I don't really know about Stratis, but Waves could/should grow quite a bit this year. They are putting out their smart contracts soon and their blockchain is about 100 times faster than Ethereum. As a result, prices of a few hundred USD could be reached reasonably.

Phew, I just read about this and was getting put off and hoping that at least the sub10k threshold would exempt me from KYC. Glad everything is back to what it was originally.

From a historical perspective some further sideways movements would be likely. But I sure wouldn't mind being wrong and seeing a breakout to over 10k.

Nobody who knows what is happening will ever seriously care about anyone banning "all big exchanges".

First of all, it's impossible that all big exchanges will be banned because countries like Switzerland have a vested interest in being the finance capital of the world, which will lead to liberal regulations regarding the new paradigm that is Bitcoin.
Secondly, decentralized exchanges are in the making which can not possibly be taken down by any regulatory institution. Both effects combined make sure that Bitcoin will not die and come back stronger than before if a large amount of countries decided to go to war against cryptos.

And in the meantime, weak and uneducated hands will get shaken out, while institutional money gets to load up on discounted Bitcoins.

It's up to you if you want to fall into their trap or not.

There's an increasing amount of bounty campaigns that require KYC. And the figure will be rising if people play along with it blindly in exchange for a few bucks.

Why would you support a scam instead of using your money to support real ICOs that have an actual chance of succeeding long-term at much higher profits than this ponzi scheme?

When will people understand that cryptos can not possibly be banned?

Sheep always walk to the slaughterhouse without objecting.

The baseline is that the majority of the coin supply belongs to less than 10 addresses. There have also been numerous lies about "airdropping" coins, even though you were required to do work as well as to purchase coins in order to receive some. The promised features also haven't been delivered even though they were announced for Q4 2017, which means that DeepSend is almost half a year late now. There's also a lot of censorship going on whenever anything critical is posted in the ANN or on their forum apparently. All in all, it's safe to assume that this is a ponzi scheme that pays people in worthless tokens to advertise aggressively.

Scaling will eventually be solved and Bitcoin will be just as quick and efficient as it was around its inception. Just be patient.

The crypto markets won't disappear. They're too efficient to just vanish and there are no fixed times or insane fees like on traditional brokerages and exchanges. A lot of people will get wiped out at some point, but that's a common symptom of quick money and not something that will kill the market.

Pump groups always load up on a coin before getting their members to pump it. That way the admins make profits by dumping on the members. Just stay away.

Waves is much more efficient, but unlike Ethereum doesn't have smart contracts yet. But in general you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket, so just get some of both.

Depends on your skillset. If you're fluently bilingual you could look for translation bounties, otherwise social media campaigns (if you have mature social media accounts). If you can code or ghostwrite there might be some jobs for you as well. Other than that you could try to look out for airdrops, most of which aren't really worth a dime though.

It might very well be over already, so it's best to start easing in already and to average your buys/sales out. If you don't buy now and prices go back up you'll kick yourself, meanwhile if you start buying (spread out over time) and prices go down you'll still catch most of the discounts.

Again, the only reason BCash can be faster than Bitcoin is because nobody actually uses it. If the Bitcoin network was completely free like that of BCash it would be much quicker and have lower fees as well. BCash is a terrible attempt at "scaling" and it wasn't even created to solve scaling issues in the first place.

If crypto were regulated, those responsible at Coinbase and CNBC would literally be getting fined or just going straight to jail now by the way, like Roger Ver already did for his felony. Enjoy supporting a criminal and getting burnt in the process of his activities.

I don't know much about XLM or XVG. But I would increase my exposition to Waves compared to Ethereum for the following reasons.

Ethereum is already quite large and will require much more volume to multiply its value than Waves in comparison.

Waves with the LPoS system has a great way to participate in the revenue of its own decentralized exchange, which is expected to grow a lot once ERC20 trading goes live next year.

Waves is, since today (activation of NG), the fastest blockchain in the world with a capacity of up to around 1000 transactions per second. For reference, the crypto-kitties game that brought Ethereum to its knees only added around 7~8 transactions per second to Ethereum's blockchain.

Waves is about to implement smart contracts in Q1 of 2018 and will at that point by the best platform for token creation (and thus ICOs) as well as decentralized apps (due to the high potential throughput). The smart contracts will not be prone to security errors like those that led to the Parity failure that resulted in a loss of $300m worth of ERC20 tokens and Ethereum.

The decentralized exchange for Waves will be a major component once regulators start trying to crack down on crypto, as they won't have any means to regulate decentralized exchanges. The volume of such is thus expected to grow massively in the coming years.

Furthermore, Waves is still very tiny compared to Ethereum at only around $13. Once the smart contracts come out there is nothing to stop Waves from growing to $100 ~ $400 like Ethereum did when it made its big jump earlier this summer. Indeed, there's nothing stopping Waves from overtaking Ethereum entirely based on fundamentals. Technical trading bots may or may not delay this, but if Ethereum doesn't improve massively it might very well be overtaken by Waves in 2018~2019.

In either case, Waves can easily go up at least tenfold next year, which is something that Ethereum will have a much harder time of accomplishing (if at all).

NG just released today. Waves is now the fastest blockchain in the world.

Waves is just getting started though. It already is the most efficient blockchain right now (up to ~125 times faster than Ethereum) and is going to implement smart contracts in a few months.

BCash is not faster than Bitcoin, at least not under the same circumstances. Bitcoin is being slowed down because the founders of BCash are spamming the Bitcoin blockchain, which causes fees and transaction times to go up. At the same time, nobody is using BCash, which means that it has low fees and low transaction times. BCash can not compare to Bitcoin, and will perish as soon as LN comes out.