i disagree with everything you just said here after this part and i do believe that long term holding any altcoin is a huge mistake even if you look at their charts and see profit for last year. there is not much future for most coins out there, they won't survive in long term specially those coins that exist purely based on hype and pumps.

here comes the big BUT.... but it is important to do whatever you think is right for YOU. if you think holding is best and gives you the better results then make sure to stick to it. just make sure to follow the first rule: never invest more than you can afford to lose.

last year was the year of shitty ICOs created by scammers to make a lot of money. this year is the year of shitty centralized shitcoins created by these centralized platforms. in about a year or two we will see all of them (Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, PayPal, Visa,....) have their own shitcoin created based on bitcoin and the blockchain technology.
in about 3 to 5 years will see their failures and see them all burn and by then we will see a huge widely used bitcoin and possibly 1 or 2 real decentralized altcoins that focus on working as a better currency.

no it won't. both projects have the same code base where it matters and both are suffering from the same flaws. the only reason why ethereum is even alive is because of the multi million dollar centralized foundation behind it which is making millions each time they pump it and also thanks to all the ICOs that are being created on it.
ICO lifetime is not going to be that long. the fever will eventually drop and they will disappear and with it the price of ETH will drop hard. and other projects which are offering much easier ICO creation with a lot less hassle and no bugs will replace them both.

i agree with your idea of sticking to only 3 coins. i have some additional reasons for that such as the fact that it is easier to handle 3 coins instead of handling 50! unfortunately people these days love creating a long list of useless worthless crap and call it "portfolio"! in reality what they are doing is that they are making everything harder on themselves and also increase their risks.

but i disagree with calling it "optimum strategy". in this market based on my experience, the optimum strategy is when you stick to a handful of coins but not for a long time. you go in and run out just as fast. in this strategy you will be trying to enjoy the pumping part of the market and avoid the dumping part of it best way you can and also you will move on to another coin and do the same thing practically maximizing your profit.

something that is never used doesn't care about scalability and all these ICOs which you call "Startups" are not being used at all. every one of them are only created as an investment, they start by taking money from newbie investors and then continue to live on exchanges as some virtual numbers with value only there without a utility.

first of all you saying you sold your bitcoin after ~5 months is not really anything special. for all we know you waited to make sure price is not going to $21k then made this topic.
second, selling ALL your coins is never a good idea the same as buying with all your money is never a good one. there should always be a balance. you sell a portion of your bitcoin (of course that is working only if you have more than 0.01BTC LOL).
and finally if you did really sell then it mean you should have already bought back because we reached the bottom and it is long gone. if you were really a good trade then you would have bought back at $5900 and if you haven't already then the first step which you said you sold was just a gamble.

wallets don't fulfill anything. wallets are there to create private keys, send and receive transactions,... and bitcoin core is a wallet.

good luck in your bag holding journey

nah, all these projects know they are not bitcoin so they won't claim anything. they will actually exist a lot easier because they don't make such dumb claims. as an example you can see Litecoin which is strong even after 8+ years even though it is a fork (copy) of bitcoin because it never claimed to be "staoshi's vision"

trading is one of those things that you have to spend a lot of time learning it. people keep saying "buy low sell high" like a chant but they don't understand it and that's the problem. it is very easy to learn too but it takes time. you have to start hanging around in the market (on exchange) and start staring at the charts for a long time and try to analyze what is happening in the market.
and also you should always know that the markets are different from each other. for example what works for stocks does not necessarily work for bitcoin and it doesn't work for altcoins. each of them require a different set of experiences to deal with their specifications.

this is mainly done to go around the sanctions and stop using US dollar. it is not the "world" they are offering their coin to but only another country that is not so pro US in the world.
in any case they are increasing the popularity of their created coin which is a good thing for them. i am interested to know how can one buy this coin though. is it listed anywhere like on regular exchanges or is it only in their country?

the only fork that i know of is the hard fork which they will increase the block size to 32 MB which is on 15 May. if this is the fork you are talking about then there will not be any "free forked coins", it is just an upgrade (a silly upgrade) that they are having and there won't be two different chains after the fork. there will only be one BCH chain.

at some point in time this may have been true. for example during the last month of 2017 when price was shooting to the moon and a huge amount of money was coming in, this may have been correct because during these surges a lot of FOMO buying takes place and attracts a lot of investors. but generally speaking bitcoin is still very small and doesn't have that many investors which means the number of stock investors are a lot higher than bitcoin investors in any country.

if you are looking for free money then i have to disappoint you and say there is no such thing.
on rare occasions you may find some giveaways, airdrops,... and things like that which altcoins do and get something that is actually worth something but as i said they (the valuable ones) are extremely rare. and they may even need you to have something already. for example Byteball did a distribution aka airdrop to bitcoin and Byteball holders.

it is not about the time it takes to unlock your coins. it might as well be an instant (which is not) and still doesn't change the fact that it is a risky thing. it is about all the lost opportunities and all the lost profit that i could have made if i hadn't done that.

you waste a lot of time setting up a master node, then waste a lot of time locking your money in something that falls down hard.
meanwhile others are jumping from altcoin to altcoin that is getting pumped every day and make at least 100% profit every day with each pump. what are you doing? you have your money locked up!

the way i see it, that is true about all the ICOs. none of them have done anything so far apart from being traded as a token and going up and down. they call themselves "companies" and pretend to solve some problem that doesn't even exist and they ask for money (raising funds) to do that!

it is a terrible trend that is going on and becoming popular and it is harming the whole industry. this needs to stop if we want to see real open source projects come out. in fact one of the problems with all these ICOs is that it makes it centralized no matter if their source is open! the devs are getting paid so no one else is going to ever contribute to it!

you are answering your own question here!
you said it yourself "in recent days". altcoins are like that, they get pumped only in a short time and that makes them good short term investments but terrible long term ones. they can get pumped in a short time, for example a pump that lasts 24 hours and in that window you can make a lot of profit but in the end investors always go back to bitcoin or fiat which matter most to them.

the "technology" is the same, basically. it is just a different way of using the same technology that creates different altcoins. otherwise there aren't really any fundamental differences between them. and of course we always have the copycats which aren't even worth talking about.
in any case different doesn't necessarily make them "better" as many people want to convince others.

the attack on bitcoin is not something that just stops over night and goes away.
people like Roger Ver will always try to take over bitcoin and do it for their own benefits to become richer. they don't even care about the future of it, they may as well make millions of dollars in one day and then kill the whole thing off.

the real target for a token such as ETH is somewhere below $100

this is based on its supply (the already huge supply and the unlimited supply that it is going to have and also the fact that it is being created at a very fast speed), its lack of demand which is decreasing as ICOs die, and also based on all the problems that this platform is having which are growing every day.

it is ok to want to trust your "instincts" and make a guess based on them but make sure not to put too much faith into a pure guess because although you may be right a couple of times but there will come a time when you make a mistake and that can easily lead to a big loss. that is how guessing works. you will be basically gambling.

the term ASIC-resistant is always misleading because no such thing exists in this technology. as long as they are being mined with some hardware (CPU or GPU) there can be an ASIC for them.

in any case as i said the day the news about Bitmain new ASICs came out i said they are taking a huge risk by doing this because most of these coins will fork and change their algorithms. for example ethereum is going to turn into PoS (nobody knows when but it is a risk).