i may not be sure about the bitcoin price in the near future and i may not be sure about when the rise is going to happen or where the bottom is going to be and a lot of things...

but i am sure about one thing: we have no indication whatsoever for the price to be wanting to go any lower. it may go lower but it will be because they manipulated the market and dumped it lower not because it was real traders selling. everyone is already out.

I confirm I have received the payment in my bitcoin wallet. Thanks.

just a suggestion:
try batching the transactions together, meaning pay everyone in one transaction instead of making a new one for each participant. that way you will save up on a lot of fees since your transaction size will be smaller than the total size of the many transactions.

also changed my signature to the new one in OP.

potential of a coin is not something you can "calculate" specially not by using coinmarketcap.com website!!!

you can however find out signs of a rise in some altcoin. it is sometimes hard but it is possible to notice that a pump is on the way. for instance when you see a small rise in price but a large rise in the volume of the coin and then see a news in the media about that coin you can say that this coin has a good potential for a daily pump.

just remember to not hold that coin for long because you will get dumped on and lose money.

that is correct. SEC's jurisdiction is theoretically restricted to USA only but the thing is when they do something other countries may follow because it would be bad for them to see for example SEC banning something that they are allowing!
not to mention that the other countries have not been so friendly towards ICOs so far. there have already been a lot of bans in different countries. USA/SEC is not the first one there.

i have been afraid for the future of ICOs and most important of all i have been worried more about the future of the platforms that ICOs run on like Ethereum.

these coins like ETH rely completely on ICOs to survive with an ICO there is no reason for them to exist anymore and SEC and a lot of countries around the world have been banning ICOs or at best putting a lot of restrictions around them.

i think 2018 can be a very dark year for ETH.

the adoption of bitcoin in Africa is nothing new. it has been going on for a while now and the people there are even more enthusiastic about bitcoin than anywhere else in the world despite all their restrictions such as access to internet and the speed and all the rest.

i even heard of a lot of bitcoin mining in different places of Africa.

i have experienced all of these as a matter of fact. the difference however is the following:
1. i have invested what i could afford to lose and i knew that i am a beginner trader so i wasn't really full of myself thinking i can succeed in a market that i entered yesterday! so when i got scammed, got dumped on, ... i only lost a small amount
2. after making the mistakes i didn't run away crying to my mom. i sat down and starting analyzing what happened and where i went wrong.

the result?
now i am more experienced and i no longer make the same mistakes.
i don't have delusions about altcoin market and i see it as it really is, which is a pump an dump market where everyone who is saying some altcoin is good are saying it because they are desperate for making profit.

my strategy?
only buy coins that are not already pumped, are not in a bubble and coins that are starting to get pumped.
and i dump these coins as soon as i get a profit that satisfies me which is usually very fast like less than a day of holding them.

to be clear the only similarity between now and 2014 is the fact that price has gone down and will eventually start rising back up again soon. other than that there is no similarity whatsoever. this downtrend had been super fast and the recovery will also be much faster than 2014 one.

just for future references remember than whenever you make an investment in anything you need to set something called stop loss you can read more about it online: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stop-lossorder.asp

but basically it means that you set a number (even manually or in your head) that when you reach that much loss you give up and sell. for example when you invest $1000 you set your stop loss on 5% and when you lose $50 you sell to prevent bigger losses. this is some sort of insurance that you don't lose all your money or end up losing $700 and only be left with $300 ignoring all the fees!

people are getting overly excited about a tiny rise in the altcoins like this! that is how the whales make profit in short term in these big coins with high liquidity. these rises are more like dead cat bounces instead of a bull market which they are in fact "trapping bulls" and taking their money.

the first question is "how familiar are you with this market?" based on your comment specially the point #5 and the fact that you say you want to buy and hold a  bunch of coins, i assume you have no idea how this market works.

so my suggestion is that you should first hang around in the market for a couple of months. and most important of all you should try to see the history of different  coins. check their charts in the long run like for a couple of years and see how they have been changing.
try to figure out why each coin rises and falls (aka pumps and dumps) and try to take advantage of that if you want profit.

how well has it performed for you so far?!!!

everyone knows that IF bitcoin falls the altcoins will be dumped even harder, which means if you buy them you will lose a lot more money than if you have bought bitcoin instead.
also when it comes to rise bitcoin will rise a lot more in the long term than any altcoin can ever do. the altcoins are only good for short term as the pumps happen in short term.

there is always a certain value to everything in the world including fake virtual tokens that exist in the name of altcoins. this value is  determined based on their utilities and also sometimes go up and down based on speculation. when the value goes higher above the real value they are considered in a bubble and that price can not be sustained, it WILL fall.
that is what has been happening so far in altcoin market and will continue happening until they  reach a much lower price which is their real value.

these aren't "experts" they are more like "attention seekers" who take the hot topics of the day and then start talking about them without much of an understanding of what is going on.
when you are in the market for a while you know that there are manipulations taking place, a lot more in altcoins than in bitcoin but they are always looking as "shocking" and big to outsider newbies who jump in from outside!

i don't really think that much is going to change only in two years. we will continue seeing the same market in 2 years also. the same pump and dump coins and basically the same market where people care mostly about making money than developing a proper cryptocurrency that can work as a decentralized currency all around the world and bitcoin will remain the king with a huge distance between it and the rest of them.

any investor will always want to maximize their profit so they invest in things that can give them the most amount of profit while keeping the risks as low as possible. investing in bitcoin does that for you.

the problem with OP's portfolio is that he made profit but also he minimized his profit by investing in multiple altcoins and holding them. go ahead and calculate his profit if you don't believe me. if he only invested in bitcoin now he could have turned that $10K into $19000 assuming he didn't sell on top and held until now and if he sold then he could have had $59000 by the end of 2017!

how much did he make with his altcoins? a lot less mostly because some of these coins are already dumped into oblivion.

what do people always refer to the whole market as ONE?!

there are nearly 2000 different altcoins and tokens and despite what it looks like most of the times they are not connected to each other. this "bear market" that OP was pointing out a while ago is different for each coin. for some of them (like the big  coins such as ETH, XRP, LTC,...) it is still ongoing and will probably continue until the end of the year since they are far from their bottoms but for many others (such as the smaller coins) the bear market has been over a long time ago. for example today i saw a coin on my exchange that had risen nearly 260% in the past 24 hours!

it is not just fear and fear alone can not do anything to the prices.
think about it, fear always exists among newbies that is the way to milk them dry. but it only leads to panic sells when the whales are dumping. and right now the whales ARE dumping because they are shorting altcoins to make profit so they need prices to go down for that matter.

and in this process only those who try to go against the market (hold altcoins) will lose money.

i disagree completely with this statement and the follow up comment by OP.
crypto is not supposed to give you that profit at all. YOU are the one that can use it to make such profits. but the real question is whether you are capable of doing it or not?
the problem usually is that people get caught up in this false promise and then start pouring their money into crypto and the result is a lot of big losses by them.

i gave you merit because of the effort although i disagree with what you said

why did you choose 2013-2015 chart to compare with 2017-2018 chart? bitcoin was not created in 2013. it started back in 2009 and there are charts for nearly as far back in time. additionally we have had the same "market cycle" multiple times before 2013.

i agree with Tytanowy Janusz about Wyckoff .
also i would like to mention that this type of analysis, generally speaking TA has never worked for bitcoin as much as you like it to.