it is being pumped! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

there are different theories.
some say it is done to take the hashrate from bitcoin to bitcoin cash and then cause some delays in bitcoin chain in order to push for SegWit2x fork.
i say it may be true.
also the fact that market was ready for a BCH pump means people were watching it to jump on board. that lone means a nice pump for any altcoin.

a better decision was to speculate about this sooner and buy when price was still low. now you would be buying into the pump. although since pump is not over yet and there is more rise to come, it can be a good investment.

there are two different ways:
1. the correct way.
you as a developer or as a team, use your experience in cryptography, economics, blockchain technology, and a couple of other stuff to create a new project. you usually code it from scratch and create the new coin.
when you do that, you just have to put the word out and the project will pick up and become popular on its own because it will be worth it.
you can invest in it in the early stages, mine it, or ... to be also involved with it and make a lot of money when your project becomes popular.
example: bitcoin! Satoshi is speculated to own nearly 1 million bitcoin because he was one of the people who mined bitcoin in early days. now it is worth $5,700,000,000 growing day by day.

2. the wrong or lazy way.
you have the smallest experience in programming, the technology, cryptography,... so you just copy paste some code and change a couple of variables making it look different and release it.
to advertise you have to spend a lot of money to trick others into believing your project has a future and fool them into buying it.
to make money you will have to run an ICO and/or premine the shit out of your coin then dump those coins when you get them and as soon as possible.
example: most altcoins

no. you can not do that because of how the orderbook works.
for example if you place an order of $100 for 1 bitcoin there will be a ton of other orders in front of you and their platform doesn't allow anyone to choose an order to fill, it automatically fills the top order. which means even if you set the order to $100 and 1BTC you will end up paying $100 fill the top order and receive ~0.017BTC and your initial order will remain untouched.

so what? let it be the worst altcoin of all times, what would that change? we are in the trading discussion board which means even the worst altcoin is a potential choice for trading. and altcion market is filled with rubbish like this. look at ETH which is the biggest altcoin around with so many hardcore, hot headed supporters! it is the one of the worst altcoins that ever existed. there have been lots of hacks and bugs in the code itself and in their official wallets leading to millions of dollars lost. but people still happily trade it to get more bitcoin.

BTG is no different. you got $115 for each bitcoin you owned for doing nothing. if you were fast enough you could have gotten nearly $1000 per BTG which many did on Yobit!

not to mention all the pump and dumps that these coins have. like the BCH pump that is going on right now. all that is profit that a trader can make very easily.

this upcoming fork which is called SegWit2x and a 2 MB hardfork to increase the base block size will cause a lot of havoc in my opinion because there are so many people against it while there are so many others supporting it, including big businesses and a lot of hashrate.

but generally speaking Hard Forks are not desirable although sometimes they are necessary.

what coin? it may be very different from coin to coin!

not being synced generally means you do not have all the previous transactions so if you are sure that you have not spent your coins you still can create a transaction, sign it  and broadcast it to the network. that is unless the blockchain is different for the coin you have in mind.

this is the altcoin board after all so you have to be specific about your issue! things are very different in this board. there are coins that don't even have a blockchain in the traditional sense!

"after" 2x day there is a much bigger chance that altcoins will drop harder than before as there is nothing in front of bitcoin anymore.

the thing about rises and falls in this market is that they happen way be  fore the dates of big news. for example when the August 1st risk presented itself price started dropping in June and July and was finished before 2 weeks prior to August 1st and the rise was started about 1 week before! and as you may know price was already at a new ATH right after August 1st.

the same thing will happen here too. when the 2x is done and dealt with the price will be rising then specially if it falls for any reason prior to that date. and that means goodbye altcoin rise

funny topic. lets break down some numbers shall we.

i have been holding bitcoin which i have been buying ever since price was about $200 or so. now a couple of days ago someone decided to give me more money because i was holding bitcoin. and i got 0.1-0.2BTC per bitcoin that i was holding...
where is the loss in that?

now lets talk about other people.
price has been rising and was at $6100 for a short amount of time, when you are talking about profit you shouldn't just take the highest price as your point. average was around $4900-$5300 when the BTG hype began that me ans with current price of above $5500 they are s till in profit.

even if we take the drop, that is about 8% drop from the top. in other words even if someone bought at the very top they could have dumped their BTG and receive 10%-20% (0.1-0.2BTC per coin) profit from it.

all that said i am not even factoring in the long term rise of bitcoin which means pretty soon, maybe a month or 3 months from now price will be at $7000-$10000.
so again where is the loss in that?!

of course this is also assuming that you dump your "gift" and not hold on to it. and also assuming that you don't care about the future pumps that it will surely have like any other pump and dump altcoin out there...

the government always calls bitcoin a commodity instead of a currency for tax purposes, it has something to do with their tax laws which are different from other countries that is why they take a different approach.

you can see US did the same, but Japan called bitcoin a currency, takes taxes from investors and removes taxes from those who use it as a currency.

with more adoption i do believe more  countries will do what Japan and a couple of others did.

anybody with large amount of money enough to diversify should do it. and anyone with small amount of money should not bother. small amounts are better invested in one thing in my experience. preferably in something that is rising big and fast like a pumping altcoin then move the profit to something solid like bitcoin.

i don't have a lot but i don't have a small amount either. so i do diversify but a little. i have already invested in real estate so that is a big chunk of money already diversified. then i am all in bitcoin like a true Hodler.
what i do with altcoins is to use them for short term as a way of doubling my trading funds and then transfer my profit to cold storage.

in my opinion planning for SegWit2x this soon is madness. that fork is not like BTG to be clearly a premined shitcoin, you need to wait and see what will happen. and also if everyone starts thinking about you, the price will go to the moon and by the time you want to sell altcoins to get bitcoin or even buy it, that would be way too late.

i also find it strange that you say you are not holding any amount of bitcoin but you claim to be holding altcoins which have lost considerable amount of their price (since you bought in summer ATH)!

