You should not be trying to convince people to invest in Bitcoin or anything else for that matter. An investment choice is a personal decision. Having said that, there's nothing wrong with introducing people to Bitcoin and having them decide for themselves. The best way to "convince" people is by showing them the results. The old "if you put in $1000 on this date, it would be worth $XXXX by now". When I got into Bitcoin, I started talking to a lot of my friends and family about putting money into it as well. I showed them the potential. Some got on board, some were not interested. So far, the ones who got on board are laughing.

If you try to get people involved and they are not interested, that's their loss. You can only show them the way and leave it to them to make their own decision.

Bitcoin payments are hard for merchants to process. Regular payments have a lot of infrastructure that allows them to handle and process payments easily. For fiat financial transactions, you have payment gateways, networks that all help make processing easier. Companies that accept bitcoin have to now build that infrastructure to support such payments, or handle payments in a "bare bones"non-optimal way. THere's also little benefit, from a merchant standpoint, of accepting Bitcoin cash or other payment methods.

What is your claim based on? Just random speculation? I do not doubt BTC price will be a lot higher than it is now, I've even seen a lot of people "predict" 100k USD by end of 2018, but again, that's just  pulling numbers out of hats. The one thing that I do know is that it'll be higher than it is now.

I believe that is the HODL philosophy you're talking about. The facts speak for themselves. Anyone who HODL'd BTC in any period over the past 2-3 years is way better off. Even in the current downtown, the only people in the red are those who bought in at the all-time highs within the last 3 months. If you bought before then, you're still smiling, though not as much as you were in December. The market will recover and start to move up once again, and those who have been HODLing bags for months will be the ones laughing.

This question has been asked a few times and the real answer is no one knows. Based on price action alone, looking at the daily price charts, it is impossible to declare this the bottom at this point. Bitcoin price has been declining steadily since December 17, 2017. Since then there have been some attempts at recovery which lasted 1 to 3 days, only for the price to turn back down. This is just one day in the green. At this point, it is impossible to call this a  recovery. For the recovery to be confirmed, the price would have to rise consistently over more than three days, and these gains would have to be sustained. What I'm doing now is watching the market for confirmation of a new upward trend before going in. Though, this approach has a risk of missing the start of a trend, it is safer in case price turns back down after a day or two.

I am not too sure this is THE recovery. If you look at the daily charts, BTC has been steadily dropping since reaching all-time highs on December 17, 2017. It has been a steady decline but there way some green days (days where price moved up) and some small price spikes, only for the decline to continue the next day. In my non-expert analysis, it's too early to call this the beginning of the next bull run. We will need a few days of upward price movement to confirm the trend.

Just my opinion.

Absolutely. No one can effectively predict any market, let alone the Bitcoin market which is more volatile than most. However, my personal feeling is this might be a bit of what traders would call "A bull trap".
From investing.com: "A bull trap is a false signal indicating that a declining trend in a stock or index has reversed and is heading upwards when, in fact, the security will continue to decline."

The market will recover, but I don't think this is it yet. This is my personal opinion. Take with a grain of salt!

Of course, Valentine's day affects the price of Bitcoin... Everything affects the price of Bitcoin. Price is probably down now because people are buying gifts. AFter Valentine's day easter will be around the corner so people will be buying easter eggs and bunnies. Hard to say which direction the price of Bitcoin will go then, But I do know that the price will be affected in one way or another.

There are various reasons for this. People always have vested interests, including and especially the media.
When Bitcoin was first created it was dismissed as some hackers pet project. I can bet you if the power structure (governments, banks) had the foresight and had known what it would become, they would probably have tried to stop it earlier. Bitcoin could probably have been stopped a lot easier in 2008/09 that today. There were only a handful of people who had nodes running. As Bitcoin has exploded, some people are trying to cash in, others are trying to destroy it because they realize it's potential. The people with the most to lose I believe are centralized institutions such as banks, and to some degree authoritarian governments. These interests are usually intertwined with media companies, thus bad press comes from some of these sources.

Bitcoin futures trading was launched on two of the biggest futures exchanges; first CBOE and then CME.

