there is not much to say really! someone (two in this case) took an educated risk and they got rewarded for it too. it is not like they were in some exclusive club who exclusively knew about bitcoin!!!
they, like every one of us, found out about bitcoin and saw the potential. then they took a bigger risk and are now rewarded for it.

unfortunately when you limit your criteria to "real use cases" of an altcoin then you end up with an empty list. because all of the altcoins promise to be fixing some real world issue but when you really check them out and try seeing what they are doing you see that they are not only not fixing anything, but also they were only created to be pumped and dumped!

my hope is that we see some real results from coins based on DAG such as Nano, IOTA, ByteBall. but they are not exactly exceptions either.

most of them couldn't sell their ethers because it is not time yet for them to dump it and the others are slowly cashing out because they are scared of crashing the market more than what it already is crashing. but they are all selling what they have received to get out.

the main factor is the nearly steady pump that took place last year. the bubbles are now bursting.

i honestly don't know why most of the answers here are repeating "it is easy"! maybe it is just a parrot behavior kind of thing but when i checked and compared ETH with other platforms i didn't find it easy at all! in fact i believe it is one of the hardest ones to create an ICO on! it is complicated, bloated and has a lot of security holes.

the only reason it is used more, in my opinion, is that ETH is more hypes than anything else in the market. sot he ICO scammers want to get paid in ETH not some altcoin that nobody knows about even though it may be so much better like Waves.

i think the first jumps will be from the biggest coins like ethereum but only a small jump and for a short time because whenever there is a huge dump like this there will be many who lose their tempter and invest at bad times and wait for a small recovery to dump and take any chance they get to dump the small amounts they have.

the the real pumps will be from smaller coins which will also be pushed into top10 coins from their pumps out of nowhere.

it is a natural course of market that should pass. you can't fight it, the only thing that you can do is to take advantage of it however you can and however you think is the best.

for instance many of the whales have been shorting these days to make profit from the panic sell of the masses and they are also going to wait for the bottom to buy more bitcoins to enjoy the follow up rises in the future.

buying altcoins is not really a diversification so when you sell all of your altcoins and go back to bitcoin you are not really using any strategies, you are instead fixing  a big mistake that you have made before!

if you are so interested in altcoins then learn how to trade and start making profit on your bitcoins by trading them.

what you are missing here is that bitcoin shooting up doesn't mean altcoins will shoot up too! in fact there is a very good chance that IF bitcoin shoots up, altcoins get dumped even more because a big bitcoin rise means all traders will invest their money in bitcoin and nothing else.

the time where altcoins really shine with their pumps is when bitcoin is stable or unpredictable and there is not much going on so it makes making profit with bitcoin hard so traders switch to altcoins to pump them and make their profit there.

it is not really a bold prediction about ETh price!
everyone knew that bitcoin were having some downtime and was headed for a bear market and when it does altcoins get dumped too. also it was very obvious that ETH was in a big bubble that needed to burst. on top of that all the issues that ICOs have been having and the fact that they were losing popularity and investor means ETH is losing demand and that means losing price big time!

the pattern will be repeated but it doesn't have to be as visible and obvious as previous times.
for example last year we were in the middle of a big bull run and also there were a lot of good news and media coverage that worked as advertisement for bitcoin. this year we still don't have either of them.

we can see the drop stop or some small rises during summer if the bear market were to continue that long and that will be the repetition of the same pattern as previous years.

i'm afraid bitcoin price is not going to be stable for a very long time. we will continue seeing a very volatile market for a couple of more years until bitcoin's adoption grow big enough to prevent huge volatility or it will be reduced if the exchanges were regulated and grow bigger.

this is exactly why i am a BitcoinHodler!

bitcoin is not something that can grow in one day. it is a whole different thing, you can even call it a revolutionary currency. so the adoption of it will take time and during that time price will rise. but in short term it will be volatile like these days.

bitcoin!
because it is THE only cryptocurrency that is worth investing in since it has a good future with the least amount of risk. of course it is not a good time to invest in anything but for the first time investment you should not even think about anything other than bitcoin!

when you go to the beach a grain of sand is also not as expensive as BTC but you don't see anybody investing in that!

i am not saying it is good or bad but based on my experience whenever you keep hearing about an altcoin that means it is already too late and that coin is in a big bubble and the bag holders are getting desperate since they started losing money.

i explained why of BTC but in the end it is your money, you should always make your own investment decisions. nobody is coming on this forum to give others financial advice!

there is no reason for confusion specially because you have been warned not to buy into a bubble but you didn't listed and not only you bought all these altcoins that were in big bubbles but also you held on to them while they were losing value!

the word "portfolio" doesn't even make sense when you are holding a bunch of pump and dump altcoins that are getting dumped all at the same time!

just check out the Full Node page on the bitcoin wiki and read what it is all about: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node
bitcoin core is one of the softwares (the most popular one) that is implementing capabilities of a full node.

as a BitcoinHolder i have found that the best solution for real long term storage of your coins is to etch your private keys or your seed on a piece of metal. it may be an electro etch which may require a third party if you don't have access to the equipment or simply a physical tool like hammer and chisel to literary write on the metal.

this probably is the worst time that you can buy anything not just ethereum since we are in a bear market and all the coins, specially ethereum, are getting dumped.

and just because the price is lower than before it doesn't mean it will go back up there again. in fact it may never even go back to $1k again and for all we know ETH may be replaced by another one of the similar and better platforms for ICOs!

the only thing this and a lot of other situations in the recent past months of new Tethers and bitcoin continues fall proves is that this guy @Bitfinex'ed was mostly butthurt for some reason and has been spreading FUD trying to scare people!

the collapse of Tether will surely hurt the whole cryptocurrency scene since it is being used quite a lot in this market but that doesn't still mean bitcoin price went up because of it and it still doesn't mean bitcoin will die if tether dies!

when you invest your money in something there are a couple of things you need to know first before you do that.
first is that you invest what you can afford to lose not bigger than that so you never become scared when some drop happens.

second is that you learn about what to do in different situations. for example stop loss is a valid thing and you need to use it more.

and finally is the fact that you should diversify but that doesn't mean buying altcoins! it means buying other things like gold for example. as you can see altcoins are always following bitcoin down but rarely up.

if this happens then it would be the first time in the history of markets not just history of altcoin markets but the whole world, that a pump team announces their pump scheduled a week early

and based on my experience whenever someone makes a topic like this, that means the said altcoin is already pumped and the starter of the topic has bought the coin on the very top and has been losing money so far
checking the charts this assumption doesn't seem so unrealistic...