$25k is just too low to be a prediction.
this year with halving and all the other adoption that has been going on we could easily see $25k in summer and that is if the rally doesn't start sooner. by the end of the year we could very well be seeing another bubble even.

hype is not a bad thing just like pump and dumps aren't if you are looking from a perspective of a trader who is looking to make profit which is what everyone around here want to be!
FOMO is bad if it is idiotic and based on nothing. otherwise a trader could always benefit from "FOMO" in general for example when you see this happening you could buy that shitcoin but sell it fast. even making a 5% profit in a matter of hours is great and you won't find it anywhere else. another use for a trader could be to see the fake hype like when a large number of newbies come to bitcointalk to advertise a shitcoin as a sell signal to dump it on those newbies and get his profit out.

nobody has ever supported centralized shitcoins ever and this is not about to change in the future. and coins like this one only got some short term traction because of the name and the million dollars that were behind them trying to pump and make profit. they all have a short life which comes to an end when they reach that expiration date. in 2020 it will be an old pumped coin on track of dying not anything else.

there is a fine line between crazy and stupid predictions!

going from $8700 to $20k is only possible under two circumstances:
1. if we were already in a bull run like in 2017 and there was a gigantic momentum.
this is obviously not true.
2. if bitcoin were a pump and dump shitcoin
this is also obviously not true.

so no your "prediction" is not possible.

this is possible but we can't put a time frame on it. when it comes to long term prediction, all we can do is guess the price not the time.

when the rise starts and kicks the bulls to wake up then it won't take that long to reach a new ATH followed by a bubble. in 2 years we are probably after the bubble in the correction phase so i don't think 236k which is a random number you came up with could be true.

i think the point of what OP says is to remind others that bitcoin is more about financial sovereignty and taking that control back in your own hands.
it is all a beginning, you can't expect wide usage of bitcoin as payments (to buy something) this early on. but it is happening everywhere.

welcome to the ICO scam world. it is obviously your first time here so let me tell you that this is one of the oldest and most see through tricks in the books of scammers. basically every time they want to fool newbies into feeling like "missing out" they throw some big names at them, it is usually a fake "partnership" and on rarer occasions they say actual "investment". it has always been the most obvious lie since most of these businesses are too big to even care about some token on a shitty platform they don't even like.
besides ICOs are illegal in most countries including USA which means Microsoft is not even legally allowed to get involved in an ICO even if they wanted to

nobody!
it has been said a million times before, experts don't waste their time on social media making predictions and publishing them for people to read. experts (the real ones not the self claimed idiots) go to the market and use their own speculation to make profit. only those who either want to scam others or manipulate them to make profit elsewise spread their guesses on social media.

the first step is NOT starting with 2 BTC!!!
you say you have no experience in trading and you just heard some people hype the profit for you, that is the most common reason for thousands of people who lost money in this market.
people already posted a lot of good suggestions here but none of them matter when you have such a large amount of money at stake in a market you do not understand.
the solution is very simple too, you first have to reduce that capital to something more reasonable like $100 and then follow the suggestions here and learn trading.

no it won't help with adoption at all, people aren't going to adopt cryptocurrencies just because a random altcoin exchange, no matter how big, started accepting fiat for day tradings! and this is only a step in right direction to make his business even bigger and run a bigger monopoly in altcoin trading business and push other smaller exchanges that may even be better out of the game! and this kind of centralization is very dangerous in this market. it simply gives them too much power to manipulate the altcoin market as they see fit.

most of the sectors you named won't even go well with blockchain technology because their needs don't match what the technology offers. the only possible thing remaining is the banking sector and based on what i have heard and also based on what we have seen from other countries such as Venezuela there is a good chance that the funds is going to be spent in banking sector and in creating a centralized government owned coin.

in case of ethereum, fork is meant to "patch up" the sinking ship so that it can remain afloat for a little bit longer than it could otherwise. there are some issues that you can never solve no matter how much you try. in that ship analogy it would be like trying to fix it while all the components are rotten, corroded and are falling apart.
for example you can't do anything with the 3+ TB blockchain of ethereum! it is that big and you can't undo that. people who want to run a real full node (not the pruned mode they call full node) have to download the entire thing otherwise they are using a centralized blockchain that may be fake and changed.

