Yes. This is why, when people talk about an 'alt season' starting, the first thing I consider is how strong BTC is looking. I think for an alt season you need huge positive sentiment in the market, so people are willing to move out of BTC and into the more speculative coins.
I don't see how people can call an alt season right now, when sentiment is flaky at best. The question now is do we flee from BTC into the relative safety of stablecoins, not do we extend out from BTC into alts. Sentiment is headed the wrong way for an alt season right now. I'd love to see one of course, just can't see it anytime soon.

Support levels are starting to break, over the last few days. I think we are a long way from a bull market.
Let's hope that BTC won't fall too far, and can recover its losses and re-establish $10k. That I think is the marker for a more bullish market sentiment. At the moment however, a recovery to even $9k looks like a long shot.
Forget alts for the time being, I don't think the market is strong enough for alts to lead on price movement. At the moment it is all about BTC.

Whilst good news isn't often reflected in XRP price, it's not that XRP never rises... it does rise, and often very suddenly and dramatically compared with other big coins. The behaviour in this sense is more similar to low cap coins, which as we know are easily manipulated. So does this provide some evidence to back up the theory of deliberate manipulation of the XRP price?

With only 10 days left until end of November, I don't think we'll see $250.
The market has been trying to fall for a while now, continually testing those support levels. I can't see any upwards pressure at all.
I do still firmly believe in ETH for the long-term, but for now I would settle for it just holding current price around $180. We need to weather the storm first before we can think about rises.

Standard pump and dump I think. Small volume coins are easy for whales or P+D groups to manipulate. As always it relies on luring in FOMO victims. Unless you are very confident in what you are doing, I would advise to stay away from the low cap stuff.

It has tiny market cap and tiny volume. That is the reason that a rise like that is possible.
The smaller the coin, the more volatile it can be, because individual buy and sell orders have more of an effect.
This is a part of the reason why increased crypto adoption will help Bitcoin to become a better store-of-value.

It may not be mathematically exact, but a good guide is that volatility is inversely proportional to volume.

This could certainly be the case given that banks are the principal target users, so not necessarily just rich people buying as individuals, but also people buying as representatives of banks.

A few nice alts in that portfolio, and some I haven't heard of. My main response though would be that you really really need some bitcoin.
I know BTC dominance is at a huge high right now, but there hasn't been any indication that it won't grow further. Bitcoin is number one in cap by a huge margin, and I would advise to have some, even if it's just a few per cent of your total.

The OP started a lot of threads, all about HST. This just makes me want to stay away from that coin.

There are plenty with really great use cases. Smart contracts are one of the best uses of crypto, so ETH and competitors have great potential for mainstream use, particularly as 5G/IoT develops.
Fast payments is another one, probably XRP leading the way here.
Privacy coins I'm not sure about. As governments take greater notice of crypto, privacy stuff is likely what they'll attack first.

Some alts are good, some are bad. Basically 'alts' means all of crypto except bitcoin - that's a huge number of different types of project, the full spectrum from solid established multi-billion $ projects with famous devs and great roadmaps and use cases - to at the other end simple outright scams and true purposeless shitcoins.
I don't like the way alts are often grouped together as if they're all the same. They're clearly not.

As far as I can see, there haven't been any signs that an alt season might start anytime soon, or even that alts can reduce BTC dominance by falling less than BTC. We may want alt season to happen, doesn't mean it is going to, at least not yet.

I understand the distinction between Ripple and XRP, and it is certainly true that XRP has its own fair share of good news, along with Ripple... but that rarely if ever seems to translate into the sort of price movement we would see for other coins.
Not sure why this is, or how much the token-dumping by Ripple plays a part... but regardless, XRP still has a really solid use case and looks good for the long-term.

It's difficult to know what any of this is really worth as actual current use-cases are thin on the ground. It's all expectation of future use, which is why the markets are so speculative. In the past I think alt booms have correlated with high market confidence... which is lacking at the moment. That being the case I would expect any new upwards movement to be led by BTC, thus increasing BTC dominance. Probably (possibly) an 'alt season' will then happen once prices are higher across the board.

I would be skeptical of any alt at the moment. The whole alt market has been moving together for a long time now. I don't think it's likely that we'll see a huge push upwards from any alt. If it's going to happen somewhere, I think it's likely bitcoin will surge first and then alts follow.

Plenty of places you can buy direct with fiat, Coinbase being probably the biggest and easiest.
Other than that, go to any major exchange, Binance for example, and you can trade your BTC for ETH and a huge number of other coins.

I saw the future that way as well. Back at the end of 2017, that seems like a golden age now. But we all know that ETH still has huge potential. It has suffered recently with the whole market dip, and the end of ICO-fever has obviously hit ETH harder than other coins... but the potential is still there. I am extremely confident that we will see ETH over $1k again.

The market keeps testing downwards again and again. Yes it keeps recovering, as it has done again today. I keep thinking at some point the momentum will shift and we will see a break upwards... but there has been no sign of this at all. I do expect the next break to be downwards because the pressure in that direction is just remorseless at the moment.

Lust is superficial, love is deeper. You can have lust at first sight because that's mostly what lust is, first sight. But you can't love someone without knowing them - meaning romantic love rather than unconditional family love.
Love is deeper. And yes lust can survive as a part of a greater love. Doesn't always, but does plenty of times and I would imagine does in most successful marriages.

I would also think that alts would increase in price, maybe less than BTC so BTC dominance might still increase, but it's difficult to envisage BTC at 100k without alts coming along for at least part of the ride.
But it is difficult to see 100k in the near future. And even if we did start that sort of meteoric rise, I would suspect there are still plenty of people sitting at a loss from the 20k ATH, so as the price rises there could well be a lot of people selling to break even, which would act as a brake on that rise.

Exactly.
Coin 'A' has a price of $1 and there are 10 million coins.
Coin 'B' has a price of $10 and there are 1 million coins.

Both have exactly the same total price.
The price of an individual coin is utterly irrelevant unless supply of coins is included as well, which is why marketcap is the measure to use.