It is now possible to make money on trading futures if the price is going up or down. It provides a great opportunity but also has some risk as if you go against the market you could lose money, even in a bull market (if you short).
One seemingly easy way to trade XBT futures would be to watch for news, especially negative news, as it is not in short supply and take short positions as soon as negative news comes out. The Bitcoin price is usually slow to react thus if you get in early, you could have your positions placed before the market reacts. Such a strategy might work in more stable markets, but with the market as volatile as it is, it is possible for things to move in the opposite direction before the effect of the news kicks in.

Has anyone tried such a strategy trading Bitcoin futures, and how likely is it that this could work reliably?

I think you missed one key point: Bitcoin is scarce!

There are over 7 billion people on Earth. About 16 million bitcoins have been created. This does not factor in how many are lost (lost private key, burned hard drives, etc). The total number of Bitcoins that can exist is 21 million, again not factoring lost coins.
In comparison, the M0 money supply of US dollars was $1.2 trillion in 2013 https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html.
Comparing with gold, it is estimated that over 180,000 metric tons of gold has been mined throughout historyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve, with a value of $8.7 billion. Comparing that to the total Bitcoin market cap of 250 billion, the total value of Bitcoin is not even close to that of gold.

It all boils down to demand and supply. As Bitcoin grows more popular, more people want to buy the same 16/21 million coins, the emission rate is not high enough to offset the increase in demand, which has been the case since the creation of bitcoin, hence the value appreciates.

Your post shows a lack of understanding of the fundamental science behind cryptocurrencies. Crypto has nothing to do with destroying the environment. And by "destroying the planet", I'm guessing you mean all the energy that goes into mining Bitcoin and other proof of work based cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and several other cryptos use proof of work, which requires a huge amount of power. But, that is not a property of cryptocurrencies in general, that was one implementation to make the network more secure. In the future, cryptocurrencies will adapt to be more energy efficient, and that is already happening. Thus, your post is not considering advances in technology.

You wouldn't be the first person to do that, and probably not the last. It is a high risk move, but with great risk comes great reward. (or great pain). If you believe in the technology and the promise of what Bitcoin has to offer, then go for it. Just weigh the options: In a couple years you could have a couple mansions and a lambo, or you could be homeless... The lambo option seems very appealing 

- Not financial advice.

The probability of this scenario happening is very very highly unlikely. Even in the event of nuclear war, "the internet" is not going to stop functioning. Yes, a lot of the sites and services we use online might cease, but the internet runs on a set of protocols that will continue to exist in such an event. Even today, some people connect to the internet through internet satellite receivers, which connect directly to geostationary satellites in space. And I am pretty sure there are at least a few of those people running Bitcoin nodes. You probably have people running Bitcoin nodes in nuclear bunkers somewhere on earth. So with those two things in place, I think the odds of having a Bitcoin extinction level event is very slim to none. And if such an event were to occur, I think most people would be preoccupied by things other than the safety of their Bitcoins.

I'm from Toronto. How often do you have these meetups?

I think this is a clear case of  market manipulation. China is still one of the largest cryptocurrency markets, even with their "Bitcoin ban". Every time negative news comes out of China, price takes a beating. Guess who's buying at the lower prices? You guessed right...

Top two would be Cloak or Sumokoin.

Anyone who thinks Monero holds this crown should look at Sumo. Yes its a clone of Monero, but it added features that make it more secure than Monero, such as a minimum ring size of 12 plus subaddresses for even greater anonymity. Sumo should really be called Monero+, cos its Monero with more privacy features added.

Then there's Cloak coin: Faster, Cloak Shield + Enigma Mixer = True end to end privacy!

People hold Bitcoin due the the potential for growth in value. But what good is having value in Bitcoin if you can not sell it for physical items in the real world?

When BTC price is dropping, that's the worst time to sell. People make the mistake of buying when there's a lot of buzz and the price is rising, and selling when price starts to drop. That's the easiest way to lose money in Bitcoin or any other kind of trading for that matter. Bitcoin had surged up over 100% in the last couple months of 2017, this is just a much needed consolidation and slight pullback. Consolidation and pullback phases are always good times to get in, not out. Once this phase is over, the next bull run begins and you can cash in on your profits then.

Is this token considered a security since holders earn interest on their holdings?