what exactly do you mean by this?
this is nothing new. ever since government existed and centralized businesses existed that were handling money, the government were intervening in their operations and demanded regulations and also asked for their "cut".
it didn't start with bitcoin exchanges. this has been the case for hundreds of years.

not to mention that these exchanges such as Coinbase (specially since they ar in US) have been already handing over their data to the government agencies, they put up some public front with their lawyers,... but behind the curtains they are working with them.

you are 100% correct but at the same time you have to keep in mind that there is nothing wrong with being interested in bitcoin price and wanting to make profit. in fact many of those who understand bitcoin, want the financial freedom and the decentralization and all the other things bitcoin offers, also enjoy the profit that bitcoin is giving them.
it is more like hitting two birds with one stone. you take advantage of bitcoin while you also increase your purchasing power as bitcoin value increases.

lol no.
if anything the quality of altcoins has declined hard over the past 2-3 years. specially ever since the ICOs became a thing in this market, everyone kept creating shitcoins and published them reducing the quality of new projects more and more.
that dude you are quoting is exaggerating though. unfortunately altcoins aren't going to die that easily. they will continue to get pumped and dumped for a couple of more years.

the problem is that people who can't control their own balance and reach zero losing everything can't control their gambling habits so even if such feature were added they would still go back down to zero because they simply will try to follow their losses and make it back (like in martingale method) and go in their setting and disable the feature to continue losing.

this is a day trading strategy, and while it is good but it is only suitable for those who want to accumulate more fiat because in bitcoin, the price always goes up. so while you are trying to make these small profits from the short term fluctuations, at some point you will end up selling and waiting for the price to come back down to buy back but the price shoots up and you will have to buy at a loss (meaning buy less bitcoin that you could afford before). which is why it will only work if you mean to accumulate more fiat.

yes altcoins are heavily manipulated but not bitcoin, at least not anymore. the bigger bitcoin market gets the harder it will be to manipulate it and it has grown so much in the past 10 years that the manipulations have shrank down a lot. while they still dominate the altcoin market.

i strongly disagree, specially if you are talking about trading cryptocurrencies not just bitcoin. if you could secure 20% profit in a shitcoin that is getting pumped it is so much better than trying to make 1000% profit and risk getting dumped on without being able to pull anything out.

what returns you expect should not be a general thing for all situations. it differs based on the situation. for example was in a day trading thing or a long term investment. was it during a bull run or a bear market. was it bitcoin or an altcoin. was it during the pump of the altcoin or when it was at the bottom,....
each scenario means a different approach and a different profit target.

that is because a lot of people in this market have no understanding of what cryptocurrencies are. they just see some numbers in their monitor which magically (in their eyes) go up and down.
otherwise those with understanding of the technology also understand there is nothing "mystical" about it! and the value can also be quantified.

this is yet another dangers of this market. it can easily give newcomers a false sense of expertise. for example during 2017 if you closed your eyes and selected any coin randomly and thrown money at it, you could make a ton of profit.
many of those who made such profits, thought they have mastered this market and that led to massive losses a couple of months later when the reality hit.

i don't think the government can ever regulate mixers! by definition a mixer must remain unregulated. so all they could do is either shut them down and the mixers will either shut down or move away to somewhere that those governments can not touch them anymore.
and all this drama will only make things more decentralized. for example if they start shutting down mixers then things such as Coinjoin will become more popular, Anon coins like Monero would fly to the moon,...

when you are trading you have to pay taxes. it is not about bitcoin, but trading in general when there is profit involved. and even if you are doing it off the exchanges you still have to pay taxes according to the law. if you are not fine with it then you have to change the law instead of evading it, that would mean doing something illegal and tax evasion can have dire consequences,

what you call "low rated exchanges" are the same as top exchanges that only have lower volume. they both are doing the same exact thing too. the only difference is that the bigger exchanges have a better popularity so they can get bigger scams that hide their tracks so much better than the shitty ones that have to choose the small exchanges.
in the end the big exchanges like Binance started IEO because they wanted the extremely large amounts of money they earn through bribes they can get in return for advertising the scam fundraising operations.

