one word: Panic

the cause of the panic has never been important. it can be anything and it changes every now and then. for example around $14k until $9k the panic was because of a lot of FUD saying "{blank} banned bitcoin". the {blank} was a lot of things including Facebook,... and different countries. I even heard "Japan banned bitcoin" among them
before that, last year around $3k-$5k it was the "anybody can spend your coins because of SegWit" FUD.
before than it was "bitcoin is gonna split and die" FUD
among these there were all the spam attacks against bitcoin and the scaling drama.
before that around $1800-$2500 it was "Bitfinex is pumping bitcoin, tether is the only reason it is rising" FUD
before that around $1200 it was the "bitcoin is a bubble" FUD and "this is like 2013" FUD.
before that around $700 it was "Bifinex got hacked and hacker is dumping all the coins" FUD
before that it was "China banned bitcoin" FUD.
before that it was "Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme" FUD.
before that around $20 it was "bitcoin is a bubble" FUD
.....

each of these caused panic and investors dumped their bitcoin and caused the crash not any imaginary dump by one person like the Mt Gox trustee in this case.

then it means your second trade where you bought 2.3 BCH and lost about 0.016BTC was a mistake. it is a 4.6% loss which is not a big deal overall but you should be more careful of trades like this in the future. you may make profit from "back and forth" trades like this between bitcoin and some other altcoin but know that the same trend is not going to last forever. there will come a time where the same trades which were giving you profit will lead to losses.
you have to try and figure out when to exit from the market and move to another if you want to continue making profit.

you keep repeating the words "sat value". what do you mean by that?

reading your previous comments I can't figure out what you are trying to increase. is it your fiat? your bitcoin or your bitcoin cash? answering this will clarify a lot of things.

it depends on how long you have in mind. do you want to double/triple it in a short time such as 1 week? 1 month? 1 year? or longer? if you have the dream of making that much profit in a short time then you should forget it because it won't happen with bitcoin. you may see on extremely rare occasions that a huge rise like 2x happens in a short period of time but it is not a normal rise for bitcoin anymore and it won't last like the $20k rise that we had recently.
but in long term there is a much better chance for that happening. just remember to invest what you can afford to lose.

the volume has started to pick up again and there has been a slight price rise but we can not call this the start of an "uplift" yet. in my opinion this is mostly because of all the still ongoing dumps that are happening. we first have to see the bear whales run out of coins to dump on the market before the price can start rising. so far each time there is an attempt to rise up, a big  dump comes on and breaks the attempt in its start. and then the panic sellers and short term traders do the rest.

I disagree. you can't call this any trend because it is not moving at all. what happened was that price fell below $9k in one big move and then nothing happened ever since that  day.
a bearish trend is when price is going down without much of a stop and it won't just happen in one or two days. in other words if price fell below $9k then went lower to reach $8k and then continue to drop below $8k and slowly decrease that would have been a bearish trend. do you see that happening? obviously not.

I think quotes from Steve Wozniak are the most misinterpreted quotes of all times. and they are all over the place. he mentions something about bitcoin and then the media goes crazy over it. at first it was all big and happy then as price reached ATH and started coming down they started talking about how he has sold all his bitcoin and has lost faith in bitcoin
then there was this quote recently where he says something about smart contracts and mentions ETH and  the media went nuts saying he is loving ethereum and blah blah about it....
now they seem to be back on the happy train about how he loves bitcoin again. I wonder how long that will last?!

I somewhat disagree with this because having the news source centralized to one place but a proper news agency that publishes proper articles that are well researched and well written and most importantly are unbiased is a lot better than having a decentralized place where everyone can go spam and spread any kind of news they want. it will be the same story all over again with the spreading of lots of false news by random and anonymous people on this blockchain. it also has a lot of attack vectors.

to "tame" bitcoin means more like reducing the volatility of it and mostly it is about "trying to do so" not actually succeeding in it. and that has nothing to do with how high the price will go and when.
a decade? LOL. bitcoin will be above $20k in less than 2 years without a doubt. the only question that remains is whether it is going to start rising this year or will it take 2018 to consolidate and then rise afterwards.
adoption is not something you can prevent. it is happening and it is growing and with it the price of bitcoin will continue to rise. sometimes rise fast and shoot up.

