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.

Those are good advises but they alone won't guarantee that you will not get hacked. Nothing is 100% bullet-proof, but you can get to 99.999% certainty that your coins won't get stolen. First things first you need to have an isolated environment for dealing with private keys - this is either a cold storage setup or a hardware wallet. Next, if you are using online services that handle your coins, like exchanges for example, then you have to practice strong security like you have described. But isolating private keys from potentially dangerous environments should be your priority #1.

You are 100% correct, investing in Bitcoin and investing in general is indeed a privilege, because it means having money for saving, and far from all people on Earth can save money, billions are barely surviving, having to skip meals, wear second-hand clothes and so on. -

On top of that, Bitcoin is a high risk speculative investment, and it has downsides that make it worse for people who can't afford to risk. Many traditional investments like bank deposits or real estate only go up and up, so if you put money in them you can reliably pull them out at any moment if you have an emergency. But with Bitcoin's volatility you might be forced to take a loss, sometimes a very significant loss if you bought during the bull run and the price crashed in the end. Bitcoin is only a great investment for those who can afford to not touch the money they invested in Bitcoin for as long as necessary to see the profits, sometimes for many years.

With $150 worth of coins it doesn't really matter what you do. It's very optimistic to expect that in the next few years Bitcoin will be worth 10 times more. Would $1,500 change your life? Even of you are from a very poor country, there's no way such sum can be life-changing and allow you to buy a house. Even 100 times and having $15,000 is really not that much in the modern world.

Sp focus on earning money first and then start worrying about investments.

This isn't really true for Bitcoin, it doesn't require that much effort. All you truly need to know is how to safely use it, and then if you're an investor you just wait for years till you are satisfied with your profit. Learning about Bitcoin in-depth is useful, but it won't affect your profits. And short-term trading is just gambling, no amount of research will help you be consistently profitable, so it's best to just focus on long-term investing.

Until the miners start hard forking the chain to censor transactions, their refusal to include certain transactions only delays them for time on average proportional to their share of network hashpower. And when or if there will be such attempt, I'm sure the whole community will choose the censorship-free chain, just like it previously rejected SegWit2x fork attempt.

All those fiat stablecoins do not have any different macroeconomic properties from other forms of fiat. They are not stable in their real value, they are stable in their exchange rate with their fiat pair, or at least supposed to be. They can't be a backbone of any sort of financial revoultion.

As for the great reset, it's just a hype narrative for promoting cryptocurrencies. The governments will never allow this to happen and they have all the power they need to stop it. And they won't hesitate to use that power if they will start seeing crypto as a threat.