you'd be surprised to learn how similar our situations can be. i do live in a third world country with shitty economy that has been experiencing super inflation for a long time now.
i was also in a situation much worse than yours and imagining even owning 1 whole bitcoin was like an impossible goal to me back then. that is why i say it is not so far-fetched.

but i kept dumping any extra fiat i had for bitcoin, traded some to make profit, have been doing a lot of work both online and offline, and have been investing my money always trying to increase it.
i started from a very small capital too, something like a $100.

just trying to tell you that you shouldn't lose hope. keep it up and always try to find ways to invest the money you have and increase it while not taking crazy risks.

the fear the centralized payment systems is starting to become palpable at this point. they can feel how their days are numbered and are going to become obsolete soon as they are replaced by the decentralized currency that doesn't need them anymore.
sooner or later bitcoin is going to be used for all the payment that services like Paypal are being used today with a much higher security and less fraud.

so obviously they want to extend their lifeline a little more by adapting to the new change. it starts  by letting their users buy bitcoin, then they start letting their users deposit and store bitcoin in their account and finally they become obsolete

so far there has been a very good momentum in the market and new highs are being set one after the other. with today's breakout above the $12.5k mark the confidence in the rise is also increasing as shorts are being closed, money is being pulled out of altcoin market and the bitcoin trading volume keeps increasing.

just because the new thing is cheaper doesn't mean the old thing becomes more expensive. the legacy transactions have the same size as they always did and their fee is just as it has always been. the only thing that changed is that we are now computing fee based on virtual size and SegWit transactions have a smaller virtual size while legacy transactions have the same virtual size as before.

it is not complex at all, at least not any more complex than any other part of bitcoin. when you don't understand the bitcoin technology of course it is going to look complex to you.

everyone wants that but unfortunately it is not possible to have no inflation because the economy that is entirely dependent on fiat is inflationary just like the fiat itself. as a result we will always continue having inflation, sometimes some financial crisis happens and the inflation gets too big. these days that "crisis" is the Corona virus that has been damaging the entire world's economy severely. on top of that governments have been printing a lot of money that increases that inflation even more.

it is not just the beginners and newbies, it is also a lot of those with short memory who seem to have forgotten the bitcoin history and the price movements so far.
or maybe they are just going with this narrative because there is some benefits in it for them. i can't really tell their intentions but it is certainly very interesting to watch.

just wait a month or two and then look back at the charts. there is a good chance that in the following months nobody remembers this new found "correlation" anymore because bitcoin could be back to its normal mode and everyone would be so busy thinking why they didn't buy when price was in $10k range and were waiting for bitcoin to drop just because some other market that had nothing to do with bitcoin had dumped.

in other words the market is acting as it has always been acting. bitcoin goes up in price a little bit, the traders abandon their altcoin bags and rush to bitcoin market causing all of the altcoins to crash some of them harder than others.

with that said i think we are seeing the start of the next major bull run that will continue all through 2021 to set the new historical record.

wait a minute why should there be a bear market when the bull market has not yet  started? the price has to rise a lot more and a lot faster than this for us to even begin seeing bear market.
besides if someone were a trader they don't need "bear market" to make profit. there are always lots of ups and downs to make profit from.

there is a pretty good chance that we will see a new ATH way higher than the previous one but it is not certain at all. bitcoin has a lot of potential to grow and it has been showing all kinds of positive signs but the future is never certain.

i disagree.
it is only a "far fetched dream" if you don't want to make an effort. otherwise you can start today and learn new skills or improve the skills you already have and start making money from them. that money can either be in form of bitcoin (getting paid in BTC) or fiat which you would then convert to bitcoin.
and i am not just saying that, i have done it myself.

again it comes down to how much effort you want to make. in fact you may have an edge compared to other people in developed countries since the cost of living in developing countries is lower.
take a look at how many freelancers are working on the internet and making good amount of money.

this would be a start if the $12k resistance is broken in the coming upward pushes. then we can see how bitcoin starts shooting up as some FOMO shapes up even if for a short period of time.
by that time bitcoin will be back on track just like always and it could maybe put an end to all the comparisons

i agree that news doesn't matter but at the same time i'd argue that whenever we see everyone is jumping at some news that makes that news matter a lot but only for short term.
sometimes it is FUD and can cause a short term drop and sometimes it is hyped up and can cause a rise.

in any case the big trend that also lasts long can not be changed by news as we can see these days that bitcoin price keeps rising even if it has some small drops from time to time. right now inching towards $12k.

i don't think looking at addresses is going to give us the best metric here because an address may have been created any time. for instance i have a funded address that is from before SegWit and i have never touched it because there is no reson to, but that doesn't mean i haven't been using SegWit for all my transactions.

the best metric in my opinion is the number of SegWit inputs per block. for example if a block has 2000 transactions and that is 2500 inputs and out of those 1500 are SegWit inputs then you can say the adoption is 60%.

