Current owners of "dirty" coins might easily deal with it by mixing -> selling BTC for XMR -> mixing again. But this doesn't solve the problem in general, since there will just be new owners of "dirty" coins. I see 2 soltuions for this - the weak one and the strong one. The weak solution would be to swap coins between people who need clean coins (customers of Coinbase and other exchanges that comply with US laws) and people who don't mind having "dirty" coins - people from some Eastern European countries, Africa, Asia, etc. This might be risky for the later, because just like it happened with BTC-E, the US government might seize some local exchanges from other countries or force local law enforcement to do it. The strong option would be to mix "dirty" coins with a big amounts of clean coins with a very high number of transactions and via some very trusted mixer. This would have huge costs in transaction fees and would require coordination from many bystanders. I can see it happening only if owners of "dirty" coins will organize this whole event and pay some bounties to people who are willing to participate in mixing with their clean coins.

Now it looks more and more like SegWit2x fork is falling apart and will be very similar to BCH in execution - mining for the sake of difficulty manipulation and quick profit. This will require some exchanges to accept B2X coins, otherwise no one will mine them, which means that SegWit2x devs will have to install replay protection - no one is that crazy to seriously switch to B2X and treat it as if it was Bitcoin. If there won't be any replay protection, miners would risk to waste their power on useless coin. This leads to next predictions: if replay protections will be introduced, we can expect to see some 30-60% switching to B2X at least for short term; if there will be no protection, this number will be much lower, around 10-30%. In both scenarios, Bitcoin shouldn't suffer much, worst case we'll drop 25% and than recover in a few days to previous levels.

In my opinion this is a very naive approach to analyze Bitcoin's price, if you simply match some charts from the past with current price chart, it doesn't in any way guarantee that the pattern will continue. Technical analysis like that can only have a small edge in predicting small fluctuations caused by speculations, but it's pretty bad at predicting macro patterns. Dotcom bubble was caused by unrealistic expectations for Internet technology, and while the same might happen with ICO's and altcoins, Bitcoin itself is pretty safe, because it's already working great for 8 years, and I think it will only continue to grow because it's so underpriced for the value it has to offer - financial independence.

A lot of newbies have some superstition that if they won't pay high enough fee to included in the next block, then their transactions will get stuck forever and lost. This pushes fees to ridiculous levels very quickly. The other problem is wallets, their recommended fee calculations are also too high, and newbies just don't know or scared to use manual fees. There is still much room for optimization of current software, and there's no need to rush blocksize hard forks until we have squeezed all capacity from current blocks.

Fees grow when there is a spam attack, and when it stops they quickly go down. Also, you need to develop some habits that will help you to reduce your fees. For example, you can pay to many addresses in the same transaction, so when you do some transaction, ask yourself if maybe you want to do another, like depositing to an exchange or something. Always check current fee status on https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ - don't trust your wallet and don't overpay if you don't need to get confirmation in next block. A little wait will not hurt you, but will help to save you a good amount of fees. If you have to do a lot of small transactions, you may want to use some online wallet that processes withdrawals in batches - this way you'll have to pay only 0.0001 BTC per transaction. Just don't keep all your money online. If you are sending coins from exchange to exchange, you can do it via altcoins, it's much cheaper than BTC.

They are not stupid. Miners can't dictate users what chain to follow, so 2x fork would be only a disaster - Bitcoin network will slow down because majority of miners leave to mine new coin, while those miners will be wasting their electricity on a coin that won't be accepted almost anywhere. Exchanges will have to add 2x coin only as an alt, otherwise they will face legal lawsuits if they'll try to treat 2x coin as if it were original Bitcoin. But Bitcoin users have the upper hand here - most of us can endure long delays and wait for difficulty adjustments, while miners will suffer huge losses if they will switch to weaker chain. This is why some pool are already breaking their promises to fork - on D-day 2x chain will have much less than current 90% of Bitcoins hashpower.

The great exodus from Bitcoin to alts is almost impossible in my opinion, for several reasons. Bitcoin has the highest amount of PoW, meaning it's very unlikely to fall victim of double-spending, it has the best security features, and it has been tested by millions of people during 8 years. Alts can't offer anything of that - this means that they are more riskier, and people won't trust them to store and move big amounts of value. Bitcoin is valuable because it's extremely secure and resilient, and this is why people are willing to pay high fees. Whales perfectly understand the technology of cryptocurrencies, and this is why they are not buying any of those "awesome" coins that scale better than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's price is totally irrelevant to its fees, you are allowed to send transactions with as low as 1000 satoshi total fee. The problem is, Bitcoin is very popular, so it had hit its limit of number of transactions it can process per block, so people are paying higher prices to get their transactions confirmed faster. If Bitcoin's price was $1,000 or $500, the problem with fees would be the same. And this is not a problem of Bitcoin, all other cryptocurrencies have the same design, and they would too have expensive fees if people started using them more.

