the government doesn't care about price as much as you may think. what they are concerned about is the usage of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and the new ways these things have created for illegal activities. such as the ICO scamming that has been going on or all the other altcoins that are created and scam people or even the illegal activities that are performed using the anonymous coins. these are the real concerns not the price of bitcoin.

in my experience the volume doesn't matter really!
people have a tendency to want to find something to blame and what better than a country like China with the way their government is. and specially since people around the world who are not from China don't know Chinese so this country is the perfect choice.

think about it. if for example the FUD said some other country like Australia, England,.... banned bitcoin it was easy to confirm. the news coming directly from these countries are in English (the language that most of the world understand either as their first or second language).

bitcoin is extremely undervalued.

whether some people can see it or not, it doesn't matter. nothing about this will ever change. bitcoin is undervalued even if you think it is a "bubble". the supply of bitcoin is designed in a way that 1BTC should be worth a huge amount so that people start using 1 satoshi instead.

and the rise that you see and think is out of ordinary is actually pretty common among things that grow like this. there are even assets that have grown like this. bitcoin is the first of its kind to become this popular and it has a lot to offer it has to grow like this.

this is one of the question that is always being asked. mostly the reason is because people see the rise of bitcoin from nothing to $5000 and still rising and think to themselves they have missed out and the only way is to find something that is still in that "nothing" stage so they can buy it.

but it is a mistake. bitcoin is still in the "nothing" stage when you consider the future price is going to be $200,000!

also these altcoins are not really doing anything these days. obviously they are profitable but you should not expect much out of them in the long term. they get pumped short term and then die off.

instead of looking at it like an "attack" you should always look at these things as "opportunities". and they are pretty common in bitcoin that you get used to the fact that they happen all the time. each time there is a different reason but they all end up having the same result which is some manipulation at first then more panic sells and finally a big drop which means a huge profit on the recovery.

a couple of months ago nobody even knew Korea even existed.
a couple of weeks ago nobody even knew Korea is even involved in cryptocurrencies.

and now that "ICO" is banned over there everyone is talking about it as if they are the center of the universe and all cryptocurrencies are being priced based on what Koreans do and people are speculating about price based on this news!!!

if altcoin trading was not profitable then it would have died and forgotten a long time ago. it is the profitability that keeps the investors around and brings in even more investors. but trading is something that is a little hard and takes time to learn and even more time to master.
most people unfortunately want to take the easy route and end up either treating trading as gambling or end up following pump groups and get dumped on and lose a lot of money and finally give up.

if you don't do these and start really learning it, then it can potentially be very profitable. even as a real full time job.

it is only "bad sign" because people have found out about what a "fork" is recently (about a couple of months ago before August drama). but in reality the forks of bitcoin existed a long time ago and they have been forking from bitcoin from early days.
there currently is also a lot of coins with the name "bitcoin" in them one way or another. other coins that have no bitcoin in their name or not even forked from bitcoin are still using "bitcoin" name to their own advantage!

go to coinmarketcap.com and search for bitcoin to see how many of them come up. there are also a couple with a little different name like BitCore but it is in fact bitcoin core. but you never hear people talk about them or complain. and soon these other new forks will join those old altcoins on the shelf of failed projects.

if Amazon (or any other big thing like it in the future) start accepting bitcoin as payment first the news of it (not the rumor though) will start a rally then it will become a big rise and price will go a lot higher in short term. but that is just the speculative effect of a good news.

the long term effects are what matter most. the fact that Amazon accepting bitcoin will put bitcoin on the radar and make it more popular every day is the biggest effect that is a long term one. people who are afraid because some random dude called bitcoin a fraud will know it was bullshit and start seeing bitcoin for what it really is: a decentralized currency.

people always answer these things generally but in fact it is very case dependent. for example depending on where you live things can be very different for you. in some countries there is no need to report these stuff and you can earn a lot of profit and never pay any taxes on it but in some other countries if you don't pay the taxes you earn from trading bitcoin and altcoins you will be considered a criminal for tax evasion.

so the best way to find your answer is to ask some professional in your country.

nothing has changed yet!

