It's imperative for your privacy and security that you avoid reusing your addresses as much as possible.

It would be very irresponsible for any wallet software to suggest reusing addresses by default.

However, you can still receive to any of the older addresses that were generated in your wallet forever.  There should be a tab to see addresses that were previously used, and you can see the addresses in your wallet's transaction history or you can save them.

It also doesn't decrease your fees.  Refer to this article for details.

This is not how fees work.  You can send any fee or no fee, it's just that lower ones may not get confirmed depending on the network conditions.

You will pay less fees when using SegWit on a regular basis because the witness data is treated as external, thus making the transaction appear somewhat smaller.

Read more about this here.

Right, so you're suggesting that people pay a price that's 70% more than where they can easily get it elsewhere?

It only takes a very small number of people to do arbitrage trading before your idea gets blown out of the water.  It's impossible for everyone to abide by this - even if it's theoretically possible, it won't get anywhere.

BTC can be manipulated in the same way that any other asset.  There's also no guarantee that it's not being manipulated to make the price rise rather than fall.

Well this thread itself has an example of a poorly generalised statement:
Even if a specific community is very open though, it's important to note that the stereotype threat can be at play in pretty much any group.  Being a minority can be strange for some people.

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https://coin.dance/stats/gender

When blocks are full, what naturally forms is a fee market which displays the supply and demand for space in the blockchain.

Because the trading volume has increased massively over the last few days, there are a lot of people trying to send to exchanges and back, but since the supply of space on the blockchain is still the same, that means that the fees rise until the correct number of transactions are being sent again.

When there's a sudden rise it results in a large number of unconfirmed transactions, but this is usually temporary until the fee market adjusts.

Pros of sending to a SegWit address:

-Significantly lower fees than legacy addresses
-Possibility of LN in the future
-Same chain as legacy (they're both BTC addresses)

Cons:

-There's no standard for signing messages with SegWit addresses, so legacy might be better for verification
-SegWit wallet implementations could potentially be buggy since they're relatively new and not implemented on some major services

If blockchain.info is still similar to when I used it, you can go into "Advanced Send" and customise your fees.  You can set a fee in satoshi/byte.  

Try basing your fees on this site, which in most cases should allow you to set a fee at least a hundred times less than that.  I'd suggest using a fee lower than their "recommended fee" by going to the lowest fee that appears it will confirm within a day or so.

If you have an abnormally large transaction which is resulting in this high fee (which is very unusual) you may have to set very low fees and wait a long time or try and get some help from accelerators.

If you have control over your private keys, you will be able to export them into the fork's reference client, which should be available with a fairly stable release.

It might be a good idea to send your BTC somewhere safe before exporting the keys, because their wallets may be unstable or infected with malware like BTG's client was.
You'll have to read Bitfinex's statements about each fork to see if they intend to credit your account.

In theory, the price would not drop that significantly at this point, because the current volume is at many billions (about 17 billion dollars in the past 24 hours).

Also, they can't simply press a button and sell them all.  It would take a lot of OTC trading and work over a long period of time which would spread it out, so really it would have even less effect on the market than that.

The futures trading could make whales like that have more of an effect if they consciously decide to short it, but still it would take quite a lot to shift BTC at this point.

So many different BTC related sites are coming down at the same time today.  I suspect that it's due to the hype causing people to rush to the websites.  Bitcointalk has been intermittently down as well lately.
I've actually been surprised by the lack of press attention for BTC outside of the business and tech sections.  You'd expect that an event as huge as this would warrant some serious and detailed attention.

What the articles in the main sections seem to be giving is just very basic (and sometimes inaccurate) explanations about what BTC is rather than anything to do with what's actually happening.

Well, Bitfinex's trading volume has increased massively over the past week or so, and since they promised an audit which wasn't delivered and USDT has been created en masse over the last couple of weeks, it's perfectly possible that they are the next Gox.

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BTC's adoption has largely been during bear markets or moderate bull markets (2014-2015).

