Bitcointalk is not Bitcoin. It's not like the Bitcoin software banned mixers. It is a sign though that Bitcoin ecosystem is changing and becoming more in-line with government demands. But Bitcoin ecosystem will always have many faces, and mixers or darknet markets will always be a part of it. They can't be separated because no one can stop Bitcoin transactions from happening.

Did they deny your payments or freeze them and your account? If you can still move your money, you can send them to other bank that is more crypto-friendly. Ask some people from your country who have experience which banks they use and if they moved larger amounts. You can even try to open account in a bank of another country, but it would come with higher fees. Or use PayPal which also has larger fees. There's also p2p trading where you will make a bank transfer to another person, but that can be quite risky because banks treat such transactions as suspicious when large transactions happen.

Your analogy has a huge flaw. Bitcoin is fungible, houses are not. Like you pointed out, there can be reasons why a house could be worth many times more than the house next door. But bitcoins are worth the same as any other bitcoin, if you ignore that ordinals nonsense.

There is no way anyone will offer to buy coins for higher than the market prices. They will just go on the market and buy as much as they want there.

And I will say some portion of my coins if the price will rise high enough. I will always hold some Bitcoin in my portfolio, but I don't plan for it to be the largest share of my portfolio - that's an unnecessary risk that in my book is not worth the potential outcomes.

Committing crime in a group is usually an aggravating circumstance, and it also makes easier to prosecute the criminals, because if you catch one, you can make them give up their partners. The businesses that suffer from these crimes could lobby the politicians to make police go harder on these crimes.

I personally never clicked on any ads on this forum, but brand recognition is working, because if I were to look for some crypto service, I'd likely look first at a service that got advertised here, just because it feels familiar even if I never visited it.

Some of the services that advertise on this forum make huge amounts of money and it's not a problem for them to generously compensate their signature campaign members even if the advertisement campaign is a net loss.

There would only be millionaires if they sell, and they can only sell if there are buyers. For that reason the huge price peaks don't last very long - lots of holders want to sell and not a lot of people want to buy so the price collapses. Plus a lot of holders just keep holding because no one knows for how long the bull run will last and when the bear market hits it's already too late to sell.

Bitcoin isn't really affecting economies or societies because only a small percentage of the population buys or sells it.

Cryptocurrency is not an essential part of ransomware attacks, other payment methods could be used too, but crypto made this process so much easier and safer for the criminals that it resulted in growth of ransomware attacks. If crypto didn't exist, there would less attacks because hackers wouldn't spend their time on developing them and focus on other attacks instead, and they would be getting caught more often because fiat payments leave more trails.

Bitcoin can make its holders poor, because there's no mechanism that prevents it from crashing. Its price is dictated by supply and demand, and those are not predictable, because no one knows how people will behave. It's entirely possible that someone will put all their savings or wealth into Bitcoin and then it will crash and ruin their life.

So far Bitcoin was on average going only up, but there's really no good explanation why, and without understanding it we can't know for how much longer it will keep growing and what will happen after it stops.

What people really don't want to talk about is that cryptocurrency enabled ransomwere, because it's a global and private payment method which is perfect for hackers to receive payments from victims. Bank transfers or PayPal are not global, they have security checks for large transactions, they can freeze accounts or transactions and accounts need to be registered with government id. Like it or not, ransomwere wouldn't be as prevalent as it is now if cryptocurrency didn't exist.

Bitcoin operated without any disruptions since the first block was mined so it's safe to say that it's extremely unlikely to be shut down ever. And this hypothethical scenario of Bitcoin shut down really depends on how severe it is. If it's just a few days an then return to normal, then the confidence in Bitcoin will be bruised but ultimately it will recover, while if it would be more severe and Bitcoin would be down for weeks or months, many people would not return to it and dump it as soon as they can.

Opportunity for what? Earning money? Bitcoin was not created to make money, Bitcoin was created to be used as money. These days Bitcoin is popular as an investment, but it's a risky investment with an unknown chance of success. If you want to invest, you just need to learn how to safely buy/hold/sell. If you can't invest or also want to earn it, then you should start researching all the earning methods like mining or jobs that pay in BTC.

Your question can't be answered in general because in reality it all depends on the concrete case. A well-paying and easy employment is far better than a low-paying and stressful self-employment, although it also heavily depends on the priorities of the individual ans some people might strongly prefer one type over the other. To put it short, whatever makes you the most happy is the best, there's no ideal case that suits everyone.

If there will be a massive solar superstorm with devastating effects, Bitcoin would be one of our last concerns, because it's decentralized and will survive it as long as the Internet survives. But the damage to the economy and supply chains could be massive, lots of people could lose jobs and there might be even food shortages because of how digitalized everything these days is.

It's not worth it using it even with Tor. If you input one address, then you won't give away any information, but check two or more addresses and the owner of the site can assume that they belong to the same owner and they can build a database of wallets with addresses that were previously unconnected.

To be safe you need to make a new Tor connection after every request and disable Javascript.

The simplest solution is to just store your seed together with instructions how to use it together with your other important documents, like your property rights. So when your children will go through your stuff, they will find the seed. If you keep it in some secret place, then instead of keeping the seed with your important things, you should put a note with a hint where the seed is, although this weaknes your security because thieves might find it too.

It has been affecting Bitcoin's viability as a payment method for awhile now. Back in 2017 I bought games on Steam with BTC a few times, and even back then there were problems with fees and they made Steam drop support for Bitcoin because customers were setting low fees, transactions were getting stuck, customers were contacting support and it all was just not worth it to maintain. I'm sure a lot of merchants who look into Bitcoin today see the situation with fees and imagine how they would have to deal with their customers having their transactions stuck and decide that now is not the time to adopt Bitcoin payments.

You can just buy back the bitcoin that you spent on supporting the business with your fiat earnings, I thought that's pretty obvious. And to avoid unnecessary exchange fees just buy enough BTC to cover your spendings for the next year or more.

Also, if spending your money on one business is enough to affect your investment strategy, it's probably a sign that you a very small amount in your holdings - you should try to earn more money, be it fiat or crypto and put it into Bitcoin.

Every school should be teaching kids that gambling is not a money making method, it's a money losing method, the simple laws of math clearly predict that everyone who gambles will lose their money in the end. Trading is also a risky activity that has similarities with gambling - unlike with gambling the odds are not known so you can't prove that it's a losing game, but the common obeservation also shows that most traders go broke. People should learn from this and don't consider themselves to be one of those special gamblers or traders that will make money easily. If you want to make money, do something that has low risk and high chance of success, like mining.

Some governments around the world told that they are interested in CBDC and people on the Internet started making crazy conspiracy theories about the great reset and how it's coming soon and will change the world. This is not going to happen, why would they take a system that works and replace is with some experimental and unproven thing that was never tested. It's almost 2024 and there's still to officially launched CBDC that actually gets used, despite CBDC being discussed for 4 or 5 years already. It's most likely that CBDC will never see the light of day, and maybe a few will get launched and quickly die, like that Venezuelan government shitcoin.

Just when I started using this forum I invested 0.01 BTC in an ICO that of course turned out to be a scam. Back then 0.01 BTC was a really small amount, so I consider it a good bargain - I learned a valuable lesson and paid only a little for it. I'm never touching again any ICOs, NFTs, DeFis and whatever else the scammers will come up in the coming years. Just holding Bitcoin is good enough growth rate for me.