Out of curiosity, since I admit, I am a Sr Member, and have never actually looked at Bitcoin Signature bounty program, lol, what kinds of payouts do you usually get?  So far I have always used it to promote the little LTC/Bottlecap store I tried to run, and now the referral post for the place I have some cloud mining at.  Just wondering if its worth it to give it a try.  If only a few thousand satoshi's then not worth it at all.  But more than that and I could get interested. 

Yes, I would suggest being very careful, and not trying it yet, since you are still at the stage where if you need to ask if you should or not.

Just remember Pump and Dump groups don't create money out of thin air.  In order for some to gain alot, others must lose alot.  Not saying this for moral reasons. But in these Pump and dumps, usually the people running the show are the ones buying up coins driving up the price slowly to begin with.  Then they announce it, and get everyone to hop onboard, driving up the price alot, meanwhile they have already switched it up to sell, meaning a majority of the coins they are selling are to the people in the pump and dump.  Then once they are out, they will signal that its time to dump, and everyone scrambles to get out, and the price plummets.  Most of the people in the group lose alot, while some are lucky and can make a quick buck.   Imagine seeing the coins you paid $1000 going up to $1500 then suddenly dropping to being worth $200 in a few seconds.

If you are a new trader, this is a recipe for losing your shirt.

Generally, I would say you should have a wallet set up.  But it is sounding like this may be the first coins you are going to be owning.  In that case, to make it easy for you to start, and since the money will be low, you can take the easy way out, and sign up on an exchange like Bittrex, or any other that carries a lot of coin types.  Inside there, you can create deposit wallets for each coin they accept for trade, and can have the coins deposit there directly.

 But once you go bigger, I still suggest setting up a regular wallet.  Exchanges do go down.  I speak from experience on this.  A lot of my coins were stored on Cryptsy.  Oh well, lesson learned   lol.

Someone mentioned Faucets.  You can use faucets if you are really desperate.  But I don't recommend them.  Usually they involve watching ads, or going to a heavily ad filled site multiple times a day to earn a few satoshi. 

It's not Illegal, as any Cryptocoin exchanges aren't regulated.  But in joining one, you probably have a better chance of losing alot of money than gaining, since the guys at the top always make sure they get out first, then they give the signal and everyone else scrambles to make it out alive.

Edit:  Removing post, as I no longer want to support anyone going to Micro-BTC.com, as I now believe that is a scam site.

I would have to say more hope than most coins out there, since this is one of the few with an actual use/business plan.  But I agree when coins take a slide, makes a person a but nervous about holding.  

Don't quote me on this, but I think it will be back up in no time.  Its just been hit by a double whammy, which is actually a positive.  First whammy, is that almost all coins tumbled this week.  That one isn't quite a positive.  Unless your looking to buy.  The double whammy came in when they announced this week that they have a manufacturer to make ASIC miners for Sia.  This upset alot of small miners, as they feel they will have to move elsewhere to mine.  Personally I don't think that many ASIC's will sell, that people will have to move to greener mining pastures.  But it does allow Sia to build up a bit of trust in the coin.  As this coin needs trust more than any almost any other coin, since Sia is the backbone for a Cloud Storage project they are creating, and in order to get customers trust enough to store their data in this cloud, they need to work at building alot of trust in the system first.

You have to remember though.  Sia isn't like most coins, its "purpose" is to create a cloud storage network, and rent out the space.  So I do see why they want to move in that direction, to better secure their chain in the future, since their business model relies on it.  They need a lot of trust built up in the network in order to have people purchase space and store their files. 

Also, if you go through their contracts for setting up a storage space to earn coins by renting HDD space, they actually already make the "big backers" put up coin collateral in the range of 100,000 Sia coins per TB they sign on for, which is already around that $2500 price tag, just to earn the trust of the buyers of the cloud storage space. 

Well, since Siacoin has its own hash type, that no other coin uses, I can say they aren't trying to overtake other mining companies, since it would only work on their coin.  Maybe they are trying to create a permanent presence to their coin by selling ASIC's that would not be able to be pointed to another coin at any time. 

Or I heard another possibility.  Since Sia is a blockchain for Storage, and their Roadmap "Goal" is to compete with places like Azure/Google/Amazon for cloud storage solutions, that possibly the "ASIC Miners" could actually be HDD storage centres, where they may pay "Mining" fees for connecting storage points all over the globe and pay people in mining fees for keeping their cloud alive. 

I am in no way attached to Sia, so I have no idea, guess we should know what its all about by tomorrow. 

Until after the Bitcoin fork, I think you will be seeing a constant rise in the few big safer coins to dump peoples BTC funds into, and I would imagine a big drop in value of BTC as that date nears.  Then after everything is properly forked over, everything will jump back to normal.  A good money making time for some, as fear is big business.

I can tell you 1 important thing about Altcoins, or cryptocurrencies in general.  The amount of money invested in 99% of the coins has nothing to do with the market cap, or the value of the coin.  And the only way to "make" money in cryptocoins is to sell to someone after the fact.  This is the way a pump and dump works.  Not everyone makes money, since in order for someone to make money, someone else has to lose money.   A lot of coins can be pumped with very little money.  Yes it will take ALOT of money to pump a coin like BTC or LTC but for the most part if everyone on the forum pumped $1000 into a coin.  Heck even $100 into a coin it would drive up the price massively.  Which causes a frenzy from people wanting to jump in on the wave.  You can't just stop and coast on a high priced coin, and everyone can then sell at the new price and everyone makes money.  What you need to do then to make money is signal everyone to sell their shares at the time all the investors are trying to jump in on the action, and sell your shares before they know what's going on.  Then in the mass selloff, the price of the coin will probably drop lower than the original price, and everyone jumping in on the wave will have lost a lot of money. 

