If the post for which the merit was attributed is deleted, would the OP lose merit points?
That would give some power to moderators to prevent that kind of thing.

It will take more than a year to make these coins disappear. Think about it, coins like Ripple are highly centralized, and you see no one using or talking about it besides pumpers and dumpers. Even so, it still has one of the highest market caps.

I think governments are taking seriously this idea of cashless society. If that happens in many countries, this can lead to an economic chaos and will lead large numbers of people to poverty. But I think people will fight against this kind of thing.

Bitcoin has the largest user base, the greatest network effect and it also has a limited supply, which makes it a better store of value. I don't see anything better than this for the next 5 years.

Bitcoin will continue to exist as long as there are computers connecting to each other over the internet. Simple as it sounds.

You can learn a lot by trading small amounts, but you have to be aware that when you start investing larger amounts it will not be easy the same way.
If the market has low liquidity, large amounts of money can cause considerable market movements, for the upside or downside. Also, it is much easier to trade with small amounts than with large amounts, because your psychological side is not fully involved and tested to the limits when you do small trades.

I think so, maybe much higher, because now we are closer to reaching a consensus to the scaling problem, and the level of uncertainty has dropped considerably.

Reaching a consensus to have a solution to the scaling issue is not an easy task, but no one said that decentralization would be an easy task.
What matters is that we have the best cryptographers in the world working on this, and we have here our best chance to make a decentralized currency to be recognized and used in our economy.

Rates are not defined by wallets, but by the network. What happens is that some wallets, like blockchain.info, have fees defined by default, to make things easier for the user. However, this is something you can change before you make a transaction.

If you are moving large sums of money, I would not recommend to trade altcoins. Bitcoin is the most stable cryptocurrency, and even then there are many uncertainties, there is not even a consensus as to how we are going to scale.
Now think about the difficulties that all these other coins will have to scale, when they go through the same problems that Bitcoin is going through.

I think we still do not have the perfect money, and maybe after decades we still have not achieved such a thing. But what matters to me is that what we have at the moment is much better than fiat currencies, and it's good to know that there are people working to make these technologies better and better.

Although a lot of websites are starting to accept Bitcoin, there is still a limited number of possibilities to buy things with it. But it is already possible to buy things using Bitcoin debit cards, if you are willing to pay the fees.

I would say that the best way is solar mining, but this is something difficult for most users, not only because of the high initial investment, but also because of technical difficulties. Anyway, I think it's just a matter of time before we can see companies able to assist users with this.

We are still at the beginning of the year, and yet there has been considerable progress, but there is still much to come. I think that for this to be the year of Bitcoin, it is necessary that at least the scaling issue be solved.