stable coins which are 1:1 on par with a fiat are not treated as 'virtual currencies' but treated as 'e-money' which requires not just a MSB licence.. but an actual bankers licence.
good luck to them but if you see any coin exchange offering a stable coin ICO, and its not banker licenced. expect trouble

governments dont care. bitcoin is like apple iphones. it has no impact on minimum wage laws or tax laws or court fine rules.
all that occurs is when someone buys btc fiat moves from a buyers account to a sellers account. fiat is not destroyed. btc is just an asset.

(i have spoke to banks, government, economists and many others)
take for instance euro..
dollar doesnt care about euro because america ensures americans pay taxes in dollars thus keeping dollars in circulation.. same situation with btc.. until laws change where taxes are paid in btc and btc is used to pay public services where by the dollar is not needed. america dont care about btc impacting the dollar.

thats another failure of the devs. by not making BTC reliant on a fiat valuation.
if btc was instead measured on a labour valuation. EG 550minimum wage hours.. then you would see many people forex dollars to africa/india where 550 hours is cheaper then you would see an american buy 10btc via africa for the price of 1american direct btc. thus causing a landslide on thee forex markets between dollar and other currencies.  but no. btc does not affect forex or fiat rules. so its not a big deal (a very big missed oppertunity)

the reason for the uncertainty and doubt is because even the core devs say this about btc
"its still in beta and not ready for public use"
"its an experiment"
"btc blockchain cant scale"

yes the very guys programming it say that.
as for qustioning death...
tulips are still sold at gardening shops every day. so tulips didnt die.. but they are not what they were before


i know many sheep who want to shout 'its too big to fail' purely because they dont want it to fail because they have invested alot into it.. but the reality is just having "first mover" status does not secure it.

what needs to happen is to have devs actually treat it as something that needs to be programmed better. and not divert their attention to other networks and projects that tag onto BTC but wont be sole features of only btc.

EG LN is not a btc solution. its a side feature for multiple coins to use.. and trust me, multiple coins will use it. LN is just paypal 2.0 locking funds up much like locking gold into fort knox. or locking your bank account fiat into paypal account and then letting people play around with unaudited unconfirmed transactions away from fort knox/banks

leaving true btc onchain innovation and expansion to stagnate.
P.S i have alot invested in btc too. but instead of kissing ass and putting my head in the sand saying its all rosy and utopia, im not afraid to admit its short comings in the hope others shout about it too and actually get some momentum going to get the short comings resolved. instead of ignoring the issues and pretending its utopia until it collapses

.. after all there is only so many times you can shout Myspace is the best thing ever invented and nothing needs to change.. right up until facebook occurs... think about it

not really

the whole concept of bitcoin was not to lock funds into addresses where someone else has the private keys/permission to move funds. your suppose to keep funds in your own private key accessed addresses away from third party services.

but if you are going to put funds into exchanges then thos exchanges should atleast have banking licences and insurances to look after the funds and repay users of losses should those third parties 'get hacked'

really funny part is that coinbase is just saying it does cold wallets for a high % of its holdings and has hot wallets for smaller reserves... stupid part is, this is something i was telling exchanges to do as far back as 2012 when i first got involved in. and now coinbase is preaching it like it some big seurity feature.
exchanges using cold wallets should have ALWAYS bn minimum standard featur. nothing special.. just the minimal requirement.
as for the need of a hot wallet, even thats not needed if they were smart enough..

all in all i dont see much thats unique and special thats ben highlightd in that article about coinbase. apart from theem chest thumping like alpha male gorilla's that they are taking in larger institution amounts. so to me its just a publicity stunt

what coinbase should be doing is showing transparency about its FIAT.. something institutions really care about. and then as a separate thing. advice USERS how to SELF protect their crypto by taking it out from exchanges.

if your reading the raw tx details of th transaction..
output is to you, input is from them

another way is to put the txid into blockchain.info and you will see

1addresss  -> 1other address

the address on the left is the sender the one on the right is the receiver(you in this case).

you cannot find the total combined holdings of that user but you can see how much the sender had in that particular address(s) he used to send you funds

first of all..
stop looking at the 15minute chart.. it will drive you potty and make u ask every day "whats next"

if you are not trading every day. dont check the prices every day
if you are a day trader you shouldnt care whats next because all your concentrating on is grabbing 1% profits daily and repeating. without caring what the overall price is compared to last week or next week

day traders dont see $6700.. they see +1%(sell) or -1%(buy)

just reading the first paragraph .. i laughed

"I embedded in the coinbase of the first genesis block. "