First requirement of going mainstream as currency - solving the scaling problem. Otherwise Bitcoin will be a "digital gold" - expensive to move, suitable mostly as storage of value or used only for very expensive purchases.
We may be getting close to it as offchain and sidechain solutions are being developed, so this problem might be solved in a few years.
The second problem is regulation and competition - some governments might start actively opposing Bitcoin, banks will start offering their clients better deals to prevent them switching to crypto. Average people probably don't really care much about decentralization and financial freedom, they want fast and cheap transactions, which was the original promise of Bitcoin, described in Satoshi's whitepaper.

Bitcoin's value in some doomsday scenario will depend on whether there is electricity and Internet or no, and it may actually be very different for different regions, since arbitraging during the war might be very hard. So, it's possible that it will be "digital gold" during hard times, especially if there will be more Bitcoin satellites and if they will be able to accept transactions too. And Bitcoin might be even more convenient than gold for transactions in case the whole economic system goes down, since it would be hard to quantify and transport gold safely.

I seriously doubt China and Russia would go to war with USA over North Korea. But it would cause a serious damage to the region, so North Korea will probably not get attacked unless they attack first. In event of real WW3 Bitcoin may go down, since people would be scared to hold something that may become useless in case of nuclear war, but a regional conflict might only boost Bitcoin, since it serves as a hedge against fiat currency and its economy.

If Adam Back meant "fork" by saying "clone-coin", than the only situation when it over-takes Bitcoin is because there's a good reason for it - i.e. Bitcoin's security get compromised, or new coin has much better features without any drawbacks. It's wrong to say that it's bad, because it's the best course of action, but it's also unrealistic, because it's more likely that Bitcoin will be the first to get new features since it has the most competent developers. As for users, they will have both coins, so their wealth shouldn't be dramatically affected.

Altcoins and ICO's will crash when more and more people will develop technical undesrtanding of cryptocurrencies, which will lead to the conclusion that most introduced coins are just worthless clones. Even now a lot of investors buy coins not because their believe in their tech, but because they expect some quick and big pump. I don't think that this bubble will negatively affect Bitcoin, since there's nothing wrong with it - in fact it's the best coin because it has the most competent developers. And this is why it's not recommended to hodl a lot of different alts long term.

I don't think it would have any significant effect on privacy, since any online wallet can be quickly checked with some tools like wallet explorer.

Here's a hot wallet of YOLOdice for example: https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/000379e0185a9c23

Improving privacy on the side of a service would  require using unique address for every deposit or routing all transactions through mixer. But it will all be expensive and inconvenient for users, so it should be mainly their responsibility to protect their privacy.

BCH is mined mostly by Bitmain, and they have to continue supporting it both via mining and buying it on exchanges to prevent it from failing. It's a mystery whether this whole venture was profitable for Bitmain, or it was all done with a goal of leveraging their position in the scaling debate with Bitcoin community and devs. If Bitmain has stopped mining it, it would quickly crash, as market would see it as lack of confidence. Similar reason why people mine Bitcoin no matter the profit of other chains - it protects their investment both in terms of coins and mining equipment.

Bitcoin is traded on totally free market, and some people believe that it's the only way to determine the true value of something and that speculation and volatility are not inherently bad things. And on the contrary, regulated markets don't reflect true value of something, which eventually leads to a crisis. Also, volatility works both ways - sometimes you receive even more than was inteded, or spend less than later. And people receive Bitcoin are more likely to believe in it and hodl, which might pay off with a huge profit.

It's possible that those addresses belong to Satoshi, but they are all from 2010, while Satoshi has started mining in Jan 2009. This means that it can also be some other early miner. Also, this transaction included only 3000 BTC, while rumors say that Satoshi owns around 1 million BTC. Also it doesn't look like dumping, the outputs might belong to the same person and it looks like that person is just testing SegWit transactions. But anyway, that's a good find, keep watching that address to see if it will get sent to some exchange.

First, a lot of people haven't even heard about Bitcoin. Out of those who have heard, most won't care. It won't cause a major uproar and people won't go protesting on the streets in any significant amounts. Governments of democratic countries can further reduce opposition, by telling their people that Bitcoin is money for criminals and terrorists. But I see a number of reasons why it haven't happened.

Bitcoin is not a threat yet. It can't process enough transactions to compete with banks, it hasn't reached mass adoption.

Bitcoin is traceable. It's much more convenient to trace its transaction, rather than something like Monero (which is not perfect too).

Governments can also benefit from Bitcoin.

No, if a government would start doing moves like that during a crisis, it will only make things worse, because people will see it as a weakness and start panicking. So, governments would need to stock Bitcoins long before the start of the crisis, but Bitcoin is still too small for it - its marketcap is only 70 billions, so any big buying would be suspicious. Also there are much more risks than with traditional investments like gold, so Bitcoin as hedge is used only in small amounts.

I'm totally against it, Bitcoin shouldn't be turned into some MLM ponzi scheme that require new investors for constant growth. People should naturally adopt Bitcoin on their own, when it will become clear that it's more advanced form of money than fiat. And before it will happen, Bitcoin needs to solve some problems, most notably scaling and legalization. If you are trying to promote Bitcoin as an investment, you should always inform people about possible risks. There is still a small possibility that Bitcoin might crash for some reason, and if it will happen, your friends and family who invested in Bitcoin because of your advice would very likely be angry at you.