only because more people get in and market grows bigger and the resistances become stronger and also more importantly because more people figure out what FUD is and they start disregarding it.

MSM? MainStream Media?!!
anyways there wasn't really any real crash! it was all FUD and a little panic because of forks. a drop was expected and a bigger drop was also expected because of how bitcoin and its panic sellers work.

price is not supposed to swing around every single second of every single day
there is different phases:
- rally
- correction
- accumulation <-- we are here

and it has already happened.
click here and look at Aug 22 (~7 days ago)

you would be most probably wasting your time because if you click on that above link you can see the rise happened, then the correction came and price went down a lot for you to buy at cheaper prices (~$3600) and you already missed it.

i say if by 1 in a million chance it dropped again, you will miss it again also.

that is an old version of Electrum, there is no wallet.dat file anymore. the wallet file is now in a JSON format with the name Default_Wallet and without any file type.

@OP
if you can't simply find the wallet file of each wallet then you need to find the documentation of each wallet and read that.
for example here is for Electrum which tells you where your wallet file is depending on your OS
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

first stop calling what exchanges give you "a wallet" and your confusion will be resolved.

in other words what exchanges give you is not a wallet, it is an account that you have some numbers on which represent a value. you don't have access to those funds the exchange does and they allow you to use these funds.

so in order to do it fast you need to have funds in your account which is a number in their centralized database. you give up control when you deposit but gain speed.

this is a weird question.
just like anything else in the world, a wide variety of people are buying bitcoin. in the early years bitcoin may have been restricted to the "nerds" but that stopped being the case after the first 2 years, give or take.
now people who want financial freedom, security, want profit, and .... are buying bitcoin. i can say all the different groups of people you have in mind have already bought bitcoin. specially the uneducated and get rich overnight type of people. and that is visible on the charts when a panic sell starts.

we are in the early stages of second stage of Early Adopters.
and remember this is not price chart. it is showing only the adoption and how it changes over time. it is slow at first then speeds up and when everyone knows about that technology there is no one left to find out about it!
the price chart would look like an S which is slow at first then speeds up with sharp rise to a high price then slows down and plateaus on that high price and stays there.

i'm sorry to tell you this but you see that thing on 22nd where price takes a dive, that was your opportunity to buy at that price, it is not going to happen.

in other words the line you drew showing the same dip is your "wish" not your "prediction"!

well that is THE issue. you either stick with the big coins with huge volume or you go into small altcoins with a small amount in order not to disturb the balance or change the price. but make sure to check the volume and the size of the orders in the orderbook, what you think is big may not be that big after all.

also there is a workaround too. you can always use multiple exchanges. sometimes for example a coin is available on a couple of exchanges: poloniex, bittrex,... so you can trade it on both places if you think your order size is disturbing the market.

people in crypto who are trading it, specially the altcoin  traders have no interest in stocks. the profit you can gain in an altcoin is ridiculously high that you won't waste your money by making it stuck in a stock

the no fees feature is obviously always something that attracts a lot of people but only if it is possible to do and not end up doing shady things in the background like fake pumping coins yourself (the exchange i mean) to make money.

but the most important feature of an exchange that everyone is looking for is "trust". we have seem multiple times that exchanges easily run away. if we can solve this somehow it will be cool.

the other thing is anonymity. these days the big exchanges have even started asking for verification. we are using currencies for god's sake! asking for verification is absurd.

this is inevitable.
the adoption is growing and more people find out about bitcoin specially now that it is all over the media. and with that the price appreciates over time. obviously that makes bitcoin an investment.

but this doesn't change the fact about why it was created and how some people use it. you can still have that "financial freedom" with bitcoin and enjoy the price appreciation too. you buy 1 bitcoin at $1000 an in 6 months you have $4000 purchasing power. there is nothing wrong with that.

your actions and your timing suggests otherwise

when you buy bitcoin on an exchange (your step 2) and then send it to your bitcoin address, you are not anonymous anymore. you have given your identification to that exchange and they (and whoever asks them) know who you are and what your bitcoin address is. using TOR doesn't change anything!

the first thing you need to do is to decide what is it you are trying to hide?
and what level of anonymity you are looking for?

depending on these two, it can be a simple paper wallet which you send the coins from exchange to that, or it can be a complicated route of using mixers, anon coins such as Monero and finally bitcoin in paper wallet. but these cost differently because of their fees.

the code is there, it has been there ever since 2.8.0 and you can even use SegWit with TestNet, they have not yet enabled it in the wallet for the mainNet and as a default thing.