The price increasing like this is doing nothing good for BTC's use, and if anything is impeding legitimate discussions (and yes, criticisms) of BTC.

When sending a Bitcoin transaction, what you're basically paying for is permanent space on the blockchain.

Because of that, your fee is not linked to how much you're sending, it's linked to how much space you're taking up on the blockchain.  This is why fees are usually measured in satoshi/byte.

The fee is high because there is a limit to how much space a block can take up (1MB) and the high demand for space has resulted in a "fee market" in which people pay higher fees in order to ensure that their transaction is included in a block.

However, you may be able to pay less than that if you want your transaction to be lower priority.  Have a look at this site.

This is one of the last steps for BTC in its awkward and strange transition from "currency" to speculative asset.

It's not really very good as a speculative asset because it opens up the space for loads of altcoins to be heavily speculated on as well, but given the right circumstances it could be a great currency.

I'm hoping that the price will fall somewhat and the Lightning Network will be implemented at a time with less wild price swings.

Most major companies have been pretty far behind in terms of BTC development.  The vast majority of recent transactions have still been legacy transactions rather than SegWit transactions, and most of the major services have not implemented SegWit yet despite the fact that there have been relatively stable releases in TREZOR and a couple of other wallets which have implemented it.

The Lightning Network may take an even longer time.

I doubt that we'll be seeing the full effects of the Lightning Network until a year or two from now, and by then this bull market is fairly likely to have subsided.

Hopefully the Lightning Network will develop well with a more peaceful environment and a more stable price, so that it can be used well by merchants later.

Depends on the PC and the GPU that they have.  No point making generalised statements like that.

Nicehash itself certainly wasn't a waste of time either.  It was convenient and it was useful.  When you have a GPU you can mine a variety of many different coins, and filtering through them all as a solo miner could be a lot of effort.

Regardless, how useful Nicehash was doesn't affect how important it is that their users are losing millions.  It's extremely important.

This is only a very broad estimate and the range is between 2.78 million and 3.79 million.

While Chainalysis seems to be the most well-known and trusted blockchain analysis company in BTC at the moment, its statements should certainly not be treated as fact.  We don't know exactly how much BTC is lost or how much could be lost in the future.

What we do know though is that as the BTC price increases, the chance of people losing coins becomes significantly lower because they're willing to spend more to secure their valuable holdings.

There's also the fact that over time, better and better security systems are being developed and there is more awareness about the most secure ways to hold coins.

Hedge funds sometimes trade pretty aggressively and don't have the same responsibilities that, say, a pension fund has when dealing with their customers' money, so it's perfectly possible that they would decide to short BTC after the introduction of futures contracts.

However, it's also possible that if the euphoria of current speculators continues, they will invest in BTC beyond their means, thus increasing the price extremely dramatically.

Either way, it'll most likely increase volatility.

Steam was one of the very few major merchants left still accepting BTC.

BTC's usage among merchants seems to have been going gradually backwards since the start of the year, with Fiverr dropping it in February and some of the groups that people claim accept Bitcoin not actually doing so or doing so indirectly.

Just goes to show that speculators and an increasing price don't make BTC better. 

Back in 2013 or so, there was a Western Union ad advertising their fees (which were in fact very high).  A picture was circulated to show that BTC, at the time, was a dramatically cheaper and freer payment system.

Now it's a somewhat different battle, since BTC transfer fees are a lot higher since then and they vary dramatically from day to day.

Still, I'd say that BTC and Western Union have very different audiences.  Western Union are unlikely to convince many BTC supporters of anything.

No IMO, due to the rapid and unpredictable price changes that have been happening during this year.  However, if you do decide to do it, remember that it doesn't matter how much BTC you're buying, it matters what the value of that BTC is.
After being seized by the US government, they reopened and reimbursed 55% of their users' funds.  They are still going but it would be a huge risk to try trading on there due to the possibility of them being seized again.
No, not personally.  It's very surprisingly common though.