the thing used in Lightning Network is not some "token" it is "bitcoin" itself because LN is not a sidechain, it is a second layer that is build on top of and is working on top of bitcoin network. you just transact bitcoin with same rules but on a different layer called Lightning Network.

a sidechain on the other hand has its own "blockchain" and you lock your bitcoin up on the bitcoin blockchain to have the tokens on the other chain. then destroy or freeze those tokens on the other chain to have bitcoin on bitcoin blockchain.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/58064/does-a-segwit-based-side-chain-like-the-lightning-network-allow-for-fractional-r

in my opinion there is only one thing that matters for price rise and that is adoption. as long as more people are coming in and starting to use bitcoin the price will go up and having a limited supply helps with that rise too. but we still need the increased adoption.  ETF isn't just some magic thing that can increase the adoption or prevent it which is why I believe its approval or rejection won't change much.

take a look at some charts and you should get a better answer.
the change can be anything and we have had huge changes in the past. but usually it is not bigger than 10% per day which can be considered as a small change since bitcoin is already volatile. amount doesn't matter ($100, $200) because it is relative. for example if price is $10 and it goes up $100 that is a gigantic rise but if price is $100,000 and goes up $100 that is nothing because the first one is 1000% rise and the second one is 0.1% rise.

it is misleading because you are focusing so hard on only a part of reality. for instance, it is true that when you own bitcoin you are relying on its technology and as a decentralized money, nobody is responsible if something goes wrong.
but at the same time this means there is no centralized authority to dictate and monitor or restrict every move you make. it also means bitcoin is open source and the technology is reviewed by literary anyone in the world who could and cared about looking at the code. and that makes it the safest technology there is.

regarding price and it being controlled you are again exaggerating the situation by a lot. there is manipulation in bitcoin market just as there is manipulation in any other market like stocks that you like to mention here. it is more because the market is small but price is NOT controlled in any way.

stop comparing bitcoin with shitcoins and you will be able to predict the market movements realistically and as a result you won't think every price change is a whale manipulation. for instance in the past few days that the rise started it was simply be cause the ETFs were rejected and people knew there is no more bad news to cause a "newbie panic sell" so they started buying back. and additionally the rise is too small to be a manipulation and we need a much bigger rise to at least $9k before we can get out of this inverse bubble first then we can talk about manipulation.

why are you using strange terms such as "coring money", "encrypted asset",...! the term is "cryptocurrency".

as for the students the courses on blockchain technology has been available for a couple of years now and they have been participating in them for education and to become what usually referred to as blockchain experts. but that doesn't mean they also buy cryptocurrencies.

I bear no malice towards Litecoin and the other couple of hundreds of coins that couldn't reach consensus on bitcoin network and forked a new coin from bitcoin from scratch and none of them used the name "bitcoin". you can still see Charlie Lee's arguments against bitcoin and how he saw it as slow so he created a new coin and called it a new name with variables he thought was best such as 2.5 min blocks and a higher total supply.
you can also see Vitalik Buterin's arguments about bitcoin from years ago, him wanting to implement his ideas into bitcoin and since he couldn't reach any sort of consensus he created his own coin and called it a new name.
same with a lot of other real developers. that is a freedom that I will respect.

BCH IS harmful to bitcoin. it is not just about the misleadings, propaganda, scams that certain people like bitcoin.com,.. do. for instance if you remember the early couple of months, during which time bitcoin was under heavy spam attack that just had stopped and the backlog was going down. then BCH came along and started literary giving money away to miners! miners could find 144 bitcoin blocks per day but if they switched they could find 1000+ BCH blocks per day so they did. and their switching over made everything worse for bitcoin for a while. and that is one of the problems it created. we don't know what other troubles lies ahead.

and again like August and other 10 million times before it, $300 is a 4% rise and not a big deal.

you not seeing a reason doesn't mean there isn't any. it just means you can't think of one.

on at least 10 maybe 20 other occasions ever since that time and before there has been Tether printing and price has been falling for the better part of past 8 months. if it had anything to do with bitcoin price rise then it should have also risen at those times.

it is very hard to say. there is not much room to go up higher than 99%. I don't think bitcoin can ever become 100% dominant because there are still altcoins out there with some potential which are currently taking that 1% from bitcoin and dropping its dominance to 99% and I don't really think it can go any higher than that.

as for total market capitalization, bitcoin's ration will continue to go down because it is very easy to create shitcoins in a second. and even if bitcoin is worth $1 million per coin its market cap can not compete with 2000 (by then it will be 10000) shitcoins each of which has billions of tokens created which make their market caps bloat.

when bitcoin is decentralized, censorship resistance, boarderless, .... you say bitcoin is blah blah, you never say some people in the community are decentralized, and ...! that is the whole ideology behind bitcoin and these are the reasons why it was created in first place.