1. i embedded it into the coinbase
2. of the genesis block

firstly the grammatical error
secondly the real satoshi knows there is only one genesis block.

thus the writer has no skill in writing, nor in undrstanding the invention known as bitcoin

if btc were in 2009 not be measured against USD and instead measured as minimum wage hours. where a californian($11) and a african(<$1) both could get BTC for lets say 550 hours labour. what you would see is americans would forex USD to african currencies and then buy BTC at 10x cheaper.. bringing the african-american exchange rates of forex into complete meltdown where people would prefer to forex before buying btc

..
however btc is measured agaisnt USD and then sheep calcuated (without real forex exchange swap) to other national currencies. so that other countries can swap fiat/btc using their native currencies internally without having to forex thus people see no benefit of forex swapping to cause any FIAT panics.

in the end banks and governments just see btc like an iphone. where someone buying BTC/Iphone hands fiat from the buyers bank account to the sellers bank account wher both are of the same country.. thus no panic from the banks.
where only maybe asmall amount of fiat the seller now has may end up getting swapped with other countries using forex but not enough to cause significant forex impact to change the economics of a country.. thus banks of a country dont care

it does not matter if a pool has 51% or 500%
if the blocks/tx data do not match the rules/data the network has.. the block the pool makes will get rejected

the real fear is not that pools will attack the network. but that DEVLOPERS will introduce new code and promote that code as mandatory and even threaten to reject pools if the pools do not adopt the new code.

i read it. and bull crap.
seems like someone who was not around in 2009 just recently looked at the publicly available information and tried to rewrite history by hinting at a few publicly available emails and a few buzzwords to make it seem legit. but in the end does not know the true concept of bitcoin and its consensus mechanism. and actually fails at the real history and code understanding.

thus i call bull crap

OP is linking a blog site (blog section of fortune.com) where someone created the handle bloomberg
the article wrote by that someone actually says that the real bloomberg cannot confirm or deny the article

the OP's footnote.. is a link that goes to youtube to play the video... by rick astley... AKA as a rickroll video  (basically the punchline meaning you just been trolled)

all in all.. i see it as a troll topic

going from a 2018 low of $5800 to $6400 is only ~10%

thats not a pump. thats a normal expectant wave. relax. 10% movemnts happen. just enjoy surfing the 1-10% profits and repeat.
its not worth calling out every 5-10% movement. as you will be posting the same question many times a month/year.

if your a day trader, then yes look at the price hourly/daily and trade the 1-10% waves.. and repeat repeat repeat

if your not a day trader and not interested in trading every day. then dont look at the price every day.
instead just tell yourself your sell price and just set an alert that only tells you it hit, when it hits. then relax and dont think about it

religion is centralised. maybe you should interview the Pope and find out more about his organisation.

however its distributed..
there is a big difference between decentralised and distributed

EG
banks. bank notes are not held in one single vault which if caught on fire would destroy all money.
bank notes are distributed. so if i burned a bank note in my pocket it wont affect or burn all the bank notes as they are not all clumped toogether..

but banknotes are centralised.

banks themselves are distributed. and not just one bank branch/HQ but many bank branches HQ's regional offices etc. but still centralised.

religion is not an open dcentralised system where everyone has both equal and no overal power alone to change the protocol.

religions do change and its people like the pope that change it, like making public statements that gay marriage may not be a sin no more. or that his ministers need to stop fooling around with the chiorboys.
so although centralised that "the pope" has more control than individuals.. killing the pop wont kill religion, because another pope in another location will get promoted because its distributed. but not dcentralised

first of all your vision is upside down
bitcoin was NEVER stable at $20k it was a hype bubble speculation period
the price after the $20k was not a crash. but was a correction of a hype bubble period. by which the price needed to settle back down.

secondly comparing 2017/8 to 2013/4/5 is flawed.

october 2013 2 big events happened
1. ASICS hit the market. this caused 3 price affcting factors
    a. cost of mining jumped from a basement dwellers hobby cost, to a industrial farm cost
    b. those hobbyiests couldnt just buy a GPU from a local store. so bought BTC to then buy ASICS
    c. those not wanting to farm using asics and unable to get btc via GPU's flippd from being miners to being btc buyser/holders
2. silk road closure and arrest international news. blasting out the words bitcoin alot. which got alot of people looking into "what is bitcoin"

start of 2014 the price dropped. this was due to MTGox. and all the fears around hundreds of thousands of users funds. which caused the long months of people asking "MTGOX wheres my coins" then others like cryptorush, cryptsy mintpal and others. and then bitstamp in 2015...

