Metamask and MEW are so popular not because of smartcontracts and dapps, but because it's insanely hard to use any sort of desktop wallets for Ethereum - the blockchain is bloated and even pruned mode doesn't help much, because the syncing is painfully slow and consumes a ton of RAM and CPU time. So, ETH users don't really have much of a choice and have to use this type of clients.

I'm sure there's plenty of Bitcoin wallets in a form of browser extensions or html pages, but people don't use them because there are much better options like good old Bitcoin Core or very popular Electrum.

To me it looks like there's not that much actual money invested in all those coins and tokens with huge marketcaps, simply because these markets mimic every movement of Bitcoin and because their marketcaps are hugely inflated by having tons of premined coins. So, if all the money from alts would be moved to Bitcoin, the total crypto market cap would be way lower than it is now. Also, for the smaller coins there's even no fiat markets, so there's no way to move the value from them into Bitcoin directly.

Also, I like to think about this market is yet another test for Bitcoin - it's constantly attacked by hundreds of coins that claim to be number one, so when this altcoin bubble will burst, people will realize that Bitcoin was objectively the best coin all along and this should deter them from throwing their money at everything new and flashy.

Electrum is by no means "unsafe" in the strict cryptographic meaning of this word, if it was, there would be tons of warnings by experts, like it happened when the last vulnerability was found. If I understand you correctly, you are referring to the vulnerability that requires the knowledge of both master public key and any of the individual private keys. To obtain those keys, attacker would need to either break into the system or use some social engineering to convince the victim to give those keys up, which essentially would mean that any crypto system would be defeated, because they all rely on total secrecy of crypto keys. Realistically, this vulnerability could only be exploited in some big organization when multiple people need to access the same wallet, and someone decided to just give individual private keys from different addresses, not knowing that when combined with master public key, all other addresses get broken. But if someone uses Electrum as their own private cold storage, there's no huge difference in security between it and Core, and this is why Electrum became so popular - it has very good user interface with good functionality, especially for cold storage.

I'm holding a huge portion of my savings in Bitcoin and so far it doesn't affect me much. In my first months in Bitcoin I was getting pretty nervous during big price movements, but now I've built tolerance to it - even the crash from the recent ATH didn't shake me, and it doesn't really bother me that I've missed the chance to short it and buy back low.  I have a strong belief that in the coming years Bitcoin will be much higher than it is now, even though I can't tell any specific number like 50k or 200k.

Bitcoin was created to solve the problem of trust in electronic payment systems where the party that maintains the ledger has absolute control over it and users are totally dependent on them. Banks and centralized payment systems can print money, freeze and seize accounts, rollback transactions, they know about every spending you've made. Bitcoin has successfully solved all these problems in its first day. This is a pretty remarkable achievement, so even if blockchain tech will fail to become widely adopted, and even if Bitcoin won't replace fiat or become massively adopted, millions of people around the world will still find it useful.

Did you read my whole post? I told that Bitcoin different, because it has qualities that can justify it's value - it has community, it has very professional developers, it has huge PoW and it has achievable goals. We can't know if the current price is mostly speculative or if it is backed by the real use, but it's clear that altcoins are in bubble, it's absurd to have coins and tokens with nothing more than a whitepaper have billions in marketcap, it's absurd to have copypaste forks have any price bigger than zero.

The market will sort everything out eventually, the hype and speculation can't last forever, cryptocurrencies need to have some fundamental properties that will back their value, otherwise they are just cheap copypaste of earlier coins. And government can't solve this irrational behavior of investors - they can crack down on some obvious scams, but they can't do much against the projects that start with somewhat legit ideas. After all, regulators didn't prevent the dotcom bubble.

Cryptocurrency market will crash because "crypto tech" is not solving anything - most altcoins and tokens are just vaporware and scams, those that have working networks are miles away from delivering on their promises, which they won't do, because they are unrealistic and developers are not competent enough. Bitcoin is different because it actually has developers who believe in the project and have the skills to keep on improving the protocol year after year. The market will crash when the speculative period will be over, because big investors won't see any fundamentals that can lead to success, only empty promises and hype.

1. The government's will likely not care, there's not much regulations for cryptocurrencies and there's so much scams in the world in general that it's probably impossible to effectively crack down on it, especially at this age when people do it over the Internet from any country in the world and can create as much fake profiles as they want. It only makes sense to try to catch only the biggest offenders and educate people about scams.

2. Those groups aren't created to benefit participants, they are created to scam them. And the people behind them only care about their own pocket. But you shouldn't worry too much about the public image of cryptocurrencies, every technology has some downsides and risks, but the legitimate use will always outweigh it.

