you are confusing multiple different and unrelated stuff together!

confirmation times with bitcoin had little to do with block generation, blocks were still being mined at the same interval of 10 minute on average. but because of the spam attack you had to pay a higher fee to be able to get a place in the next block. obviously when you paid smaller fee you were having a very low priority and got a very late confirmation.

what is happening with bitcoin cash is very different. the problem is with finding blocks. nobody is finding any in long intervals. there has been 1 hour blocks, there has been 13 hours too. and when nobody finds any block your transactions won't confirm!
and the reason is because of the high difficulty and low hashrate (few miners are mining it). of course the difficulty was programmatically changed to fix it but it is not yet enough.

it depends on the coin and why it crashed.

sometimes it is a shitcoin that pumpers pumped from 1 satoshi to 100 and now they are leaving and it will continue down the tube.

sometimes it is a heavily manipulated coin like ethereum that people are dumping and the manipulators are waiting to start pumping it again as soon as it reached bottom.

sometimes it is a silly panic sell or a correction where people see the top and the little come back from it and start pushing the big red buttons saying "sell sell sell..."

in the first 1 of course you should stay away. but in the other two if you can find that bottom where dumping stops or is becoming very slow, it is a good idea to buy and keep your eyes open afterwards to sell fast to get that short term profit you are looking for.
beware that it is easier said than done

in a normal world there are 1 block every 10 minutes on average which makes 144 block each day. 144 * 12.5BTC = 1,800BTC
imagine you have 10% of the hashrate and lets say each day you get 10% of 1800BTC = 180BTC = $486,000

(assuming BCH reached equilibrium and is mining 1 block every 10 min on average) now in our fucked up world you can one day decide to switch your 10% hashrate on bitcoin to bitcoin cash. with it you can mine a lot more because first of all 10% on BCH is a lot more (nearly 80% of total there maybe more but lets take 80%) and also because of this big hashrate rise more blocks will be generate in 1 day. lets say 200 blocks
200 * 12.5 BCH * 80% * $500 = $1,000,000

right now ViaBTC that has 5% of bitcoin hashrate has mined 25% of bitcoin cash's blocks.

of course things aren't as simple as this and i am making big assumptions about numbers. for example a miner can not just sell the coins as he gets them. coinbase transaction (that 12.5) need to stay about 100 blocks IIRC or so before becomes spendable.

no, whether people are selling or buying the exchanges make profit either way. the fee is on the orders that get filled it doesn't matter what type of order it is. a buy order gives the same fee to the exchange as a sell order. for example each dump that takes place on bittrex is giving them 0.5% fee of its volume (2x 0.25%)

this is why they add coins with high volume even though they are shit like ethereum.

until today and possibly still in the near future both bitcoin and bitcoin cash are using the same keys. this means private key of bitcoin is the same as private key of bitcoin cash.
if you have a bitcoin cash address and send bitcoin to that address you can simply export that private key from your bitcoin cash wallet and import it in bitcoin wallet and have your funds.
if that address belongs to a service like an exchange you need to ask them to do it for you but they may not.

in the future bitcoin cash may change the keys to have a new address format in that case you will be unable to send anything to those addresses because if you put that in your bitcoin wallet it will reject it.

p.s. be careful when using bitcoin cash wallets they may not be as trusted as you may think.

it did not solve anything.
they only thing that bitcoin cash changed is the max block size and increased it to 8 MB. it does not make bitcoin faster. blocks are still being generated with the same interval (which is about 10 minutes on average) after the difficulty is adjusted. and this increase to 8 MB will cause a lot of problems in the long run and will eventually centralize bitcoin.
imagine a network where you can only connect to a couple of "mega servers" instead of a decentralized set of nodes around the world.
if you think mining is centralized to China, then wait until Nodes are also centralized to China and they reject your transaction because they don't like you

is it really the biggest?
i don't know, there have been some pretty huge giveaways in the past for many altcoins. and many of them are worth a lot more than BCH. for example the byteball thing was worth 0.3-0.4BTC and it is still pretty high.
or someone who is saying he is a millionaire because of NEM XEM https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1927404.0
and the list goes on and on...

what happened to your "Human verification" thing. i liked it a lot more than this reCaptcha thing, it is very annoying sometimes when it keeps rejecting your answers and shows you weird images and asking you to select weird stuff!

if possible bring your own captcha thing back.

if you want to start trading you need to decide on 1 thing: what do you want to hold your profit in?
most people keep their profit in bitcoin. this means for example you start with 1BTC, price goes up you sell, then it takes a dip you buy back and now you hold 1.1BTC and repeat this. and the same with altcoins. you buy an altcoin it goes up you dump it and take your bitcoin out, once more you hold more bitcoin now.
it is the strategy because bitcoin also rises in long term. that means the more of it you hold, the bigger your long term profit will be.

the next thing you need to do is to learn how to be very active and fast in the market. specially in altcoins. it is very important to make up your decisions first then invest. for example you buy some altcoin in its dip then it rises you need to have a target to sell before you even invest. and make sure to sell at that point. don't get emotional and don't listen to others. sell and get out fast and move on to the next thing as fast as you can to make profit elsewhere. they won't wait for you to come then go up.

