The next bubble will be when Mega starts some service for file sharing that accepts Bitcoin.
People will be using the service to trade illegal movies and software.
Kimdotcom will make a Billion dollars. Bitcoin will be worth $2,000.
Then Mega gets raided and shut down (again)
and Bitcoin crashes back to $500. 
People are jumping off buildings because they lost their imaginary internet money fortune.

I've had a couple transactions take an hour to an hour and a half recently. 
Unless it took more than a couple hours and the transaction fee was really small I think you should be ok. 

Also some services want more confirmations so maybe Bustabit requires more confirms than Direct Bet?

You need to honestly think of the type of person that created Bitcoin, and why they did it.  
They wanted an anonymous, decentralized monetary system.
They know enough about computers and cryptography to do serious programming. (So they have a way to make money already.)

This is not the type of person who did this to become famous, or get rich.
(Well maybe they realized they could make some money but definitely not to become famous.)

You can learn a lot watching streamers on Twitch. 
Jason Somerville, Jamie Staples, Talonchick, Nanonoko, etc  are all very good players and you can learn a lot from them. 
Daniel Negraneu and Phil Helmuth have streamed a few times too.
Daniel streamed a $50,000 buyin tournament live!

Be very careful if you meet someone you don't know. 
Pretend the BTC is cash, because it basically is. 
You are telling someone you don't know to come meet you, and that you will have money with you. 
I see stories on the news every week or two about someone getting robbed meeting someone to sell an Xbox, PlayStation etc.

Can someone explain what FUD stands for?  

I know it has something to do with people saying Bitcoin will fall in price.  
"The sky is falling" posts are all probably from people with an agenda. 
Trying to spread panic so people sell and they can pick up some cheap coins.

Yes, we need more users to increase price. More companies need to accept BTC as payment. 
(As some people mentioned, some businesses might not want to take Bitcoin unless transactions were confirmed instantly or close to it.) 

Also, sites that take Bitcoin need to do a better job advertising it. 
I was looking at Newegg today,
www.newegg.com 
And saw they took payment in BTC. I've been a customer of that site for years and never knew they accepted Bitcoin!

I think it depends on how much you are talking about selling. 
If I had only a couple coins, I would probably hold them for a couple more years. 
If I had bought 100 coins years ago, I would sell half of them and take the profits and invest in something else. 

Honestly I don't think the price of BTC will increase that much over the next couple years unless something big happens. 
Everything is stale right now. Lots of people just sitting on coins. We need more users and more coins moving for the price to really climb.

If you have some extra cash and don't mind sitting on it, BTC is probably still a pretty safe investment. 
I don't think there will be any huge crash. Even the recent BitFinex hack only caused a little bit of damage.
Its not like the MtGox days which was, honestly, just the bursting of a bubble like the US housing market a few years ago. 
You might not get rich quick, but you probably won't go broker overnight, either.

The only way we will see a large increase in price that stays is through mass adoption.  
We need another big company to start taking payments in Bitcoin.  
This will lead to lots of new users, and a huge increase in the number of daily transactions.

For the first time? A couple hundred? A couple thousand?  
Its hard to say. 
It's a good question, tho, because getting new users is the main thing we need to accomplish if we want to grow cryptocurrencies and increase the price of our coins.

Who are you referring to? Are you saying there are some coin holders with so many BTC that they can manipulate the price?
Or are you talking about some of the big Chinese mining pools? 

I know this has been discussed before, and hasn't it been agreed that
holding the private key is your only real ownership?    

The coins, if they are worth any fiat currency, all that is just some abstract ideas...  
and the only thing you really have physical control of is the fact you have the password to decrypt that part of the transaction chain.

Nice! Well written, easy to read, and has some good info. 

I might add a little more emphasis on warning people about cloud mining, something like-

"99.99% of cloud mining sites are a scam. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Be sure to do research, and never invest money you can't afford to lose. "

This would be awesome, except for the fact that no one uses Windows phones.

I actually think Windows phone OS is decent, but their app store is just so far behind other companies. 
If they could somehow work out a deal with Google and take the best parts of each platform, they would crush Apple. 
But I don't think that would ever happen in my lifetime.  

For someone that is concerned with verifying file checksums, state sponsored attacks, etc... 
I'm surprised you are using Avast! Good antivirus, but I had to remove it when they started snooping on users encrypted traffic. 
(MITM traffic interception using pre-installed certificates)

Heres a good write-up for anyone interested: 
http://www.thesafemac.com/avasts-man-in-the-middle/

GMK- 
I think you should post some info proving your statements or people will dismiss you as someone who is angry and trying to make false claims. 
If you have at least some kind of proof- chatlogs, screenshots, an explanation to why they are a "scam", people will be much more likely to listen to you.

Aren't the Israeli government supposedly involved in the Zcash project?  
I remember reading that Scipr lab have some involvement with government projects.  
http://www.scipr-lab.org/
https://z.cash/

EDIT:
There is actually a thread about that here, unfortunately no one after the OP really posts much useful information.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1389890.0

I feel like the recent price changes are only affecting users with a big investment. 
Most people are holding their BTC and hoping for $1000 coins. 
The only people spending coins are probably on darknet markets.

Yes, but remember the main reason that Megaupload got shut down was because they were paying users. 
Investigators were able to prove that the company was giving payouts to accounts brining in large amounts of traffic. 
If they have any sort of payment system, they will have to be VERY careful about what they are taking payments for, or the government will argue that people are paying to download files that are known to be illegal.