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES#L74

random claims like this are easy to make. you write a code and say it is the best thing in the world.
what matters is how that code will perform in real life situations.

as an example you can see that ethereum was advertised as being able to handle a lot of transactions and be fast, blah blah. but when push came to shove the network failed miserably because simply it couldn't handle a small surge in number of transactions!
and the same has always been true about the rest of them. they say they solve problems but instead they introduce 100 new ones.

well, we still have the issues with spam attack, the recently hashrate shenanigans which delayed the blocks a lot and the miner shenanigans like what Antpool has been doing with mining empty and half empty blocks all day long.
all these lead to a bigger mempool and a higher fee, making it hard for us to use bitcoin as a currency.

it is impossible to tell!
$5000 is something that will probably be here in a month. it is not far and the market is also very ready for it but at the same time we have a big fight coming on for bitcoin in a couple of months after this rise. the fight with the SegWit2x proposal and that can cause a lot of issues.

what the hell, this article doesn't explain anything! specially regarding ASICboost which is the main subject of it! it just gives some data that we all knew prior to this and are mostly copy paste of all over the internet and then ends the article with the most vague two lines:

"The motivation behind boycotting SegWit transactions lies in suspected use of ASICBOOST by miners, a function which manufacturer Bitmain had previously denounced.

“[Using ASICBOOST], however profitable, is not something we would do for the greater good of Bitcoin,” the company wrote in a blog post in April."

what does this even mean?
the 80K unconfirmed transactions weren't SegWit transaction to boycott or whatever, they are normal tx. and i don't get how the ASICBoost comes in here either!

well, it is a messed up situation right now. and it is partly a hidden shenanigan performed by miners too. you see when bitcoin cash was released they had plans on reducing the difficulty like this and because of that it was obvious a situation like what we see now (super fast blocks) would take place temporarily until the difficulty is readjusted again.
so the miners waited and let the hashrate remain low so the difficulty comes down. and as soon as it came down they ran to mine BCH so the hashrate shooted up (shot up?) like this and blocks are being found super fast!

the only good news is that this situation will not last forever. the difficulty has to rise at some point and then with ~10 min blocks on average and the much lower price, it will no longer be wise or profitable to mine BCH

i just hope we don't see difficulty swings like this every couple of weeks!

not ALL, but a significant amount of hashrate left and caused this. even if it is temporary.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=15days 2 TH/S was lost on 22nd

as 25hashcoin said the bitcoin cash blocks are being found super fast, it was 2 min last time i checked. and THAT is exactly why bitcoin transactions are talking too long!
you see it is more like an indirect attack against bitcoin performed by bitcoin cash. they made their chain profitable for miners by manually changing the difficulty and making the blocks easy to find. it is like a free giveaway to miners and because of it a lot of them switched, so it takes longer for bitcoin blocks to be found.

sorry to disappoint you but the drop time is over and price has started to move upwards. currently it is above $4300 as i am typing this and there is a bigger chance that it will soon try to test the ATH and probably even break it to reach new records in history of bitcoin.

of course there is always a chance of drops but if we are speaking of chances here then the chances of reaching $5000 is 100 times bigger than the chances of price going below $4000 again!!

it is best to stick with electrum for android as the watch only wallet too. specially if you are not just using the watch-only wallet for checking balance but also you want to use it to make raw unsigned transactions to sign with your cold storage.
the raw transactions that electrum builds for signing are specific to it since they have more in their scriptsig for helping the cold wallet in signing.

speaking of safety any additional time or steps are worth it, specially if we are talking about considerable amount of bitcoin. and besides the Linux world is too big and flexible, you can make it as small as possible to boot up in the fastest way possible. like using the light distros.
the USB and your port is also important too. a USB 3, 3.1 is much faster than the older ones.

in any case, any option has its pros and cons. in the end you have to decide if the pros are more or the cons.

where did you even bring these abbreviations from? half of them don't even exist, i think you may be making some of them up too

in any case, there is only one bitcoin and there will always be one bitcoin as long as the universe exists! and that is what the majority are supporting and their consensus says it is.
when a chain is created from bitcoin (aka a fork) and that fork has a low level of support and that majority above sees it as an altcoin, that fork becomes an altcoin.
the obvious examples are Litecoin and Dogecoin that everyone knows about. these are forks of bitcoin that are considered altcoins. bitcoin cash and any other forks or anything in the future with the same circumstances are going to be altcoins too.