the Chinese exchanges are still scheduled to be closed and they have even posted warnings to their users to withdraw if they like before the closure of their exchanges. there is no much news about what will happen next and how long will they stay closed. it may be like last time and only last a couple of months before they come back with a real license this time and work under regulations and we hopefully no longer see any issues with them again.

do you even know how many forks bitcoin already had and without any issues? always with 100% support of the network aka full consensus.
compared to that ETH is fully centralized because the just force you to fork and go to the new chain. like they did with the ETH/ETC fork where majority did not want the fork but the minority with the money wanted the fork and created the ETH fork.
now is the same story again, they are forcing you to go to the new fork because they have implemented a "bomb" that will kill the old chain even if you choose that.

despite common belief which is being repeated to death, you are sometimes forced to keep bitcoin/money on exchanges. the correct suggestion is not to keep bitcoin there for more than necessary. because an exchange is used by a trader and as a trader you would want to have your funds ready or even in many cases to hold them in open orders like placing a buy order at a low price which you are expecting to be reached but not last. or placing stop loss orders and a lot of things like that.
but if you are not trading then you must move the funds out of exchange.

we are in a "dumbass" trap
it is when people make irrational decisions in a market that is harder to predict. there currently are a lot going on with bitcoin. the China FUD is finally over so the price is recovering but there are a lot more FUD on the way and the weak hands have not gone out yet they are now coming back and soon will panic-come-back to buy back at a more expensive price than they have sold. and soon will panic again and sell the same way with the new FUD about the upcoming fork.

usually when they are talking about "digital form of currency" these days they mean the blockchain technology or one of its subcategories that spawned from it.
but it always is a centralized usage of the blockchain technology no matter what. that is how the banks and government and a country issued currency should always work. which is why bitcoin will always have that edge.

price is always the result of "supply and demand". well the demand part is what they can hype up and get people to invest in their altcoin since there is no other usage for them.
the supply part is what the people can get their hands on. it is mostly the mining reward but also sometimes these airdrops, the PoS reward, and other methods of distribution of that coin.

in case of these big airdrops where they give away large sums and to a lot of people, they are effectively creating a lot of "sell pressure" which will sooner or later start showing itself by preventing price from going up and pushing it down.

since bitcoin is not magical it won't make you rich!

bitcoin is a currency but also an investment just like anything else. you can make profit and become "rich" only if you know what you are doing. otherwise you and your kids and grand kids will go bankrupt. just as we keep seeing people lose money even though bitcoin price has been rising!

profit is important but not the most important thing. there are lots of things you need to consider. like how much risk your investment has. the risks of bitcoin investment is a lot lower than any other altcoin.

besides if what you explained here is all the logic you need to invest in something then i can bring 100 examples of things that are 10000 times better than ETH because they could have given much more profit!

example: HTMLCOIN!
it is literary a shitcoin. the value was 0.1 satoshi (yeah it was literary worth less than 1 satoshi) and went up to 15 satoshi. that is a 14,900% profit
your $1000 investment could have turned into $150,000
so with that man's logic HTML5 is the best investment!!!

your title is pretty weird because all these things you named are not really joining bitcoin revolution nor they are joining the decentralization revolution. they are the same old financial systems owned by the same people doing the same thing but the only difference is that they are using a new underlying technology for the same thing.

in a sense this is good since that will improve the financial systems and increase the security of banks to some extent but it is still not the same as bitcoin which is the decentralized and without border money. and it will never be.

tether is mostly tied to bitfinex since the same company is behind both of them. polo and bittrex and others added tether since the trading volume increased a while back.

if that company (i think it was a bank) goes down or starts having any trouble the price of USDT will tank hard. we saw last year when bitfinex was hacked USDT fell down below $1 easily. so it is easy to lose money.
as for safety, they are clearly not guaranteeing anything! it is like most altcoins 1 USDT = 1 USDT. there is nothing saying 1 USDT = 1 USD and they certainly don't guarantee exchanging it for fiat!

in my opinion it is a good thing to use for short term like for holding your funds in fiat but not to rely on for longer. it is risky.