BitcoinCash was created to bash bitcoin, to replace it or at least take the market from it. that is the whole ideology behind BCH. you can't say it is only some people who are doing it. it is the whole thing. they broke consensus and went against everything that a decentralized network stands for and created a minority fork just because they had money and hashrate to throw at it.

if price breaks above $7k then I would consider it a "significant price movement", otherwise it is still nothing and ignorable. but if we do break it, it becomes more possible to continue this trend at least to $8k prior to ETF rejection and then come back down as silly day traders continue making the market more volatile and that would just postpone $10k target another month.

just remember than just because you saw the possibility of making profit, or even if you made profit once or twice it doesn't mean it is easy or even possible at times to make this kind of profit consistently. specially in a market that is unpredictable sometimes.

for example right now it seems we are on the rise but we still have a big unpredictable event ahead of us called ETF and that can change the direction both before its event and after it and there is no way of knowing how.

for a while now, bitcoin has been looked at as a good alternative to the old and big investments such as gold. many even refer to bitcoin as digital gold, although I disagree with this view but that is an inevitable thing that has happened and people are "investing" in bitcoin instead of using it as a currency. one of the cases is when there is an economic crisis going on. but I don't expect any noticeable rise because of it because people of these countries usually trade off the main markets and because of that they don't affect the prices.

seems like $60,000 is more like the safest bet that you could make as a predictor that has a high chance of coming true. otherwise it is such a low prediction for such a long time into the future. right now we are already near the bottom of the price and although there may be drops but it is basically the bottom. so we can not expect the price to  stay here unless some series of unexpected events happen.
with that said  the rise can start and with it the price will already be at $60k in a year if things don't go wrong. and by the halving which is in 2020 we are already above that mark and rising more. so the result may be somewhere around $100k after it.

you don't really have to use hardware wallets! even with a desktop wallet that is set up properly and is secure you can have a good enough security. and the bulk of your storage should always be in 100% cold storage such as a paper wallet.
a desktop wallet doesn't have to be a bad or insecure choice if you know how to use it and with how much.

people's experience with bitcoin fees and generally with bitcoin will always come down to the wallet that they are using. the experts don't care, they know how things work and will get the best experience but we are talking about end users here. and they rely on their wallets. for instance if someone uses blockchain.info they will have the worst experience when it comes to fees since their fee estimation is known to be broken and give bad suggestions, either too low or too big. but good wallets such as Electrum are known to be better at suggesting fees and simplifying things for people with less knowledge and experience with bitcoin so you will get a much better experience with them.

illusions never last long. even a dream doesn't last until eternity, you have to wake up from it sometime!
the altcoin bubbles had to burst eventually and that bursting means the total market cap that you were being promised by the pumpers also vanished into thin air as they started dumping their coins on those who were happily bag holding these coins while dreaming about being a millionaire

in this market as a rule of thumb you should always consider altcoin market caps as fake unless proven otherwise. a coin that has premine or an ICO also has fake market cap but a real coin with its circulating supply being large (like Doge for instance) will decline in the long run and can not remain high like XRP or ETH with fake huge supply.

there are two reasons why one would sell his bitcoins for a "negative news" like the ETF rejection. one of them is a logical speculative reason and the other is just dumb!
the logical reason is that you speculate that the market will react strongly towards that price so you want to act fast before that reaction to the news occurs. this reaction can be a sell-off to a bad news or a buying-frenzy to a good news. as long as you are a trader and know what you are doing and also act fast if your speculation was wrong, this is a good decision. in case of recent ETF denial some may have sold in anticipation of a drop (which we had a teeny tiny drop) but since it didn't occur they would have bought back losing a little due to fees.
the dumb reason is a panic sell just because the media is filled with bad news and because some other idiot is saying bitcoin will drop hard... it is obvious how bad this is so I wouldn't go into it

at the end of the day smart contracts are awesome but they are not used!
lets be frank, so far the concept of smart contracts have been around for many years, and ethereum was released in 2015. in all this time the only usage of them have been to create some shitty ICO and raise money! which is why I believe RSK and by extension majority of other smart contract platforms are not used that much. there is a shitton of them on Ethereum network because people want the hype of ETH to raise more money in their ICO and get richer.

part of the problem may be because RSK is a sidechain of bitcoin but there is no two way peg between your coins there and your actual bitcoins. so if you wanted to convert your RSK back to bitcoin you would have to go through "Federated Parties" www.rsk.co/blog/sidechains-drivechains-and-rsk-2-way-peg-design and some say it centralizes things.

if bitcoin cash wanted to "coexist" with bitcoin then their creators would have put their efforts and millions of dollars worth of advertising into creating a brand new cryptocurrency with a bran new name.
but forking from bitcoin and using its name is just parasitic in my eyes. there is no coexistence, they have wanted to take over from day one and have not given up that effort yet.

usually when  these estimations are made they consider coins that haven't moved for a long time as "lost" but they are not lost, and that makes the estimation unlikely to be accurate.

as for the "contribution to others", yeah you are correct but the effects of it is not big enough in my opinion to be considered a big deal. for instance usually nowadays people who lose bitcoin don't own that much of it to begin with and they usually don't lose their private keys, they lose it to some scam. and that is a different loss.
not to mention that price won't go up with lack of supply, price goes up with increase of demand!