i think there may still be some minor disturbance in the market and consequently some more fluctuation and delay to reach $3000 because it mostly is too soon to start speculating normally. the speculators are also enjoying this as they see the big swings as a way of making money. but since the general movement has been towards up it is easily possible to reach $3000 this month as the drama slows down and fades away.

and after that it will be a big rally and no more small rises because it was kept down for a long time.

this is cryptocurrency market and you are in the altcoin part of it. 30% is what you earn in 1 day or worst case scenario in 1 week. not in 1 year!

look at some of the charts to see how price has been moving for each of these coins that you have "invested" in. and stop trying to hold altcoins, start learning how to trade instead. you buy these coins in the dips when they are low and dump them as soon as they reached their top and take your 30% and invest it in the next altcoin. rinse and repeat. in 1 year you would have a lot more profit and a lot less losses this way.

p.s. the only thing worth holding for long term is bitcoin because it has real world usage and that is growing. the rest are pure speculation tools.

to answer this one needs a time machine to travel to the future and look at the market and come back!

BCH has the same chance of reaching $1000 as any other altcoin has. if you think some altcoin can reach it then so does BCH.
the price rise is not really important. what matters is if they can keep the price up. we have seen time and time again that altcoins get pumped and go to ridiculously high prices. i believe it was ZCash which was worth about 6-7 bitcoins! in other words 6-7 times more valuable than bitcoin at some point. but it never lasted and now it is on its way down to a small portion of 1 bitcoin!

it is too soon to say, there hasn't been that many blocks mined, and most importantly there have been an extremely small number of transctions in total on bitcoin cash network.

let some time pass, and let people claim their BCC tokens and start selling then we can give opinion on whether or not it is doing well.
and besides none of the exchanges that i've checked allow deposits of BCC yet.

they are not supporting BCC (BCH)!
they expected a mass withdrawal from their exchange so they decided to do this instead and credit BCC to those who don't withdraw and continue holding bitcoin in their Bittrex bitcoin balance.

and they clearly said they may not add the market for it. "monitoring the situation". similar to most exchanges such as polo. but others won't credit you, they probably want to dump it themselves.

the drop is because ETH has been pumped. and what comes after a pump? that is right a dump!

if you want to make money from ETH or any other altcoin for that matter, you have to learn to trade them. to notice the signs of rise and fall and try to find the best "low" to buy and best "high" to sell them.
the mentality of "hold and profit" won't work in 99% of the times with all the altcoins.

ETH has been performing poorly ever since it reached its ATH months ago, and if you want my advice i say stay away from it if you like your money for now and then get in when it reaches the bottom.

it did NOT defy anything. all speculation was telling about a RISE on the way. the fear and being not-sure was only back when miners haven't yet started signalling for SegWit and there was  a small but legit fear of split due to UASF on August 1st. by that time price was around $2000 and momentarily dropped to below it.

but after the signalling started and reached 100%, there was no not-being-sure anymore. anyone talking about price fall was either confused or spreading FUD. there was and is no longer any reason for any kind of fall.

what you have been reading and regarding as "speculation" was FUD instead.

BIP is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. each of them are different proposals to improve bitcoin in one way or another. BIP148 is User Activated Soft Fork or UASF for short. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0148.mediawiki
it was supposed to "force" miners to accept SegWit by rejecting any block that is not signalling for SegWit by the time specified in the BIP.

but now that time is past and also since 100% of the blocks are signalling for SegWit nothing happened. in other words there was nothing to reject.

the thing you need to understand about fees is that miners set the fees! they do it by simply ignoring any transaction that has lower fees than they like and you will be forced to pay higher fees. they have already proven that they will mine empty blocks if they like. you can check out the blocks mined by F2Pool for example. there are low fee transactions in the mempool but they only include the high fee ones and they simply ignore the rest. so you will be forced to pay a higher fee.

and who is to say it wasn't the miners themselves who were spamming the network to increase the fees. they certainly were the only people benefiting from it! the total fee of blocks reached 3-4 bitcoin (nearly $10K bonus)

it didn't start at $370ish, look at the charts for gods sake. it started at $900 and dropped down to $300ish.
the first price is what the exchange says it is, because there is no coin to put a sell order!!! ViaBTC decided the first price should be ~$900 so they placed a virtual sell order there. and idiots started buying and selling. and eventually because of lack of interest it dropped down. and will continue down when it actually releases.

and this is what exchanges do, they take advantage of a fucked up situation to make money. bitfinex still has BU tokens listed! and that is dead in the waters.
don't you remember what they did with Lisk! i believe it was Yobit which first listed it and started a market for people to trade and it didn't even have a chain, nor a released code yet.

suffice it to say this is not the real price, and as soon as it is released people will start selling to this price and crash it down.

i believe BCC's hard fork is scheduled as the same time as UASF in which case it will be in 17 hours and 45 minutes https://www.xbt.eu/

since it is time based it will be activated on epoch time 1501590000 which is the same as Tue 1 Aug 2017 12:20:00 UTC.
https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/master/doc/abc/uahf-technical-spec.md#req-2-configurable-activation-time

- get the popcorn ready.