1. If you had 2FA enabled and they disabled it without your permission then I'd place them at fault.
2. You might want to spend an hour discussing that with an attorney to figure out if proceeding with more billable hours is likely to have a positive return on your investment. It sounds like a matter for small claims court (though I don't know your jurisdiction so it's hard to say)
3. Basically any attorney who deals with financial matters? I wouldn't pursue trying to get the money back by finding the attacker; that's generally a lost cause.

If a critical protocol bug was exploited and not found for a long time after being exploited (weeks or more) then it would cause a huge loss of confidence.

I still believe that the most likely cause of Bitcoin's death would be apathy. Everyone has to agree to stop supporting the project in order for it to die.

DAPP is a very broad term so it really depends upon the functionality you want. But in general it's going to require learning how to interface with a new network such as Bitcoin / Lightning / Ethereum. There are Lightning resources at https://dev.lightning.community/

For Ethereum you'd likely end up writing a smart contract so you'd need to learn Solidity - take care that it's easy to write a "working" solidity app that is insecure!

It's all interrelated - sometimes stuff I tweet comes from work conversations while some of the stuff I find on twitter helps me suggest new things for us to implement at work!

huge fan here :) thank you for your contributions to bitcoin

It's an apples and oranges type of comparision, but in general open systems are going to be more secure because they have more eyes on them, probing for vulnerabilities. Note that banks get hacked all of the time...

At a very high level, money you keep in the bank for the next ten years is GUARANTEED to be worth less than when you deposited it. Bitcoin offers no guarantees either way, but it has a huge upside potential.

Some ups, some downs, and some sideways. There will be no shortage of drama and fud as folks jockey for relevance.

While some nations such as China and India have cracked down a lot on crypto, others like Japan have become much more risk averse and want to protect users, while some such as the US seem to be generally embracing it. From what I hear, a number of politicians already own bitcoin, so hopefully that number continues to rise to disincentivize them from legislating such counterrevolutionary moves... but I do think that the most devious thing nation states could be doing is working to pit us against each other in order to distract us and slow down the pace of innovation.

One of my main issues with proof of stake is the nobility problem - the rich get richer without having to expend significant resources. I prefer proof of work because it's more dynamic - new participants can enter the network without having to "buy out" existing participants. It seems more like a competitive free market.

It's basically impossible to quantify "safely decentralized" though we seem to be doing fine lately - the ecosystem at large has become much more efficient in its use of block space. We aren't maxing out block weight by any means yet and great strides are occurring with Lightning Network, so I think we're in a pretty good position.

I doubt we will ever have a significant portion of bitcoin holders that verify everything, but then again everyone has the freedom to choose their own security model. So long as it's possible for users who WANT to have the strongest security model to afford the hardware required to run a full node, I think we're in a healthy state.

It's extremely low risk and we'll likely have years of lead time with seeing that quantum computing is evolving to the point that it becomes a risk. This is something that the entire digital security space will be keeping an eye on, because the ramifications are far greater than just bitcoin. From a technical level, even if quantum computers were deployed tomorrow that could break some encryption algorithms, it's unlikely they would be able to break the multiple ciphers used in the Bitcoin protocol.

There are a multitude of ways that developers could go about it, and they should really make it clear when users are downloading the software for the first time. You could build the app with built-in versioning that detects when other apps no longer speak the same "language" and then old versions would organically become less and less useful as most of the users upgraded. More drastic measures such as a kill switch that disables the app could also be written, though of course any such open source dapps could be altered by another developer to disable it.

In general, it's like consensus upgrades - if a new version offers a better experience then a lot of people will upgrade to it and this will likely then incentivize the laggards to upgrade as well.

In a sense I'd argue that this has been happening ever since the advent of the Internet. It's just becoming easier to coordinate as hardware and software continues to improve. For example, I haven't worked from an office in 4 years and my current company is about 80% remote and distributed all around the world. I consider myself a member of dozens of different communities that are running on different platforms. With the advent of virtual reality and projects like Decentraland, visualizing these communities may be taken to the next level.

