To start with I think the network is being threatened. These could just be the government playin a long game with the quotes of allowing decentralization.

I appreciate the nuance you bring to the "Bitcoin as illegal" concept  It's not about endorsing illegal activities but about recognizing the vital role censorship resistance plays in protecting financial freedom, particularly for the bitcoin network as a decentralized network.

Your point about the 2014-16 period and the subsequent shift towards hoarding due to price surges is kinda a fact. The volatility and fee unpredictability have been major problems which have been kinda ignored too.

I guess the answer is yes. While there was indeed a little boom for Bitcoin when the first derivatives were introduced in 2017, I don't think they were the catalyst of the bull run in that year. It was imo a mix of optimism after the halving, the advent of new technologies like Lightning and Segwit, but also the strong altcoin rally fueled mainly by Ethereum.

The US ETF approval in 2023/24 seemed to be much more influential when we take into account price action. It's likely BTC could have stagnated under $50k for most of 2024 if this approval didn't materialize. And we may not have seen the 100k yet even if the rest of the events (Trump's interest for Bitcoiner voters, for example) were identic.

But on the other hand: All ETFs together are only managing less than 10% of the Bitcoins out there. While other 10-20% are presumed to be lost or "locked", the BTC on the "free market" still make up 70% or so, or ten times the ETF holdings.

In addition, if we look at the user statistics provided by crypto.com and Triple-A, the main "mass adoption" steps seem to have happened before 2023, the pandemic very likely being the catalyst.

Edit: There's an additional argument that we don't need the ETFs and friends: The ETF only have a large market share in the US. There are however many other countries with a strong Bitcoin adoption, e.g. in Asia and Latin America, where either no financial products based on BTC were approved or they have a very low market share (like in the EU).

My guess is that this may depending a lot of the outcome of the next strong bear market. If BTC manages to navigate the next bearish dump with less than 70% loss compared to the ATH then I expect panic dumps to reduce further over time. Then excessive FOMO could still become a challenge, but much capital is needed to create a strong spike like in 2017 or so which would put the volatility-reducing tendency at risk.

IMO the influence of bigger "institutional" actors depends on their behavior on the market. If they really are less prone to react to panic and FOMO, then they may have indeed such a volatility-moderating influence, but only if they have a bigger share on the liquid market (the BTC ready to be traded, e.g. those sitting on exchanges) than "weak hands". If weak hands and highly speculative capital continue to dominate the liquid market instead, a large percentage of "locked up" Bitcoins could also decrease liquidity on exchanges and thus order books would become thinner, creating opportunities for those traders who benefit from volatility, e.g. via leveraged positions.

So in general my take is that the influence of these actors could be smaller than expected. I don't like this scenario either, but it is likely that we'll see at least an increase of institutional money for some years still.

Well, he used the name Thaddeus in his science publications, including his most well known one (the Lightning "whitepaper" he wrote together with Joseph Poon), so I guess this is his real name. Hell, he has even a Wikipedia article (Edit, no, that is another guy, lol). Tadge may be a nickname he uses on X and in the community, and probably simply a short form of Thaddeus. Perhaps to distinguish himself from the ophtalmologist. See also his Crunchbase profile.

I think we're not there yet. Monero is a project I like and I personally would not even be sad if it became the leading cryptocurrency, but I think Bitcoin still can be saved. From all the investor newbies still there are sometimes people trickling into the "real Bitcoiner community" and falling more deep in the Bitcoin ethos rabbit hole. And the developers are also working on features which could enhance privacy in the future. One example being CISA (Cross-Input Signature Aggregation), which could make CoinJoins, a privacy-friendly technique, very much the standard way to transact on Bitcoin. If more than 30-40% of Bitcoiners used CoinJoins, it could become then almost as private as Monero. But it's still some years away. But Taproot for example has also improved privacy a bit, although more for some niche use cases. And not to forget Lightning which can also be described as a privacy technique.

Yes, that's why the Bitcoin community imo shouldn't stay passive looking at the influx of the "new style investors". It's best to convince all those who can invest into "real" Bitcoin to do it. Not your keys - not Bitcoin!

There are of course institutional investors who currently cannot invest in Bitcoin in a way which isn't via ETFs. It is possible that regulatory changes in the future could allow them to invest directly in Bitcoin, but that can take years, even decades. But on the other hand: institutional investors are also companies which can be in theory "controlled by the government" (it's not so easy in democratic countries but it still is theoretically possible, e.g. via harsh "state of emergency" regulations in an economic crisis for exmaple). So it's basically not that important if these hodlers use the services of other companies, like ETF operators, to access Bitcoin.

But there's a catch: currently the "financial" Bitcoin sector is very concentrated on a couple of ETFs and exchange operators (Coinbase, mostly) which are almost all located in the US. This is more problematic in my opinion, because they all could be controlled by the same government. Perhaps institutional investors from outside the US should thus look at least for ETFs or ETPs in their own country instead of investing all in the US ETFs.