What are we all buying for this Black Friday sale?

No, that's perfectly fine. Kraken was sued by the SEC for operating as an unregistered securities exchange for things like SOL and ADA, not for BTC. The SEC has come out and explicitly said BTC and ETH are not a securities.

https://cassels.com/insights/sec-declares-bitcoin-and-ether-as-non-securities/

On the other hand people whom I trust for sound investing advice like William Bernstein and other Bogleheads think BTC has no value as an investment.

People are wrong about things they don't understand all the time. Paul Krugman wrote that the internet was a passing fad in the 80s. He obviously admits he was wrong now, and just didn't see the potential. I don't know a whole lot about William Bernstein, but it looks like he was born in 1948, and advocates for safe and sound investing strategies. That's good for the average person. However, as we age, we inevitably lose touch with the advancements of the world. When I am 80, I am going to be out of touch with a lot of new shit, too! Hell, I am now on a lot of this TikTok shit, but clearly there is opportunity there. We can't all be experts in everything, and sometimes we are wrong and have to eat crow. Bitcoin is 14 years old now. I have been told by countless people it was a passing fad that was going nowhere. Very very few people listened to me over the years. Here we are, 13 years after I got into Bitcoin at 81 cents. It's still here. It's still the most secure decentralized cryptographic network in history. It ain't going anywhere.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency

Bitcoin, however, was doomed if the code was unreliable. Earlier this year, Dan Kaminsky, a leading Internet-security researcher, investigated the currency and was sure he would find major weaknesses. Kaminsky is famous among hackers for discovering, in 2008, a fundamental flaw in the Internet which would have allowed a skilled coder to take over any Web site or even to shut down the Internet. Kaminsky alerted the Department of Homeland Security and executives at Microsoft and Cisco to the problem and worked with them to patch it. He is one of the most adept practitioners of “penetration testing,” the art of compromising the security of computer systems at the behest of owners who want to know their vulnerabilities. Bitcoin, he felt, was an easy target.

“When I first looked at the code, I was sure I was going to be able to break it,” Kaminsky said, noting that the programming style was dense and inscrutable. “The way the whole thing was formatted was insane. Only the most paranoid, painstaking coder in the world could avoid making mistakes.”

Kaminsky lives in Seattle, but, while visiting family in San Francisco in July, he retreated to the basement of his mother’s house to work on his bitcoin attacks. In a windowless room jammed with computers, Kaminsky paced around talking to himself, trying to build a mental picture of the bitcoin network. He quickly identified nine ways to compromise the system and scoured Nakamoto’s code for an insertion point for his first attack. But when he found the right spot, there was a message waiting for him. “Attack Removed,” it said. The same thing happened over and over, infuriating Kaminsky. “I came up with beautiful bugs,” he said. “But every time I went after the code there was a line that addressed the problem.”

He was like a burglar who was certain that he could break into a bank by digging a tunnel, drilling through a wall, or climbing down a vent, and on each attempt he discovered a freshly poured cement barrier with a sign telling him to go home. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kaminsky said, still in awe.

Kaminsky ticked off the skills Nakamoto would need to pull it off. “He’s a world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language,” he said. “He understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking.”

“Either there’s a team of people who worked on this,” Kaminsky said, “or this guy is a genius.”

Kaminsky wasn’t alone in this assessment. Soon after creating the currency, Nakamoto posted a nine-page technical paper describing how bitcoin would function. That document included three references to the work of Stuart Haber, a researcher at H.P. Labs, in Princeton. Haber is a director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and knew all about bitcoin. “Whoever did this had a deep understanding of cryptography,” Haber said when I called. “They’ve read the academic papers, they have a keen intelligence, and they’re combining the concepts in a genuinely new way.”

The story behind Bitcoin is one of the most interesting stories in history, and it is constantly overshadowed by BS around crypto as a whole. Pump and dump scams, exchange hacks, frauds like FTX and Celsius, and shiba inu coins constantly make people see the whole space as a joke. However, really look into Bitcoin. Read the white paper. Research how it came about. I was there almost at the start, and have been deeply following it the whole time. It's truly a marvel, if nothing else for the novelty of the code and how it has changed the world. It will continue to change the world.