto, he is seen as a pioneer in the electronic vehicle and space industries... he is involved in those industries far more than in crypto... so he is not going away and there is no reason to expect his popularity to decline.

His most recent talks on bitcoin reveal that he owns both BTC and ETH personally --so we can always hope that he might be more careful in the future with his public comments now that everyone has seen the effect of his environmental comments on the market.

During 'altseasons', that is after bitcoin has had a major rally and money begins to flow into altcoins causing them to rally, it might be wise to sell some bitcoin for altcoins to take advantage of the higher gains... ultimately to increase your bitcoin holdings further than simply holding the bitcoin. Yes, there are tax considerations in countries where they apply, but the gains might well justify the tax hit.

By design, fiat currencies steal wealth away from people over time by inflation... this is necessary for the system to survive because the current financial system is debt-based.

So far in countries where an outright ban was attempted we have seen that such a ban could not be enforced, that people continued to trade and in fact crypto prices rose significantly as compared with places without a ban.

To ban bitcoin would be a vein effort at this point.

The bitcoin mining council report recently just days ago emphasized that bitcoin mining uses renewable energy more than any other country or industry out there, and the rate of transitioning to renewable sources is also faster than in any other industry.

I feel that in a matter of years we are going to find that the recent environmental concerns (and the news FUD that followed) will actually have turned out to be a great thing for the crypto: it's going to accelerate the transition to more environmentally-friendly means of mining and network operation.

There is the straight up scammers and then there is the scammers trying to scam the already scammed by offering all kinds of "crypto recovery services" --this is the highest quality crypto forum and I don't see many of these posts here, but there are so many "lost or stolen coin recovery" ads all over almost every other crypto-related forum out there.

Blockchain by nature (immutability) makes the space prone to scams.

Imagine someone asking in 1921 "what do you think will happen to electricity in 100 years?"... no matter how visionary one may have been back then, chances are they would have grossly underestimated the extent of technological evolution we have seen that followed (the main one being computing, followed by network computing, i.e. the internet, now crypto).

Typically "all eggs in one basket" may not be a great idea, but considering it is BTC you are talking about (versus any other crypto asset out there) I am confident you are going to be OK --actually far above just OK in time. :-)

This may be true, but it still won't be under the control of any central government who would just make more of it as they see fit. This is a huge difference with bitcoin.

Yup. What a person does when bitcoin reaches $1 million depends on how long that person has been invested in bitcoin by then, and how much they have been able to stack by that time.

If you are just entering the space at those prices, you likely wouldn't do anything differently than now if entering for the first time at these prices.

When people learn about bitcoin, they also tend to learn about monetary history (as mentioned above) and often times actually become more conscious of saving generally speaking in their lives --saving more and getting more educated are of course great things and it's amazing how bitcoin has become the means to this.

You are not alone, the crypto space gets the largest number of new investors pretty much at the peak of the cycle every time (the 'euphoria' stage of the market cycle). Most people learn a great deal the first cycle they enter the space and although it can be a costly lesson to learn, it serves them well for future cycles.

Both holding and mining have risks in terms of downward price action, however with mining the risks are just more. If you are simply holding and prices go down you can always wait for a recovery, but if you are mining and there is a crash it can make mining not just unprofitable, but even causing a loss depending on your power source and how up to date your rig is...

People lost money because often times when they first get in, they don't really understand the asset and are just trying to make a buck... this causes them to sell at a loss when they may have held the crypto if they really understood what they were investing in... investing in bad shitcoins is another reason, but also comes down to lack of adequate knowledge and not doing due diligence when it comes to researching and understanding these assets.

Bitcoin is under the control of large investors --%95 of trading volume comes from whale investors at any given time, an increasing portion of these very large investors are now institutions... so yes as we have seen already, we can expect the market to be manipulated so as to increase the gain of these large stake-holders.