hopefully it will stop!

i find ICOs as a disease in the crypto currency world. it leads to creation of useless projects over and over and it also leads to becoming lazy developers.

you can simply compare a developer of an ICO coin with the developers of real cryptocurrencies with no shenanigans such as bitcoin and litecoin. if you compare how active bitcoin developers or litecoin developers are and how much time they are spending on developing the code without getting paid to do so then you can see the difference.

they have always been the "penny stocks" and it has nothing to do with the marketcap or price or how much they go up and down. it is all about utilities. when the altcoins have zero usage and only exist to be traded or more accurately to be pump and dumped to make more bitcoin out of them, then they become worthless even with value hence they are "penny stocks".

the main characteristics that the altcoins share with penny stocks is the high risk and the short term reward and long term death.

i have tried trading bitcoin but i never like the exchanges and the risk of them. however i always make sure to do this (meaning to sell on top and buy the correction) when i am almost certain about a correction on the way. for example when the price reached the $2900+ i was nearly certain that if it can't break the $3000 it will drop and it happened.
or when the bitfinex hack happened or lots of other big FUD, these have always been good points to sell some small number of coins to buy them back in a couple of days to hold more coins in the end. and it has worked good so far for me.
my suggestion is do the same as me and make sure to not do it with all your stash. just dedicate some small portion that you are willing to lose and trade with that. exchanges can run away at any moment!

short answer is gain experience.

you need to learn how trading works. learn some technical analysis, it helps a lot but don't rely on it ever. you don't even have to trade to learn, you can watch the market for a while, make speculations write it down and see if your decision was profitable after the day's end.
after a while you start understanding how the market works and can feel confident enough to invest real money and make good profit. but there is a learning curve that you need to get over first. it may take some time but eventually it will be all easier and faster.

non of these ICOs care about anything, even if bitcoin or ethereum fall down and burn to the ground tomorrow they won't care because they haven't really invested anything. neither money nor time.
they just copy paste some code and do little changes in smallest amount of time then invest some money in advertising it. and millions of dollars is handed to them for doing nothing!

30% is already a pretty high percentage of population to know about bitcoin and it is far less than that in most countries.
and it has nothing to do with being upper or middle class. you can always purchase and use bitcoin with any amount that you wish. be it a small amount of money like less than 100 bucks or be it a large amount of money like 1 million dollar.
and even as an investment the same is true, you can always invest in a fraction of bitcoin. there are 8 decimal places after the 1 whole bitcoin and you can choose a small amount that is meaningful in fiat value and buy that much.

if you are indeed new to this you need to know one important thing: this market is different from Stocks market in many aspects.
the biggest thing you will notice is all the manipulations. when someone owns majority of the "shares" and also has lots of money they can easily manipulate everything.
also you need to know about what affects the prices.

for example in case of ethereum the ICOs have been increasing the price of ether artificially. and it is actually scaring me to want to enter it now because all these funds will soon start exiting and when they do they will crash the market with themselves.

that is the advertising department of ethereum hard at work for you. instead of development and fixing the bugs and issues like the network congestion and transaction delays and lots of others they spend money on fooling people. and that is why i dumped ethereum for profit and got out a long time ago.

i don't think if anyone reads this they will continue holding any ether anymore
https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d36

the price is in the short term fluctuation and craziness for the time being so i don't think it will react to this particular news. it will probably continue being crazy for now.

this news however will contribute to the long term rise. because this means a lot more adoption, and that is real adoption by merchants and people using bitcoin as currency because the tax is removed on that not from traders who speculate and make profit. and that will always be much better and bigger rise in long run.

the underlying assumption of these two different speculations are different!

* those who say price will go down are either idiots who are spamming for FUD to make some profit by shorting or are making the assumption that there will be some disastrous chain split by that date.

