Many open source projects eventually were bought buy big corporations, maybe similar destiny awaits crypto projects as well

Every big company was called evil empire - now it is Google, before that it was Microsoft.

There is anti monopoly legislation to take care of the monopolists.

Bitcoin is a fairly new thing, it evolves, we don't what it will become in 5-10 years. It may even become centralized at some point.

Highly unlikely. If this was true there would be a lot of noise about this in the news.

if you have this money you probably already know this - diversification is the key

Many countries already started to create their own crypto currencies. Many central banks are thinking about it. They surely won't sit and watch.

i don't think that increase in cost mining bitcoins is proportionate to increase of bitcoins price.

what really amazes me is the recent volatility of bitcoin, the price is changing plus/minus hundred of dollars within single day.

I think bitcoin market is not that huge (yet), can there be some "shadow market makers" manipulating the price and making huge profits from this crazy volatility?

I am a total newbie to this forum and don't know very much about crypto currencies.

What are major factors affecting bitcoin (or any other crypto currency) price? Is this mostly supply and demand, do other factors (difficulty of mining, hash rate, etc) play significant role in bitcoins price?