there are a lot of pump and dump altcoins out there and all of them are getting dumped these past days and because of that questions like OP are filling the forum once again. and the funny thing that i found today while reading some comments is that ETH bag holders are getting nervous because their coin lost another 10% today and it still continues going down.

i wanna say nah it won't happen no more but then i look at lightning network and how fast it is being adopted (1000+ channels) and see the potentials that LN is going to introduce to bitcoin and say 1600% is small for it.

unfortunately i have not heard that many good reviews from wallets that support multiple altcoins on top of bitcoin. the only thing that stands out is a hardware wallet which will cost you. so if you have no issue with that, i suggest buying a Trezor or Ledger Nano. both of them are good choices. check their websites to see what coins they support.

except c-cex and sometimes yobit, all of the exchanges that i have seen have been pretty fast. both their website (the web interface you visit) and also their API. and that is most of the times not always.

every single one of these exchanges without an exception become very slow and even go down during high traffic times for example when there is a big dump going on and everyone is dumping their coins.

why would bitcoin be gone?

answer this important initial question and then you get your answer too. because bitcoin is not just going to vanish one morning after you wake up. there will be a reason and since altcoins are mostly based on bitcoin there is a good chance that same reason will also be applied to them and they also disappear!

also depending on the reason why bitcoin vanished in your theory, the reason may apply to other cryptocurrencies even if they share nothing with bitcoin, the fact that they are in the same category (crypto-currency) can be enough.

that sounds like a plausible theory.
but lets not forget that what most of the media cares about is more readers. all of the news sites without exceptions have advertisements on their website which will give them more money the more visitors they have. when price is falling they keep writing about it the same way when price is rising. it is not "always" their fault when people care more about drops and when they call it bubble than when they write about positive news.

besides it was not only the media that caused the drop. the drop would have happened anyways because the market makers were selling as much as they could to push it down that way.

all 4 of these "factors" are the result of one "factor" and that factor is not knowing how to trade.

before starting to trade one must first learn how to trade. and that requires a lot of work and spending a lot of time. most people are lazy so they skip this step and get right to trading. but some of them start more cautiously and with a smaller amount so they learn better but others go bigger at the beginning and understand nothing in the end.

in this process, because they don't know what they are doing, they also don't know how to treat different circumstances such as the time when price falls all of a sudden despite all your expectations. or the opposite: meaning rise out of the blue. and not knowing means they start using their emotions more than  their logic to make a decision.

otherwise we have all these emotions, but for example those who know what they are doing and also have some greed can turn that into ambition and become more successful!

that's true. but the media is only putting wood in the fire that is already burning. they didn't start this fire. the drop started and became big thanks to panic sellers and the FUD made it bigger by adding more panic sellers to the process.
for example bitfinex subpoena was weeks ago and nobody reported it. but as soon as a small drop happened, media was filled with the news!

there are a lot of them that joined bitcoin for wrong reasons but this above reason is also wrong and this is part of the reason why the fluctuations are always this big.
the real purpose of bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is to be a currency which is even in their names "coin" and "currency". decentralized currencies such as bitcoin need to be used like that not be advertised as "digital gold" or "store of value" if you want to see less fluctuation and more adoption.

that is just one of the many reasons why this drop happened. and it happens every year. this time it is so much bigger than it should have been because the manipulation and the FUD is a lot bigger.
at this point i think it will take at least one more month of this chaos before market starts becoming more stable and predictable.

one of them can be bitcoin price!

look at bitcoin and follow it. when it is dropping you must pull out of altcoins immediately because they will get dumped on you unless you have invested in an exception at that time (like DigixDao right now!).

other than that you need to analyze the charts and the market (news) to see if there are any signs of an upcoming pump for that coin. for example RaiBlocks changed its name to Nano and it got pumped. analyzing the news meant seeing this and expecting a pump and buying before it starts.

whenever you are looking at the price of a pair, there is always a base currency that the other one is traded with. in case of ETH/BTC bitcoin is that base currency. think of BTC here as USD when you trade BTC/USD.

so when you say ETH/BTC price is 0.1 it means that you pay 0.1 bitcoin to get 1 Ethereum.

there is no split chart. it is one market with 1 chart.

"onion.top" and similar services are "websites" what i don't understand is how using these websites to access .onion websites infects your computer with ransomware?!

edit:
never mind that! i guess what OP copy pasted here without link was vague. at least for me
these "Tor-to-web proxy services" are simply replacing the bitcoin address in the website you visit. and it happens to be used mostly by victims of ransomare.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tor-to-web-proxy-caught-replacing-bitcoin-addresses-on-ransomware-payment-sites/

i wouldn't jump into any conclusion and start calling this tiny rise as "recovery" because it is too soon to tell. but i am sure about one thing and that is the fact that we are in a reverse bubble™ and it needs to be corrected sooner or later.
this current price does not look natural to me.

who? investors!

it is always easy to blame things on the boogieman instead of accepting the responsibility for them.
who are whales and who are weak hands if not investors themselves? those who don't understand bitcoin and have just bought it to make money fast have been panic selling.

what are the FUDs? some country banning bitcoin? if anyone sold bitcoin because of this news then they don't deserve to hold any amount of this decentralized currency.
facebook banned ICO ads? this one is the most ridiculous one...

as i have always said, bitcoin market is very small. it is even smaller in altcoins. and a small market will react to changes like this, wildly and big.
in other words you see sharp drops and also sharp rises in price.

this "smallness" is also perfectly visible on exchanges when you look at the order books. they are "thin" and with big whales and large number of traders buys and sells causes big swings. and when we say "you should leave your money on exchanges" that means less people are leaving open orders => thinner order books.

exactly. it is funny that all year long last year bitcoin price was super high over in India because people have been on a buying frenzy. at some point it even reached 20% higher (possibly more but i never saw it) than USD markets. and you never saw this mass coverage of the situation saying yeah price is $970 on Coinbase but it is nearly over $1200 in India

you are losing money because you thought you were diversifying and you were misled by pretty words like "portfolio". sorry to say this but you are a bag holder.

altcoins have never been good investments to begin with. they are highly manipulated and only used for short term pump and dumps. investing in them is not diversification in your investment. investing in them should only be used for short term and profit making.

there may be 2 or 3 exception coins (none of them are in top 10 though) but exception don't make the rules.

you should have looked for reasons back around $10000 price when bitcoin clearly wanted to go above $10k and stay there but they kept pushing it down below it! the charts looked like this:


and when that support was broken, the buy support also vanished so it dropped much lower to $8k and that buy support won't  come back for a long time unless price start showing signs of real recovery.

you are correct but i do believe that negative news (or mainly FUD) has always been a secondary force that helped the drop but it never caused it. the market makers get the dumping started and as price falls other traders join in with stop loss,... and then the FUD starts coming out and the weak hands panic sell making the dip bigger.

as you can see there was a lot of buys happening around $10k even with all the FUD and all the dumps that happened. but in the end the pressure of the dump was bigger than the strength of the total buys so it broke down.