you are missing the biggest difference which is actually the reason why people aren't "investing" in bitcoin these days.

that  difference is the fact that people who "gained" bitcoin back in 2009 and basically in early years weren't getting in because they wanted to make "fiat profit". instead they got involved with bitcoin because they saw the true potential of a decentralized payment system that nobody can censor and works globally.
but these days most people are interested in that "fiat profit" which is why they are reluctant to buy bitcoin now!!! but if they started to ignore the monetary gains and focused on the real value of bitcoin they wouldn't hesitate to buy it.

what you are describing is no longer blockchain and has no cryptography involved anymore. it is just a database like what banks have where you own an account which has an associated balance with it. and unless you can find a way to decentralize it and include cryptography in it so that there is no way of cheating that "balance" without needing a centralized entity to update these balances and control fraud, you won't be able to implement your idea.

yes, the best way of remaining anonymous according to Craig Scammer Wright is to always connect to NSA and report all your activities down to every detail willingly
because that is where we land with big blocks, a handful of nodes run by NSA which you have to connect to.

Paypal's first days was just as bad as bitcoin's if not worse. they even had to give away money to make people come and trust their company and use it to make payments on the internet! I don't know for a fact if it was called that but I am sure it was considered a nerd money back then too.

it is just about being young, new and different. so people have to be bothered to learn how to use it and since they are usually lazy they don't learn and instead they choose to see it as a strange thing and end up with names such as "nerd money" to explain it to themselves and justify their own laziness.

is it really?
I am really not familiar with these things but from what I have read it seems like something IRS would be interested in most of all and it has nothing to do with "recognition as currency" but rather seeing the large amount of money that went in and out of cryptocurrency market in 2017 and the government wanting his share of the "taxes".

using another centralized service instead of some other centralized service for exchanging your cryptocurrencies is hardly the best method of "keeping your bitcoins safe" as your title suggests! you are giving up one bad solution for another bad solution.

also regarding wallets, most of the "multi currency" wallets are new and still have a lot of bugs that need fixing before they can be considered as a safe way of storing your funds not to mention that many of them still don't have any easy way of setting up a cold storage. they are usually focused on being hot wallets instead.

like the peak of a bubble, the low of a bottom is impossible to predict.

this means by the time bitcoin price went from $9k to $15k in ~15 days, it was already in the bubble but you could not say whether it is the "top" or not. we eventually figured that the "top" is at $19900 or $20k if you round it up.
now is exactly the same. price has dropped and has reached the end of the drop but you can never say where the "bottom" is. we are already at the bottom but price may or may not go any lower.

with that said I think there is no point in asking this question because you are basically asking people to make a guess on something they CAN NOT predict.

another reason why you are wrong about thinking a fork coin can lead to a bull run is that we have already had a lot of these fork coins and they all failed. if you look at their prices, the first one had the highest value and then from then on, each consecutive fork had a lower value and as we reached about 20th fork coin the prices reached about 10k satoshi and lower until by the 50th fork coin they were basically worthless to the point where they wouldn't even succeed in lengthening their blockchain for a single day.

no, they are being robbed and scammed because they chose a centralized place to put their decentralized bitcoin. in other words they got scammed the day they decided to leave their bitcoins on exchanges and not have control over their private keys. and this has nothing to do with decentralization!

so you start by talking about decentralization but then demand centralization through regulations?!

this is just some kid trying to troll people. he probably lost a lot of money in cryptocurrencies after investing in a bunch of shitcoins and ICOs that went belly up and the pressure of losing that much money in his parent's basement made him delusional and led into thinking that his "hand" was an "escort" or a  "famous pornstar" LOL. he just has a good imagination, that's all. the cure is simple too, he just has to get out of that basement and let some sun shine on his head. the fresh air would also help.

to be fair that is not an indication of good future for cryptocurrencies though. these companies aren't making profit from cryptocurrencies, they are making profit from people using the services they offer. so whether bitcoin is $3000 or $20000 they will make profit only if people use their exchange, use their web wallet, or use their merchant interface and pay them fees for using those services.

the best solution is still cold storage and that can also be used for your passwords too. meaning you don't save them in your browser but store them elsewhere in a place when your computer doesn't access it. like on a paper or on your phone (assuming your phone is not connected to internet or infected) or something like that.

