there are only two times when i ever buy an altcoin:

1. when i see a recent history of stable price with it staying at a reasonable range with little fluctuations and then leading to a big pump. i buy before the pump happens to sell on top.

2. when there is a huge dump and price tanks hard. that is a good short term investment. you buy in the dip after the dump slowed down and finished and hope you did well speculating and sell in a very short time after it recovered (also known as Dead Cat Bounce).

it has always been like this so far.
bitcoin down ---> altcoins dump hard
bitcoin up -----> altcoins dump

mostly it is because when bitcoin is rising every trader takes his money to bitcoin and wants to participate in that rise and dumps the altcoins or even closing the open buy orders means less resistance and a simpler dump.

when bitcoin is stable is the time for altcoins to get pumped and give profit because bitcoin can not give you profit when it is stable if you are a trader.

yes and yes.
Ripple has nothing like bitcoin. it is a centralized altcoin that is not even mineable. every token is issued by the owner and as they want. the distribution is ridiculous and the owners are benefiting from it.

then comes the supply. when bitcoin has a cap of 21 million XRP has 100,000 million.
when bitcoin has a 16.5 million coins in circulation XRP has 38343 million and they keep releasing more and more to a total of 100 billion

as for usage, when bitcoin is the biggest and is treated as a real currency. XRP has none. it is just a token to be traded and most pump and dumped. currently the bubble is bursting slowly.

this year we had a big pumping season and that made majority of altcoins to go into bubbles. most of them had some news to increase the bubble size and have a bigger pump and some of them have already came down. but most are still in them.

ETH, DASH, XRP are good examples of these bubble coins which need to come down to low prices because theyare overvalued.

you should have asked this before you bought
but anyways you did good. Litecoin is one of the good altcoins which has been around for a very long time. it has a good developing team and this coin has a lot of potential of growth. if you look at the price history it has gone up this year from around $4 to nearly $50 current price.
the resistance around 0.01BTC has been huge preventing it from ever going lower.

the future also holds a lot of news and new features of it.
with SegWit a lot of chances to grow opened up. the Lightning Network is an example which will bring the Atomic Swap and makes LTC easily acceptable to anyone who is accepting bitcoin for example.
there is also Confidential Transactions coming which will make LTC a serious cometitor among the Anon coins such as Monero.

there have been a lot of rumors about NEO lately, lots of them even contradictory to each other. they started linking NEO to China a lot and when things got hard over there about ICOs and all the exchanges closing, the NEO price tankes hard.
now they are trying to bring it back.

price seems to be recovering good though. it seems to be responding to the news and also the fact that NEO is a growing coin with lots of investors these days.

what i said about this spike came out of me a couple of weeks ago when the dip was getting started, when the FUD was at its height.
i warned others to "BUY THE DIP" like always.
this, here today was the reason i said buy the dips. the chance to pick up some more coins for those who missed out. and for others to make a quick and big profit.

there is still some doubt in the market otherwise we would have already seen a big ass FOMO by now and price could be at $4800+

this is just a start. i expect so much more forks like these.

before all the bitcoin forks were actually trying to creat a new coin. and actually contribute to the technology. you can look at Litecoin and its creator Charlee Lee for a good example of a good coin forked from bitcoin.

but this new wave of coins forking from bitcoin are just trying to make money. usually it is with the airdrop, mining and pump and dumps.
this bitcoin gold one choose to also premine the shit out of it before release too.

i have not heard any issues with BTCC, they even announced it a long time ago and gave enough time to their users to withdraw and people have been doing fine so far.
as for ViaBtc, they didn't have that many users anyways. it was a useless exchange which was created just to promote bitcoin cash and bitcoin unlimited and had those listed. nobody traded anything else there.

there will surely be a rise and it will become big but the previous ATH which was a little above $5000 seems to be a bit far away and the SegWit2x drama seems to me to be a lot closer than the time required for breaking the ATH and go above it like reaching $5500 for example.

besides the drama about China is not over yet. it can not get any worse than this but it is still like a hand-brake that prevents any speedy movement.

i think a more logical speculation would be testing of $5000 resistance once again before the fork drama starts.

you are obviously bag-holding NEO with the way you are trying to convince others and your title. NEO will never go up to $1000 and even if it goes there, it won't be because of things you said. it will be because of a big pump.

regardless of that, i am expecting a big NEO rally myself. but it will be a big pump. this coin is one of those coins that have been making a lot of noise and getting hyped up. it has the potential of seeing a huge pump after this period of down-time is over.

there is no way to "reverse" the transactions here, when you send something it is gone. you have to make sure you are sending to the correct address. and bittrex has enough warnings about it everywhere.

i am not familiar with the technicality of this but if Iconomi and Ethereum use the same method of deriving keys you are in luck. you just get the Iconomi private key (possibly even convert it back to its original form) and then import it in your ETC wallet and have access to the coins.

when you put bitcoin among others and ask for good investments then obviously the only choice is bitcoin!
everyone knows that bitcoin is that main investment that everyone has and the altcoins are like the side investment rather than anything else.

additionally it is hard to choose among altcoins too. because there are times that the worst altcoin is the best investment because it is being pumped. the shitcoin that goe up 100% can give you the same profit than anything else that goes up 100%.

i believe Atomic Swap can only work with coins that are based on bitcoin also have SegWit activated and have the features required for the Atomic Swap. so it is restrictive but still a very good feature to have and be able to exchange these coins easily and without the need of these centralized exchanges.

coins such as Litecoin will start a huge rise pretty soon. it will be buying more if i were you.

the "storm" came and went while you were sleeping.

apparently you do not have access to any bitcoin price charts so let me remind you that the "news" combined with lots of FUD about China came a couple of weeks ago and price went down becaues of it. what you are seeing right now is the recovery and price going up. and it will continue going up because China news is already priced in

nothing happened when China banned all the ICOs.
all you saw happen was a price drop but it was because of the FUD that they were spreading. the media and the whales have been lying their ass off about China banning lots of things they never even intend to ban. things like mining or even bitcoin itself and that always creates panic among the kids who are invested in the market and don't have the ability to read.

only if you know how to do it.

it is not luck, so what you say is not what i agree with. sometimes unexpected drops happen sometimes they are out of our hand but what you do about it is in your control. you can keep holding and hoping and still losing money or you can STOP it by dumping at a small loss and prvent bigger disasters.

in any case trading altcoins is only working as long as you don't buy in their bubbles. you buy before the bubble and then dump when others start talking about how good that altcoin is

very good point.
i have always tried to reflect this in my topics and i hope some people took the advice and made a move on this opportunity that was provided to us. you can always stay on the sides and watch the movements before jumping in but the important matter is to jump it and not be greedy.

i see people always waiting for lower prices. and when their target is reached they start waiting for more lower prices and their wait will become forever because that second lower price never comes.
in this scenario when price hit $3000 they were waiting for $2000 instead of buying!!!

but there is a big fear regarding Ethereum these days. the fear that is caused by the upcoming hard fork that ETH must have otherwise it will no longer be useable because of the difficulty bomb.

and when the hard fork happens a large number of people involved with ether will go away. these were miners who have been supporting and mining it so far. they will go to the next best thing and the media will be filled with that replacing ETH for pump and dumping.

possibly because it is very weird to even have that kind of market!

USDT is unofficially supposed to be worth 1 USD. in other words having a market to trade and assume there is fluctuations is against the very nature of this coin since technically speaking it should not move from 1 USD at all.

also adding such market can also cause fluctuations.