bitcoin's strength is in a lot of things. security (in other words: "nobody can crack it") is just one of them.
the thing about banning it or not, is related to its decentralization and it is called being "permission-less" which in simple terms means nobody can tell you how to use bitcoin or where or when. you can do whatever you like with it.

the problem with your "portfolio" is that you started investing on top of the bubbles! in other words after each of these altcoins were pumped and were already at their highest price possible (or near high on either side of that peak) you started buying them.
that is both unlucky and a mistake. now you have to endure the slippery slope also known as dumping and possibly lose a lot of money.

yes there will be a lot of growth of the market in total because there will be a lot of new coins, mostly shitcoins and they always bloat things up a lot and not to forget all the pumps which will also bloat it.

but we will also have a lot of reds and red days because there have been a lot of bubbles among altcoins thanks to their huge pumps and they all need to burst and go down until they reach the bottom which is a far away target now.

with all the development of bitcoin these days it is constantly improving. with all these improvements its adoption will grow more than before and as far as price of it is concerned it will be a lot more than this in long term.

additionally these "improvements" consist of some features which can potentially end a lot of altcoins. for example the fast transactions with no fees will kill lots of altcoins which were advertised as "cheap". the side chains with smart contracts will put an end to or at least take a big chunk of the market out of all these ICO platforms.
and all of these will lead to more growth.

today is a very good experience for everyone who is asking the same question as OP. look at the market for a moment, you can see bitcoin had a little drop and with it ALL the market turned into red!
after this, bitcoin will recover and eventually start a big rally like last year but most altcoins will remain low and continue falling.

everything about bans like this are strange, specially credit cards not debit cards ban because the debt is one of the biggest revenues of banks!! and why would a bank cut their own revenue if not for some other hidden reasons?
and when it comes to India, they have been scared of bitcoin for over a year now and it seems like the more their government panics about bitcoin the more people are going to buy it!

on some level this was expected though!
bitcoin is not something small that doesn't do anything. it may be small but it is growing fast and it has the potential of becoming huge. and it is disturbing some corrupted systems in some places in the world including banking system. this means bitcoin will have a lot of enemies, including governments who will try to control bitcoin.

but remember not to confuse this (meaning control) with regulations and what most of the world are trying to do. that is not a bad thing. it will help the growth and will help weed out criminals.

OP is just a classical bag holder who is desperate to make some money so he is spamming all over the forum to get some attention to this coin not knowing that nobody is going to buy something just because someone spammed about it on bitcointalk!

look at his post history like this topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2984162.0 the title of it is saying Ripple to $100 but it links to this topic! there are lots of these spams in his history!!!

you chose a very strange title for your topic! and it does not reflect what you are saying in it either.
for example reading the title, i am thinking only person who can lose $2000 in trading is someone who is an absolute newbie who lost a lot in one or a couple of bad trades. like 80-90% loss. or someone who went in big like investing $100,000 and lost 2% of it. in each case your topic doesn't talk about either of these!


i disagree with these two.
c. sometimes it is best to actually stop trading for many reasons. for example after you lose and realize market is too wild for you at that time, it is best to stop trading and get out of the market. for example a couple of weeks ago when bitcoin price broke below $10k and everything in altcoin market turned to shit, i simply cashed out back to bitcoin and stopped trading.
d. diversification is not really a good thing when you diversify into altcoins. you should instead diversify your money in other things such as gold,... (traditional assets) on top of bitcoin.

possibly neither of these two!
decentralized exchanges are  so much better if we can find a good one of course. the current exchanges for bitcoin and altcoins are all untrustworthy and highly risky to use. in fact risk of exchanges is one of the risks of trading cryptocurrencies and it is one of the reasons why market is not yet big enough.

the first sentence is more than enough for me to know whose quote i am reading and how much should it pay attention to it. a "bank"!
it is almost funny how many of these are flying around this year ever since price started dropping

i am afraid the main reason for this recent litecoin pump was because of the upcoming hard fork that it is going to have. despite all the warnings that people including the developer gave about it and called it "scam", people are still buying LTC for the free money they are going to get.

if my guess is correct them it might lead to a big dump right after the fork happens and LTC can lose most of this current gain.

any coin that has a high daily volume in long term not just one or two days. go to coinmarketcap.com or the exchange you are using and sort their list based on volume. the top coins of that list are good options for start.

but i still suggest starting with bitcoin trading then moving to altcoins. because the higher level of manipulation in altcoins makes it tough for a beginner to make profit.

you can always use cold storage options such as paper wallet!
the good news is that bitcoin gold is the same as bitcoin where it counts (keys) so you can easily use a secure tool which is tested and trusted like bitaddress.org and generate a random private key offline.

then simply convert your address to a BTG address.
you can use the bitcoin gold explorer to do that!

when you access your wallet while being online you are at a risk of being hacked and it doesn't matter what kind wallet you are using. and when you are using a web wallet then the risk of getting hacked are even more because you are going to a website that might have been hacked or be leaking your information!

it seems like we are at that time of year again when the rise has started and bitcoin is showing all signs of a rally so everyone is making predictions about how big it will get by some arbitrary time!

bitcoin is on the rise and the speed of this rise and as a result the price by the end of 2018 is completely unpredictable. for example the thing above poster said about lightning network can speed up the rise by a lot but it needs to start being adopted by some major merchant/service first.

for example imagine Amazon starting to accept bitcoin payments through LN. it will possibly push price to $100k!

no because even the biggest pumpers in the world can not pump a useless token that has an unlimited supply to a 10x pump after it is already in a bubble.

Vitalik is not really doing anything special. he stole the idea which was already around and built something around it which is full of issues. you know he was pushing to build it on bitcoin but thankfully he was shut down. and the only reason he is worth whatever billion dollar is because he premined the shit out of ethereum!

i fear for the future of it though. it is hyped up and it seems to have little chance of going down (despite what you said) but it has lots of issues as i said and with things like Rootstock (which is practically going to do what ethereum does but for free and on top of bitcoin) it will lose its place!

unfortunately centralized and decentralized exchanges are not comparable because thy are not offering the same thing. the offer "trading" basically but it is under a very different features. and that is why despite all the scams and huge risks of centralized exchanges that happen every day they are still very popular.

but the thing is we need to give decentralized exchanges a better chance. the more we use them and help with the development of them, even if it is simply reporting bugs, the better they will become. that is how an open source and decentralized system should work.

there are some good suggestions here but they are only reducing the risk. at the end of it all you are still using a web wallet on an online computer and that is risky on its own.
add to that the fact that MEW may be popular but the popularity is only among users not a lot of coder who must review the code to find bugs and fix them.