another way of looking at it however, is that you can see bitcoin currently underpriced. something that they refer to as "inverse bubble" in the market. in which case even a 80% rise which will only bring the price to a little above $10k is not going to create a bubble, it will only remove the inverse bubble and bring bitcoin back to its real value.
although that is debatable and some people would disagree with this but I do believe BTC is underpriced right now.

NASDAQ and the enthusiasm of OP is one of those things that will only last now that they are not yet involved with bitcoin (at least not publicly and not on a large scale). this is one of those things that when it happens everyone would start crying about it and claim how bad it is and how they entered and ruined the market with their manipulations.
something along the lines of the excitement about the Futures markets that started last year and now everyone is crying about how shorting there is causing the drops and it is even turning into a thing that people speculate about for drops!

once it might have been that way, and people may have believed that bitcoin is a "Ponzi" but today in the year 2018 where bitcoin has proven its worth and specially since there are countries like Japan that have openly accepted bitcoin as a legal way of payment, only an idiot thinks that way!

as for the future of bitcoin, it is only rise in front of it. more adoption, more growth, higher price, a lot more merchants accepting it as payment and more countries doing what Japan did and eventually we will see $1 million per bitcoin some day.

I think bitcoin is currently on a slow price rise with a consistent speed since the downtrend has been over for a long time now and also because the market has been waiting for a rise with majority of the investors out of the market and waiting for the positive signals to come before they come back. they are get ting impatient.
at the same time we still have that uncertainty because of ETF that will be determined this month so there may not be a major rise and all we may see is this slow rise so I wouldn't expect a big breakout anytime soon, at least not until ETF is rejected for good.

it is impossible to say but in my opinion there is not just one but multiple countries that are more influential in the bitcoin market than other countries. usually the big and developed countries are in that list. countries that have adopted bitcoin on a larger scale and also have a lot of investors indicated by the daily trading volume. countries such as US, China, Japan, and Germany comes to mind.

I wouldn't keep my hopes up if I were you. for majority of altcoins the ATH they experienced last year has been their only chance of  gaining any moment of fame and those prices were literary their all time high and they will never go there ever again. many of them are already dead thanks to the previous 9 months of dumping. and some of the bigger ones are still getting dumped as we speak.

it will never be either kill or be killed in the real world. there will always be a middle ground. bitcoin is not going to ever kill or delete or anything else the monetary systems and it doesn't matter how many numbers to mention about the energy usage or the transactions processed by each,... in the end bitcoin will remain the only decentralized currency of the world while the same centralized monetary systems still exist and continue working like before.

a "country" is not adopting bitcoin, unless they throw away their fiat and use bitcoin as their national currency which is not happening.
what is happening though is that people are adopting bitcoin because it is useful and then the country regulates its usage to prevent chaos and illegal activities. and people aren't adopting bitcoin because of its price, they are adopting it because of its utility. the "price guys" are speculators that come and go, they don't shape the long term.

yes of course! when you use bitcoin you are doing exactly that. but it is not killing the middlemen like banks for example because again banks are providing utilities and because of that they are still used.

bitcoin is a currency and a payment system, not "solve-the-world's-problems-system". if you want to help with the situation in other countries then go ahead and donate out of your own pocket and try to help them, why are you trying to put your hand in other people's pocket and use their money to donate?

- rules and regulations have been issued for bitcoin for a while now. in fact last year the regulation of bitcoin by Japan and 2 other countries led to a huge bitcoin rally. so you can't say regulations is the reason for the price fall.
- nonsense. exchanges were always asking for KYC if they were accepting fiat. the big exchanges for instance such as Coinbase, Kraken, .... have always been requiring KYC and users to submit their documents. you are confusing some altcoin exchanges such as bittrex asking for KYC with bitcoin exchanges!

that is one of the main reasons why we see this phenomena known as "FOMO buying". these people who are wishing for low prices to buy at will continue waiting for those low prices and if some day they get lucky and that price was actually achieved they start being scared and want a lower price. but eventually as the price rise inevitably happens they know they have missed all their chances again so they will start buying again. I expect to see this around $9500 and definitely above $10k with a large wave of FOMO buyers who were wishing to buy at $7000 but didn't do it to buy then.

I think not. because a side-chain is connected to bitcoin chain and is relying on it for its existence but at the same time it is disconnected in a way because you go on another chain and basically convert your bitcoins to new tokens on that chain....
at least that's how I understand it.

for now there is neither news nor any indication of any kind of strong downward movement. price had a very small rise and broke above $7000 but since  there still is fear in the market it couldn't continue on that upward trend. and I don't think this is going to change until ETF results come out in September. with that said I wouldn't get my hopes up for either rise even if price reached $7100 or a drop even if price reached $6500 unless you are one of those day traders who is making profit in this small range!

what you are calling "negative speculation" has in fact been FUD, misinformation and basically bullshit being spread by mainly those who wanted to  buy bitcoin cheaper or short bitcoin while it was going down. otherwise the downtrend has been natural to some point.
also I disagree with saying it was "caused largely by negative news". based on what I have seen, negative news rarely causes a drop, they only intensify a drop. in other words if there were no drop in first place then the news couldn't create it.

so far we are past the 6 months mark with a little less than 8 months of down time with no major rises and about 2 months of this 8 has been near stability price close to the bottom. so we may very well be at the end of the period which bitcoin required for its "recovery".
there is only one roadblock remaining and that is ETF, and I believe that as soon as we get past that we can start getting back on track.

"To understand" usually has two different meanings. one that everyone should consider is only to understand bitcoin as an end user meaning the basics such as how to use a bitcoin wallet and which wallet to use. and nothing about these topics are hard to understand. anybody with any level of education or any age can understand it.

but another meaning is to understand the technical aspect of things, in other words to peak under the hood. this is the hard thing but also it is not necessary if you are just a user of bitcoin.

the biggest mistake that beginners in altcoin market make is bag holding!

usually it starts as them trying so hard to make some money in this market and then as they see the pumps they get too excited but enter late into the pump. then by making the biggest mistake of not selling on top of the pump they end up on the downtrend of the pump and dump double sided event. and as they lose money they start asking others what to do since they are newbies and others not wanting the drops to continue will encourage them to bag hold some more so they continue losing almost all their money in this process.

just to clarify: this means if they don't accept bc1 addressed you can not withdraw from that service to your address but you still can make deposits meaning you can have  your coins in a bech32 address and send from that address to your exchange for instance but withdraw to a base58 address (starting with 1 or 3).

this is not something that others should tell you. just like bitcoin itself, start trying it out and see for yourself. almost all bitcoin wallets have already implemented SegWit, so you may already be able to use it. start a new wallet for example with Electrum and choose SegWit, get one address, send a transaction of some small amount to it and then spend it to see how things work.

you can also go play around in this site: https://coinb.in/#fees to see how different outputs create a different transaction size and require a different fee.

you  shouldn't have been bag holding altcoins in first place. about 7-8 years of altcoin history is more than enough to tell you that.
as for USDT, be very careful with this altcoin. it is not as safe as you may think. it has become very popular and majority of the market, specially altcoin traders, are using it but this token is still pretty risky because it is a centralized coin which may not even really be backed by real US dollars. and the company issuing them has been known to be shady.