To answer your second question, any wallet where you can access the private key is a safe place to hold a coin during a fork.  Just like Bitcoin Cash, don't keep it on an exchange or some other place where you don't control the private key.  I don't know if ETH is going to hard fork, or not ... but if it does, you theoretically don't have to do anything immediately.  You can just let your coins sit on the new block chain until a new fork wallet is developed, and claim them at any time in the future by importing your old etherium key.  I just printed off my BitCoin private keys, and kept them in my safe for whenever I want to claim the bitcoin cash.

I think everyone's strategy is going to vary based on what they want to accomplish.  To me, trading would damn near be a full time job ... while investing is looking for fairly passive gains.  You can build a pretty solid portfolio of holdings without leaving the top 25 in market cap, and still buy on the dips to increase returns.  And from what I've seen, a simple strategy like that is blowing the doors off traditional investments.  Now, that's not to say that past returns will keep up at the same pace, but for me, it was certainly worth the risk to throw some money into the pool and diversify into a new asset class.

And I get why people want to find a great ICO or take a risk on a low market cap coin that's getting pumped, looking for that 100X gain.  I reserve a small percentage of portfolio for that, too.  But the core of my portfolio are cryptos that I buy with the intention of holding indefinitely.

High market cap isn't nessasarily a signal that a coin will grow in the future, it's more of an indication that the coin has gained popularity and already had a pretty good investment base.  Some coins have been near the top of market cap, like Doge, but have faded quickly.  Bitcoin has always been #1 and has continued to gain value.  Not much to draw from it, except you'll notice the most talked about coins are almost always near the top. 

Wow.... that's harsh.  I tend to follow the Warren Buffet model of investing, that buying and holding good large cap assets will blow away the returns of guys that jump on the newest and shiniest thing that pops up every day while blowing a good percentage of their returns on fees.  Now, I know this model hasn't been tried and proven in the cyrpto world, but what has been tried and proven in the cyrpto world?

Anyway, If you think advising someone that the core of their portfolio should be made up of good, large cap, proven, fairly stable, and worthwhile projects is "noob advice", then we'll have to agree to disagree.   In the mean time, you should read up on Warren Buffet's $1,000,000 bet with the hedge fund trader.  Warren picked one investment, a boring large cap Vangaurd index fund, and blew the hedge fund trader away to the tune of 400% over 10 years .... 

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffetts-bet-hedge-funds-year-eight-brka-brkb.asp

Crowd source it.  Go to coinmarketcap.com and investigate the top 25 or so.  Those are coins, for the most part, that have already been vetted by the community and deemed worth investing in.  Sticking the with top coins is a good way to diversify and get your feet wet without having to worry about getting stuck in a scam coin.  After you are comfortable with that, you can try your luck with newer coins or ICOs, if you want.

It should be note that this is just a proposal floated by two congressmen.  Congressmen float proposals all the time, and the vast majority of them die without even getting to a vote.  It would have to survive committees, get attached to a bill, and be voted in by the house and senate, then signed by Trump.  And of course, bitcoin doesn't have a "lobby", but the banks do.

It is however promising that this blockchain proposal is sponsored by both a Republican and a Democrat.  Bi-partisan bills have a much better chance of surviving.

If I understand the question correctly, you are asking how would "cash out" your alt coin profits to fiat at a time when bitcoin is declining? 

Good question, since most Alt Coins can't be traded directly for fiat.  One thing to remember is that just because bitcoin has declined, it doesn't mean that you would lose your profits if you convert your altcoins back to bitcoin, just for a few minutes, just for the purpose of cashing it out.  You just get more bitcoin than you originally had because the price would be lower.

Or, if you are not comfortable with converting to Bitcoin, you could convert your alt coin to something like Etherium or Litecoin, then send it to Coinbase and cash it out to fiat.  At Coinbase, right now, you can only cash out from Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Etherium.

For shear number of Tokens ... Funfair.  It's cheap and I took a chance on it.  I don't recommend it, I have no idea how that one will turn out.  I just wanted to hold something that, if it explodes, I'd have a lot of it.

