first of all bitcoin won't be "more rare"! there currently is ~17 million bitcoin in circulation and by the time the next halving occurs there will be a bout 18.375 million bitcoin in circulation and will continue to grow. so you can't say it will be rarer because of halving.
what block reward halving does is that it slows down production of new coins.

secondly price doesn't have to rise because of halving. bitcoin have always risen based on more adoption aka demand for bitcoin not because of its supply. the limited supply contributes to more rise but the real reason is that demand otherwise the supply is growing with or without halving.
additionally there has always been a hype about halving which has led to a sudden rise due to speculation prior to halving. it usually happens 1 or 2 month before it so you can't plan for "May 2020" for this reason that I mentioned and also because finding blocks is a chance thing, the time is not fixed it may take exactly 2 weeks to find 2016 blocks or it may take longer or shorter which will change that date.

that is a very common misconception that stems from the fact that a "bitcoin ASIC" doesn't work for mining litecoin but ASIC only means Application-specific integrated circuits in simple terms it is a hardware that is designed to perform specific hashing algorithms. this algo can be SHA256 to mine bitcoin or other coins based on it or it can be some other thing so it can be used for litecoin or any other different coin.
here is an LTC ASIC miner by Bitmain which has been in use for many many years by the way: https://shop.bitmain.com/promote/antminer_l3_litecoin_asic_scrypt_miner/overview

many of these "institutes" are only looking for earning more money. they are not at all interested in cryptocurrencies. they might as well be dealing with potatoes if potato trading had the same volume and potential of earning money! all these services you are talking about are aiming to get a piece of the profit that is possible in this ecosystem. which is why I disagree with your last statement. they don't have to buy anything from anyone cheap. they just make their profit by not even being involved in cryptocurrencies hence not exposing themselves to the risks associated with them.

based on the little experience that I have gained in these years I wouldn't trust any kind of "wall" when it comes to cryptocurrency markets. whether it is a big sell wall or a big buy wall there is a good chance that it is a fake one that is placed there by some whale(s) trying to manipulate the market into moving in a certain direction that they want.

the main characteristic of the fake walls is that they always move. for example if price is now $6800 and the wall is at $6850 you can go away and come back in a couple of hours and if price by then is $6850 the wall will be at $6900.

I disagree, this year was mostly newcomers licking their wounds in the cryptocurrency market rather than adoption of the blockchain technology. it was mainly last year that the "boom" happened because of price rises the technology was also becoming popular.

no, the miners only find blocks by performing certain "work". they don't know how to verify transactions. a full node does the verification for them. a miner can also run a node and do the verification but still the verification is done by the node not the miner.

it is not about the "first mover advantage" otherwise the previous projects that were made before bitcoin (before 2008) would have been bigger than bitcoin now instead of not existing at all!

what you do with the profit or the money after selling depends mainly on your strategy. some people inject a certain amount of money in the market and start trading with it and grow that money. for example you may start with $100 and never get out until you reach $1 million. that means when you make profit you invest it back in. for example when I trade I end up with more bitcoin so basically I invested some fiat but now I am increasing the amount of bitcoin I have by investing back the profit.

but also another strategy is to inject a certain amount of money (lets say $1000) and keep it that way because you are only comfortable with trading that much. so when you make $20 profit you cash that out and keep it at $1000.

the question is do you honestly think that the "big money wall street whatever..." is waiting for Goldman Sachs, SEC, etc to come in bitcoin and has not done it yet? I don't think so.
besides I do believe that this "big money" that you are talking about which would be belonging to wall street guys is only aiming for making profit and making profit does not require price rise. it can actually be a huge drop while they short bitcoin, use Futures, ... to make a lot more profit and do it in a safe way away from exchanges!
so I wouldn't be so happy about them entering the market if I were you

I think that may be partly because people are now starting to realize that SEC will continue postponing their ETF decision as long as they can which is a couple of months into 2019 based on what I read before and that basically means those who were hoping for a drop due to the rejection don't have that hope anymore and aren't going to wait for it to happen. so we may see them slowly come back to the market and buy back. hence the rise.

you are just using buzzwords and making them bold to stand out. the fact is bitcoin is not going to rise because of HODL and LAMBO. instead bitcoin will rise because it is the one and only decentralized currency that is working globally and properly with a high security.

and as an investor people shouldn't just fill their bags with things they don't understand and then keep their fingers crossed for good luck and hope for profit.

as for the "bear market" it was just a short term side track so that the short term traders could take their profit out and start up fresh at a lower price getting ready for the next rising phase with their accumulated coins at the bottom.

