The various banks are afraid of the potential that Crypto brings.  If people can instantly transfer money across the globe without involving a bank they stand to lose a lot of money in fees.  This is only one of the reasons they dislike Crypto though.

It is already at top 15 by marketcap.

How much do you think it can rise?

I don't think so it can rise more than 3x or 4x in 1-2 years.

Both good and bad...that all alts are pegged on BTC.

I think for the market to "mature" the coins/tokens need to be independent of BTC.  Less chance for en-mass manipulation then and hopefully reduce volatility too.

I do not think that Bitcoin will be the future currency, Bitcoin might be the one that opened the age for decentralized digital currency but I am sure Bitcoin will always be an alternative if it stays as is and had not been replaced by more advance cryptocurrency.  The government won't accept it but rather create their own currency.

Though a decrease is possible but $3000 seems way below the possible lowest limit for bitcoin. I believe bitcoin would never go below $5k for this century. Different might be the case after that. And it's higlhy likely for bitcoin to maintain a price between $10k-15k.

From the start of bounty I am sure it takes more than 3 months to finish the bounty campaigns itself and then you can expect the payments in next month or so if things workout well. Once the period of distribution is over then also you might say that you have not got what you need unless and until you exchange the tokens for real money otherwise what is the use holding tokens with no meaning or value to it. So you may need to wait for another month or so until they come and hit the exchangers. That would be your actual finish line and yes it do takes more than 6 months many times.

It is not more than 4months ago I was a beliver of "the flippening". Now it seems very far away.

But the honest truth is that hype around ICO's with massive Facebook marketing, did drive ETH prices up a lot during Q4 of 2017 and during Q1 it was time to cash that out so they could build their projects, that has put a lot of pressure on ETH, which you would not find in the same manner with BTC, since most ICO funds are in ETH.

Yes, many times we make wrong decisions when we panic because it create fear in our body system that becloud our thinking process. For instance whenever we observe that the price of one of ours altcoins is dipping so badly we tend to panic which might lead us to sell. I remember selling my Docademic tokens to regret later due to panic.

Look, price of anything can go anywhere and anytime.  So it is not possible to predict the price of ETH in 2018. But in my opinion, the current market situation indicates that its price will be $1500-$2000. Though I am not fully sure.