CoinJoin and any other (decentralized) methods of mixing have always been making it harder to link the transactions that go through the process together. this is an inherent property of bitcoin itself that it is not fully anonymous so all we can do is to improve it but not make de-anonimysing impossible.

however, the more these methods are used the harder it would get to find the link. nowadays CoinJoin is not that popular so there still may be a very small risk although there hasn't been any reports saying the opposit so far.

this sounds like an entirely different thing and it is possible to do. 2 different people can create two different keys and then share their public keys with each other to add and then come up with an aggregated signature which would be a single sig but coming from both of them. that is simplified version of what Schnorr signatures do.

since each signature you are looking at are created using different messages and different private keys they have to be dealt with individually. even in transactions when there are multiple signatures (like in multi sig transactions or a tx with multiple inputs each with one signature) the signatures have to be checked individually.

since there is no popular usage for multiple message verification at a time you won't find any tool that can do it all in one place. you'll have to write the code yourself.

sounds more like yet another free advertisement of a new service which this time it seems to be a physical wallet type of them. usually these things aren't worth the time.

it is very strange that you have such certainty about this! specially when nothing is certain in bitcoin market. not to mention last time there was a US election it had no effects on bitcoin price whatsoever and there is no reason why this time should be any different.

now you are just twisting the words and adding a lot of assumption into your claims to make them true by force.
if the key is within a known range like between 1 and 10, if the RNG was broken and were creating non-random keys, if the RNG was broken and had bias, if, if, if,... then it becomes possible to find ways to compute the private key.

otherwise 100% of the keys produced by good wallets that have experts reviewing them (eg. bitcoin core and a lot of others) have always been 100% safe and random and it is impossible to break them.

CEO of some company buying bitcoin is not the same as "billionaires buying bitcoin". you are just exaggerating possibly to get youtube views. the fact is that those real rich people who have been buying bitcoin have been doing it under the radar and you will never know about it. the rest who have some business to advertise will always make it public for advertisement.

Thanks for inviting me. let me be the 100th.

1. When and why did you become interested in cryptocurrencies?
I don't quite remember how it started because it happened slowly. but i think it was mostly in 2016 that I kept hearing about bitcoin from my friends and how its price is on the rise and will reach $1000 and things like that.
Sadly I wasted some time on faucets back then instead of buying bitcoin.

2. When and why did you buy your first bitcoin?
I made my first purchase in 2016 and because I wanted to join the profit wagon but slowly I became fascinated with bitcoin as a currency and that led to more investment or I should say me dumping fiat every month for bitcoin. and I've been doing it with any amount of extra fiat that I have and don't need ever since.

3. How did you get on the forum?
The same friends that introduced me to bitcoin and faucets introduced me to this forum so that I could learn more from experts since they stopped being able to answer my questions!

4.1. What prevents mass adoption of cryptocurrencies?
Oooh that's a tough question to answer. I guess there are a lot of reasons and I see most of them are mentioned by others. The only thing I could add is that lack of adoption is itself a preventing force. For example a merchant sees there is little bitcoin adoption so they don't bother adding it as a payment option, the average Joe sees there is no merchant accepting bitcoin so they don't adopt it. like the chicken and egg problem.

4.2. How do you think mass advertising of gambling projects has a positive effect on the development of the forum or harms the community?
I think it has been very useful. The online gambling business is growing and like many other things it suffers high fees, terrible regulations, taxation, issues with banking system, and a lot more. all of these are fixed by using a decentralized currency like bitcoin.
These gambling sites have created a niche business that is also introducing bitcoin to many people all around the world.

4.3. How do you consider whether 2-3 years of experience in cryptocurrency is enough to successfully invest or does an investor need to receive special education?
I don't think there is any kind of education that can teach investment in general. Of course we have lots of it available for investment in general and the knowledge can be used in cryptocurrency world too but the problem is that the whole thing is more of a pseudo science.

5. What do you think of the current Merit system and signature campaigns?  Do they harm the forum?
The merit system has been one of the greatest things added to this forum. It single handedly cut down the spam to very little amount.

6. The most useful forum topic? Most helpful users?
I would reference the merit stats page that contains both:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats

7. 3 things you would implement on the forum?
The new version of the forum with a little bit more modern look would be nice.
Some additional security measures such as 2FA
Removing cloud-flare...

8. Do you trade on exchanges or invest in projects?
I'm mostly buying bitcoin but yes I also sometimes trade altcoins specially when we have these big altcoin pumping seasons when there is a lot of easy profit to be made.

9. Tell a story about your big profit or big loss?
My biggest loss was in gambling and with the damn martingale strategy where you keep increasing your bet until you win back all you had lost so far. the best thing out of that was my decision to never gamble again.
My biggest profit is simply owning bitcoin!

10. What do you think about the DEFI ecosystem?
I'd stay away from it because all I can see is the same ICO scams with different names and different dev groups.

11. Is your anonymity a vital necessity or precaution?
Obviously a necessity. Specially when you hear about all the crimes that happen against people who flaunt their dirty laundry in public (eg. those getting robbed at gunpoint).

12. The last cryptocurrency book you read?
I've been meaning to finish reading Mastering Bitcoin, but so far I've read only some of the chapters.

13. Advise 3 cryptocurrencies/tokens for investment in the next 1-2 years?
I don't think it is a good idea to make such advice. People have to always make their own choices when it comes to investment.

14. How much will Bitcoin cost at the end of 2020?
Another hard question. I see in my magic ball that price will be $16420

15. P.S. (Optional)
I'd like to thank Satoshi Nakamoto for all the efforts he put into inventing bitcoin and changing all our lives.
And hope everyone stay healthy during this world wide pandemic.