things like ICO have always had an expiration date so they were inevitably heading towards their doom. and what we are seeing today in the form of decreased investment in them is the result of that. in other words this death didn't happen today, it started about two years ago when they initially were born and everyone was blind because they could make some profit  from them.

oh man, that gave me a scare for a moment

i honestly don't know whether this was a good idea or a very bad one.
it is good to introduce other people to bitcoin specially someone close to you but considering the age of that person (15 in your case) and the volatility of the market and the fact that most people who get into it by starting to trade get too caught up into the hype and usually end up losing a lot of money, i don't think starting him off with $800 (0.2) was such a good idea.

you can predict it if you can predict the pumps or at least be able to catch the pumps when they are starting so that you can make the most amount of profit. but the problem is that people like OP who have to ask, have no idea how to do something like that so the only option for them is to make an investment and the only investment option that we have in cryptocurrency world is bitcoin!

it is impossible to answer such a vague question because the answer is so broad and it can be literary anything from the bitcoin's PoW to some of these newly found algorithms that you have not even heard the name of.

your question at this point is like asking what graphic card is the best! which for instance depends on your budget, what you plan on doing with it,...

i very much disagree with this because history has proven to us that a project can only gain value as long as it is offering something useful to people and they can only survive in the long run that way. otherwise they can do what you said and use the hype that exists surrounding ethereum platform (which is nearly gone now anyways) to get their token hyped up but that wouldn't last for long. the evidence is hundreds of tokens that have died in the past 12 months alone.

as for your second paragraph it seems to me that you own ETH and the only reason you said this comment is that you are afraid that the death of ICO tokens is the death of your investment

the days of gambling with ICOs are over, in fact it has been over for a long time now, it has been nearly a year that they died for good. although they still hang around but it is the "walking dead" that is looking like the old ICOs that got pumped. they were even replaced by other things last of which is IEOs which are also going to die soon because they all have the same fate while being on the same path.

it depends on what you call "promising project"?
i don't see any real promising projects, all i see is coins that have a higher chance of getting a bigger pump than others. and that translates into an upcoming dump for every one of them that have that "promise" of big pump.

actually those losses can be avoided altogether if you choose a better timing strategy for both of your enters and exits of the market. for example people these days are focusing a lot on "what" to buy but they should instead focus on "when" to buy because every altcoin is worth buying at some point.
then you should try to figure out when to dump it because others will dump whether you like it or not and the prices will crash. so it is better if you get out faster than them.

for altcoins a simple HD will probably do the work for you because they don't really need that much activity since mot of their chains are not used at all, and you can also always use light weight clients or web wallets like MEW,...
but of course it is obvious that SSD is hundreds of times faster and better for doing literary anything and that includes running cryptocurrency nodes.

i wouldn't really trust news sites at all specially those unknown low traffic ones  that keep publishing imaginary news like this one. they both exaggerated Tom Lee when he was predicting price and now they are again doing the same when he isn't.

those predicting more drops at this point are purely idiots who are even dumber than those who were predicting a new ATH in 2017. these people are either trolling or are those guys who always go against the market trend because they are caught up in the previous trend which is already over

for this year we will see rises eventually even if it takes a couple of months to occur. my guess would be a price below $10k because to go above it means a much bigger price rise than possible without having something big happen. other than that with normal market rises that bitcoin inevitably has, price will reach something around $8k to $10k and in my opinion anything above that can not be predicted right now.

that is only true of the coin you buy gets pumped right after you bought it.
the problem however is that a lot of altcoins are still dumping hard so when you buy them at these decreased prices you lose a lot of money instead as others continue to dump it.
your best case scenario is that you end up bag holding some altcoin that doesn't even move for another 8-9 months and then finally sees a very small pump before dying for good.

you are not completely right.
the thing is, news like this (a random coin listing on an exchange) has always been the same. it needs to satisfy a bunch of conditions for it to get pumped (and you have to realize that it IS a pump before you can explain the behavior):
- the exchange has to be a decent one. for example being listed on an exchange that nobody has even heard of or a shitty exchange like Yobit is not going to lead to a pump. but listing on a big famous one like Binance can.
- the news has to be hyped up. otherwise people won't even hear about it and that will never lead to a pump if people aren't hyped up.
- more importantly a pumping team (it can be the developers of that coin) has to actually pump the coin for it to go up, otherwise it won't magically get pumped!

nobody cares about it even a tiny bit...

both of these coins are exactly the same: centralized, manipulated, terrible long term investment and useless.

the only time they become good investments is when they are getting pumped. and they both do get pumps as we have seen so far and they have done it well but only for a short time before they again get dumped and come back down to worth nothing.

SOME altcoins (mostly the small altcoins) are currently turning bullish. of course the correct term is not "bullish" but "pumping". and that is because bitcoin price is stable and during times like this, bitcoin traders switch to altcoins and start pumping the coins that are easier to pump, which are small coins, and make a lot of profit as long as bitcoin remains stable. but as soon as bitcoin starts rising they dump all of the altcoins and go back immediately to bitcoin.

if you are talking about user avatars on the bitcointalk profiles (like my current one) then you have to know that you can no longer do that because the admin disabled them and only those who already had such avatars kept them for the time being.

but if it is some other animated photo (since your OP is not clear) then it all depends on the design. it can be good or bad, for instance if it is a well designed animated photo that is not too crowded, or too fast and wild then it can be a nice thing to have.

more than 90% of the altcoins are worthless because they are useless.

it also covers the new coins. the reason for it is simple too. it is because the developers have never focused so much on developing than they have focused on pump and dumping. for years they have been creating coins that can get the biggest pumps instead of focusing on creating decent projects that can be used. so the result is a market filled with junk that get pumped for a while  and then end up in the graveyard.

nobody cares about it anymore because the platform has turned into a spamfest of low quality articles written or copied there by people who want to make small amount of money but they are not capable of doing anything else. and as the quality of the platform declines so does the interest.

the only time STEEM was a thing was the initial days where they were practically giving money away to get people to sign up on there and increase their traffic but since this was a broken design at heart, it eventually failed.

now the only remaining option is if some pumping group picks it up and starts pumping it.

nbody ever uses stable coins for something like that because the costs of transferring money that way is going to be so much bigger than doing it through regular methods because of the fees and also there are a lot of risks involved with this method.

what you may be referring to is "transferring money between exchanges". for example for arbitrage traders who want to buy bitcoin on another exchange with fiat but transferring fiat from exchange 1 to 2 costs a lot.