SEC postponing their decision about something that is not even useful for bitcoin is not the reason why cryptocurrencies are not rising. the altcoins have been getting dumped simply because they were pumped and their bubbles needed bursting and they needed to come down to more realistic price based on their lack of demand.
as for bitcoin the current price is still a pretty good rise considering it is now higher 6x more that a year ago. and now it is building up for the next rise.

a decentralized currency like bitcoin doesn't need a middle mad when you are using it as a currency which was the intended purpose of it from day one that it was invented. but when you use it in any other way that is not its purpose such as for trading and profit making then you are going to use third parties and middle men such as exchanges.

"stands by"? LOL.
it seems like news sites are running out of bullshit to publish so they sometimes start re-posting the same old news again. specifically since they move with the current and the current market current! is a rising one (even if it is a small one) so they started pulling out old news.
nothing has changed for predictions like this to change. $250k is still as possible as it was before. no more, no less. and it is mainly based on extrapolation of some data and based on history of bitcoin and its spikes.

those who have been worried about bitcoin's future are those who never understood what they were exchanging their fiat for. they bought bitcoin but they never bothered to check out what it is they bought and how it is working. they just bought it because there was a hype going on and they wanted to be rich.

bitcoin is not the safest investment at all, but it is a good investment since it has a good future and a lot of potential. the reality is that bitcoin is still in its early stages and can be considered a very young technology. and as it is with young technologies they are risky as an investment but full of potential for gigantic rises.

why shouldn't bitcoin survive just because some sectors don't want to adopt bitcoin right now?
again I would go back to the car example, not everyone owns a car so will the car industry survive?!

in case of bitcoin, as I said it is unique. if a government adopts the blockchain technology, they will be creating a centralized coin (like Venezuelan Petro) nobody cares about a centralized altcoin and it certainly won't even affect bitcoin's adoption or even its survival.

why do you even insist on separating the two from each other?
it is like asking which one would survive longer, cars or combustion engines! bitcoin is based on blockchain technology and it is the one that introduced it to the world. bitcoin is also the one that is improving this technology and as the technology grows bitcoin grows and vice versa. they are not separate, they are one thing.

accumulating more wealth in general and also creating some sort of passive income. so far I have only bee working on the accumulating more wealth part by investing in bitcoin and other revenues that I have for earning money including altcoin trading. but my longer term plans are to have passive incomes. I don't have any serious one yet but that is the goal. not just to fight world wide recession but generally to have some sort of safety net to fall back on even if I couldn't or didn't want to work anymore.

the way I see it is that bitcoin already has enough anonymity.  that that is more than enough. you say every transaction is public but even if I show you my address and transaction you still wouldn't be able to know who I am.
and this level of anonymity can even be considered a good thing if you ask me. if bitcoin was fully anonymous we may have had a lot more FUD and attacks against bitcoin. with this small level of anonymity they are still FUDing it and say it is being used for illegal activities when it is not, if there were more then they would have attacked it even more.

there are two things that we shall not confuse. one of them is the warnings that has been given, sometimes by central banks about cryoptocurrencies. they are valid warnings that we have also given to newcomers about the risks that they have, specially altcoins and some people need to hear those warnings because they blindly put their money where they don't understand.
the other one is when people like Warren Buffet as you said are talking against bitcoin and some of them do it constantly. these people are never worried about OUR money, they are worried about THEIR OWN skin.

if by panic you mean the inside India panic and price that was bitcoin's price in India then you may be correct, although I have not really checked the Indian bitcoin prices but these panics are not important because they are not affecting the rest of the market and for example price in USD is still the same and on its own trend regardless of what has been going on in a country such as India.

you gotta trust in numbers when it comes to market cap because there is nothing else you can trust in when it comes to something that has no meaning.
people look at the number of coins and think 2000 is nothing but the reality when it comes to total marketcap is that the altcoins are being created at an alarming rate! I actually calculated the total number of coins in circulation 4 days ago and it was 18,992,064,409,496 (18 trillion) and today it is 19,045,916,973,830 (19 trillion). in other words a little less than 54 billion coins entered the circulation in only 4 days! considering that the average price of these <2000 altcoins excluding bitcoin is $179.36 that means  $9,658,995,938,946 ($9.6 trillion) market cap was created in only 4 days!

you can calculate all of this using excel and coinmarketcap.com! and all of it is meaningless numbers.