so far all the good VPN provides are accepting bitcoin payments, in fact they have been doing this for a very long time, probably ever since bitcoin became a thing and gained some popularity back in 2010ish. there is a good website called https://thatoneprivacysite.net/ which was created by someone on reddit at first with just a google doc thing and then with a lot of additional information which you can visit to see the list of all of them with their methods of payments. you can see the good ones there are already accepting bitcoin.

well, when a country adopts bitcoin and is open to the technology it helps a lot with the adoption by merchants to start accepting bitcoin. and Japan is like the pioneer in this area so obviously there will be a lot of news like this. but also Japanese did another thing which helped a lot with the adoption of bitcoin as a currency and that was removal of taxes on bitcoin payments and this is the best form of adoption because bitcoin will be used as a currency more.

having an opinion about bitcoin is one thing and being uneducated and telling your uneducated opinion to others is another. you shouldn't confuse the two of these. and Warren Buffet's opinions have always been uneducated ones, whether he understands what he is talking about (meaning intention FUD spreading) or he is just outright wrong remains to be seen in long term because eventually we will always find out whether they have any bitcoin or not. for example we saw how JP Morgan have been investing in bitcoin despite all the FUD they have been spreading.

there is an old topic about cloudminings and Ponzi schemes that they run here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=878387.0 which is a little outdated since OP doesn't seem to be around but the general information there and the "checklist" you are looking for is a good enough information.

if you want my experience I say they are all either already Ponzi schemes or will turn into one at some point without any exceptions. the good/legit cloud mining services closed down a long time ago and never reopened. the existing legit ones will not make enough profit so they have to do other stuff to make profit and they end up wrecking everything.

the long list of "consequences" you posted here are not "consequences of gambling". instead they are consequences of gambling addiction which is a whole different topic. when the gambling habits get out of hand for someone, these are the results that they are going to get in return.
as for me, I have never been a gambling addict. I have always managed to have it under control and do it quite easily as a matter of fact. and that means I have never even thought about any of these consequences nor experienced any of them.

nobody cares about market cap when it comes to cryptocurrencies. you may use the number to get a good feeling about it and be able to do some arbitrary comparison in your head but that  doesn't make it right. and the CBOE, CME, NASDAQ,... and anyone else that may add these futures market never do it because of the market cap! they do it because of the interest that was seen from the investors in that thing, in this case it was bitcoin and its high volume.

LOL. for starters because Facebook is a company and a company has a market capitalization and it is a meaningful number for it and when you say it is worth billions it means something. but when it comes to cryptocurencies it has no meaning when you talk about their market capitalization. it is like asking why oranges are orange but apples aren't orange and instead they are green/red!

additionally because Facebook is a company which is doing something useful, it may seem silly to many but there is a big real demand for them. but for cryptocurrencies in general there is no demand apart from some traders looking to make money and there is only real demand for bitcoin and possibly for some altcoins that aren't even in the top 20 and bitcoin alone can not reach billions over night it will take time to be adopted and it will eventually get there.

is it just me or does this look like something you write using Thesaurus! "procuring robotized styles of coins" I mean what the hell is that

in any case the thing you should do is to stop hanging out in forums and read/write about the price specially when you need to use a dictionary
when investing your money, you accept the different risks that come with it if you can't do that then maybe you shouldn't be making an investment. the market has drops sometimes. it can't just go up forever.

its just news. nothing good or bad about it if you ask me.
the banning of ICO and crypto related ads on these platforms may have contributed to the recent drop of bitcoin price a little but it was not the cause of it and it certainly was not the whole reason for the big drop. as a result any news that goes against this ban is not a good news because it won't change anything even if all these platforms were to lift the bans today price would have recovered a little just like the drop because of them were a little but the main drop for other reasons were bigger.

no they do NOT. it is mostly the other way around. but altcoins may affect bitcoin price a little but I wouldn't say they are pushing it up and down!

because not everything is about price!

because most of these altcoins are only created for trading purposes and nothing more. in fact the adoption for majority of them is purely from speculators.

no they don't run a full node and they don't have to run a full node. Coinmarketcap.com is not an exchange to need to run one and it is not an exchange to be able to even affect the market the way all these dramatic articles these days are suggesting they did!
you are correct, they just gather data from exchanges and put them on their website and that data is updated every 5 minutes. and just because there may be some wrong data there doesn't mean they are "scamming"!

first they start an actual company not some nerds in their parent's basement calling themselves "company" and asking for funds through an ICO.
then they actually do something in that company, like offering a service or an actual business in general.
and finally they start advertising about their real company or their real product that they will actually deliver in that company!

in this case they can advertise their stuff anywhere and nobody is going to ban them.
for the rest, their option is bitcointalk signature campaigns since here there still isn't any restrictions on what people put in their signatures. however you still can't put a banner ad among bitcointalk's banner ads because theymos doesn't accept ICOs.

