i'm not surprised to hear this, usually all these laws and restrictions such as the KYC and AML that exchanges apply are only there to mess with regular users and make things harder for them. those real hackers with stolen money are always getting away a lot easier and there isn't much that any exchange has ever done to them.

i don't know why you think cryptocurrency market is a big one compared to the global businesses. it is big but in comparison it is too tiny. for example Amazon brought in $280 billion in first quarter of 2019 alone while Binance which is the biggest altcoin exchange only made $550 million in an entire year of 2019 and that's what they claimed which may be a lie for advertisement. and that's the biggest one, the rest are so much smaller specially all these small businesses that aren't exchange services.

the only people who can really answer your question about what they do with their money is the ones who are earning that money. we can only make random useless guesses

because first of all people who aren't living in their parent's house have to pay for stuff from groceries to rent and utilities. and to pay for all that they have to have fiat because the grocery store, the bank, ... don't accept cryptocurrencies.

secondly what you refer to as "stable currencies" are just altcoins like any other, with the difference that these are 100% centralized. and in case of the most popular one tether it is the shadiest and most used at the same time.
assuming someone was naive enough to do this and the next day bitfinex was shut down by the FBI their lives would be ruined in a blinking of an eye because they lose all their life savings in a centralized shitcoin with no guarantee.

JoinMarket is more of a protocol rather than a token (and Defi is just like ICOs with a useless token). it solves a problem instead of raising funds. it also has utilities rather than being a token that is being traded. there is also no centralized token platform involved in it.
i don't even know why you included this as an example of Defi!

the problem is that it is not an investment it is a ripoff. and the bigger problem is that the whole thing is seen as the "crypto world" that also includes bitcoin. so when 90% of that world becomes a shitshow, it is easy for people to see bitcoin as another one of the scams.

and that slows that adoption...

low cap coins have never gone up and will never do in the future either. because their purpose is not to rise but to get pumped and dumped (emphasis on the dump part).
that is why they are created in first place. every trader knows this too, they buy these shitcoins from time to time to gamble and increase their bitcoins in that short time when they are being pumped. then they all dump it and get out. obviously some lose in this gamble and some win but one thing is always true, the price of these shitcoins never remains high.

reading this bumped topic makes me wonder how many people who read this topic (or some others similar to this one) actually learned from it and made some changes in their strategy in bitcoin world. if there could be a survey asking people how they used to think a couple of years ago and how they think about bitcoin now, it would give very interesting results.

in any case although i disgree with some points in OP (such as selling part) i think it is a good post which is still valid to this day. i disagree with selling part because i think it should never be black and white. it could be best if people sold a little in big rises near the ATH. even in mass adoption in many countries bitcoin may not still be accepted as payment.

i would think twice before using anything that comes from someone who makes such a silly statement with a lot of flaws in it.

first of all what the hell does "encrypted using Bitcoin" means? it's like saying "encrypted using dollar".
secondly there is nothing special about bitcoin private keys since they are simply numbers. the encryption technique is what matters and it is never wise to reuse a bitcoin private key for other purposes in different cryptography schemes because it increases the risk of leaking it and losing your coins.

and of course it is just advertising the shitcoin called bcash-sv.

calling people who are trying to brute force a private key by having only the address "hackers" is an insult to hackers and computer programmers and to math... they are just newbies who have no understanding of cryptography nor size of numbers.
if there were even a teeny tiny chance of something like this happening, bitcoin and a lot of other things on the internet including banking system would have died.

of course this lack of knowledge is also being abused by a different type of scammers selling them fake wallet files, fake or even malicious programs to run,...

theoretically it is possible but in reality it costs a ton of money and would require a very covert operation and coordination of at least 4 big mining pools to abuse the miners' hash power that has connected to their pool and perform such an attack.
and the result of such an attack would simply be reversal of some blocks, to reverse a transaction they actually have to be the ones sending such transaction and another entity has to be receiving it and the amount has to be huge for it to cause any issues. otherwise worst thing would be turning confirmed txs to unconfirmed which would be picked up by the 49% of the miners again.