It's too early to tell for sure. Thousands of startups and companies tell us that they will use blockchain to solve almost any problem in the world, but so far there's no good working example that show how blockchain is used in some industry. Also, it's not entirely correct to compare different blockchains, because blockchain is very closely tied to its parent network, and there are lots of different project configurations - there are private and public networks, permissioned and permissionless, small network and big networks, hierarchical and peer-to-peer and so on - public and open blockchains like Bitcoin have proved themselves to be working and stable, but the same has not been proven for all those other kinds of experimental blockchains. Bitcoin has already repelled many attacks, time will tell whether other blockchains are resistant to attacks or not.

Blockchain is not some magic wand that can fix everything, it's just a type of database. Problems like poverty and famine are not cased by databases obviously, they are social problems that need social solutions. Some people believe that blockchain can curb corruption, but it hasn't been tested yet, and it also seems unlikely, because there are many examples of technological attempts to solve corruption fail, because corrupt individuals often find ways to circumvent them.

Isn't this the same guy who recently told that Bitcoin will kill the Internet? Nothing shocking here, some bankers are really scared and frustrated seeing people creating their own money, and they were also taught that money is the creation of banks, totally ignoring thousands of years of history. Ironically, their public display of fear and anger might only make cryptocurrency stronger, because it means that cryptocurrencies are working as intended - disrupting the banks.

I think only people who are very unfamiliar with Bitcoin or those who are extremely prejudiced are viewing Bitcoin as money for illegal trades. This is because those who are at least a bit familiar with Bitcoin got their information from some videos, articles or from their friends, and so far I haven't seen any media that describe Bitcoin as criminal money, it's more common to hear that it's a bubble and fad. So, there's no big need to save Bitcoin's reputation, it will all get fixed by itself eventually when the technology and the market will get more mature.

I think the popularity of libertarian ideas is a good indicator of how adopted cryptocurrencies will be - at the current moment it would be just a few percents. A lot of crypto enthusiasts keep comparing cryptocurrencies and blockchain to the Internet, automobile, lightbulb and other great inventions, but the problem with this comparison is that cryptocurrencies aren't making any great breakthrough, at the current state their user experience is much worse than banks for an average user, and if cryptocurrencies will solve all their problems, they still don't offer anything that could attract the masses - people don't care about centralization and freedom, they just gonna use whatever is the most cheap and convenient.

Bitcoin, as always, is driving this market up an down, altcoins are mostly traded against it, so when it jumps $10 and alts don't change in their BTC price, they are also jumping 10% in USD, so the whole market moves. The same happens when the market goes down, perhaps even harder, because traders usually sell alts to then sell BTC, as there's often no way to sell alts for fiat. So, it's not surprising to see large changes in the whole marketcap, but this doesn't mean that investead money are spread among all coins.

The last rally was so long and so big that a huge portion of Bitcoin users consists of people who entered at that time - they have no experience of hodling during bear market, witnessing 70% decline from ATH and hodling at a loss. It's natural that they are worried, even if they know well that similar trends  happened in the past and Bitcoin successfully recovered and reached new highs - it's just not the same as experiencing that process yourself.

It doesn't really matter what's happening with the price now, there can be many scenarios, but in the long run they will lead to the same result - Bitcoin will go up again, unless something big and unexpected happens  (which is very unlikely).

As for predictions, a lot of them are probably just shilling, so I wouldn't pay much attention to them. And a lot of people don't think that Bitcoin is going to crash to the ground, they just want to be sure they are buying at the bottom or after the bottom, and for now it's too early to say that we have seen it or passed it.

I believe the huge percentage of ICO funds come from the scammers themselves who put their own ETH into contracts to create an illusion of confidence and induce FOMO in potential victims. So, the actual amount of coins invested in ICO's might be going down, despite the seeming popularity of ICO's, but it's still way higher than it should be, people should be treatening all ICO's as scams, and in cases when they are conducted by some big and established entities, they are still insanely high risk investments, because there's no successful ICO's that have delivered a full working product.

Your questions are impossible to answer without any additional assumptions - if he will just say something generic like "Hi, I'm back", then we don't know what will he say regarding the current Bitcoin protocol, developers, community, rival forks, etc. What I think is most likely happen immediately is the market panic, BTC will probably drop 2-5% percent as speculators will be scared that the biggest rumored whale might sell his coins. If Satoshi will be positive regarding Bitcoin, it might experience a small boost, if he will be critical, the price will somewhat drop, but I'm sure it won't crash too much, as a lot of people now have their own opinions regarding cryptocurrency protocols. If Satoshi would stand against Bcash, it will crash to the ground, because it is based on the premise that its the "original Satoshi's vision" and that Craig Wright is Satoshi.

For honest miners who have invested a lot of resources in their operations and are viewing Bitcoin as a long-term business, it should make a lot of sense to use pools like these that are guaranteed to not be used against Bitcoin. But if established miners offer better fees or other advantages that translate directly into profits, than it shouldn't be surprising that most miners will choose them, because the nature of this business is very marginal. And lets not forget that Bitmain can use their influence to force miners into using their pools.