that's simply because in bitcoin when we send a transaction we pay for the space in blocks not for the transfer of amount of money. that is one of many things that sets bitcoin apart from banks.

i wouldn't call them a "whale" either. the more appropriate word is to call them "custodian" since it clearly belongs to a service and it is their users' funds not their own.

i don't mind the spike in transaction fees and i actually believe that it is showing that bitcoin is working as it is supposed to. a fee market that turns the block space into a valuable commodity that can not be  cheaply spammed.
but the problems begin when the fees remain up after the spike. for now it hasn't been long enough to become concerning. if we end up seeing the same situation as 2017 specially since price is rising similar to 2017, we should start worrying because this time the growth is going to be a lot bigger and with it can come a much bigger fee spike.

this topic is a very good example of how sometime the definition of "whale" is so ridiculous, as if a "whale" comes from another universe and has unlimited mony. it is more like a "boogeyman" rather than a "whale".

we actually have very few wallets that deserve to be called a "bitcoin wallet". many of them are closed source, poorly written, buggy, lack features,...
you also seem to be ignoring that electrum is being used by a great percentage of total bitcoin users. i dare say there are more people using electrum than there are running bitcoin core.

i think this is yet another big step in China's master plan for world domination. they want to have more power economically and be far ahead of all other countries. so far you can see their foothold in all parts of the world which happens to be strong too.
while people are focusing to much on domestic use of Digital Yuan i don't think it is going to have that much usage domestically. the main work will be global and between countries.
more important of all is that they are going to be the first country who did this. even if other countries started today they will be playing catch up with a 2 year headstart of China.

this is the FOMO that we have all been expecting as soon as the price rise began. i don't think it is because of paypal although it may have had some catalyst effects to get the rise started.

the FOMO has gotten big too, it is so much that even the transaction fees is seeing a big spike and it has gone over 200 satoshi/bytes which is pretty high since there are lots of people buying bitcoin and pulling it out of exchanges.

i think it is even possible to see $20k be tested very soon.

but you just explained production cost not intrinsic value. and neither gold nor bitcoin are not products being sold so that we can put their production cost + tax + profit as the final value.
this definition specifically doesn't work for bitcoin because its production cost depends directly on its value not the other way around (thanks to the way difficulty is defined).

for example you can spend a lot of money to recycle urine into drinkable water (what NASA does for astronauts) but you can't sell the water at a high price just because your production cost were high.

value should only be defined by considering factors such as utility and scarcity. since we can't put numbers on it people end up using "production cost" which is wrong if you ask me.

it provides a good utility. it helps gamblers make bets and lost money while the elite get fatter from their money

bitcoin age is getting closer to 12 years now

and of course bitcoin has changed. it has gotten so much better. the nodes are a lot more efficient and they have a lot less bugs and exploits both in the implementation and the protocol. the mining is also a lot more efficient and has made the network outstandingly secure.

bitcoin never promised to have ultra cheap or free transactions. although i am not a fan of high fees either. bitcoin was always meant to give financial freedom by decentralizing money.

no, actually they are not correlated at all. and Stock market has never had any kind of effects on bitcoin market whatsoever in the past decade! recently for a couple of weeks some people tried so hard to create this kind of correlation but as we have seen from the past week and the rest of previous 10 years, while bitcoin is rising with a very strong momentum the Stock market (and a couple of other markets) are having a lot of troubles. we even saw a big dump in US Stock market this past week and with US election we may see more dumps in it too. meanwhile bitcoin keeps doing its own thing like always.

they have been buying bitcoin for a long time now. specifically speaking they were buying bitcoin when the price had fallen and was at a stable state at the bottom. for example the $6k that we recently had or the $3k of a year ago.
nowadays that price is rising and we are in a bull market, the news of it keeps coming out on these news sites that only go wherever the wind blows!

keep it up but know that you don't need deep understanding of the bitcoin technology to make good contribution to the open source community. for example a simple bug report is also a great contribution because it helps developers improve their code.

i have a theory about this.
right until very recently these centralized parties were thinking about creating their own centralized coin and use the hype to sell it to the masses and make a ton of profit while compete with bitcoin.

the thing is, one of them did it sooner than others thinking they could take the market before others join in. the result was mostly a big failure. that new one was called "Libra". Facebook started the hype of this shitcoin in 2017 right when the market was overhyped with bitcoin setting new highs every week. after 3 years it has not yet been released and it is considered dead already.

other companies seeing that big fail changed their direction and are coming towards bitcoin now. because they know creating their own shitcoin is not going to end well.

if Libra succeeded then today we were in a very different situation. we would have seen PayPalCoin instead of this news!

there is a good solution for that and that is selling step by step instead of only selling once in one order. for example you expect price to reach $100 then you sell 40% on $90 and another 40% on $100 and the remaining 20% on $110. meanwhile you set some automatic orders to sell if the price reached $90 and dumped down to <$80 to not get caught.

what you explained doesn't sound like "mass adoption of bitcoin" but more like mass adoption of "paypal" instead!
people aren't going to be using bitcoin to pay for stuff but they will be using this third party centralized service to sell their bitcoins to so that they could use paypal dollar to buy stuff with!
besides you can not withdraw the bitcoin you bought as far as i can tell by reading the news sites which is another indicator that it is not "bitcoin usage".

a different type of war has already been taking place for over a decade now. an economical war with China being ahead while they keep increasing their foothold all around the world in different continents even in US.
my speculation is that in a couple of years an armed conflict is not going to even be possible because China will simply reply with "if you threaten us with conflict, we will crush  your economy and starve you to death".

DeFi with the current design and definition, absolutely not. it is not even legit enough to attract attention. but the decentralization and the movement started by bitcoin is.
eventually the fraud that currently dominates DeFi today will be solved with a better solution that is both decentralized and safe and then it can be considered a competitor to the centralized solution.

but they are not allowing the most important thing: to withdraw bitcoin from their website.
the way i understand the news is that you can buy bitcoin and you can store it on Paypal and you can sell it again there but you will not be able to cash it out which makes no sense!
it is like an exchange that only works with fiat.

the funny thing is that when one dude does something illegal with bitcoin worth 10 bucks the media renders us deaf with the nonstop negative news but when these banks are caught in their illegal act worth trillions of dollars we only see a small article with a very mellow tone that nobody really reads either. in fact the topic is mostly discussed in bitcoin forums and not many place else.

this is a bit weird to say though. PayPal is not a merchant to accept bitcoin but they are a service provider that has been providing payment services and online wallet option to people. now they have added the option to work with bitcoin too.
the way i see it this is another way for them to make more money from commissions while keeping their users and won't affect adoption of bitcoin.

what we have been seeing in the past 2 or 3 days is one of the best examples of FOMO that i always talk about in the speculation board. a major resistance is broken (the $11k was the one this time) then the market shows small positive signs and immediately a lot of money starts jumping in from all those weak hands that have been waiting for an unreasonable drop to buy greedily!