there is no need to just be black and white! sell all or hodl all!
the best thing is to find that balance between these two. if you want to do trading then sell on top and buy back in the dips and as they say "keep your profit in bitcoin not in fiat" and also it is always a good idea to cash out at least something to taste the victory an the profit that you have gotten. if you do that, it can help you to have less stress in case of any following rise or fall since you already have gotten at least something out of it.

the only pro that any of these altcoins have is "profit" and they give that profit to those who are experienced enough to make it not everyone who joins in late. there is nothing else.
the cons are limitless, they start at simple things such as terrible design of the wallets and no clear roadmap to some serious problems such as serious bugs and exploits, centralization and worst of all malware in their executable files!

as far as profit goes, ETH can give you a more secure profit if you buy inside the big dips. because you can be sure that there are a lot of whales that are manipulating the price and pumping it. but as it enters bubble things become nasty.

LTC is the same but at least it has the benefit of being copy of bitcoin and since recently it made a huge improvement called SegWit and that is being followed by a lot of new features such as the lightning network and also there have been talks about anonymous transactions, this coin is going to have a nice bull run.

steem in my opinion has always been a bad design, they had a lot of coins and dumped it all on random people who used their platform to post crap and just generate views and the price tanked. and it will continue to do so because there is a huge supply and also the fact that you can't really beat something like Reddit with Steem when you add money to the equation.

i don't consider Ripple a currency, it is heavily centralized and when price goes up it only makes those with millions of coins richer and they will dump on the investors.

the rest of the coins are either too small or i never found them interesting enough to do any research about. but as far as profit goes NEM and a couple of others showed to be profitable.

sounds more like rubbing your left nut with the right one and producing 12 thousand of some swimmers that die, in which case that is a low count. it should be ~20-300 million

the reason why you are not understanding this rise is because you have not yet understood what bitcoin is and what it offers!
you, like many others, think bitcoin is just offering one thing and that is cheap transactions! so you conclude that since transactions are no longer cheap, price should also fall and bitcoin to fall down and die!
i suggest learning more about what bitcoin offers apart from "cheap transactions"!

we are currently at 9.5 billionth bet, i think this time it actually went up from 8 billion to 9 billion much faster that you missed the mark

also don't forget that recently bitsler had some trouble with DDoS and also there was a maintenance, these may not be that long but it is time that people couldn't make any bets.

absolutely no verification needed:
btc-e, c-cex
downside: prices can be lower sometimes and in case of c-cex not enough liquidity.

cryptopia
downside: lower liquidity, lower price for selling and higher for buying (big spread).

a couple of other tiny exchanges, bleutrade for example but they are tiny.

little verification needed
bittrex
i have never done any verification, my account type is called legacy and my limit is 100 BTC withdrawal per day.

poloniex:
i never used this exchange but i think it has similar rules.

it is going to be the same as any other price: too cheap to sell anything.

and also for short term kind of a deal, you can never know, many may think like you do and keep holding to sell at a higher price ($2200) but market maker decides $2001 is the price to sell.
or you may think that $2001 is the price to sell and market maker gladly takes your coins off your hand to sell it back to you at $2200.

to clarify: you have to wait and see

if we start sharing all these "predictions" about bitcoin price we will be here all year. speculation board is full of them

any "cancelled" transaction is broadcasted and finally propagates through the network one way or another. i currently have 1 transaction that is staying out there for about 2 weeks (just moving coins to cold storage with low fee and don't care).
so the number you quoted is the total of all of the transactions. nothing is really cancelled unless you double spend it with higher fee.

and if anything this number is bigger because of all the double spends and all the Opt in RBF transactions which makes a transaction exist more than once in the mempool because not all nodes recognize it and they will reject it while others replace it with the new one.

yes it does. paying 300-330 satoshi per byte ensures confirmation within next block.
this is sad but true, sad because the fees have gone up a lot because of stubbornness!

i disagree with this part. being stuck is mostly users' fault specially if they are using a bad client and then because of large number of transactions and high fees and all the rest.
and i say it is user's fault because this is bitcoin and the main purpose of it is to give user full control over everything, and it is mandatory that anyone who wishes to use bitcoin needs to learn some pretty simple things. and one of those many things these days is knowing what fees are and how much is needed.

this is sadly true!
but the worst part is that altcoins are no prize themselves. things will get way worse if any one of them is used in massive scale.

irrelevant.
altcoins are getting pumped and their marketcap is a fake number. this was explained a million times.

the rally is mostly traders, and also people who buy bitcoin for whatever reason! long term storage or any other form of usage. and although they would love a lower fee and no headache they will continue to do so because there is a lot more benefits to using bitcoin than just low fees.

