(sorry for the late reply, thread fell out of my watchlist so I had to search it...)

Good point. Breaking this barrier, for me, would thus likely have to begin at the merchant's side. Above all in bear markets and early bull markets it can be an attractive option to accept Bitcoin and just hodl, instead of using payment processors (which charge fees and thus take away the advantage against credit cards). Merchants could set up promos when Bitcoin is really cheap, to capitalize from those who think Bitcoin is dead.

As you wrote, I think it would be a big milestone for BTC if we see the next bear market only losing 50% of the ATH. That could even start a kind of supercycle if people become less and less afraid to catch the falling knife. I believe though we're still not there. For the next bear I'd be glad with only 66% loss.

I'm not that sure about that. China for example shifted some policies in the recent 20 years (compare the more left-leaning and more authoritarian Xi era with previous leaderships). Dictatorships can be quite unpredictable because of the high amount of power the elite concentrates. For me, thus the kind of government isn't that important -- it's more important that the reserves are distributed among several countries/blocs.

And yeah, I agree that a reserve would have only really a positive effect (distinct from other lass if it's done like in El Salvador, i.e. anti-cyclic and "permanent" in the sense to not try to take profits and speculate too much.

I think Bitrefill for example indeed has a limit for purchases. And in some countries you can only use bank-based methods for purchases over $10k or so. But regulations are muss less strict with merchants than with exchanges, and for example the European AML regulations only require KYC for specific businesses (like lawyers or real estate agents).

Ah that's indeed a good metric (Could be part of a "retail interest index", might such a thing exist already?)

To measure "real" transaction activity taking out memes and that stuff it's not that difficult to filter out transactions with specific scripts, consolidations and so on. It becomes more difficult however if you want to distinguish between activity for "P2P cash" and for trading/speculation. Glassnode, Arkham and other chain analysis companies could of course measure transactions that do not go to/from exchange wallets.

A superficial search has however brought up no good metrics for retail activity. There are charts like this one based on the holdings of addresses, but they're not what I'm searching for -- and this chart in particular is even more flawed because it's quite obvious that at a Bitcoin at $100,000 the average/median address holdings will be smaller than when Bitcoin was at $1000.

Thanks for yor explanation. In part I agree. Yeah I think that is too OT to deepen the discussion here. If you want you can open a thread about it, I'll participate in the discussion ...