2015 also suffered the debates of the 1mb block barrier. which late 2015 the cor devs first suggestd a 2mb basblock and segwit..(yea thy back tracked)

...
anyway.. none of these events occured in 2017-2018 to cause the hype spike. and none of the big exchanges and other dramas of 2014/5 are causing the stagnation of 17/8

craig wright is in lots of trouble due to australian government and a multi million dollar debt craig owes them
craig has tried getting them to back down by saying he is satoshi and that the finantial tool (trust) he opened by which he scammd the aussie government, by suggesting he is satoshi to get tax grants..
is honourable simply by him saying "he is satoshi" (facepalm)
that didnt work

then craig wright tried to do a SELF leak to media that he is satoshi hoping media coverage would be the proof that "he is satoshi"
that didnt work

then craig wright tried to use satoshis signature that is PUBLICLY AVAILABLE to scam he way into making people beleive "he is satoshi"
that didnt work

he then paid a family member of a friend of his(the friend set up the EMPTY TRUST and later died), so craig got the friends family member to false claim the trust ownership was in debate. as yet another attempt to TRY to legitimise the trust and TRY to legitimise claims over the satoshi identity
that didnt work

now he is trying to patent blockchain techniques/features to attempt to say that he is legitimately able to patent it because "h is satoshi" purely so that he can later go back to australian court and say. "look i patented this because i am satoshi"
IT WONT WORK

he cannot prove he is satoshi because he is not satoshi. so h is trying all this media manipulation and patent crap in an attempt to use media/patents as his "evidence" (facepalm)

though this is usually social drama. what craig wright is doing. and what also greg maxwell and adam back are doing by patenting concepts of blockchain tech is something that is ruining the whole purpose of bitcoin/blockchain.

and yes adam back, greg maxwell and others are just as bad as craig wright

firstly. EVERYONE needs to realise this:
1. bitcoin is code.
2. bitcoin has no arms, legs or a voice.
3. bitcoin does not attend business meetings

now most importantly
4. if YOU want to see bitcoin accepted at YOUR local stores then YOU all have to go ask YOUR stores to look into bitcoin

think about it
5. YOU can also try mentioning the code flaws to the devs, such as lack of fee control formulae and not expanding the base block.. i do say try but they are too deep in banker pockets and just want to invent paypal2.0(LN)

LN is to bitcoin what banks are to gold. their mindset...(facepalm)
"bitcoin cant scale as medium of exchange, its too slow to transact and to heavy(tx weight) to have everyone use it"
"gold cant scale as medium of exchange, its too slow to transact and to heavy to have everyone use it"

"we need to lock bitcoins into managed multisigs and then let people play around with unaudited transactions"
"we need to lock gold into bank vaults and then let people play around with unaudited paper receipts"

octobr-march seen a SPECULATIVE bubble layer on the price, which has corrected down.

the october-march UNDERLAYING VALUE was 6-9k due to the mining costs of such upholding that.. but now there is a new batch of miners that are cheaper which has brought the average cost per btc down. although the hashrate has risen since march to mitigate some of that underlaying value dip the underlaying value is still lower than the 9k top.

so i agree with the OP we are near the healthy new underlaying value. and now just have to wait for the hashrate and difficulty movements to push the underlying costs up to then move the support lines up to move the price up.

simple terms
take some data. and lump it together into a batch/block of data..  then when you give that batch block an identity. you link that identity to the next batch block of data. thus making the next block chained to the previous block... hence blockchain

as for what that data is thats being batched together into a block.. it could be anything.

cryptocurrency is the concept of the data in a blockchain being financial.(currency)
where as the data could be
cryptoID where the data is identification (personal details)
cryptoland where the data is land registry (land ownership details)
cryptocorp where the data is corporation registry(business details)
cryptomed where the data is medical rgistry (patient diagnoses/test result details)

without using the buzzword jargon that requires more explanation. or comparisons to cash which involves metal coins or paper bank note misconceptions..

bitcoin is a electronic cheque currency system fully validated and chain locked into blocks of transactions by random people using specialised computers around the world

why do i use these words
cheque:- unlike bank notes or coins. bitcoin is about transactions with a destination, amount and signature. just like a cheque
chainlocked into blocks of transactions:- better than waffling about blockledgers, hashes and immutability. it explains where the term blockchain derives from
random people:- no point waffling about decentralised and not bank institutional control
specialised computers:- standard computers are not enough. and waffling about asics just ends up with more questions

it could also mean that exchanges are locking up their real fiat into the tether fed reserve. and getting tether bearer bonds in return
meaning its not a buy thats about to buy coin. but an exchange just swapping real fiat for tether so they can arbitrage with othr exchanges in the background = no change