A fee of $2 is still OK, for international payments. But I am worried that this is going to increase further. If the consensus is not reached on block size, then the situation will get worse.

If it is confirmed, then it is going to be huge. But it seems that some random guy manually edited that page and filled in the information regarding Google. There is the name of Amazon Web Services as well. 

Yes... looking at the exchange volumes, it seems so. The BTC vs ETH volumes are much higher than the ETH vs USD or ETH vs EUR volumes. Regarding LTC, the LTC vs BTC volumes are still greater than LTC vs USD or LTC vs CNY, but the latter group has started to behave independently.

To be fair, Dogecoin is one of the oldest altcoins around (although not as old as Litecoin and Namecoin). Also, it is having a significant and loyal user base. If the other alts such as Steem and Golem, which are being used only by a few thousand people can get themselves included in the top 20 altcoin list, then why not the Dogecoin?

I don't think that the current spike in the BTC exchange rates is a bubble. It is having more than 10 million users, and the user base have been growing for the past many years. But the same can't be said about most of the altcoins. They don't have a large number of users.

Right now, DigiByte, Bytecoin and Siacoin comes to my mind. Strong basics, and technology is also robust. The user base and volumes have been increasing for the past few days.

The first time I invested in alts was in 2013. Litecoin gave me good returns, but I lost huge in Quark, Labcoin and Terracoin. I still own a few Litecoins and Namecoins. I also have a few Terracoins, Dogecoins, Quark, and Freicoin in my wallets, but these are worthless now.

I think that it is pure speculation. I have studied the technology behind NEM, and there are dozens of similar alts around. So in my opinion, the current spike seems to be a pump-and-dump.

There are very few exchanges out there, which will permit trading in BTC/ALT without ID verification. The first one which comes to my mind is BTC-e. They have been one of the oldest exchanges around, and they require absolutely no personal identification. But only a limited number of options are available in BTC-e, like LTC, ETH, NMC, NVC, PPC, DSH, ETH.etc.

What about Litecoin (LTC)? It has been one of the oldest altcoins and previously, it was the no.2 crypto-currency in terms of market cap. There are still a lot of people who use LTC, and the transaction fee is a fraction of that when using BTC.

You are wrong. The market cap for Zcash has increased when the exchange rates went up, and it has decreased when the exchange rates went down. Check the charts at coinmarketcap for more information:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/

Ripple is already having a market cap of around $15 billion, and it has even managed to overtake Ethereum. So it may be a bit late to invest in this currency. Its exchange rate has increased by 7,000% during the last 3 months (from $0.005 per coin to $0.350 per coin).

Right now it is showing 33.5% support for SegWit and 41.0% support for BU. None of the proposals are anywhere near the 95% support which is needed for their implementation. So what lies ahead?

Gold is one of the least riskiest asset in the world, and that is probably the reason why so many people (and even the governments and the banks) use it. Bitcoin is relatively new. And until it gets stabilized, the risk will be there.

I agree with you that the confirmation bottleneck is quite worrying. But at the same time, if you convert your BTC to LTC, then you have to pay a small fee (on top of the transaction fee). Also, you need to convert your LTC back to BTC, as very few online retailers accept LTC.

This can't continue like this in the long term. As we know, the number of users is increasing with every passing day, and therefore it can be expected that the number of transactions will also rise. If we are having such delays and backlogs now, what will be the situation after one year?

More people are using crypto-currencies, and this is definitely one of the reasons why newer coins are being invented every day. For example, the number of crypto-currency users have increased by around 10x during the past three years.

OK.. Here comes my list:

1. Ether: Userbase is strong, technology is well advanced.
2. Ripple: Already got a good user base, including some of the banks.
3. Litecoin: One of the oldest altcoins. Still having a very significant userbase.
4. Dogecoin: One of my past favorites. Has a lot of potential.
5. Stellar Lumens: Selecting the 5th one was tough. Went with Stellar, just because it had a unique name.

I wasn't much surprised when Ether and Ripple overtook Litecoin (at least these cryptos are quite old and somewhat popular). But today I got the shock of my life, after finding that NEM has also overtaken the market cap of Litecoin.

Buying in exchange for BTC is definitely one of the options. But buying with fiat is not that popular. That said, for some of these altcoins, it is really profitable to do mining. The ROI varies from coin to coin. Need to make detailed analysis, before jumping in to the mining scene.