you are wrong. 2017 was the one and only year that has been good to ICO scams and it will never be repeated again. by 2020 we will no longer even hear the name "ICO" anymore as they will have been dead for a long time.

it has nothing to do with "scam projects" but the fact that all ICOs have been useless and there has never been any reason for any of them to even exist let alone raise that much money. many people don't realize this yet but as time passes by and they see how dead all these tokens are they will have no choice to accept the reality.

i prefer calling it a "transition" phase and humans have always had trouble with transitioning because they always resist change. and being in a downtrend for over year has accustomed them to certain things which now they are resisting to give up and come back to reality.
so it would take time for this trend to change and the reversal to start and price to go back to the "rising mode" that it really belongs to.

why do you think that is?
don't confuse it when many people are wishing for regulations and ETFs these days with bitcoin being "at their mercy"! it is just those people who are fooled into thinking things such as ETF are good and necessary for bitcoin. many of them have motivations such as "profit" and they are excited about ETF only because they think it is the only way bitcoin can rise up!!!

i don't think you can ever find a way to exchange your altcoins without any "charge". you will have to spend something to do it, it is either paying fees to some exchange, paying escrow fees, or the cost of selling for less because you are using some alternative method.

but as a suggestion you can check out the Currency Exchange board on bitcointalk here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0
you can put up your coins for sale with better prices than most places. but you will have to use escrows and pay their fees.

another option can be atomic swaps which can remove the escrow and its fee but it will require both chains to support Atomic Swap and both parties to know how to use it properly.

you can't have everything at the same time! you don't want to spend anything, you don't want to mine anything, and you don't want to work. but at the same time you want to earn, you want to mine and you want to protect against 51% attack?!!!

that is not possible.
you have to give something to receive something in return.
for example you have to spend your computing power and mine some coin to contribute to its hashing power and make 51% attacks harder.
or you have to invest your money and buy some altcoin to have a share of it to run a PoS node and earn stakes.

you can run a full node of some coin, like bitcoin full node and contribute to its network and increase the decentralization of it a small amount but you won't be earning anything.

it is too soon to predict how the market is going to be in 2019 let alone make the conclusion already and call it bullish or bearish. we have just entered this year and we did it after one of the biggest dramas in bitcoin community with another one of BCASH's attacks against bitcoin that also succeeded in crashing its price.

for the market to move ahead, it first has to heal from the damage that was done to it and the investor confidence to come back as the healing process continues. then we can see the real trend shape up. which doesn't have that much chance to continue being bearish since it was bearish for over a year now.

you should stop looking for and waiting for some sort of magical event that can "stimulate" the price to go up. any such kind of even is going to be purely hype (things such as ETF, regulations, Bakkt, halving...) and their effects will only be temporary.

the only thing that truly matters is bitcoin's utility and the adoption of it because of them. and they are things such as lightning network and other scaling proposals in the future like signature aggregation that will continue to make bitcoin better and more useful.
these are real things that truly affect the price.

i disagree with this because i believe something like that is either guaranteed or impossible. there is nothing in the middle like being unlikely.

at this point we have no reason to believe bitcoin is going to be abandoned. because bitcoin is just getting started, some newcomers like OP who read some FUD most of the times may not see this now but that is happening. so at this point it is impossible. and the only option is to grow more.

as far as i know "they" didn't discover anything. someone else found it and you were lucky that he decided to report it instead of exploiting it after the release.
hard forks should always be avoided in my opinion. they are like the last resort and better for solving serious bugs not changing the infrastructure so much like this fork.

this market has always been so harsh to all those who act way too late. the time for selling and shorting is long gone and those who did it long time ago made a good amount of profit. those who did it late and try to do it still are only losing money in their gamble.

now is the time to either stand and watch what happens next or give up the greed for having a tiny bit better deal and start buying now.

the purposes are different.
when those shitcoins translate their paper into different languages they want to spread the word as much as they can so that they can get more victims to pump it biggest so they can dump on more number of people and make more profit. not to mention that they premine their coins or it is ICO so it is premined by definition and pay with the free tokens they have made out of thin air without cost. and don't forget that their design is  a centralized design so there is someone in the center with money in his pocket to do these things.
we have none of that in bitcoin!

i've sent you a personal message.

having ups and downs, or even generally downtrend is not considered a "bad year for bitcoin" because not everything is about the price and obviously as other user mentioned it was a great opportunity to buy cheap bitcoins.
not to mention that not all of the price drop was manipulation. only a part of it near the end was pure manipulation, the rest was a simple bubble burst and correction.

bitcoin is still around because it provides useful utilities and because of that each time its price is manipulated, it comes back up again.

considering their "mission" was to push the price below $6k you can't say they failed because we are currently below $6k!

i sent Lutpic a personal message requesting an update on this campaigns situation on January 9th but haven't heard back from him yet.
the management was supposed to be transferred to someone else like 777 campaign but nothing is happening here. maybe because unlike 777 with lightlord, the owner (bitblender) isn't active here? has anyone tried contacting bitblender?

there simply is no asset that can have any returns even close to bitcoin in the long run. maybe some innovative company (like Apple for example in early days of it) that is brand new and you could get in on the ground floor but nothing  else.

as for diversification i personally only have gold although i never trust its price in the long run like in 5 to 10 years!

there won't be any "development" of "cryptoindustry" for a long time for now because there are a lot of bag holders like you who are too caught up in the fake advertisement of shitcoins that promised them better cryptocurrencies than they really delivered. they were promising a coin better than bitcoin which you ate up and started bag holding it and then lost a lot of money in it.
the result is lazy developers who are more interested in making money by pump and dumping coins and take the money from gullible people like you  who bag hold their useless tokens.

what the hell is a "petro-dollar"? all i can find about it is the following which is saying it is US dollar that is paid to oil-exporting countries in exchange for oil!
https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-a-petrodollar-3306358
so your question doesn't make any sense at all.

there is also Petro which is the cryptocurrency created by Venezuelan government and that also has nothing to do with other cryptocurrencies if it falls or not.

i don't use Electrum-LTC to be sure but maybe it is rejecting the old format addresses which were starting with 3. try converting it to the new format starting with M and try again:
https://litecoin-project.github.io/p2sh-convert/

make sure you understand what is happening and the address is correct before sending a big amount to it though.

are you sure the address you are pasting in your wallet send text box is a correct address? also try posting the whole error message it helps identifying the problem easier. "invalid line..." can be anything. my guess is that there is a problem in your address. try searching the address on some LTC blockexplorer like blockcypher.com and see if you get a similar error

i have only participated in actual airdrops not the thing that kids call airdrop these days.
an airdrop is like a free giveaway which you don't have to do anything for. you just sign up, or give your wallet address (usually linking bitcoin addresses with balance in them) and receive a free amount of altcoins in return. that is the ones i have ever bothered with.
these days they make you jump through hoops, advertise for them (do work like a job) then take your identity with a lot of documentation then give you a tiny amount of shitcoin that dies the next day