Give it time - years. This isn't some get-rich-quick thing.  See where things are a year from now when we are nearly 5 months past the halving.

Anyone who expects a straight upward trajectory is delusional.

It was the same type of person who was here in July 2010 (right after the slashdot article) saying it would never reach a dollar and be under $ 0.01.  And then it would drop back below $1 soon. And then it would never stay about 10, 30, 100 etc.

The double spend from March 2013 was a particularly odd case with an accidental hard fork due to the 0.7 and 0.8 upgrade.  If you want to read more, there is a lot out there, but barring something like this, 6 confirmations is usually sufficient, but if you are running a service like OKPAY, then monitoring the network status is important.  And perhaps keeping at least two different versions of Bitcoin Core running on different nodes to ensure they are in agreement.

The odds of any official government entity embracing Venezuela is essentially zero for their domestic use.  Maduro and his ilk (the Chavez disciples) have no desire to lose control of their money supply.  Regardless of what they have said about helping the little guy, they have only cared about their own power and the riches it brings.  It has been demonstrated repeatedly that while they want to equalize income, these policies only equalize suffering with the degree of suffering being proportional to the degree to which their policies are implemented.  Venezuela has gone full socialist and has reaped the consequences of doing so - going from the richest country in South America to the poorest in just a few decades.  It should be a lesson to socialists everywhere, but they see that those in power succeeded in enriching themselves for a decade or two and so are willing to give it a try by promising "free" stuff to people to get their votes, e.g. an advanced auction on stolen goods.

Venezuela could use it for trade in order to avoid international payments networks so as to avoid having to attempt to smuggle $5 million in gold into the US like was reported they did last week.  (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article235417622.html).

Individuals would be smart to buy some insurance against authoritarians (socialists, fascists, totalitarians, communists) with a bitcoin or two in case it is ever needed.

I'd also add it is not just a hedge for bad government or bad economic decisions by private financial institutions, but it is even more so a hedge against bad governing philosophies that overarch all these things, specifically anti-liberty, authoritarian philosophies (socialism, fascism, communism, dictatorships etc).  These anti-freedom philosophies enable both bad government and public backstopping bad private decisions.

This goes from corporations like Countrywide making bad loans, to individuals making bad economic decisions (e.g. picking political science as a major vs accounting, engineering, medicine or law) and going into a lot of debt, then these corporations or people expect someone else to pay the bills for their own poor decisions.  Socialization of risk and bad decisions under any type of authoritarian system that forces one person to pay for another is evil and something that bitcoin can help to end via the bitcoin hedge.

This explains why many in government do not like it because it begins to remove people and their money from the control of the power-hungry politicians.

It looks like the OP troll left last December and hasn't come back. Holding is a long term prospect, not for weeks or months and if you have done so you've been well rewarded.  The same type of troll thought bitcoin couldn't sustain dollar parity, or $10 or $30 or $100 or $1000 etc.  It hasn't ever been straight up, and has been a bumpy road.

Everyone who listened to the trolls and sold out at those points lost out on tremendous gains.  People who mined (or bought) and held have done great.

Anyone selling now is ignoring the upcoming halving which -in the past- has had big gains in the year after. Will it happen this time?  No one knows for sure, but a halving of new supply with constant or growing demand is simple economics.  If you sell now, it is a poor gamble.

This will probably answer your question, in short it is possible, but not recommended as it encourages address reuse, could have privacy implications and could have interactions between protocols using the same key pairs.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/80638/how-would-one-encrypt-a-message-using-a-bitcoin-public-key-and-use-its-priva

You might want to check out bitmessage for something similar to what you are asking if you wish to see how it could be implemented:
https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage

One certainly hopes it never does. A centralized crypto controlled by that group is worse than useless.

And you are right if this is chaos there has been chaos since 2010.

Much also depends on your timeframe.  If you are talking about weeks or months vs years, your perspective will be different.  Anyone who is buying/selling with the week or month perspective will probably be disappointed at some point.

I heard similar on slashdot in July 2010 when it was around $0.10.   You are 9 years too late with the FUD.

The statement wasn't that it would create a scare to make the miners bail out, but a market scare. 

I don't believe anyone with any understanding of how bitcoin works believes for a second that hash rate dropped by 40%.  As has been discussed up-thread and elsewhere this is likely due to poor logic and calculations on these web sites by not using a long enough rolling window to show the current hash rate.  In ~10 days at the next difficulty adjustment, the truth will be obvious.

If you feel the need safety that you can't provide for yourself, just stick with fiat and credit cards.  Please don't import the training wheels from there into the Tour de France, it only slows those athletes down.

WE?  Speak for yourself.  The nature of freedom is that there are inalienable rights not subject to the whim of the majority. Freedom of expression is one of them.

If you value freedom, anonymity is critical. If you value control and authoritarianism (fascism, socialism, communism etc) you don't want anonymity because it will interfere with your control over everyone else.  Control is a siren song, but the odds are you won't be the one in control, you'll be the one controlled.

Exactly. If one starts measuring just after one block and ends just before the next, the apparent hash rate would be zero - no blocks were found. If I start measuring just after block A and then end just before block C with B in between the hash rate would be much less than if I start measuring just before block A and just after block C.  If this persisted over 24-72 hours, it might be meaningful, otherwise it is quite likely to be noise in the data.  When you have one block in around 90 minutes and a small enough measurement period, it might appear to have a lower hash rate when in fact it is pure variance in finding a block.

The click bait, FUD type articles are rampant.

You don't want anonymity, publicize everything about yourself, but don't use force to impose your whims and beliefs in the rest of us. 

An animal lives in a state of perpetual transparency, a human does not if the human wants to be free. Just because you don't care about your liberty, don't sell the rest of us down the river to assuage your conscience.

I agree it is much less secure.  And one doesn't need crypto for that. There are plenty of solutions that don't need crypto to reach trustful consensus.

In which case it is a centralized coin that can be pressured to behave a particular way. Might as well have a centralized database.

Exactly. And I'd also add that a block chain in its own isn't worth a lot if the block chain isn't secured enough by something of value that helps to preclude it being rewritten in a reorganization.  The value of bitcoin helps secure the bitcoin block chain due to POW costs.

Block chain alone, without value is not worth a lot.

Just ask the people of Venezuela, Cyprus, China, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Turkey, Iran and Argentina recently and Cuba, North Korea, Germany, etc in the past if you want to understand why one might want to have a currency not controlled by governments and banks.  Plus transportable across borders.

Just like the people of Cyprus who didn't worry about the money in their banks in early 2013.  Then how much did the government seize?  Just like the people of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba etc haven't worried about the money in their banks.  How much of the value was inflated away?  99.999999999999% in Venezuela. Only 95% in Argentina depending on when you start counting.