Bitcoin banks do exist but they are a monumentally stupid thing to put your money in.  The reason for this is that because Bitcoin is not very established nor is the price stable, there is no bank that you can genuinely trust to continue paying out forever, just like an exchange.  The chance of any given "Bitcoin bank" collapsing partway through your investment with your money still in it is dramatically higher than the interest that you will earn from it as a Bitcoin bank would act like an exchange, just giving the promise that you will get your Bitcoin back (you wouldn't own the Bitcoin anymore).

I think that longevity is not the relevant factor here, because we pretty much know that Bitcoin will continue to exist for a long time as well as gold.  The reason that the two are incomparable is because Bitcoin is a currency whereas gold is just used as a store of value and for sentimental value.  Bitcoin cannot have this sentimental value as, like online fiat currency, it does not physically exist and is not physically backed by any asset.

I'm not sure about that.  Bitcoin's use as a currency is not changed by the ETF - in the case of approval, it would be viewed more as an investment and arguably less as a currency.  I think that the SEC's reasons for rejecting it were genuinely based on their fears of Bitcoin's volatility and the safety of their investors with fraud etc, because they aren't linked to any government agencies which might oppose the rise of Bitcoin as a currency.

It's not that the transactions are actually without fees, so Xapo must have some kind of underhand way related to people spending in their wallet which makes them enough money to cover the costs.  You should be able to customise and manage your fees properly like you can with Blockchain.

There will always be people who have been successful trading altcoins, in the same way there will be people who won the lottery.  Altcoin trading can be a good idea if you're really good at it but newbies jump into buying altcoins because they think that that coin will be the future when the chance of it actually happening is near nil like in the case of DASH.

This shows that there is no definitive most profitable sport.  There may be sports like football which are often bet on because people are interested and they are popular, but the more a person knows about a sport the more accurate their bets will be, which is why I tend to take an interest on a variety of different sports' betting as I am not more interested in one sport than another particularly.

Yes but if you have a genuine reason to stop e.g. financial troubles and you therefore need to stop, it would be a huge problem to be unable to quit and this is an addiction which gamblers need to recognise and act upon.

This is quite unlikely to happen.  Governments can regulate the value of a currency by reducing the amount of circulation in the case that the usage decreased and still maintain their acceptable but not ideal amount of inflation in some circumstances.

It depends on your commitment to actually working.  Generally, anyone claiming to have a secret solution to your financial problems or claiming that others are lying to you is in fact lying to you themselves.

But America can't stop people using Bitcoin in all of the other countries in the world, and they don't even seem to feel threatened by Bitcoin, having a reasonably lenient stance to it, so I don't think they would be directly hostile.

Yep, dice sites and gambling with Bitcoin in general is fairly secure, as is investing in their bankrolls etc.  Unfortunately though how trustworthy they are can't be verified except by other members of the community, so they could collapse at any time.

Nothing just leaps all the way up hundreds of percent at a time without any hint of grounding itself or stabilising.  Frankly, while there's a lot of FUD about the future of Bitcoin, altcoins will still not overtake it.  Even ETH is nowhere close.  It's a bubble.

You're right that web wallets are not as secure, but web wallets tend to be very user-friendly and easy for people to use if they're not very technical.  When storing a small amount of BTC, web wallets are perfectly fine.  There's also always the threat of malware infection, which would be likely to get to your PC wallet well before your web wallet if you were infected.  Hardware wallets, however, are pretty much immune.

Can I do https://letstalkbitcoin.com/forum please?

Obviously no.  Not only is it guaranteeing that it'll give you money pretty much instantly, it's also telling you to "disable your antivirus software" and download this free software.

It scares me that someone with BTC2, if you genuinely have that much, would even be vaguely interested in this or even have any doubt that this is a total scam.

Let me summarise the proposed transaction.

Someone sends you 15 euros worth of Bitcoin (about 0.013).

You, with absolutely no reason for people to trust that you will do this, send them 15 euros on PayPal.

You then allow the transaction to stay in the 60 days during which you could, for any reason, chargeback the money.

You also expect people to believe that you will generally do this despite several warnings on the forum about this type of transactions and the fact that you have built up no trust and can hardly speak recognisable English.

This is sort of true, but Bitcoin is not completely free either.  A very large amount of Bitcoin is in the hands of a few investors, with Jihan Wu for example. 

You don't have to speculate, because they gave you the reasons themselves:

"the Commission is disapproving this proposed rule change because it does not find the proposal to be consistent with Section 6(b)(5) of the Exchange Act, which requires, among other things, that the rules of a national securities exchange be designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices and to protect investors and the public interest."

Basically, they're concerned about Bitcoin's use in fraud and scams, which cannot be changed as it's part of Bitcoin's fundamental nature.

Human knowledge isn't endless, but human belief is.

Humans have a tendency to discuss ideas which they'll never quite understand or be sure of.  Often these are things which humans will never quite understand, like the creation of the universe.  I think that this limits human knowledge, because something is only knowledge if it is the collective belief of people, which it seldom is.  I also think that human knowledge can never be endless because there are a finite number of things to know (or at least that we can know).

Nothing is a waste if you enjoy your time.  It doesn't matter whether it's on the Internet or outside, whether you learn, whether you earn or whatever.  The aim of life is enjoyment whether you know that or whether you do it directly or indirectly.

So no, I don't waste my time on the Internet.