Take your time to learn, this forum is the first step if you want to know bitcoin. Read a lot and try it for yourself. As soon as you start to deal with bitcoin addresses, wallets, etc. you'll start to understand the basics... As soon as you start to wait for a transaction, because it's not confirming for days, you'll start to understand the needs for further developments for the system and as soon as you won't care about price drops (like nowdays we have), you'll be fine with bitcoin.

And how will you realize that bitcoin made a base and stable and that's the price where you should start buying...
This is the beauty of trading that you cannot say that this is now the start of the bull trend and this is the time you put all in, all you have is opinions and expectations about the future price.
Now those people are selling, who bought over e.g. $10,000 and those who bought under $1,000 are still in massive profit.
There's no need to catch the lowest price when a bull trend starts... You can do your investment in smaller amounts continously, like you invest 10% of your capital every week if the trend is good for you. This is just for a long term investment, if someone wants to daytrade, that's another story... Anyway, weaker hands have sold their coins already...

Governments know bitcoin, they are about to tax the incomes from bitcoin, so there's no need to worry about banning bitcoin. Governments wants money from bitcoin, if they ban it, there will be no income from it. They just can't make it illegal because in that case they can't trace the route of the money because it will go thru localbitcoins and on similar sites. Sooner or later governments develop the way they can tax the incomes but they can't rule bitcoin itself.

Lightning network will solve the fee and the speed problem of bitcoin. However, in order to use it like cash, there's a need from the merchants to accept is as a method of payment. Merchants will accept bitcoin in their shops if they can accept it legally, so regulations are needed. There's no reason for governments to ban bitcoin but to regulate, so this way they can tax it. Bitcoin will not replace cash, but it will replace some other transactions, where you use cash now or wire transfer, but cash will remain.

Maybe you mean will direct peer-to-peer Bitcoin to altcoins transactions be possible in the future?
This makes sense in case you think about decentralized exchanges, there are a few and you can trade your bitcoins for altcoins (and vice versa) there. Also, decentralized exchanges are present for ETH and for the tokens as well.
Maybe in the future the decentralized exchanges will spread but you should not forget about the lightning network and about the atomic swap too, so there are a lot of developments in progress to help bitcoin transactions in the future.

I think we just need to be patient a bit now. The WaveCrest cards was shot to dead there's nothing else we can do with it. It's understandable that there are conspiracy theories around, because this has impact on a lot of people, and there's no instant alternative solution right now.
If the wallet provider wants to continue with their card business, it's their task to find another card issuer (a trustable and rock solid one). I'm sure the card business was a success for the wallet providers (just look at the fees) so it they want to maintain their profit they have to do something. And we can't do anything to influence or hurry it, we're not in the position, so we just have to wait. If the wallet provider will end the card business, they will let us know. Communication from the wallet providers was about that they're searching for alternative card issuers, so it's a common interest to find a solution asap.

You should not wait for xx:00:45 but max. xx:00:01 and the free spots are taken... I was trying to accelerate a transaction last week with ViaBTC. I took days trying (I was not in a hurry) without success... After, I had a look at the system time and it was delayed by 30 or 40 seconds.... After synchronization, my system time was OK and I was lucky enough to catch one spot right between xx:00:00 and 01, so the timing is the key (and the luck of course...)
I was not in a hurry, so I took it calm, but I can imagine that someone is really upset and has an urgent transaction, that won't help with the exact timing...

Or maybe they're just want to move the market to catch some decent entry points, and after they can make some profit for themselves... They (banks) won't let people buy bitcoins, I'm sure, but I'm not really sure that behind the scenes they don't invest into risky things (or their venture capital companies, because they don't have as much regulations as the banks itself).

Bitcoin was developed to be able to transfer money between people without banks...
If you do the necessary steps to secure your coins you'll be fine. Always keep your seed (the words generated with your address/wallet) at several safe places just to make sure that you have backup if you are in need.  But first of all, read and learn, to understand the basics of the whole thing and the risks you have to face in order to save your funds. Do your own research and ask for help from the community.
Keep your coins safe as you would keep your real money in real life.

If you want to be serious on bitcoin, buy a hardware wallet and you won't worry about security after. If you want to buy and store more bitcoins than the price of the hardware wallet, it really worths it's price, if you are a newbie. As you gain some experience, you can try different wallets too, when you will have the basic understanding of the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. Search for the necessary backup steps to ensure your security and you'll be fine.

