Banks for feel like cryptos are their enemies. In a way, they are, because without cryptos, people have no other option but to trust a bank if they want to make digital transfers, and while cryptos there's an alternative. But banks are strong and versatile, they offer lots of services that cryptos can't perform. Also, banks have an advantage because they cards are widely accepted, whereas cryptos are barely adopted as a form of payment. Banks can also adopt cryptos, and sometimes they do, but it's still not very common. There's tension between banks and cryptos, but they aren't fully enemies, and they aren't a threat to each other.

The op noted well that this guy is literally a major financial criminal, but just so rich that he remains free and talks nonsense about Bitcoin. But I don't hate him, I don't have that in me. To me, he is just pathetic, disgusting, ridiculous. He has a lot of power because of his vast financial resources, but thankfully, he can't do much about Bitcoin. I'm not surprised he despises Bitcoin so much, as Bitcoin is designed to counteract the influence of guys like him, to give people a chance of not relying on banks and traditional economy. So whatever he says about Bitcoin is just white noise.

End of November 2013: $900. Next time with $900: end of January 2017. Time in between: 3 years, 2 months.
Mid-December 2017: $19k. Next time with $19k: start of December 2020. Time in between: nearly 3 years.
Yeah, there's a difference, but I'd say it's a very small one. Then, if we count November 2021 with $67k as the ATH, the next time the price reaches that level should be November 2024 or somewhere around that time, but the recovery of the market in general can, of course, start much earlier.
So far, to me, the differences aren't that big, but we'll see if this 3-year (give or take a couple of months) cycle thing checks out this time.

Interesting that LadyofCrypto1 calculates her cycles differently, but her result is also November 2024, just like in my case.

It's actually great if the op sold after BTCV lost just 30% of the price because I see that it went way-way down pretty fast and now has virtually no trading volume and a price of something very close to zero. I've always been suspicious of BTC clones, so I didn't invest in those and often didn't even bother to claim when via airdrop when that option was available on some platforms. But in 2017, I decided to keep hodling when the price was $15k+, mainly because I thought it would continue to rise and because I didn't want to spend a lot on transaction fees. But then the bear market lasted for so long that I ended up selling by coins, just at a much lower price. Sometimes selling at a good price is the right thing to do if you know you'll need to sell at some point in the near future anyway.

13. Roman Dolidze
12. Renato Moicano
11. Randy Brown
10. Natalia Silva
9. Aliaskhab Khizriev
8. Gilbert Urbina
7. Molly McCann
6. Charles Johnson
5. Themba Gorimbo
4. Jung Gyeong Lee
3. Luana Carolina
2. Marquel Mederos
1. Thomas Petersen

NOT go the Full Distance 8

Game 1:  44, 18'
Game 2:  44, 22'

Bitcoin was meant to be used as money, so paying with Bitcoin meant using it as intended. There's nothing bad in it for Bitcoin because usage means liquidity, and it's not good for a currency when it is just stuck and not moving at all. As long as you're okay with the fees and waiting time (for the first confirmation on Blockchain), using Bitcoin is totally fine. But here I want to point out that you, op, are talking about the positive impact of wider Bitcoin adoption, whereas it's not that simple: Bitcoin can't handle too many transactions, so that sort of adoption requires off-chain solutions. Otherwise, the fees will get very high, and lots of transactions will get stuck.

The website just doesn't scroll for me, unfortunately, so I can't read the article. But I've tried to read it (not sure if I read all of it because those were copies elsewhere, but maybe I did) on other websites.
It's a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and it seems like the idea is that Bitcoin is at its peak with the ETF approval, and then it stops becoming a major topic, stops getting the same level of attention. Bitcoin stops being this anti-establishment phenomenon, loses its appeal, and it sort of becomes a bad asset (bad, because it's not backed up by anything), which might still see a few price spikes but will get worse.
I don't know, I don't think that's true. I do believe that Bitcoin will continue growing, as it always does, and new accessibility of Bitcoin brings new demand, new interest in it.

People like that usually make mistakes along the way. The owner of Silk Road himself used an email with and his real name and surname online, which gave him away. This Jimmy guy reported some of his BTC being stolen, which raised suspicions about where he got that kind of money from. If you don't leave your own identification info, BTC can't be traced back to you. But usually, people aren't careful enough, they leave a bunch of digital footprints and then can be deanonymized.

Okay, I agree that it's a mathematical certainty that the monetary system will fail at some point, but by that I just mean that humanity will go extinct at some point, and Earth will become uninhabitable at some point, etc. That doesn't mean that fiat currencies will disappear over our lifetimes. They might, but they can also easily keep going.
As for inflation skyrocketing, that really depends on a country, and a lot of countries did much better in 2023 than in 2022 in this regard.
The op, it seems, is focused on the US, as if the whole world in the US, but it's not. Also, while the US debt is rising, US inflation rate is very mild.
I don't think there will be a monetary collapse any time soon, but if we talk about something like a global economic crisis (which is more realistic), I believe Bitcoin will initially go down with everything else, but it will recover faster than other markets and can have its best time while others are still struggling.