Lightning

Grin

BTCPay

OpenBazaar

The biggest threat to Bitcoin is apathy. The only way that Bitcoin can stall and then wither and die is if no new people becomes interested in it and the currently interested people become more interested in something else.

Too many people worrying about what others (both inside and outside crypto) think or say about the cryptosphere. I find that a lot of stuff on social media simply isn't worth spending time responding to because it wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run. I think being constructive and collaborating with others to build things is the most effective use of one's resources.

Gambling and porn. They're always on the forefront of cutting edge tech!

I think it will generally come down to incentives. If you're paying a bunch of devs to work on such a project and they're mainly in it for the paycheck, they probably won't stick with it for the long term and become deep experts. While it's often lamented that there aren't a /ton/ of devs working on Bitcoin and related protocols, I'd note that pretty much all of those who are working on them are doing so because they are philosophically / ideologically motivated to contribute to the project, and these motivations are less likely to change than financial motivations.

Right, so the fundamental problem of linking digital assets to physical assets (tokenization, if you will) is that you then have to involve yet another layer of human consensus. You have /not only/ the human consensus required to form the protocol that automates the rules via machine consensus, but you also have to achieve consensus from whatever humans write the rules for the physical space in which the physical assets reside. AKA the local government. This adds a ton of complexity and unpredictability and if I might reference Nick Szabo, seems like it also disrupts the social scalability of any such protocol.

Smart contracts are currently too insecure and can suffer from things such as the oracle problem, though I fully expect that this space will continue to evolve and that over time the smart contract space will become better understood and adopt standards and best practices that will make them safer to use. I do think that using any of these crypto network protocols makes the most sense when you can keep their effects completely contained to the digital realm.

Sadly the winery has shut down and all equipment has been sold off!

It's probably going to boil down to the incentives issue - I'd bet it will be harder to become rich overnight by launching a sidechain that is pegged to bitcoin than to launch a new altcoin from scratch (especially if it's funded by an ICO.) On the flip side, hopefully that means that developers who are more inspired by building ideas than by the prospect of overnight wealth will end up experimenting with sidechains tech because there's ALSO less downside if you fail.

With regard to lightning we're already seeing some "layer 1.5" solutions such as eltoo that are trying to make channel opens and closes more scalable. I've also heard of some folks working on "layer 3" infrastructure though it's too early to tell what the time frame is to see working software.

Prediction markets, or more generally, information markets, have long been theorized and in my opinion are sorely needed if we want to build truly free markets. Theoretically we should be able to make better collective decisions if we just enable people to put their money where their mouth is... of course, there are also a number of negative consequences that can result. It seems like the "wisdom of the crowd" can work in many cases, but not all... and such markets can create perverse incentives that lead to things such as assassination markets. But you have to take the good with the bad, when you're building new tools - it's difficult if not impossible to build a useful tool that can't be abused.

Hard to say without defining "predominant" - many of the metrics being used such as "market cap" are highly flawed. Also, it's easy to envision a future where say, Facebook or Amazon creates a "cryptocurrency" that all of their users are incentivized to adopt, which could easily result in a cryptocurrency with far greater adoption than any currently in existence. But would that cryptocurrency have the same properties as Bitcoin? Highly unlikely...

With regard to clever new projects I'm keeping an eye on Grin.

Basically no hope, I'm afraid.

Politics and greed can't stop the builders from building; most of the vitriol you see online is not coming from the folks who have their heads down solving the hard problems.

Documentation and education! That's why I really like the idea of https://readingbitcoin.org

There's a ton of "lore" and historical information that long-time devs have soaked up over the years but isn't clearly written down in a digestible format. When I've done some spelunking through Bitcoin history for articles I've written in the past I often end up having to sift through tons of mailing list archives and IRC logs which is quite grueling. It would be nice to have some technical writers take a stab at conveying more of this information to newcomers.