Highly illegal in the real world, but perfectly normal in the cryptocurrency world.     

Yes, alot of them

Just looked up blackcoin on Bittrex and there have been over $150,000 worth of blackcoin trades in past 24 hours alone.

I don't see the others on my regular exchange.  But best bet if your looking if a coin is being traded alot is to jump on an exchange then look at the 24 hr volume.  Some coins have little to no trading at all, and others might surprise you.  Sometimes a coin with sit for months on end with no action, then someone will pump it and all of a sudden massive surge of coin trading and money to be made... or lost.

That is kind of a loaded question.  It is a "good" investment.  No probably not.  It is a high risk investment.  But high risk investments usually have greater rewards than low risk.  Especially in smaller alt coins. 

With a regular investment, like the restaurant that was mentioned, you are investing in something that exists, so there is a decent chance it will exist after the 3 years you leave it.  If it makes money or not, and how much is an entirely different question.  With small alt-coins, you are investing in someones idea.  That idea might be to create a community and a coin with an economy, and that coin may grow large.  The idea also can easily be to get rich quick, off the backs of the people investing in their coin.  Of the "bigger" alt coins that I purchased 2 years ago, when I decided to back away for a while, only a handful of coins still existed.  The rest just fell to the wayside, or the developer did something really dumb and killed it off by "accident".   Only play around with what you can lose and not think twice about it.   

Your looking at 2 different things.  First and foremost, the Market cap for any coin is FALSE.   

For the Market cap of a particular coin, they are just taking a time slice of how many coins are currently available and what the trading price was at that current time, and multiply it to get the cap.  People can easily manipulate the price of a coin, especially a smaller, lesser traded coin, and prices can fluctuate wildly.  I will give you 2 examples.

if I took a coin with 1 billion coins, and the price to make it easy was $0.001 the market cap would be $1 million.  If I went to the exchange and noticed I could easily buy up the coins to take that minute's price on the exchange up to $0.0013 with for $50.  The Market cap for the coin would show up as $1.3 million, with only $50 added.  Also if someone did actually try to sell a large fraction of the coins all at once, the price of the coin would fall badly

Another example, is actually something that happened in 2013.  There was a coin called MarineCoin.  They pre-mined about 100 Billion coins, then had a reward in the 10 coins/block range.  The few coins that did sell, were selling at about the $0.10 range.  So they maintained that the market cap of the coin was around $10 Billion, which was larger than BTC at the time.  They believed that since they had such a huge market cap, that they were going to purchase an island in the Atlantic, and form their own Cryptocurrency based Nation.  They were quite deluded and they fell fairly quickly.  But just shows how you can never trust the Market cap.

I can tell you from experience that it is NOT safe to store coins on any exchange.  Sure its safe to store a bit there to trade, but just be sure anything you have there can be lost at any time.

I had alot of my coins stored at Cryptsy, which was probably the largest Alt coin exchange a few years ago, so seemed a really safe place.  They claimed to have been hacked, and a large majority of the coins gone, or they just walked off with everyone's coins?  Either way, the vast majority of my coins vanished with them.  Luckily I had my BTC stored in my Wallet, so that I still have.  Still in the rebuilding process, but lesson learned.       

Gridcoin and Curecoin.  Both coin projects are in place to use computing power for assisting researchers find cures for cancer, AIDS, or other computing projects like SETI, searching for signs of alien life.

I would say the best place to look would be at Coins like Curecoin and Gridcoin. 

Both check occasionally for how much non mining "work" was completed then pay out accordingly.  At least in Curecoin's case, since I "mine" for them.  They have 2 sides.  1 side is the regular mining of the coin to keep the Blockchain alive, which splits the profits between the 2 groups.  You would then need to come up with some measurement and counter for the proof of Human Work, and divide the rewards according to how you see fit.  There could be other ways, but that is just 1 that I know is being used today that is similar to your answer.

That is a great idea as well, only problem is no one will tell them which coin they found that is basically in-mined, so will take a lot of homework.

My other suggestion, if not just for humanity sake, which I "mine" with my Video cards is Curecoin.  I make around $0.33 a day with 1 old video card running at medium load.  You basically sign up for folding@home.  Your computer works helping scientists find the cure for cancer, and other diseases ect.  Make sure you join the Curecoin team.  Then every night they run a script that sees how much work your computer/computers submitted and pay you accordingly.  There may be other coins still paying out more mining with video cards?  So can't say for sure.  I can say the coins themselves sell fairly quickly on Bittrex, which is an added bonus.   

Yeah def not a millionaire here.  I don't even know if I am a thousandaire.  LMAO.  Well from Mining/trading anyways.  Then again I stepped away for a while, and left the majority of my coins in Cryptsy.  LMAO, not going to see any of those again.  Anyways, starting back up from the beginning again.

My best advice for a beginner would be to mine for a pool that does the guessing for you.  I personally mine at Prohashing.com.  It controls what coins it is mining, and pays you for your hashing power every time you submit some work.  You can get paid out in about 100 or so different coins, and can choose what % of each coin you want to be paid in. 

Other than that, I use to mine at ipominer.com, which was decent as well.  Whatever coin was deemed to have the best payout at the time was what you would be mining.  The biggest problem was you had no idea what you were mining, and would have to find a place to sell the coins that would accept them.  Last I checked the hash rate at that site was down alot, so I recommend someplace larger like Prohashing.com.