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from your comments here i have a feeling that you read a lot of reddit emotional bullshit and you are caught up in it. if so, you have to seriously stop it or that will hurt you badly.

valuable? we don't know yet.
it may replace bitcoin and become the majority chain. or it may end up being nothing with 0 hashrate. or it may be a split and leave bitcoin half and half!

if these numbers are bitcoin core versions, then i believe btc1 has already merged 0.15 changes into their repository. but i am certain that there has been NO security vulnerabilities in bitcoin core 0.14.

a large part of bitcoin network is still on 0.14 by the way!

replay protection is not an improvement. it is either a necessity or a damaging thing.
it is a necessity if a fork doesn't have enough support (>95%) and can potentially leave another chain running.
a damaging thing if it has a large support (>95%) because it causes everyone to be forced to upgrade their wallets. think of this as if after SegWit fork in September you would have to upgrade your wallet just because they implemented replay protection for SegWit soft fork which had 100% support!

their team believes they have a large amount of support and i believe they won't implement replay protection until proven otherwise which means until the real signaling begins.

no they won't. they will start sending invalid blocks and then transactions which will be rejected by the bitcoin network. the worst thing that can happen is wasting bitcoin nodes' resources such as bandwidth and CPU power.
(don't confuse this with replay attack)

by the way if they would have looked exactly like bitcoin nodes then there would have been a serious flaw in bitcoin!

all that said is just my understanding and my plans. i prefer to wait and watch before deciding what B2X is. wait to see how many of the miners stay and how many will go, how many of the businesses, .... will do the same.
and obviously i am holding bitcoin but for a very long time i don't mind any dips, in the end the real bitcoin will survive.

how about "None"!
all the coins you listed are pretty bad in long term and they have been performing horribly in long term too. their short term however is magnificent which is the norm with most altcoins out there anyways.

i say it now that most of these coins have a much higher risk of being at least half their current value in 6 months than they have a chance of going any higher.
and all investment is about these chances, you invest in what has the higher chance of rise.

there are two kind of centralized crypto exchanges.
1. those with fiat. which means you will have to deal with the fiat rules and regulations, taxes, registrations, asking for documents, paying taxes yourself,...
2. those with only crypto. this may also subject to most of the above because you will be running a business with what can be also considered money.

since you say you are a "software engineer" you can also work on a decentralized exchange. these are open source, work only with crypto currency, nobody can restrict them and there are not regulations or taxes either.

unless bitcoin dies or in other words becomes absolutely useless, it can not lose its momentum or lose its value over long term. bitcoin will continue being adopted and become more and more useful.

now consider the scarcity of bitcoin which is defined by the fixed cap of 21 million, you will see how the price can only go up in the long term as more people adopt it but there is still the same amount of it available.

bitcoin was not "supposed to" go down. it was a speculation that bitcoin may go down after bitcoin gold fork and because some may cash out their money after getting the bonus. and as speculations go, they are a guess not a sure thing.

besides, price did go down. about a 15-17% drop took place after the BTG fork and it was partly because people cashed out and partly fear.

when you make an investment like this first you have to be fairly certain that you are going to make that kind of profit and not just have a feeling or have a wishful thinking about it!
there are many coins like this which may look promising and you may think you can make a lot of profit in long term but you will be disappointed when they stay the same or drop all  year long and then only rise in a month or about 2 weeks and then back to falling.
so plan accordingly.

as for wallets, others have said it already. use a desktop wallet. you can always install them on an offline computer and use it as your "cold storage". in fact it is usually the exact same as bitcoin. so you can use cold storage articles about bitcoin to create an altcoin version.

well since you are already in the trading board posting this question then why not invest in trading?

start with small amounts and take a look at the altcoin market. try learning how they move up and down. start investing in some, trade them and see if you can make a profit. in time educate yourself more about trading in general, technical analysis is also helpful if you learn some of it, and gain more experience in general too.
finally you won't be needing to invest bitcoin in anything other than yourself.

if you are talking about forks of bitcoin which are code changes, they will happen like before. small changes will go through easily and people will not even notice them like all the small forks that we had so far. and big changes will also happen if they are good like the scaling one with segwit.

if you mean the contentious forks creating an altcoin. then these are not new. and people will always fork bitcoin and create an altcoin out of it. they want more money that is why they do it. and they are too lazy or uneducated to build something themselves.

the world's population of 11 billion is a little misleading because obviously not everyone is going to invest in bitcoin and many of them are children or old people. not to mention all the third world countries which have places without internet or any computer around.

it is also misleading because it is too big
if only 21 million people invest in bitcoin, the (21 million +1)th person will have to beg the rest to sell him the coin that is already scarce. that is how this thing will work.

it is hard to tell because all forks doesn't have to be like each other and certainly all of them don't have the same result.

positive:
you are investing in bitcoin!
you may get the forked coin and make additional profit
price of bitcoin may go higher after the fork and you miss out if you haven't bought before it

negative:
price may go down, but it will be temporary. the negative part is that you may not have any more fiat to buy in the dip.
you may risk losing bitcoin if the fork doesn't have replay protection or you make a mistake or their wallet was malware.