I'm sorry but there is no such thing as an automated trading bot which you can start up on a VPS and then start making money from it! the market is not something that can be predicted and not being predictable means it can not be automated. there is just no way. there are certain strategies that can give you some profit, some of them are pretty small amount of profit and some of them are pretty risky and also all of it will still require some knowledge of the market and how to trade in it.

there are some bots around like the Gunbot and CAT which use something like Ping Pong trading but you still have to choose the market wisely and monitor it too. and there is still a risk in each of these strategies.

I say as long as you can trade normally (buying low, selling high) and you can do it by spending less than an hour daily, you don't need a bot or 24 hour coverage!

the biggest difference is that the demand for bitcoin comes from a lot of different sources. from speculators trying to make money, from long term investors who know the potential of bitcoin as a decentralized currency, from those who want to get out of their centralized and corrupted economy, from rich people trying to park their money somewhere safe and out of reach, from people who want to use bitcoin as a currency,.... and this demand will always come back and grow over time. that is why each time bitcoin had a drop ever, it always recovers and comes back up and then rises big time.

but ethereum demand comes from only two groups: speculators who want to make quick amount of money because of its  pumps and those who want to invest in an ICO and make a quick amount of money because of ICOs and their pumps. this type of demand never comes back and with all the ICO troubles these days it may as well go away for good at some point.

sometimes it is fun to cheat, as long as you are not harming anyone I don't see any problem with that. like when you are playing a friendly card game at home with a bunch of people you know, it may not even be for money
I have never done it but I have to admit I have thought about doing it.

but when it is fixing games and stuff like that which can harm others and also when it can be considered thievery, then that is it right at all.

if we can get the same situation, then yeah under same circumstances the market tends to react the same way or at least a pretty similar result can be expected but last year had a lot of good and huge news like Japan's adoption of bitcoin as a currency which led to a lot of increase in demand for bitcoin not just by Japanese but by all the people who have been skeptical about bitcoin since all they have heard was FUD.

we sometimes need something to open people's eyes.

unfortunately that is true and WE need to do something about it and do it quickly if you ask me!
all these ICOs and all these people who are taking advantage of the not-regulated state of this market to scam people need to be pushed out of the market by us, because there is nobody else doing it in a decentralized free market. the first thing to do is to stop investing in these ICOs so that they see that making money for them is no longer an option and then we also have to educate newcomers not to fall for their schemes and advertisement. eventually we can hope to get all of them out and then as a result we can stop seeing these silly kind of bans happening.

whenever price is going sideways it is best time to stay away and wait in my opinion. the good time to buy is when price has been falling for a while and when you expect it to be at the end of the line or whenever price is starting to rise back up and you expect it to be at the start of the line. these two are the best time to buy bitcoin and get the best deal.
but sideways always has a certain level of uncertainty and risk with it.

well here is the thing, investment is always risky. investing in bitcoin is even riskier. and taking risks is not something that is the same with everyone, some people want to take bigger risks some others don't like taking any risks at all.

for example I always like to know that I have a safety net to fall back on because I don't want to be forced to start from scratch if something went wrong. so I will never sell my house to invest in bitcoin.
but some others want to become rich a lot faster so they take bigger risks. sometimes it works fine and they become super rich and sometimes it doesn't and they will be screwed. lets say someone invested in bitcoin when it was $1000 by selling their house for $100K, they could have sold their coins for ~$2 million. but someone who sold his house to buy bitcoin at $20k is now having less than half of what he invested.

who is to say which one of these two strategies is best? at the end of it all it will be up to you to make a decision.

terrible advice in a trading discussion board! it is as if you have never heard of stop loss!

you MUST sell your coins at a loss but the important thing is to move fast. the right way of doing it is to sell when you expect a drop to happen or worse case scenario to sell as soon as drop began and you reached your stop loss limit. then you buy back at the bottom if you still wanted to be involved.

what you shouldn't be doing however is to sell at the bottom when it is already too late. that is the wrong move.