you don't really need a blockchain for that matter! you need a decentralized platform that the government can not block. and it can be a news site or a chatroom or whatever that is censorship resistance. blockchain is mainly good for when you want a distributed public ledger, preferably in a decentralized manner.
not to mention that what you are describing here can be overcome by usage of VPNs or TOR network.

you still have to make on chain transactions and that will require paying on chain fees. so you won't be escaping that when using a decentralized exchange.
but there are solutions such as Lightning Network and the cross chain transactions called Atomic Swap which may take place on the second layer and because of that they can have nearly zero transaction fees. but I have not seen this in action so this is just a theory for the time being. hopefully it becomes a reality soon.

whenever a news like that comes out, it will either affect the price of said coins immediately or not at all. and that means when the news came out before the price of these coins should have dropped hard which has not happened and now it is too late for it to happen.
in other words the news didn't have the effect that you thought it might have because people didn't pay any attention to it.

1. true, but when we are talking about stimulating the economy we need to look at both advantages and disadvantages of it. and I'd say the downside of gambling is bigger than the upside of it for the economy. it is true that a casino can create new jobs but it also is making a lot of gamblers (players) poorer which is the damaging part of it to the economy.
2. that is the only benefit that I can agree about.
3. this is not a benefit!
4. yeah but that is a chance not a sure thing so I don't think we can call it a benefit
5. I don't even know how this is going to work! taxes? aren't better ways for that to happen?
6. this is the same as #1
7. this is the same as #2

on one hand it is understandable that people like Warren Buffet don't understand bitcoin and don't see it as an investment. being old ancient apart, he considered companies that are giving some product or service as investment not a currency. so he probably sees Forex the same way too.

on the other hand calling it things such as "rat poison" and saying "it won't end well" is just silly because we all know that bitcoin is the best technology that could have happen in economy field and also we can see that all around the world people and the government are adopting it with open arms.

- price of bitcoin like everything else depends on its supply and demand.
- the supply is not "low" it is a reasonable amount which is the important part and also it is limited to a fixed number (is capped).
- the demand is going to rise as the adoption increases. and adoption will only increase over time and as more people find out about bitcoin or more merchants start accepting bitcoin or more people start spending bitcoin as a currency. and that in turn will increase the price of it.

I still don't understand why some governments or even big corporations would want to create such coins but they are doing it anyways so to answer your first question, yes we will see many coins like that which are created by the governments and are backed by some real assets like Petro which is backed by oil.
these are still going to be centralized coins though and there is not much of a difference between them and the fiat that the governments are already issuing except the fact that it may be a little bit more transparent about the supply and circulation of the coins.

it doesn't matter how many times this question is being asked here by people with big wishes of getting rich by bag holding ethereum, in the end ethereum is still the same useless token with a lot of bugs and a huge supply which doesn't even have a cap for it! in other words an inflationary token with zero usage. this can never even come close to bitcoin no matter how tight you hold your bags or how many government ranking systems call it "number 1". it still is centralized.

I have been seeing a bunch of topics like this that report weird things about price! another one was saying price has not yet fallen below $9000. and now you are saying in recent "weeks" it has been rising!!! so I want to ask where are you people getting your data from?!

price has been mostly going down in the past weeks and it still has not moved enough to be considered "rising" it is still pretty much in the same zone as it was before, round $8.5k. unless it starts testing $9k, that is not a rise or "steady gains".

Canadian banks are open-minded about bitcoin. in fact there are some banks in Canada that are so happy that bitcoin exists and are even talking about adopting it and offering a bunch of services for it. what you read in OP is just one bank in Canada that presumably did this according to OP.

being wrong is not a new thing when it comes to speculating about bitcoin price in near future. being unreasonably wrong is another thing though and I wouldn't call this speculation an unreasonable one. it was actually a safe speculation saying that this consensus conference could possibly lead to a rally even a small one and he was not the only one with this speculation. it is not like he speculated bitcoin is going to $1 million because of it this or drop to $1000 like so many others are doing...