i don't really find anything this guy says to have any kind of value whatsoever because it does not matter what he says, the only thing that matters to me is WHY he says it. you mentioned his bitcoin price predictions and the fact that you think he is too bullish, but he isn't bullish he is bullshit. all he said ever about bitcoin price has been to advertise himself and gain some popularity that he could later on use to make money by scamming people!
and he is doing it again too. he first starts by playing on people's emotions and say what they want to hear (eg. bitcoin to the moon) and then feeds them his crap such as advertising shitcoins that he wants pumped, ICO scams,...

there is no way anybody can answer that for you, specially not a website that you are looking for. most of them are full of shit and are trying to feed you their own biased views on the market and make some money in the process from you!

however, we are getting closer to the end of the year and we are running out of time for a big rise. if it continues this way into December (meaning below $10k level) then there won't be any rise until January or even February.
right now everyone has their eyes on $10k, if it breaks and price goes above it with even a small momentum, then the "big rise" will start and we most probably see an initial big shoot up. the more we stay in below $10k level the bigger that shoot up is going to be too.

the attack was more like a political thing rather than a real attack and it was from Syrian or maybe even from US trying to increase the tension in the region. in any case the only reason why this company is releasing this unrealistic profit is because they are trying to keep their damage to a minimum by trying to show the investors they are "OK" even after the losses they sustained. and also to try and prevent the IPO from failing and make some money from it.

this is not always necessarily true.
you can use the "name" bitcoin in your product without any issues but when it comes to a "logo" things are different. logos are designed by designers and it is their intellectual property so they own the copyright for it. you can only use it IF they allow you. since the orange bitcoin logo was placed in public domain and for free use, he can do it. otherwise there may be another bitcoin logo design by someone else that is not "free to use".

this looks exciting and all for bitcoin believers around here but i can't help but wonder about the tax implications of doing something like this in New York. i am not really familiar with NY state laws but since US hasn't accepted bitcoin as a currency but only as a commodity, doesn't it mean that he now has to pay a gigantic tax on his $15.3 million purchase of a commodity?

you have to wonder what would the "value" of a blockchain that is deployed in a few seconds by a newbie who has no understand of the technology is going to be when there are blockchain projects that have taken years to build by expert developers!

the idea of it alone is absurd.
the whole point of this movement starting with bitcoin has been to solve problems and create useful tools (eg a currency) that people could use not create something as quick as possible to earn money in easiest way you can!!!

the problem is that these DEXes that we see today aren't really "decentralized exchanges" in my opinion.

a decentralized exchange in its true form must not contain any kind of middle man whatsoever which means there is absolutely  NO FEES  involved when using a "true DEX". the exchange will only be between two parties through a secure channel using cryptography, hashed locktime smart contracts similar to what bitcoin has and the only fee is the transaction (aka network) fees.
with introduction of Atomic Swap technology which majority of altcoins (since they are copies of bitcoin) have this becomes an even bigger reality.

as a result i don't think there is going to be that much "fees" to earn from DEXes in the future as the current design will become obsolete eventually too. just like the centralized "altcoin" exchanges (not those that have fiat involved) will become obsolete too.

that is not "astonishing", there are other idiots bigger than him with a lot more "zombie" followers. that doesn't make them experts though. in fact 99% of those who are posting analysis on Youtube don't have any understanding of the market and most of them don't even trade. i wouldn't be surprised to learn that they don't even own any bitcoin or own very little like 0.001!

the thing is those that are actually "experts" will never waste their time on creating Youtube videos for the pennies youbute pays them

bitcoin is not a person to produce pollution, it is not a machine to burn fuel and produce pollution either. bitcoin is just zeros and ones on your computer which is then connected to the "grid" which is then goes to an electric company and that company is burning fuel and producing pollution.
so in other words your quarrel is not with bitcoin, it is with that company and if you want to reduce the carbon footprint you have to go to the electric companies and petition them to start polluting the environment less.