Its sad because theres a faction of miners that seem to be preventing solutions to the scaling issues while holding large amounts of alts. It seems like a convenient way to pump their altholdings while still doing well in bitcoin which is rising steadily for now despite the problems.

I think the answer has been well answered already in the thread, the confirmation time is fixed by an adjusting difficulty rate, the only way to change that would be to change the bitcoin protocol.

There are however already plans to increase the number of transactions the network can handle. This is in the form of currently 2 competing ideas, Segwit which and bitcoin unlimited both of which essentially will increase the number of transactions that can go into each block. Then there are future plans for things like the lightning network which promises a near unlimited number of transactions.

The question isn't bitcoin vs cash in my opinion its in what proportion do you separate them. They both have a good place for them in the world, cash will always be the best method for offline payment but bitcoin could easily destroy a large portion of card payments and take over that market.

Paper money works offline so there will always be a place for it as you say. Bitcoin's area will be in cross border transactions and online payments.

No country has adopted bitcoin yet, they just accept it as a type of currency/method of payment. But yes nearly every country will do that soon its the first truly borderless currency.

No way will it only go to 1800-1900, it will go to 3000+ before having any major fall of more than 10% or so.

I prefer PoS as others have said because it removes the inefficiency from the huge electricity usage used for PoW, and both PoS and PoW incentive centralisation, PoW incentivizes centralisation in mining operations while PoS incentivizes centralisation in the form of hoarding.

Unfortunately the bitcoin network is overloaded and transaction fees required are skyrocketing, your transactions are going to stay unconfirmed until things calm down.

I don't think bitcoin will take over all payment systems or anything like that but I think in the future it will both be a traded asset and something that works in the background. For example you send money from one account to another and the banks will use bitcoin in the background in some way. This will bridge the divide between the technically competent and technically incompetent. Cash for instance is never going away nor is national currencies so the future has to be something that will link currencies to bitcoin.

Transparency yes because everyone can read the blockchain but theres currently nothing fast about bitcoin.

Ripple is just hype, all the partnerships announced with banks are about them using the blockchain technology and the company behind ripple but not the currency. Yes some ripple is burned in the process but its a minimal amount and the banks will never use it directly.

The lock-up may sound great but first of all its only a temporary measure and second of all even if the rest of the coins were burned instead of locked up there is still little actual use for the currency at the prices and supply currently available. Now if the amounts burned for transactions were bigger and not simply a spam prevention filter the whole thing would be much different.

In my experience bitcoin convinces itself and you don't need to help it. For me my technically incompetent friends are the ones asking me for help to get them into bitcoin. With all the positive news flowing about bitcoin everyone is eager to get on the bandwagon already.