there is nothing wrong about that but that only puts you in the minority. there are many different groups of people, most of them are accumulating bitcoin. they may cash out at the top when the price is near the ATH for the maximum profit and then put it somewhere else, although rarely in gold, but they all eventually come back to bitcoin again as the drops end. meaning these days that price is near the bottom.

when it comes to doing arbitrage trading it is always a good idea to keep in mind that you are not the only one doing it. it may sound like a silly thing at first but it helps in a lot of scenarios. like knowing that you are in a deadline that is approaching fast and you need to be quick or in your case knowing that if 50% profit was truly possible then at least 2 dozen other traders have been all over it!

another thing that I think is worth mentioning based on your case is to always check that you are actually looking at the same coins on both markets! trust me when I say this that in a lot of cases you think they are the same but you are looking at two different coins. like bitcoin-cash versus bitconnect which both are shown as BCC on some exchanges, or bitcoin-cash which Bitcoin.com sells to people fakely as bitcoin. or the case of USDT versus USD.
if price of bitcoin is 3500 US dollars and USDT value drops to 0.9 dollar instead of 1 dollar then you will see bitcoin value as 3888 USDT and that can be misleading.

it is because 90% of what is usually found on the internet is pure garbage specially when it is cryptocurrency related. such as the Youtube videos telling you how to trade altcoins and what to trade. so reading them and watching these videos is only going to mislead you!

1) that is the key! you either have experience or don't. it is not impossible to gain experience but it requires hard work and spending a lot of time.
2) having fear is not a bad thing. in fact it is perfectly natural to fear what is going to happen to your money as long as it is not affecting your better judgment.
3) patience is what bag holders tell themselves to justify their idiocy.
4) you already said it in your #1

to be fair when Bakkt was announced the market was in pretty bad shape already. we have been having ETFs rejected left and right by SEC and people were hearing how they are going to approve it and how price is going to rise then BAM they rejected another one
so nobody believed in Bakkt either. additionally there was the downtrend which was still ongoing and then the BCH attack which actually happened at the time when Bakkt was supposed to launch and that pulled the price down drastically. no other news could have done any better.

actually the chart looks like it is flat lining also known as the stable phase which accompanied by the high volume shows the accumulation that is taking place in the background and is ongoing still.

as for analysis, it is hard to analyze anything at times like this. we know that there has been a large drop so far, we also know that the $3k buy support is very strong and we also know that bitcoin is s till very new, unpredictable and also growing. all of which means that the chances of price starting to rise soon is pretty high. if I were a gambling man I would start placing my bets about it.

bitcoin has been growing constantly and with a very solid foundation. everything else you hear about it is just noise that is lost in the vast background of bitcoin. and it is not about the price or other silly characteristics such as market capitalization. it is all about the actual growth and adoption that bitcoin had, all the infrastructure that has been build and continues being build on top of bitcoin and because of bitcoin.

since bitcoin is not some pump and dump shitcoin, its price will never "pump" and people like Mc Afee are only a tiny part of the ecosystem and their effects are only focused on the shitcoins, mostly the ICOs which he was advertising and getting paid for them and the altcoins that he obviously pumped.
other than that bitcoin is on its own trajectory and whales may manipulate it in short term but the long term direction and the final mass adoption result can not be change.

these aren't exactly celebrities. or at least you can all them lowest tier celebs
and what they are doing is in fact shilling, since like anybody else in the world they also want to make profit and like any other newbies they also can fall for the s cams of altcoins and ICOs. so when they are already caught up in the web of deceit set by the ICOs, they want to get out of it by pulling others in that trap.
this has also been happening for a long time too. the market always corrects itself in about a year or two when it gets rid of all these shitcoins and these "promoters" together as they get dumped to zero.

you are mostly wrong.
having more than one investment is not going to give you more profit, and also having more than one investment (aka diversification) is not about making more profit, it is instead about reducing the risk of your investment while still making profit.
so when you buy something else like gold it is because you want to have a stake in another market that is not going to drop with bitcoin, or vice versa, you buy bitcoin because you want to have something that doesn't drop with gold. so that if one of them dropped you are not in total loss.

besides OP is not even talking about diversification! he is talking about people giving up bitcoin and buying gold instead. and he is saying they are dong it now that it is not time to sell but the time to buy