1. i wouldn't put it like that but essentially true. projects that are standalone are generally better because the developer has put more thought into them. but not all of them. just like tokens they can also copy some code and change some arbitrary lines and create a new useless coin that ends up in the same graveyard.
2. that is true.
3. whether ETH will go up ever or not won't change anything about the token prices. people still have to buy those token for their prices to go up.

be careful because it is so easy to confuse high market activity with manipulation. and based on your comment it seems like you might have actually confused the two together. there are times in the market that a very large number of trades take place in a very short amount of time. it doesn't mean that market is being manipulated, it just means there is more traders active at that time for some reason. the reason can be anything too, like breaking a certain resistance and their stop losses going off.

and by the way don't rely too much on big orders that bots keep placing and updating regularly a little deeper than the top order. those can never be an indicator of which direction the price would go.

sorry, there is no such thing as "4 year cycle" in bitcoin. it only happened once in past 10 years. and now people are forcing themselves into believing there is such trend by only relying on that one time (2013 to 2017)!
that doesn't make it a cycle.

when people talk about "long term" and bullishness of bitcoin they are talking about the over all trend that happens over the years not in some couple of months or even one year. meaning price may be down this month (for example) but it will be up in a year from now.

that is an entirely different discussion and it is not something you could see by drawing some lines on the charts!
your argument is that bitcoin adoption has come to an end and no more people are going to ever adopt bitcoin. that simply is false. the adoption has not yet happened for more than 1% of the world. we still have a long way to go.

your "theory" doesn't have any reasons in it. you are basically making guesses based on your own feeling.
try explaining it and come up with reasons first. for example why do you think bitcoin adoption has come to an end while it is just starting up?

the problem with investing in altcoins is not just about them being trash because even if they weren't, they are still following bitcoin! which means those who think they are "diversifying" into altcoins, are changing their money into something that moves (in fiat terms) smaller than bitcoin and whenever bitcoin falls they fall harder.

and in bitcoin terms they are always falling down. which is the common case with majority of altcoin investors since they invest their bitcoin (fiat > bitcoin > altcoins) and whenever bitcoin goes up like these days, those altcoins lose value against bitcoin which means these investors are losing a lot more money since they are losing their total BTC amount.

everyone who has ever mentioned "waste of electricity" and "bitcoin" in the same sentence have been trying to attack bitcoin for different purposes. the thing is, the amount of energy used on its own is not an indicating factor about being wasteful or not. it is about why that amount of energy is used and what is given in return.
in case of bitcoin, the purpose which all of those attackers deliberately ignore is to have a unique global payment system that can not be shut down, censored, or controlled. it works 24/7 and literary everyone on the entire planet can use it if they choose to because there is no centralized authority that can prevent them for any arbitrary reason like being from certain country or nonsense like that.
for this valuable service, the amount of electricity used is nothing!

it is the most obvious thing and it didn't really need any "research"!
ever since 2017 when the ICO hype started dying and with it the ETH price started dumping consistently, the use of this platform has been declining because that is the only use case of it and nothing else. with ICOs near death, the usage is nearly zero.
on top of that we have a lot of other platforms that are more efficient and much easier to use for smart contracts which is why ethereum is losing its market share.
then on top of all that, we have exchanges that got into the game of scamming through fund raising and started the IEO thing with their own tokens so there is no need for ETH anymore.

the result is the decline.

none of these services do any of the things you said. what they do is that they are removing the risk entirely but for the owners of the site because they are not investing their own money, they are using other people's money to invest and when they make profit, they will take their cut and if there is a loss then it is the user who is experiencing the loss while THEY still get paid so they make profit either way.

because centralized services don't work for free. they have to pay for hosting, labor and a lot of other things. not to mention that it is a business that is suppose to make money for their owners. so when you are using their platform you have to pay for it. hence the whatever percentage fee different services charge you.

the thing about Dota 2 if you have watched some of the tournaments is that apart from the team work and all that, the strategies these teams use is one of the key factors in their winning. sometimes we see some unknown Chinese team come along and use some crazy strategy that beats every team out there! i remember back in Dota 1 (Warcraft before Valve took over) there was a team that picked the craziest heros that didn't even match each other and all went to one lane at the bottom! the other team (the experts of that time) were beaten in about 10 minutes because they couldn't fight that combo that rushed their lane from first second!

the volume isn't "too great" because we are still in the sideways action mode even though it may look like this was a bull break,... and that makes most investors anxious while day traders more active. in other words the investors are trying to wait for the signal (breaking above $12k properly or maybe $13k) before they invest and that makes it ideal for the day traders who are making profit from these 5% ups and downs that keep repeating every couple of days.

your anxiety doesn't make any sense to me!
you don't have to wait to know if the address was correct or not. when you past it in your wallet to pay to, first you check if it was pasted correctly by simply checking a couple of characters from the start and the end. then you only let the wallet check the validity of the address (encoding and checksum) and do the rest.
as soon as you click send and the transaction is sent to the bitcoin network, you are done. there is no reason to wait 30 minutes for 3 confirmation to be sure if it was  correct or not!