because people are using fiat to launder their multi mullion dollars of dirty money and they are doing it easily through fiat channels and without the hassle of cryptocurrencies and their restrictions. besides when you use bitcoin all your transactions are saved up on blockchain view-able by all. but with fiat the blockchain is your books and what you put in them and you can write anything in them and easily launder money (fiat).

use http://www.coinwarz.com website for getting your answer and i think it is best to ask your question in the altcoin mining board instead.

but the profitablity change is usually because of three things:
1) price: which you can't do anything about unless you are a pumper.
and also you have to be good at speculation to know how the prices may change to sell at the best time to make the best profit.

2) the difficulty:
http://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart
http://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/monero-difficulty-chart
http://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/zcash-difficulty-chart
which seems to be the same for ZEC but rising with a higher rate in ethereum which means it is getting harder for you to make profit from ethereum mining and maybe you should stick to the other two.
and actually i believe that is why ethereum mining took a hit a while back.

3) block reward.
i am not sure about how each of these 3 work but halving can be a good thing for them, since it is known to increase their prices into a bubble.

i am not a miner but from what i have seen in these years, in the end miners always switch between these different coins, go to newer coins with lower difficulty and always try to maximize their profit and bigger coins are mostly left to be mined by big mining farms.

it is also on bitfinex and bittrex and also c-cex exchanges and in addition to the exchanges you  can also buy it from the official website
coinmarketcap.com/assets/tether/#markets

it is best if you read all about it in details on their website https://tether.to and as it says you can transfer it between exchanges. it is a cryptocurrency with blockchain and everything just like many other cryptocurrencies.

we all keep saying decentralized but many don't get what it means that is why they think China or any other country for that matter, has a say in this. they do not.

bitcoin is going to exist and get stronger every day and there is no stopping it. and believe me when i say they already know this, otherwise they would have done something about it already in the past 8 years.

all the FUD and all the negativity that has been thrown at bitcoin could only slow it down, and could never shake it from its real path towards adoption.

yes i did read the article and there isn't much to it to read and discuss. but apparently you didn't understand my comment. the only valid thing of that article was the supply chart!

i am not saying it is impossible to happen, i agree with it.
i am saying putting up articles like that saying it will go to $25000 and topics here is just as stupid as saying bitcoin price will go down to $10

wow this is such a cool news to hear because it has actual bitcoin usage instead of fiat in it, and that is always nice.

i am wondering if anyone can give us some statistics on how successful these businesses were and how many people have been using them with bitcoin in the past 2-3 years?

in the beginning of all this when everything was looking bad and you could see a new FUD topic in this board every 5 minutes price only went down to $930ish and jumped back up to $950 and became stable, there is no way it can go as low as $900 at this point.

and although i disagree with your term of calling it on glass legs, i think it may stay volatile for a while but certainly not as much as you think...

well believe it or not majority of people who are using cryptocurrencies are not looking for using them in underground dark corners of the internet!
it has always been mostly for investment and then for a decentralized cash that they can use online without the hassle of the banks.

and bitcoin offers more than enough privacy and anonymity to all these users. and none of them even have to use a mixer, or even if they do they reach a higher level of privacy without any problems.

OP should have explained what happened in details and i hope he comes back and does that.

but here is what i have seen from these pump groups:
they advertise themselves as good and profitable, with golden signals and lots of other hyping to seem good. and then ask newbies who are desperate for earning a profit from trading to pay them some join-in fee so they can share the signals and become rich.

now what happens in reality is that the pumpers start buying some dead coin while it is still cheap and after they bought enough of it, they put up some sell orders then they call their newbies and tell them this coin is going up, and those newbies start buying those coins (mostly from those sell orders) and pushing the price up.
and when price is high enough the  pumpers unload, crashing the price. now the newbies are left bag holding what they have bought from the scammer pumpers.

this is not only daydreaming but also i say it is more harmful to bitcoin's adoption than anything else.