* those who say price will go up are either idiots who again spamming the same or are making the assumption that since SegWit has a large support now, it will be activated and we finally move on so it leads to price rise.

i say we don't know. neither these assumptions are strong. but i personally leaning towards the second one because of the large support from hashrate and the fact that they are signalling the same SegWit activation. although there are still a lot of things unknown.

not at all. regulations won't make people hide their assets. almost everything else in the word has some sort of regulation and people don't hide it. like gold for example the regulation only makes its market more secure and less prune to manipulations and scams like Mt gox.

you can also see what regulations did for bitcoin in Japan. nobody in Japan switched to Monero or others because government regulated bitcoin there. instead they adopted bitcoin more than ever before.

p.s. the ICOs and other types of scams go to anon coins to hide their scammy actions is a different story though.

most altcoins don't have a fiat market so your only choice is to sell for bitcoin. in this case selling to bitcoin and then selling bitcoin for fiat is possible but the fees will kill any kind of profit you may make.
also if the altcoin has a fiat market and you were able to sell for fiat instead of bitcoin then there is still the problem with their fiat values. they all go down as bitcoin price falls. so you still lose money.

the whole point of altcoin market has always been to make more bitcoin by day trading, then to hold that bitcoin as the long term investment and make an additional profit. that is why the number of alt/fiat markets are very small.

it's like this:
you buy 1 bitcoin at $1200 then start day trading altcoins you make that 1BTC into 1.2BTC but bitcoin price falls down to $1000, you still hold the bitcoin and continue making profit on it. you make that 1.2 in to 1.5 and price of bitcoin goes up to $1500 eventually. then you continue making profit on it and make that 1.5 into 2BTC and bitcoin price is now $2500.

you invested $1200 but you gained $5000 in 6 months.

i don't care what the news says. i don't even care what random people who only come online after price has gone up and needs a correction say.

i buy bitcoin every time i have some money lying around that i don't need and i feel comfortable investing that amount in bitcoin.
i also buy bitcoin every time price drops because some manipulators decided to initialize a panic sell. that is me investing during a discount day.

thanks for the answer. it is strange that the installation file is 115 MB (for linux).
and it seems like it is just me that wants to verify a signature after downloading an installation file since this topic is nearly a year old
i hope OP checks this.

This is how a real random private key looks like (generated with bitaddress.org to make a point):
FC46D306D1CA227F3A7A8342571A1CA19C13C122C7C4FA33C9BA7699E5D19481

and here is your private key:
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364101

also that website doesn't have "all" the private keys and doesn't even generate all of them it fails after some point if you continue going deep enough.

it also has nothing to do with Vanity address, i don't know why you even mentioned it here!

i have some questions
1. is there a walkthrough for installing the wallet and running it in lite mode (i have just started downloading the installation file so i don't know if it is required!)
2. how big will the wallet size be if i run it in lite mode
3. why don't you provide digital signatures for the installation files. it is an absolute necessity for security reasons!
4. can i claim the airdrops through the android wallet

you do realize that all the things you said here, mostly about scaling and a lot more has been said a million times by a thousand different altcoins. each of them also lied about lots of things such as being used by big companies that makes you laugh when you hear it!

these are just empty claims until proven otherwise.

ethereum was claiming, and still is, to have no scaling issue. the flippening bullshit is still out there but we all saw as soon as it gained some traction the whole system crumbled.

show us real usage.
show us merchant adoption.
show us how your network will handle 10,000 transaction each 10 seconds
show us how your network will perform under 3 years of spam attack.
...

the fear of August 1 is already priced in. that was the 2 times dip and sell pressure down to $2100 and $2200 bottoms. the chances of that happening is really slim now.
and what you see now as the price is what you get because of the effects of that date in the future. if a chain split happens price will fall but the fear of chain split won't have any more effect than what we saw already.

actually they do.

again it is not prophecy, or prediction. it is more like an outline of possibilities.

technical analysis is not for future prediction it is future speculation.
i am not an expert in this field but with little knowledge i have and with analysis that i have seen so far, it helps a lot to make a sense of what is going on. and as a result it is not a waste of time at all to learn it and find for some good ones out there.

and also on top of that sometimes it is not what happens in real world but what people expect to happen. for example if majority are using analysis and then coming to the conclusion that price is going below certain level then it will happen because will act based on it.