The market is driven by speculators. If there are some bad news, even if they are very small and unreliable, speculators expect to see some price drop, so they start selling, because they see it as earning opportunity. This selling amplifies the price drop far beyond what would have happened initially - then the noobs start to panic and sell too. In the end, some people profit from buying in the dip or just buying back lower than they have sold, while others loss their money when they sell at the bottom. This is how it always was, so it's better to just hodl if you aren't an expert trader.

First, China is rumored to ban exchanges, not Bitcoin itself. From technical point of view, this would have zero direct effect on the network.
If China banned Bitcoin and enforced it via their ISP's, then all nodes from China would stop to operate and the Bitcoin network would be only accessible  via TOR and VPN. This mean there would be no forking and no "Chinese only" Bitcoin. Such fork might be theoretically possible if all Chinese nodes were cutoff from the rest of the network by The Great Chinese Firewall, but even if one node communicated with the main network, the whole "Chinese only" Bitcoin would reorg, because main net chain will be longer.

Bounty pools usually represent 1% to 5% of received ICO funds. If an average ICO gets a few millions of dollars, then an average bounty pool is a five figure number. But a single person can't claim the whole bounty pool, usually it's spread between 50-100 users. Some users claim bounties multiple times, but that's cheating and they often get caught and banned, so don't do it. So, a very active bounty participant can expect to get $100 per bounty campaign if he does all tasks - signature, twitter, article, translation, etc. So, here's your answer - in order to become a millionaire from bounties, you would have to participate in ~10,000 campaigns, which is unrealistic. This number could be brought down if you have saved your rewards and waited till they skyrocket - but it comes with a risk of losing your value if your tokens drop (which they usually do at some point).

"Don't care about" might be not optimal, as people start caring about money pretty quickly - even hundreds of dollars are big enough to stop risking for many people. It's better think about investments in terms of worst case EV - lets say you can afford to lose $1,000 - then you invest $2,000 but promise yourself to sell if the price will go down 2 times lower from the one you've bought in. This will be much more profitable than investing $1,000, because you will have more coins in the first case. The downside of first method is that it is more likely that Bitcoin will drop 2 times than that it will drop to near zero, but I think the difference is not too big, because the chances that it will continue growing are much higher.

It may be possible that the Chinese government is directly involved in Bitcoin price manipulation as a part of their broad plan to control Bitcoin - just remember that most miners are located in China and Bitmain, the biggest miner manufacturer, is also Chinese, and play their own game with attempt to get more control over Bitcoin. There are even rumors that Bitmain is closely tied to Chinese government. Maybe China was stockpiling bitcoins for a couple of years already and would like to see it as a global currency some day, so they can utilize their strong position in it.

The speed of big price swings on Bitcoin markets clearly indicates that Bitcoin is still in highly speculative state. In traditional markets the price only changes a fraction of percent during the day and day traders utilize leverages to boost their profits, while in Bitcoin leverages may be extremely risky. In my opinion this means that the price can still grow much higher, as we enter from speculative phase to mass adoption by investors and users. Higher volumes should bring volatility down, which will boost adoption and volumes even further.

If you want to be extra careful, you can wait a week to see if there will be more dips - we seem to be entering a new FUD season, so further drops are certainly possible. But Bitcoin has also been showing a lot of strength, so maybe the bull run will soon continue and we'll again try to test $5,000/ Whatever you choose, it's better to stick to your position and not try to follow trends, because Bitcoin markets are highly speculative, and some market makers are in much better position than amateur traders. Try to invest for a longer periods of time, at least a year - so far the price have been almost always higher than 1 year ago, except for 2013 crash.

It doesn't really matter how you bet, there will never be a safe bet (that would mean free money for players and free loss for casino). The safest bet you can get on dice sites would have 98-99% chance to win, but the payout would be extremely small, so to get any decent returns, you would have to make huge bets, and with each bet you will be risking to lose it all. And your Expected Value will always be the same, not matter which strategy do you use, so in the long run you can expect pretty close results from all strategies.

The best way to counter manipulation is to do the opposite - if you hear FUD rumors, buy Bitcoin instead if selling. Not only you will be likely to profit, you may also deny any profits to the people behind the FUD, and also make them lose money, because they usually open short positions before launching FUD. Alternatively, you can turn from trader into hodler, thus decreasing Bitcoins volatility and lowering available supply on the market.

Russia is hopping back and forth between banning crypto and embracing it, for me it even looks like an attempt to manipulate the market, although it seems to be not as successful as the classic "China bans Bitcoin". Don't trust what Russia says, they can always change their mind, and for now they are just waiting and trying to figure out how to benefit from crypto in the best way. Also, if you read you news from some sites, it's very likely that they are nor fresh and are already priced in, whales have much better sources and make their moves before the public hears about it.