think of it this way, articles like these that keep speculating about a huge rise (a surge to ridiculously high prices) are false promises and make bitcoin look like a "get rich quick" thing where people can buy now and become rich overnight!

and this is harmful because people start only seeing the investment part of bitcoin and we can never see the mass adoption ever. and besides when price doesn't rise with that speed and rises with slower logical speed and has some dips like 2 days ago, all those people who bought with the dream of getting rich will dump scared and run away.

it is not based on your decision. there should first be a bank that offers such services that you can use. and that is not going to happen in the near future since bitcoin is such an small fish for banks to start getting involved with.

first of all running a node is not about how much it will cost you and certainly (as many these days try to say) is not about making money (being rewarded just because you run a node).
it is about supporting the decentralized network that you want to use. what did you think decentralized mean then!

with that said, number of nodes have no effect on an altcoin price. if that were the case 90% of the altcoins would have never seen a price above 1 satoshi.

number of nodes (real nodes run by users not data centers mass nodes) means more people are supporting that altcoin, more people are using it and it ensures the security of the network.

i disagree with the subject being like this because bitcoin transactions are still cheap which makes bitcoin still for everyone. but at the same time we can't ignore the problem at hand which is small block size and inability of bitcoin to handle all these transactions which is making the fees go up.

we are a long way away from those scary pictures but if we continue down this path of fighting over control instead of developing bitcoin we will get there.

well to put simply, only someone who has no idea what trading is and wants to make money does that. in other words he is gambling not trading.

when you trade, you open positions, you think about all the possibilities, if you think price is going down then you don't buy, you wait to buy. an in situations like price going down from $900 to $800 (which are extremely rare by the way) you don't just go to sleep wishing it won't happen,you place some stop loss orders so you don't lose $100 and then buy back at the bottom to not miss the come back.

and if you can't do any of these then you shouldn't be trading at all.

your question doesn't make any sense, you are saying it yourself "it is a scam" then you say would you invest in a scam. if you didn't know it is a scam then it was a different story.

and this is what will happen no matter if you go in early or late.
you go in and invest some amount, they they start paying you some profit and before you reach ROI they run away and if you request withdrawal before they run away and you reach ROI they deny your request. simple as that you lose both ways.

if you go in early you lose small amount, if you in late you lose more. in both cases it ends with loss.

they technically ban that too if they find out some goods are bought with bitcoin. but in the end people are just investing in bitcoin to be some part of this rise and have a big profit in the end of all this. and you can always buy with cash and hold in your cold storages without anybody even knowing.

well if you want to call a coin which is worth 2-3 satoshi and the volume has declined quite a bit an alive coin then that is your thing.

but generally when the price declines this much and this hard, and then there is not really any good usage for the coin and then on top of that there is a huge supply available out there, we consider the coin dead and it will continue going down with no hope of reversal apart from a faint possibility of a short term pump and then death.

since USDT is the same as USD price, i say the best option from these group is the first option of trading USDT because trading bitcoin is your best option always.

after that i say all the altcoins can be viable options with a good profit potential as long as you can analyze them and find out if it is a good entrance price or not.

for instance from your list i have my eyes on litecoin and think it will soon start a very big rally like the one we had around its halving and it will be mostly because of the SegWit activation.

1. there is no massive adoption, it is slowly rising though and that slow rise means more investors are coming in and investing more money in bitcoin => more demand and increasing price

2. has zero effect on how price changes at this point.

3. this also has no effect. they are researching how to make an altcoin. this may in a way attract more attention to the technology and maybe bitcoin but it is not that big.

4. is the same as 1!

i have never encountered this, maybe the problem is with the platform that you are using!

anyways, bitcoin price has always been so volatile and hard to predict and nothing has changed about it from 2012/2013 until today. the same rules for stoploss,... still applies.

and in my experience things such as stoploss and any automation like that needs more rules, rules that can only be set with a bot. for example if the price were reached and then if ... and if... and if... were true then execute the stoploss. and you can't achieve that on an exchange platform.