i agree.

go check the price history and see how it has changed. don't just look at the price, but also check the timing it took to get to a price then if you could go and check the new to see the reason for each drop and size of them. then you can get your answer, or at least get a general idea.

in short anything is possible. but the chances of a drop that big (about $900 at this point) is not enough to be considered. there can surely be drops in the future for many reasons ranging from a simple correction to a widespread FUD but in the market there always is a pretty strong buy support which is waiting to buy bitcoin at lower prices, and a 100 dollar drop is big enough for people to just at the opportunity and buy.

today is my lucky day
thanks guys.

i like this part.
they all love to bash bitcoin and bitch and whine about any problem that it has and just claim that their altcoin (bags they are holding) is better than bitcoin and will replace it and all the while their altcoin has lots more problems, technical or otherwise.

whenever i am fair, i say altcoins have introduced a whole new world to us. they have a lot of nice features and are exploring so many different areas of blockchain technology.
but nowadays this world is filled with people who are only seeking money, not development. they want ways of making the altcoin in a way that gives them more money. and as soon as this stops being their main goal we can see a huge cryptocurrency that bitcoin and all the rest of cryptocurrencies would be shitcoins in comparison
i just hope it happens in our lifetime!

lending bitcoin because of its anonymity and being irreversible will always be a hard job to do but because of the decent profit it can give you, it becomes interesting.
in my opinion the only good way of doing it is to take a valid collateral so that you can always have a good insurance that your money is safe. this means doing the same thing as banks do, they take your home and give you a loan for example and if you don't pay back the loan they will evict you.

about exchanges like poloniex i have to say i never liked doing it, mostly because i don't quite get it
and also because it is a third party and an exchange and there have been so many so called hacks that i don't want to risk anything.

forget about anything with the word "long" in it when you are in altcoin world
they don't survive long and your investment will either go down consistently or if you are lucky you have to wait a long time for another pump to get out.
the term bag holder comes to mind in these situations.

with that said i say do a half and half if you think they will rise.


i know the feeling, i get it all the time, i see some good coin, even some projects that are similar to another and 10 times better but they fail at having a higher price!
and to this day i have no explanation for it.

think about what you are saying for a moment before saying it.

did you think about it?

... if bitcoin is "stuck" or slow or whatever, people are using it to transfer money from one place to another mostly to buy something from a merchant or pay for a service.
or they are traders transferring bitcoin from cold storage to exchange and vice versa.

in both this cases nobody wants or can use an altcoin. for payment the merchants and services don't even want an altcoin. and they don't even have it.
for trading, you are trading bitcoin! so you will transfer bitcoin.

now think about what you said one more time!
now look at the price of altcoins and how they have been rising over the past month. the conclusion is simply, they are buying altcoins to make more bitcoin profit.

the correct way of looking at this situation is like this:
in 2009 you could have bought 1000BTC or 1000e+8 satoshi at a small price
then in 2010 the same amount became hard to buy.
....
now in 2017 buying 1000BTC is literary impossible for majority of us.
now we talk about buying 1BTC or 1e+8 satoshi
...
in a couple of years people are going to say 0.1BTC is too expensive i am going to wait until price dips to $9000 and buy.

then it's settled, bitcoin is the king of crypto since this has been going on for at least 2 years and only the severity has increased. and this is not something that can "kill" bitcoin. it only pisses users off while miners earn a lot more money.


just be careful when the whales you are advertising for started to dump on your head.

they can still regulate bitcoin and put taxes on it and they do do that.

you need to read the whole news not just the headlines. these warnings are not restricted to one or two countries all of them have issued such warnings to their people. and the warning tells them to be careful when investing in bitcoin, since it is not regulated and volatile and they may lose a lot of money. and this is the same warning we give to any newcomer asking if it is ok to invest all his life savings in bitcoin.

all these things you described look like pump to be honest because none of the reasons warrant a real demand for the coin and all show FOMO buying the coin to join in the possible price rise. for example ownership change, or sometimes even release of a wallet software or things like that doesn't really change much and we can see from their history that these coins get dumped which proves the pump assumption.


2005 was just talk! the development began in 2011
i see on exchanges from 2013!
ripple company was funded in 2012!

---

but this is actually raising a pretty interesting question for me at least, and whenever i ask it nobody seems to have any proper answer for it.

these coins that are rising now have been around for years (not talking only about XRP) and nothing has changed about them. everything is almost the same as before but the price is rising.
you can't tell me that people suddenly decided after many years that these pump and dumping altcoins are suddenly good, and all of them at once!

what would be the motivation for doing that? (what would they want to achieve)