we have no way of knowing whether Hal knew Satoshi personally or knew him like the rest of us as an anonymous person online who only contacted others through emails,...
as for him being the first to mine, i think he was since back then "running bitcoin" was equal to also mining with your CPU and the tweet from Hal Finney is 7 days after first bitcoin block so it is safe to assume he was the first.

in many senses last year was different but in the end when you look at the trend itself you can see it was very similar for some reason which i can not yet explain.
for example there was no reason for bitcoin to drop this low but it did, similar to last time. there was also no reason for the downtrend to last this long but it did, again similar to last time. and many more.
and don't get me started on altcoins. i saw the exact same pattern of pump and dumping and newbie trapping all over last year.

coins like ripple have always performed based on hype alone and they have always performed in short term and then fell down hard as everyone dumps them which is why experienced people don't "invest" in them. they always tend to only stick to trading these coins for maximize profitability.

despite what you think "money" doesn't have unlimited supply. a government can not just start printing unlimited amount of money as they wish. there are some limits there too and if they do then the value of that money will fall so imagine if today value of 1 bitcoin is equal to 4000 units of another currency if that currency started being printed out of control then the value of it would fall and then you have to exchange something like 10000 of it for 1 bitcoin.
so what happens is that unlimited fiat can not buy up bitcoin.

even if bitcoin were to have a much longer sideways trend (which i don't give it a high possibility) bitcoin is capable of outperforming every other asset in the world specially since some of the markets like the stocks market have not been having such a good time lately and there is also an expected recession on the way...

i don't think they are interested in cryptocurrencies, many of them may not even care enough to check it out to see what it is. but what they are interested in is the enthusiasm that people showed so far in investing in them based on the data gathered from exchanges. and considering it has only been from a very small portion of the society they want to expand that and make money from it.
in short they see the market is lacking a service provider and they want to make money off of that.

in any case, as long as we get some adoption out of it, i am happy.

this year has just been started! we are in first 10 days of the year! you can't expect the price to make any significant change in such a short time, specially when that time is at the beginning of the year and coincides with holidays.

there are no issues here either. only people accumulating and some others trying to spread FUD to keep it down for their accumulation.

i have been encouraging everyone that i talk to and knows about bitcoin or shows interest to use it as a currency more often. and so far in all these years i have never introduced bitcoin as anything but a currency which they can buy stuff with online and offline. i even discourage people who talk about price and profit if they are new from seeing it as such.
but unfortunately the volatility have always changed the mindset of some people and there is not much we can do about it.
i still don't get why people try to use ETH as payment though!

if people stopped focusing on bitcoin's life and death and the possibility of it in some imaginary future and instead started focusing their energy on what bitcoin is doing right NOW and the things that this revolutionary decentralized currency is offering us, then we wouldn't be at this very low rate of adoption! we could have been at at least 10% adoption by now and funny part is that their "profit dreams" due to the price rise would have also been satisfied.

that is only the way you think not what really is happening in the cryptocurrency world.

there is no denying that many are only interested in the price, you included, but that  doesn't mean that is the only thing that matters and because of it no development would take place! the fact is a lot of cool things are going on at all times in this world because the technology is a very interesting one. it just happens that bitcoin is the biggest innovation and it is ahead because of that otherwise things are very good if you stop looking at the price only!

remember that you can't really compare bitcoin to any other asset because it is a very new thing that is different from everything else. any asset that has ever existed faced challenges but nothing that constantly put roadblocks in front of it reaching its potential. while bitcoin is the opposite, it has a lot of potential and so far it has been facing a lot of challenges preventing it from achieving them.
and being revolutionary you can't expect it to "change the world" in only a decade!

bitcoin doesn't have a "birth home" and that is the whole point of it. in fact one of the reasons why the creator of bitcoin is "unknown" and is using a pseudonym is exactly that. it helps with preventing any kind of centralization in bitcoin and the idea behind it.
bitcoin is a decentralized system and to do that it needs to be global without any "birth home" and it will never have.

so what if it had, then it could have become centralized and be worthless like many centralized altcoins out there.

just another case of the widespread hype of cryptocurrencies that is infecting everyone from small time newbie investors to big corporations worth billions of dollars. everyone looks at the numbers that showed up in 2017 and look at market cap,... and they all want a piece of the action.
being open source and under MIT license has made it easy for these big corporations to take advantage of other people's work for their own purposes.
for at least another 10 years we will continue seeing a lot of crap coins be created every day until eventually the market purges itself and we are left with only a handful of useful cryptocurrencies.

this has nothing to do with bitcoin. he is just trying to make more money by forcing an ethereum hard fork to PoS where he can do nothing and earn profit on the huge amount of premined ether that he owns.


nobody is forcing your to continue buying and using bitcoin. sell your bitcoins, stop and get out and log out of here too....
oh wait, you won't

the "experts" have been expecting a recession for years now. it is mostly human nature to want the (recent) history to repeat itself. on one hand i think it is too soon for a big recession to be repeated, on the other hand there are signs of it out there.
although we won't know for sure, it needs some insider information and a lot of research to see whether things are really as bad underneath or are they just pretty bad like they always are.

as for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, i always say that bitcoin is a completely separate market which is a different beast. although we may see a lot of manipulation in it in case of a recession and a lot of panic buys or panic sells. in short we may see chaos.

that is a theory that you came up with but it doesn't make much sense if you think about it.
bitcoin is not just some stock that you buy in your country to make profit. bitcoin is a global currency with a global market. and most importantly bitcoin has nothing to do with traditional markets.
prove me wrong and show me an actual relationship between bitcoin and stocks apart from price? well you can't because there is none! and that is why your "theory" doesn't make any sense.

well as far as making "guesses" go, you are free to make any guess you like. and you just did that, you throw a completely random price at us as your guess and that is why your topic is worthless.

all you did here was report some arbitrary numbers from the past and then threw the $2300 at us
and no, at this point there is no way price can go any lower and we have no reason to believe it will. not just fundamentals but also technicals are approving this.

one of the downsides of bitcoin communities have always been the fact that there will be a lot of kids in it who don't understand anything about the market but insist on participating in it. some of them choose the route of nonsense spreading because they think if they do that they can make money by shorting bitcoin or maybe buy more of it when it drops more.

based on what i have seen this type of people is contributing to volatility, not by their nonsense but by their late FOMO purchases and panic sells that feeds the whales.

it is starting to turn into a trend where every country starts creating their own coin. it is just so simple to do so that they all want in because there is a lot of money in doing something like that and not even the government is going to overlook such large amounts of money.
but i don't think it has anything to do with "sidelining bitcoin" though. they want the control over a cryptocurrency which is the hype of our age and as i mentioned there is a lot of profit.

most probably not. it is usually because your computer lacks the necessary libraries installed on it that are needed to run the application and they are not included in the package either. and developers usually drop support for older versions of windows because they are outdated and even Microsoft is no longer supporting them.
so you'll have to either do some sort of update like what i explained above to solve it or simply switch your OS to a newer version or better yet, to Linux.