By dollar amount, Bitcoin.  Interestingly, bitcoin is also the coin that I hold the least of by number of coins.  

I think everyone should hold some bitcoin and etherium.  After those two, it is highly debatable, and it kind of depends on what you are looking to accomplish.  The way to make the biggest profits seems to be finding an ICO that explodes ... but that takes a lot of risk, a lot of research, some faith, and a bit of luck.  There are plenty of good and stable coins if you are looking to diversify without taken on a lot of risk.

Is it possible you have, perhaps inadvertently, created two different accounts over the years, and the account you are logging into on your new device isn't the same account you made the transactions from?  You have to eliminate all possibilities. 

If you look at the way this is set up, it's like the developer wanted it to be near worthless forever.  I guess it was supposed to be fun and something people give to eachother in forums as "tips" ... It may always be around in that roll, but I don't see it going anywhere.  In fact, at one time it was the #2 currency IIRC, but now it's dropped to #53 at coin market cap.  It keeps fading.  It's got it place, but it's not a good investment, IMO.

I made two small purchases during the down trend ... I'm still up long term (heck, everyone's thats been holding more than 6 weeks is still up long term) ... I do miss $5000 though.  My return calculations were mind boggling at $5000.

There is also DigixDOA, which is supposedly backed by 1 gram of gold per token... But last time I checked it was trading at significantly more than the cost of 1 gram of gold.... Not sure why.

Does it make sense?  Sure.  It could be a safe haven that you could quickly "shapeshift" your holding to in a crash ... Especially for people who don't want to move things in and out of exchanges, or have options to convert to fiat, but do have a multi asset wallet with shapeshift built in. 

I'm just not sure if these are well executed, and from what i can tell, you have to take on faith that the gold really exists.

If I want to buy gold as an investment and not hold it myself, I'd buy GLD on the stock exchange, instead. 

Not a single one has been in the green over the last 2 or 3 days.  My best performer was OMG, which looks like it only lost about 10% as of now.  I have a lot in the green today (last 24 hours), starting to work it's way up, hopefully, but over all, everything was hit pretty hard.

How long did you allow the wallet to sync to the network?  I've heard it can take over 24 hours.  I'm not sure about monero, but in most cases I don't think new transactions will not show up until the wallet has fully synced.  Hopefully someone more familiar with monero will chime in.

I went the completely lazy route.  I mostly just buy and hold things that are supported in Exodus/Eden Wallet, so I can see them and manage them all in the same place.  They support about 25 assets now, and plan to support quite a few more.  I do have some holdings that are not supported, and just keep them in separate wallet.

China does not like the exporting of their wealth ... they limit their wealthy citizens to $50,000/yr in international transfers, to force reinvestment at home instead of abroad.  China starting cracking down on BitCoin earlier this year as it was believed their wealthy citizens were using Bitcoin to export more wealth than allowed.  This may be another reason why China choose this path ... they found it was too hard to control and perhaps found the problem was worse than they thought.

The US will probably continue to meddle in ICOs and try to establish cyrpto-laws to slow down money laundering and drug dealing, but they usually don't take such a heavy handed approach to shut down everything.  I suspect the first move they'll make is to make ICOs an "accredited investor only" playing field, then start requiring people to report their Fiat Exchanges (Coinbase, etc.) on their taxes every year, then maybe some SEC rules to monitor and punish crypto "bad actors".  I don't expect any more than that from the US, though.  I think regulation will slow down investment growth, though.

Someone posted this on a Slack Channel I've been Lurking in.  Does this mean there is an insane amount of transactions still waiting to process? ... I hate to say it, but this looks bad.  Especially if these are headed to the exchanges.

While it's pretty clear at this point that this is a joke, there was a video floating around for a long time of a guy on one of those financial network shows, during the height of the DotCom bubble of 2000, saying something like "I just moved my mom's retirement funds to tech stocks, I know it's risky, but these are going nowhere but up!" (I paraphrase, it's been a while)