any kind of change will always have both downsides and upsides. so it is wrong to say SegWit didn't have any downsides! because it did. for example the fact that it is opt-in makes it an inefficient block size increase. and also the complexity of it has been a problem for services to adopt it.

i think certain people are trying so hard to hype up STO more than it really is worth it. so the information that we are receiving about STO is not realistic in my opinion. and as a result it is hard to talk about future of it instead of ICOs and i also believe that it is not going to change anything for the altcoin market either.

i think 2019 is going to be a good year mainly because it will be time for the rise since we have already had an extremely prolonged bear market and had a very gigantic drop down from the ATH which is unrealistic and this needs to be recovered to have the market correct itself. and 2019 will be the time for it.
then there will be all these positive news which will also be hyping bitcoin up and can help with that rise upwards.

you can see how the altcoins have tanked hard and it proves that bag holding altcoins in the long run is going to leave you with a huge loss. and running a masternode of majority of altcoins means becoming a big bag holder who unlike other bag holders can not dump his coins immediately and will be in even a bigger loss because running a master node costs you.

if that was possible then there could have been at least a couple of millionaire newbies in bitcointalk since there are many with a lot of alt accounts who have been farming bounties all year long and none of them gained any decent amount of money out of it to reach 1 bitcoin.

another thing about PoS is that the method of rewarding people is seriously flawed. for example when someone is rich (specially if they are rich NOT because they bought BUT because they premined the coin) then it measn they will be rewarded a huge amount for free and for doing literary nothing.

not to mention that it can damage the price a lot too. miners work hard and want to continue working so they don't dump their coins to crash the market. a whale who is getting it for free can dump it at any time he wants, move to another PoS coin, buy a large sum there to pump, get paid for free then dump and come back to buy cheap. rinse and repeat.
you see the whale can easily get in and out  and dump but a miner can not turn on and off!

the market is not a yo-yo to have it go up and down one after another. there needs to be some time in between. the market has to enter recovery phase and stay at the bottom a while before it can become healthy again and rise back up.

not to mention that the pumpers would need fresh blood to pump their shitcoins otherwise there is no nobody who will give them any money.

the newbies who were worried about future of bitcoin have already sold and are out. i don't think there is anybody left with major amounts of bitcoin who is also worried about the future. that is why the drops look so weird these days.

i think it is not possible to know which coin is going to get pumped the most in the altcoin market when the pumping season starts.

it is usually surprising too because most of the times a new coin comes along that takes the market by the storm and is pumped for at least half a year to 2 years and takes the top ranking position below bitcoin at #2.

i believe that the days of ICO scams are nearly over because they over did it in the past year and scammed so many people out of so much money that people are now caught up with the method and are more aware of it now.

as you can see the death of ICOs have already started with them failing to raise any money and many of them closing down with an embarrassment. they need to come up with a new method of scamming people now.

it is not a bearish market it is a dump!

and a dump simply happens when you pump something. so in other words you can not expect a balloon to be filled with hot air for months without exploding at some point and deflate.
that is what has been happening to altcoins this year. they were losing that "air" that was blown into them by getting dumped.

there has never been any challenge by any coin against bitcoin ever to want to end now! the only thing that was, was a lot of money that they spend in advertising their useless altcoin to get it pumped up.

funny enough, this is not even the first time an altcoin made such attempts
have you forgotten the "flippening" nonsense? in the history about a hundred altcoins have done it for their pumps. the most recent ones are ETH and before that it was Dash and .... and they are all either dead or dying.

it is always easy for some people to get overly excited about bitcoin and start making emotional speculations about its price which is also then extended to some of the alt coins. for example when it was rising towards $20k they were expecting much higher prices.

similarly they are doing the same today too. they are getting overly excited and speculation unrealistic low prices for bitcoin now!

from what i understand there is a difference between using the blockchain technology in space program by NASA and with what OP is talking about which is mining blocks of a PoW coin which is processing transactions and needs to be competing about it!

the problem is that most people have trouble claiming their free BCH fork coins since there is no decent simple wallet to use for dumping it and they are also afraid since they have been scammed with a lot of malware from all these fork coins in the past year. otherwise the BSV and BCH prices would have been dumped a lot harder than this after they forked.

when you believe price is going up a lot higher than current price then it doesn't matter whether it goes a little lower or not. the risk of waiting is not enough to make investors wait. they wait because they are greedy.

and why do you think that? just because it is a big and scary number it doesn't mean it is impossible. $20,000 was also big and scary when price was $200 three years ago...

i don't think so.
people are used to these types of predictions. some have been predicting $1 million while others have been predicting bitcoin's death for years and nothing is changing. bitcoin is still going on as always.

the fiat backed and crypto backed stable coins are similarly centralized and that makes them terrible in my opinion specially since most of the companies creating these coins are either very shady (like Bitfinex creating Tether) or are creating them to make money from processing transactions because they saw a need and trying to exploit it.

the Algorithm-backed stable coins "sound good" but i have not yet had time to study them to make up my mind. but if anything has a potential of being a valuable stablecoin it is this category of them.

if you want to "invest" in it then the answer is NO. it is not worth investing into. but as a trading perspective in short term, this shitcoin is currently being pumped which makes a very good candidate for traders to buy and enjoy the short term profit.

but be careful because you are getting involved in a pump and dump and you need to know how to handle a pump and dump situation without losing a lot of money.

why do you mean by "old" bitcoin?
there is only one coin we have called bitcoin and then we have about 60 shitcoins that forked from it and all of them are worthless.

in short: a very risky but possibly also high profit pump and dump coin.

i have always been only a BitcoinHodler hence the username here!

i never understood why people hold altcoins either. they have always been inferior in long run when it comes to profit anyways. the best amount of profit from altcoins has always been gained in short term trading them when they are getting pumped. after that it is only losses.

investing in multiple altcoins (like 20 that OP is suggesting) has been a big mistake that the newcomers to altcion market have been making because they have been trying to import concepts from stocks market into altcoin market. concepts such as diversifying portfolio.

but they miss out the fact that altcoin market is like penny stocks not stocks market. which means what they do is not diversification, it is an illusion they are making for themselves to make themselves feel better.