I think it's very unlikely that alts will get major improvements before Bitcoin does. It may seem like alts are ahead and can offer new important features, but at the same time they are highly experimental, very often they require hard forks and critical patches to fix bugs, and most of them have some underlying flaws. Bitcoin developers were considered many of those features, like for example PoS or smart contracts. a long time ago, and they have decided that they will damage Bitcoins decentralization, which they see as the most important feature and the primary source of Bitcoins value. And major investors understand it too, so it's unlikely that we will see any flippening, unless something really big will happen.

Day trading without any information that can give you an edge, especially on unregulated markets, is one of the worst things you can do in finance, especially if you buy/sell in panic mode. Smart people make very long term bets, by picking something that in their opinion has untapped potential - this is why so many people tell others to just hodl, because Bitcoin can grow to 5 or 6 figures if it will continue getting adoption. It's better to just relax and stop checking price and news every 20 minutes and thinking when to sell - it's investment for years and decades.

When it comes to real world illegal casinos, they are often tied to organized crime, because organized crime just takes every illegal business under its wing - drugs, prostitution, gunsm etc. But on the internet, casinos can be very independent, as they don't need any "protection". So, they are just like any other business, trying to offer the best service to their customers. There's a common misconception that casinos get profit because they are cheating, but in reality they just have a small publicly disclosed edge, and when it comes to Bitcoin casinos, this edge is much smaller than the edge of legal fiat casinos. I personally had very good experience with Bitcoin casinos, and I see that they really care for their customers and always try to improve.

Accepting Bitcoin as payment for work has its own pros and cons. First of all, you can easily connect with people from any point on the globe, something that might be not always possible in traditional financial system. The fees will also be much lower, and you might even bypass some annoying regulations and won't have to rely on third party payment processors. As for cons, I think volatility is the biggest one. Sometimes the price might drop just after you have received your payment, but on the other hand, it might also rise. If you live on a tight budget, you might need to be more careful with it, and more often sell than hold. Sometimes you also might get into trouble if you earn a good amount of money but don't pay your taxes. So, in general, Bitcoin requires a bit more effort than fiat, but it provides new opportunities, so it's certainly worth it.

SegWit2x is promised to be backed by some businesses and 85-90% of miners. It has no support from Bitcoin developers. It also doesn't mean that even it's supporters will treat SegWi2x as original Bitcoin, because if it will be traded on exchange against the original Bitcoin and if it will be weaker, it will open a huge arbitrage opportunity, which would cause a huge loses to supporters of 2x. It's also worth to mention that SegWit2x has less than 200 nodes.

Bitcoin as of now is supported by thousands of businesses all over the world, a huge team of developers and contributors and thousands of full nodes. There are no signs that Bitcoin community is going to switch to 2x, so that fork will have only a fraction of Bitcoin's ecosystem and economic strength.

Meanwhile mempool is only a few megabytes big and cheap transactions get confirmed in a few hours. This proves a few points: high fees were caused by spam attack; high fees were also caused by bad wallet software - most wallet don't allow their users to chose custom fees; most importantly, there's no need for blocksize increase yet, SegWi2x is unnecessary and very dangerous for those who would follow it - they are going to risk losing their Bitcoins and ending up in with weak coins, even though they might have huge hashpower in the beginning.

First, you should realize that giving investment advises is a huge responsibility, if your advice will cause them a loss, your relatives might become very angry at you, especially if they had invested some big amounts. You should emphasize to invest only amounts they are willing to lose, so in worst case they will not suffer too much from a loss.

Now, about convincing them, it's not very hard - just make them understand Bitcoin technology, tell them that it's valuable because of its fundamental properties. Tell them that Bitcoins full potential hasn't yet been uncovered, so it's possible to get very high returns in the long run, by being an early adopter.

BTC is extremely bullish since the beggining of 2016 - FUD could only drop if for a few days, a week maximum - then it always continued to grow. In a recent week we had 2 waves of "China bans Bitcoin" FUD, and a lot of hard fork FUD prior to that, yet we haven't entered any bear market, only some local dips. It may be hard to say when exactly will bear market start, but it's clear that it is not here yet. In 2014 Bitcoin's price was severely crippled by a similar FUD, but todays Bitcoin is much stronger.

The real question for cryptocurrencies is whether global ban on them would prevent their mass adoption or only delay it? The whole point of crypto is its ability to withstand any direct attacks, but it would be up to people to risk their freedom and wealth (if crypto will be illegal) to get more financial freedom. Take weed for example - it was illegal in all states, yet very high percentage of population tried it at least once, similar can happen if crypto will be banned - people will continue to use it nonetheless, if they will clearly see benefits for them. What is important is that cryptocurrencies need to continue improving, and offer better privacy and scalability, so they can compete better with legacy financial system.

There is no organized marketing campaign for Bitcoin, hodlers do not promote it on national TV or mainstream media, some of us might tell our friends and family about Bitcoin, others keep it quiet. Regardless, Bitcoin's growth is too big to be explained by multi-level marketing theory. The reason why it's growing is because more and more people become convinced that it's actually valuable, because it delivers all what it has promised - decentralization, immutability, resistance to attacks, total financial freedom. People are convinced by Bitcoin itself, not by its hodlers.