majority of them are using the very huge database that the ICO scams have been building over the past 3 years. that was part of their earning method specially during the end when people weren't falling for any of those and they started asking for fake KYC. all of that information has been sold on dark net multiple times already.

that is why we see this type of targeted scamming meaning it is very rare that a person who has never been into cryptocurrencies receiving such scam Emails.

it depends a lot on the type of the project too.
for example if you wanted to create a website for selling stuff with a bitcoin wallet backend receiving the funds you may find better developers on freelance sites aiming for a general group of developers with experience in creating something like that.

but if you want to create a more cryptocurrency focused project then you won't find that many devs outside of crypto communities that are familiar with the technology who could help you.

and then we have low quality projects such as creating an ICO which you don't even have to look around, any newbie who has spent 30 minutes searching the internet can know how to create one and they won't even ask for that much money to create it.

it's just numbers chosen to play on people's greed. it is like this so that they see that they can pay $50 and receive $50k in return and may get greedy enough to not think about anything else and click on the link there.
then they will be redirected to a scam site looking like blockchain.com that asks them to enter their login information which they steal.

their broken English is funny though.

all that money may not tank US economy but it will harm it a little bit and not to mention that the money doesn't just evaporate but it will go back to China and will be invested in Chinese economy strengthening it more.

with the world economy in a disastrous state because of the widespread of the virus and the US printing a lot more money than normal, we are headed for devaluation of US dollar one way or another.
with all the wards that Trump has been starting all over the world things are getting even worse. we could be headed to repetition of 2008 but this time instead of banks it will be caused by Trump...

US dollar has already lost some of its value but it is not noticeable because other fiat currencies in the world are not having a good time either but it will show itself in form of inflation.

in some ways the announcement itself could give hope to people and businesses to keep going and with that view it was not such a bad announcement in my opinion.
besides people don't just get reckless just because of the announcement either so i don't think the cases are going to grow just because of this.

you shouldn't just look at the current price but at the trend. for example in this case price is not "still going down". the dropped stopped days ago. it is now being dumped to $9900 and immediately bought back jumping back to above $10k ($10200 now) and since there are no more weak hands left there is no panic sell to push it lower. so either whales have to dump more or stop mini dumps for the price to go back up.

"dead" is an altcoin that is barely used that can't even fill 100 kilo bytes of its blocks after 2.5 years. but LN that has been handling a thousand times more transactions than those altcoins is well alive. the current capacity of it is over $10 million with nearly 14000 nodes. most altcoins don't even have 1200 nodes.

i have seen enough people in real life and online that seemingly hate bitcoin so much and criticize those who bought it to the point that they are trying to change their mind and then i find out later that they have been buying bitcoin long before i even know about bitcoin.
the scarcity seems to have gotten to these people.
that is why i am not convinced that this guy isn't accumulating bitcoin himself and this is mostly like a social media fakeout to me.

it is always best to ask these question from a lawyer who is familiar with the law and specifically the law regarding cryptocurrencies. but in the past i have seen some companies paid part of the salary in bitcoin and of course there is always freelancers who are getting paid in bitcoin although that is not exactly an official salary.

you got it all backwards!

it all starts from bitcoin, always. bitcoin price goes up, it fills the media, a lot of newcomers come, then the price goes higher. then the scammers come and start creating all these schemes to rob those newcomers hence the ICOs.
now is the same too, bitcoin price is on the rise but with the difference that DEFI is not new like ICO, it is the same thing under a different name and is the continued attempt to keep the scam alive. they have alraedy changed the name at least 4 times but it keeps failing because people have caught up.

scarcity is not going to prevent bitcoin from being used by every human on earth as a currency because scarcity mainly means that bitcoin has a clear cap on its supply and a clear predefined supply production that is not going to change like the way fiat does on the whim of the government.

but at the same time i have never read anywhere that Satoshi claimed that bitcoin is to replace fiat though.