you receive a fork coin after the fork happens so you have to deposit your bitcoin there before the fork so that the exchange has control of the bitcoins and receives the forked coins in your stead and then credits your account with the new tokens.

you can hold them in your wallet but then you will have to download a new wallet for the forked coin in order to be able to spend it and also you may have to wait a little while before the exchanges open deposits (they usually disable it for a day or two).

do you actually know any countries that have actually prohibited bitcoin "circulation"?

because so far i have seen exchanges being banned, ICOs being banned, banks being banned from investing in bitcoin and even banning businesses from accepting bitcoin. but never "circulation". maybe you are calling one of these as circulation.
and the number of countries doing that is too few. and some of these bans are perfectly justified. like banning ICOs (since they are indeed illegal).

there is not much specific for Ethereum to require special equipment, it is simple GPUs for gaming and appropriate motherboards to have enough slots for these GPUs and a powerful power supply and risers for those GPUs!

the rig can be used for many altcoins and remember that if you plan on mining ETH only and did your calculation based on that, know that the mining will end for this coin pretty soon when they switch to PoS. the block reward is already reduced a lot too. so your calculations may need some updating. you won't reach ROI if you start mining now. because it is already too late.

because it is easy for you to say they are "wrong" ICOs now that they are over and their fate is clear to everyone. but by the time they are hyping things up, every one of them are super active and show themselves as the best and most active team in the whole world.

besides investing in ICOs are all the same, and it is like gambling. none of them really do anything. the criteria you mentioned are pointless too. none of those ICOs do anything either, they are just more profitable because the bets people made were more lucky, nothing more.

there is always a reason, it doesn't have to be a logical one though. it can be a simple pump, it can be some random news like some random altcoin enabling SegWit, or some illogical reasons such as releasing a new wallet!

all of them.

very few. maybe 10% of them in my experience. but as we get closer to the pump itself it becomes easier to predict them based on what you see on the charts. (it becomes easier not easy).
things such as increase in the volume, the price rise itself, seeing some news on the media and things like that.

yes, that can be a strategy. you watch the market (usually automatic) and when you see this type of rise and speculate a bigger rise you invest and enjoy the profit.
it is like catching the train mid way and jumping out before the finish line.

everyone is entitled to their opinion.
and some people use their power to influence the market too. that is ok too. in the end none of it will change anything.
there have been lots of users calling bitcoin cash as real bitcoin from before August to this day. as you can see BCH is still an altcoin no matter how much they repeat the same thing. it gets pump and dumped but that doesn't change anything.

if by BTH or BTC cash you mean the altcoin named "bitcoin cash" then that is not out of ordinary. the time between blocks and how difficulty works (apart from the adjustment of difficulty) are exactly the same as bitcoin which means the confirmation time (which you are calling transaction time by mistake) are the same.

on average there is 1 block every 10 minutes in bitcoin and all the forks that follow the same rules including bitcoin cash and bitcoin gold.
which means 20 confirmation in 4 hours is normal.

they ask for more confirmation (20 versus 3) because BCH network is less secure.

to be honest i have never in my life looked at the market cap of an altcoin before investing in it! because i see absolutely no reason to look at it. i don't gain any sort of information from that.

what matters are
- the price (as in the history of it, how it changed, what it was a week ago, a month ago,...),
- the volume (how that changed and if it is high enough),
- the order books of that coin (looking at things such as the buy walls or sell walls and trying to figure out how fake they are),
- and finally the news about said coin (such as any recent developments)
- i may have missed something, but market cap is not in that list...

use the same place that you use to buy/sell them!
for example if it is an exchange like poloniex then just open their website and see what the prices are.
if it is your local guy to buy these things from, then open their website, telegram or call them on phone or whatever to ask what their prices are

all the rest of the places such as coinmarketcap.com will give you average prices which will be updated with delays (5 minutes in this case)

from what i have read, that family has been investing in bitcoin for a while now. they recently took a "fiat" loan on their house and bought more bitcoin with that money.

and you can use any legit exchanges such as GDAX to buy bitcoin, i believe some of them have limitations but if you buy it slowly and in steps that won't matter.
also you can always find someone to buy face to face. you just put up some add and find them.

first of all "limited" does not mean "not enough".
think of limited supply as the opposite of what fiat has. you can't print bitcoin like you can print money without much of a limitation. but there is enough units in bitcoin to suffice usage.

secondly forks have nothing to do with bitcoin's supply. there already have been 2 hard forks directly from bitcoin with its blockchain. which one of them can you use as payment in your Microsoft account? that is right only bitcoin. not bitcoin x nor bitcoin y nor bitcoin z. only bitcoin. that means all those x and y and z are altcoins.

"normal value"?!!

the normal value of a coin like DigiByte which has a 9.34 billion coins in circulation and has been worth 20-40 satoshi for all its life except for a pump to 700+ is the same as Dogecoin's "normal value". back to 20 satoshi is a better price for these coins with huge supply.

the pumps happen though, they are different than when you are talking about "value" not just some price that happens in a couple of days.

if by previous price you mean the bottom that it started from before getting pumped, then it is possible but usually after a pump prices go down to a price a little higher than the bottom they started from. and waves is not one of those shitcoins that dies after one pump so it is harder to go that low.

bitcoin price like many other things is purely based on supply and demand. and when the demand for bitcoin rises like crazy without the supply changing then price rises like crazy also

India for example has issue with trading overseas so their people have to stick to their local exchanges and because of increasing demand in India, the price is rising like this. and people want bitcoin and have no other choice but to buy it at this price.

yeah, but the other "digital coins" never really had much of a chance against bitcoin because of the top 3 altcoins that are currently taking their place. when we are talking about their performance in altcoins, there are a lot of them and most of the times the big 3 take all the attention away from the good coins.
and bitcoin with all its "real" potential can easily go to the moon and leave them behind.

when you put it like that (gamble) then there is not much to say about it. gamble away my friend if that makes you happy. keep the amount to a manageable minimum and there is nothing wrong with investing in DOGE now that it is near the bottom.

although i were you i would also keep an eye on bitcoin price because if it goes up higher than this you can be sure 19 satoshi will turn into 16-15 and so on.

i have to say cryptocurrency. i have never tried Forex but have done some stocks trading. i still find cryptos much more profitable. possibly because i am more familiar with them and this market in general.

additionally you will never see such profit and so common in other markets. i mean there is penny stocks which is similar to altcoin market but altcoins, because of manipulations will have much bigger rises.

poor Chinese that have to deal with that shit from their government all day long every day, but who cares about what China does any more? they lost their validity a long time ago when they first started coming down on their exchanges and each exchange volume went down 10 times showing how fake that volume was!

the only thing which remains remotely important is mining, which is coming to an end with other countries like Japan and Russia starting their own ASIC production and mining farms.

hopefully in a couple of years we see a more decentralization and also more people realizing what decentralized currency really means.

if by support you mean will they add the coin for trading then i believe if it comes down to a new  coin to exist like the other forks then all the top exchanges and most of all the exchanges out there will add it for trading, just like they added bitcoin cash.

not that many made statements, and those who said something, said a vague thing like saying "we shall see what will happen". if you want statements you have to wait at least 1 week be fore the fork.