Being friendy and communicating to be friendy is different... you can communicate that you're friendly and after you have invited a lot of innovative compaines to your country you can easily change the law and there's nothing the companies can do against it. Japan is an exception, they are OK for bitcoin.
There's a difference between bitcoin friendly countries and blockchain friendly countries. I know that Sweeden is on it's way to turn their digital currency (they have already ended printing money physically) into a blockchain based currency, just because of the strengths of the technology, but they won't do anything with bitcoin.

If you have a real world job which is in connection with IT or graphics, content creation, etc. (anything that can be done from home on a PC) then you can start to think about working for bitcoin instead of buying bitcoin. This way you'll learn slowly what bitcoin is and you don't risk your money you make your living from. Or, if you're ready to lose some money, you can buy bitcoin directly, but prepare for some mistakes and losses. This is the way how everyone starts with bitcoin, so if you start small, you'll lose smaller. The learning curve is like stock exhange trading or forex trading. Would you put your life savings on a forex pair without analyzing it prior? If not, you should read and learn first and you won't miss anything. Don't be FOMO, that causes bad decisions, which costs real money.

First, I'd like to thank you for the prizes! I'd like to share the second prize, the location information:
According to the location of the cache, the information I've received is the following:
"the cache is located in the Otjozondjupa Region of Namibia"
I hope that someone will find the hidden treasure and share the story with us

If you mean that blockchain technology has changed a lot and improved in the last years, that's true. Bitcoin is also improving, although it does it slowly, because it's a stable and working system (these days it's a bit slow because of the high amount of transactions, but still working). You can have a look at altcoins, with different systems and different strengths and weaknesses, but as long as you can only buy altcoins with bitcoin, bitcoin will be the major cryptocurrency. As soon as bitcoin will have the linghtning network on the mainnet, it will have the major improvement you're missing.

You can buy bitcoin from exchanges (there are much more exchanges, not only Kraken, and Kraken has already started the business again after the update, so it seems they will survive...) or you can buy it from the people at localbitcoins.
When you buy bitcoin, you have to have a bitcoin wallet to hold the bitcoins, if the bitcoins show up in the wallet, you can be sure that they're real and if you do the necessary safety precautions, they will be yours until the end of time or until you s(p)end them. (you should choose a wallet type that fits your needs, online, offline, paper, hardware, mobile, etc., check google for the differences and details).
You should not keep your bitcoins on exchanges (your opinion is right about exhanges, but they are  improving), so as soon as you exhanged your money to bitcoin, you should send it to your own wallet asap.
Banks won't bother with bitcoin now neither in the future, so they are only interested in the blockchain itself, as a kind of system to cut down the running costs of the international wire transactions... but you should know this better if you're working for banks.

This news is not really new, there were some topics about it in the forum this week already, where we already discussed the opinions...
It's a nice marketing trick from KFC, just to make sure that they can reach another market, where the people are tech oriented and has a nice bucket of coins to spend them on chicken...
Anyway, there were news about McDonald's and other big chains on the same topic, so there's nothing new...

It seems you're right, I've tried to use the similar PushTx function of blockchain.info and when I sent the raw TX, it gave me an error message like: Insufficient fees or something similar.
This means that they're not dealing with transactions, sent with low fee settings?
Do they use this to filter out spam (or suspicious) transactions, or I don't know what is the reason for them.

Update1:
I was extreamly lucky, I have just managed to include the tranaction into the ViaBTC accelerator for free, so it seems they see the transaction. (I hope they don't rely on blockchain.info but have their own blockchain interface, they are big enough to have their own system for this...)
But let's wait for ViaBTC to find their first block in this hour to see if the transaction has been included or not.
Edit:
Just found the first block, the transaction is included, it has the first confirmation Thanks for everyone, it seems it's only blockchain.info that has a bug or something, but there's no problem with the other parties.
Edit2:
The transaction is visible in blockchain.info now, right after it has it's first confirmation. Weird...

Thanks for the quick help, I'll try ViaBTC now, and let everyone know if the transaction is visible for ViaBTC or not. I was so worried that I haven't tried ViaBTC at all, because I was sure that I had done something wrong or something similar...
Be back as soon as I have tried it.

The mass adoption won't happen from a day to another, so bitcoin still have time (and that time is really needed) to come up with the developments to cut the fees and speed up the transactions. This is why most of the people are waiting for the lightning network to go live, and that needs time because despite of that tests on the testnet was done and was successfull, it needs further testing before using it on the main net... There's no sense to start something when it's only half-done, so we have time to wait until tests are done and we can start using it.