just being around and seeing ups and downs doesn't give you experience. in other words what you are calling experience is just data and based on that you are drawing a wrong conclusion. the fact is, it has nothing to do with luck or if anything the role of luck is so small that it is negligible.

you are only looking at a small picture and only because you couldn't predict the market, you are concluding that it is unpredictable. it is true that from time to time it becomes harder to predict but most times it is clear where bitcoin is headed in short term and it is always clear where it is headed in the long term.

it short because everything that is not bitcoin is called "alt"coin.

alternative cryptocurrencies have never been known for being useful, they have always acted as a small market with a lot of manipulation (so high risk) where people go to in order to increase their bitcoin wealth. if you ask people "how to earn bitcoin?" or visit the topics asking it, you can see the most common answer is "trade altcoins" and that is the only reason almost all of them exist.

now with their purpose cleared out, you can easily understand why they are getting dumped each time bitcoin rises or falls.

Andreas Antonopoulos is the only person that i liked listening to since most importantly he is knowledgeable enough about bitcoin to talk about it, not like others who don't even understand how it works but still create videos! and also because he is good at teaching that knowledge to others.
https://antonopoulos.com/

the right thing to do is to educate yourself about bitcoin and its market (aka the price) so that you don't have to seek help from others, like looking up "signal groups" or some idiot on reddit, youtube, telegram, twitter,... who is spreading bullshit all over the internet and has enough shills to praise him and pretend he is actually good!
if you do that, you will find yourself in a lot better situation no matter what the price is doing. and in the end it will come down to experience. if you have it then you will be fine and if not then start gaining some experience, start by looking at chart history.

bitcoin has always been the "topic of interest". and then it filled the media when it started reaching the previous iconic ATH of 2013 and also because of mass adoption in Japan then it became a bigger "topic of interest" but it didn't start because of price surge.

maybe you are commenting from an alternate universe but the "value" of bitcoin reached nearly $20,000 not $13 million!

try the search function of the forum, you will get your answer in 10 exact copies of your question.

i don't think that many people are doing it this way. most of them don't even verify the signatures and even if they do, they just download everything and get all the links from the same place (the website) and the best they are going to do is to double check if they are on the right website (eg. electrum.org)

of course the chances are low and if a hack actually takes place it will be known fast enough and you can find out about it on the social media.

that is not "trading" strategy. that is simply an investment and OP is talking about trading bitcoin.
and thanks to the high volatility of bitcoin price it has been creating a lot of good opportunities to trade it and make good profit, in other words you can buy some amount of bitcoin and then trade with a part of it to increase that amount (store your profit in bitcoin). and you don't have to do it constantly, you can only do it when the market is most predictable and stay away when it is hard to predict.

there is nothing called real value in my opinion. there is only supply and demand. supply is clear since it is the coins on the market but the demand is what is changing. for example by the time this topic was created the demand was continuously increasing and exploded to the moon by the end of the year because of the small mainstream adoption in US. and now that demand is coming back down to real demand so the price is falling.
of course there is a lot more to it than just demand. for example the manipulations that has been going on have been taking a toll on the price this year.

it has neither been most profitable nor most stable altcoin! i don't know where you got that from!!!
the most profitable altcoin are those with the biggest pumps, and small altcoins have always been the most profitable ones, specifically those that  went from 0.01 satoshi up to 5000 satoshi last year. and it is not stable either, a pump from 0.06BTC to 0.15BTC and then dump down to 0.05BTC is not called "stable"...

bitcoin is not on any ride right now. and as far as investment goes you invest in something that has real potential not something that is going up and down based on hype and pump and dumps. and bitcoin is the only thing that has "real potential".

and what superiority is that? just because they are different and because their advertisement tells you they are better, it doesn't mean they actually are any better! and getting pumped and dumped is not a technological superiority ...
in fact you shouldn't even be comparing bitcoin with tokens like eth when you are talking about it being "money" since eth is not even a currency, it is a token!

in that case just google electricity pricing based on countries and look at the tables that come up. 4.5 cents is low but not the lowest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
there are also countries that have varying price for electricity based on your usage. for example when you use less than certain amount (100 kwh) the price will be 0.9 cent, from 100-200 kwh it will be 1 cent and so on. so a miner may end up paying a higher price than a normal home user.

I don't know how you are so sure about this being the bottom but it is true that if price doesn't go below $7700-$7600 and instead bounces back up we can say it is the end of the downtrend because we will be getting out of the triangle that price was stuck in and has been going sideways for more than a month now. but it still needs to also break above $9000 at this point to be on the recovery/rise.

these two are not even related!
bittrex is an altcoin exchange platform not a bitcoin one. it has a bitcoin/tether market but last time i checked not only tether markets on exchanges like this didn't affect the price but it also doesn't even have enough liquidity to do anything.

i agree with @ranochigo, i just want to add a little thing about Web of Trust [1]. the way using PGP should really be like is that you build a WOT of your own. for example you start from somewhere, lets say you know me personally so you meet me face to face and get my PGP pubkey and then go home and add it to your trusted signatures. then some day you want to install Electrum and since i have been around a long time and i know for a fact what the right pubkey of Electrum dev is, you ask me to confirm it. then what i do is that i sign 0x2BD5824B7F9470E6 with my PGP private key and give you the signature to verify with my public key that you already had. now your WOT is grown a little more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

i don't like this at all.

i was actually looking forward to see a properly regulated exchange with reasonable regulatory rules in a country that is known to be bitcoin friendly already (Japan). because i expect that such regulations should make these exchanges safe and eliminate repetition of things like Mt Gox (which was in Japan also and was not regulated) as best as possible.
to be honest this escape from regulations does not look good to me, specially since they recently had an "alleged hack"!

there is just too many dumb things in this two small lines that i don't know where to begin

bitcoin old tech?!!! it doesn't get any newer than bitcoin! it is not even matured, it is calling an infant that just came out of the womb an old man and start arranging its funeral!

awesome projects? name a couple of them here and say WHY you think they are awesome and the WHY has to be detailed technical argument not the copy paste of some ICO webpage advertising it and not just because its price is pump and dumping and is giving you profit! tell us which one of these "awesome" projects have you actually used, made some transactions in, checked their code, features, strength and weaknesses,...
you see, i know it, everyone else knows it and you know it yourself too, you are just mad because your investment in some altcoin(s) didn't give you profit because bitcoin price dropped and the altcoins followed it harder.

the withdrawal fees of exchanges have always been high and it has little to do with bitcoin transaction fees. after the fees went up they all increased their already high withdrawal fees and some of them decreased it recently but it is still pretty high. for example there are exchanges charging 0.0015BTC=$12-$13 for a withdrawal.

price may go down but saying it will go down is just fake news and FUD. there is no indication of any price drop as there is no indication of any price rise for now.
if you are stuck making a decision you can always sell smaller parts. you don't have to sell your whole 1BTC, sell 0.3-0.6BTC for example so that you have some money ready, of course sell only if YOU expect a drop not because you read someone saying it will drop.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_1

i couldn't find the direct download link for this so i had to upload the PDF i had on my computer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdmi6diqo9apqb6/Bitcoin%20Stress%20Testing%2C%20Khaled%20Baqer.pdf?dl=0

how can price go up and down while they are dumping their bitcoin? if people dump price goes only down. but when it is going up AND down it means there is equal amount of sells and buys. and in this case it is mostly because price is moving sideways and it has not broken any line yet so investors are not sure which way it should go.

then do NOT trade.

nobody should give you advice about what to do with your money, you either learn it and know it eventually on your own or you should stay away from any kind of investment if  you can not figure it out yourself.