I can't see there being a viable long-term chain split here. Constantinople is the real ETH, and the others won't last.

It is becoming normal now that there is an expectation that any fork of any coin (looking at you BTC) leads to the creation of a viable new currency. But this is not always the case. A fork is an upgrade, not a money-grabbing opportunity to split the chain.

ETH has now claimed back the number 2 spot, and has doubled in price from the recnt low aorund $80 - but it is still a good time to buy ETH. The project is strong and still looks under-priced vs BTC.

I think the one to watch is BTC, as it is usually bitcoin that leads the bull run and alts follow later.
We've had a decent increase recently in percentage terms, but in dollar terms we are nowhere near seeing a bull emerge yet.

Crypto markets are highly speculative and often thin - which leads to volatility. The current dip is not unprecedented, have a look back at some previous years and you'll see the same sort of pattern in percentage terms - it just looks bigger now because the charts are in dollars, so previous bull and bear trends are obscured because they happened at lower $ points.
I fully expect the market to recover, but equally I also expect another big bear in future. However I expect the overall trend will be upwards.

I like them all. ETH and XRP are further along in development but this is reflected in higher cap. Earlier last year I would have said ADA was overhyped and overpriced, but some of that has died away now, so it is probably an equally good buy as the others.

It's easier to get rich now that the price has fallen so far since the original post in this thread. But this is a good reminder as well - prices do fall as well as rise, it's not a one-way ride to profit, and it is very easy to lose money as well.

I don't have any special knowledge about FLXX, but if it has low trading volumes then this means it is effectively tied to its trading pair. This is a key reason why a lot of ERC20 coins that are paired with ETH have fallen so hard in dollar terms.
I think in a bear market it is often most informative to measure the price not in dollars, but rather in units of its trading pair(s). So if an altcoin is worth $100 and trades against ETH, and ETH is at $200, then the coin is worth 0.5 ETH. If ETH then falls to $100 and the alt has no trades, the alt effectively drops to $50 - the reason being that it is unchanged at 0.5 ETH.
Hope that helps and isn't confusing!

A long time since the original post in this thread, but general good advice in a bear market I think is to put money into BTC rather than alts, as it is often BTC that leads the recovery, with alts following later.

No, it is not late. The markets are still young and volatile. Now is a good time to buy in if you haven't already, it's certainly much better for a newcomer now than the insane prices we had at the start of 2018. I would say the chances of another 80-90% fall from current positions are very slim indeed. A lot of us are expecting price rises during 2019. Maybe not to ATH values, but certainly x2 or x3 on current price levels.

I've never really liked Deep Onion, it always felt like a bit of a cult to me with a lot of die-hard fans.
I have to say I don't have any opinion on the technical merits of the coin, just that anything that has that level of hype I tend to be very wary of.

It depends what we mean by bull run. If it means prices increasing to maybe x2 or x3 the current values, then I think there is a good chance this year. Anything more than that I think is unlikely.

I think for any coin, the idea of it hitting a new ATH is a long way off. NEO is still a good project, but we should really just be concerned about the whole market and when it is going to recover somewhat. I would say ATH for anything is a long long way off at the moment, and barring anything dramatic is at least a couple of years away.

Good luck OP!

It is certainly a gamble, but everything in crypto is a gamble. This sort of risk is not for everyone, but it does show a lot of faith in crypto. I think you will be proven right. So long as you have coins from strong projects, in the future we will come to see the current prices as an absolute bargain.

I do think that one will come - crypto still has as bright a future as ever, it's just that the markets are thin and so speculative, which helps to cause this volatility.
I don't know when it will come, but I think we'd need something like $300b for the whole market before we could say that we were even on the path to recovery. It's worth noting too that percentage increases can be misleading when we've dropped so far already. For example ETH has increased almost 100% recently, from $80 to around $160 - but this is nothing compared to its ATH of over $1,000.

It's always difficult to say, but if we are coming towards the end of the bear market and nearing the start of a new bull, then it can be useful to look at those coins that have fallen hardest during the dip. Some of these will not be worth having, but others will be good coins that have been oversold - just as a bull market tends to peak too high and then fall back, so a bear often falls too low and leads to strong recoveries.

ETH has looked low against BTC for a while - and it still does, check the historic charts.
I would expect ETH price (vs BTC) to continue to increase at least until the fork.

Sure you can fork at a reduced rate, but it isn't really reduced, it's still the same proportion of the total. I don't see what the point would be. Individual coin value is irrelevant unless it is considered alongside the total number of coins.

Say there is coin A at $1 and there is a total supply of 100 million coins, and say coin B (the forked version) has 1 million coins, then the starting price for coin B would be $100... in this situation both coins would be the same.
So if you had 100 of coin A before the fork, then the fork with supply reduced by a factor of 100 gives you 1 of coin B... so you have $100 worth of both coins, there's no difference.

I can't see anything replacing BTC as the main crypto now or in the near future. If one coin can do it, it's probably ETH. Maybe XRP, I don't know. The point is that even if it does happen it will likely be only once crypto has mass market adoption. Once smart contracts are a part of everyday life and once much cross-currency banking is done using XRP, then sure, they'd have a chance to be number one in cap.

The ETH price increase is probably due to the hard fork, but it was at historic lows against BTC anyway, so that may have played a part. It's difficult to see whether it will continue to rise or not given that the bear market for crypto as a whole has shown no signs of abating.

It's unlucky if you bought in at the peak, but I do think that XRP will be worth a lot more in a few years' time. It's a hugely strong project, with a genuine current real-world use case. One problem with XRP price movements is that they are often quite sudden and dramatic, whcih can mean it's risky to try to sell to short the coin and buy back later as you may miss a big price rise.

I can't really advise what to do, other than say that I believe very strongly that XRP will come to be a game-changer in the multi-trillion dollar international finance sector.