I do believe that wars are on the rise and can continue to be on the rise in 2024, but that's not the same as World War III (the definition pointed out by Solosanz is really helpful here). Wars can go on differently, and even when they're full-scale, it doesn't necessarily mean that people use cryptos less (or more, for that matter). My country is in a full-scale war right now, and I don't think it has a major impact on crypto usage (certainly not a negative impact anyway) here, let alone in the rest of the world.
If we hit that very dark point of collapse of human civilization as we know it, the Internet not being a thing anymore, and survivors living in their small isolated communities, then yeah, cryptos will be irrelevant. But in that case, cryptos will be the last thing to think about.
At this point, I don't think wars are having a significant impact on cryptos.

China was supposed to genuinely become a rival of the US and perhaps even outperform the US economy in the near future, but I don't think we'll see that happen. The US economy is stable and pretty strong, and you're right that China's economy is struggling. There are many things that seem wrong with it, which makes it difficult to just find an easy fix. There's the one-child policy catching up to them (the policy was abandoned too late), there's youth unemployment, a high foreign debt (proportionately to GDP, higher than in the US), etc. I don't think that China's economy will collapse, but I do believe it won't be able to compete with the US economy. On the one hand, it's good because economic and political power are interrelated, and China is a very dangerous political state. On the other hand, so many people live there and will suffer from the consequences of poor policies that I can't cheer in this situation.

I've looked at photos of Boracay, and this place does look really beautiful. The fact that it's already a major resort makes it different from other projects of Bitcoin cities, islands and hubs because those I've seen were intended to be built from ground zero, basically, whereas here, the influx of tourists and a lot of businesses are already there. This, perhaps, will help Boracay succeed where others have failed.
I don't think one island can fix a country's economy, but it may be a step in the right direction.

Well, it's been more than a few years, and we can clearly see the op was very wrong. Ukrainian hryvnia is still there, and so are the rest of the listed currencies. Fiat currencies have their issues, but they're such a tight part of the economic and political systems of the countries that they aren't abandoned easily, even when some of them have been failing their societies for several years or more of hyperinflation. It's not easy for a country to abandon its own fiat and to adopt something they don't and can't control (like a proper cryptocurrency). As for CBDCs, they're an option, hypothetically, but still not a full replacement of fiat because, let's face it, a lot of people still need cash in many places, so fully digital money without a cash version can be a catastrophe for rural areas and some age groups, such as children (who can't legally have a bank account) and the elderly (who struggle with digitalization).
A variety of fiat currencies is here to stay.

The price didn't grow immediately after the ETF approvals for a couple of reasons. One is that a lot of BTC got sold as a consequence, including, allegedly, billions of dollars worth of BTC by Grayscale. Another reason is that the news was overhyped well in advance because a potential ETF approval was a major theme of Q4, 2023. In October, the price was below $27k, and now we're at over $40k. That's the ETF approval growth, basically, and it's massive.
As for a proper bull run and full price recovery, I just think it's too early for that, and no events like adoption news can change that. Halving doesn't equal a bull market either, but many expect the price to rise eventually after halving.

The trick to making likeable predictions is to make them vague enough so that they can play into humanity's love for confirmation bias, and people will find 'evidence' that those predictions were correct. "Further price action around Bitcoin halving" is a wonderful example because Bitcoin has "price action" all the time, and there's no strict definition of what that means. Some goes for "broader institutional involvement" as any news about any major investment fund and Bitcoin kind of counts here.
So yeah, in the same spirit, I can say that Bitcoin will be volatile, we will see some market fluctuations, the ETFs will remain a relevant question, and Bitcoin will get significant media attention over the next few months.

I was never in such a bad situation, but there was a time when I was just getting into the crypto market, when Bitcoin was crucial for me to be able to buy food, and I was a full-time student, so finding a different job was very hard. But I did need to pay the bills and rent a flat back then, which was partially why I was in somewhat of a struggle. I'm really happy that you managed to change your financial situation, I understand that escaping poverty (breaking the cycle of poverty, especially) is a very hard thing to do.
But when possible, I do think a person should earn money on a regular basis instead of fully relying on profits from long-term holding.

That's a nice thread because it gives an idea of how losing a seed usually happens, and also shows that, thankfully, the majority of people here have never lost their seeds.
I can say that I haven't lost any BTC, so I haven't lost access to my money, but I think I have lost my seed once or twice because of forgetting where to find it. But I was using a wallet with a password, so I could still access my funds, and then just create a new wallet and write everything down this time. Maybe I just got lucky, but I generally consider myself a fairly responsible and careful person.

The richest people do have a lot of power and can influence politics, but I think it's a vast overstatement to say that they can change anything they wish to change in a country. Also, they aren't the most powerful in a country, unless a country has a very weak political system. There's the president, the prime minister, institutions like the parliament, which are likely to be more powerful than rich individuals.
Now, I've checked the net worth of all the individuals listed by the op. They're all billionaires, but the amount is usually less than $5 billion. CZ is an exception with $15 billion, but he might lose a lot because of criminal investigations. In any case, all the top-10 have over $100 billion net worth, so none of these are even close yet.

If Grayscale actually sold as much BTC recently, I think it's a very interesting case for us. Grayscale has been selling over January, and the article says that more than $4 billion worth of coins have been sold since January 11. The price dropped from $48k to less than $39k over the course of almost two weeks, so almost by 20%. But it's already around $42k, so around it's currently down by around 13% from the pre-sale price. That's the kind of power a strong organization and billions of dollars currently have on the price. Somewhat significant, but also very temporary. I do agree that $118 million worth of coins is nothing compared to this.