As a Jnr Member you will only get small amounts from signature campaigns. If you have a social media presence I would recommend you pick Facebook and Twitter bounties as these often don't depend on your rank here, but rather on your number of followers. Many campaigns also offer payment for being active in their Telegram or Slack channel.
Typically these are Ethereum-based projects, so you give your Eth address on sign up and your coins are sent there. Use your own private wallet address though, not an exchange address.

The most common misunderstanding of a hard-fork is that it always results in a new alternative version of the coin - this assumption isn't correct.

Simply a hard-fork is when the rules governing the coin change. Miners can choose to follow the new rules or stick with the old rules.

If everyone follows the new rules, then there is no new coin, the result is simply that the coin continues with the new rules.

However if some miners follow the new rules and some stick with the old rules, then both chains progress, and so a new coin is created (effectively an alternate version of the old coin). Up until this point the chain for both coins is the same, so whatever you hold in the original coin you will also now hold in the new coin. It is this chain split rather than the fork itself that causes the creation of the new coin.

I would agree that Byteball is the better of the two projects, and it would be the best of the two to buy even if they were equal in cap, but given that Byteball's marketcap is so much lower it is certainly the one to accumulate.

I do think Ripple is a good coin, but $300 per coin would mean an insanely high marketcap... I don't think that will happen. Yes it is a good bet for a big increase though if you're looking over a 3 year span, just not $300.

Personally I prefer ETH over LTC. Ethereum isn't just an ICO platform. I'm confident that smart contracts will be huge, and Ethereum is the best of these platforms at the moment and for the forseeable future.

Others have given the reasons, just a pump and then fallback.
It is not a crash though, it is just dropping back to where it was before the pump. These sorts of price movements are quite common. It does not have an impact on long time value of the coin.

Short term, if bitcoin price plummets then alts will do the same.
If bitcoin doesn't recover, then longer term I think some good alts will recover. We will need a lot of new trading pairs, maybe everything would trade against ETH instead.

I think alts dropping before was in anticipation of getting free coins when bitcoin went through a chain split. If it's just anticipation that bitcoin will rise - with no serious upcoming chain split - then I don't think there is a reason for alts to drop at all. Just my guess though, these markets can be impossible to predict!

I also feel that it is taking over my life a bit! As long as the prices keep increasing, I suppose I will continue to be addicted. I see this stopping once we have full mainstream adoption and prices reach long-term stability. But until we reach that point it is difficult to let go.

One thing that will help is to research the project, look for the usual stuff... do they have a whitepaper, a roadmap, clear team members etc... if they don't have any of these and just a simple website/twitter/telegram set-up with no substance, then it isn't really any good. Not necessarily a scam, but probably not worth getting involved in.

Yes, I know
BCH is a ridiculous 'project', it has no purpose beyond pure speculation. It will fade eventually.

If you're new, there's far too much to learn if you are going for lots of coins. I would just stick with bitcoin, follow developments and see how and why the price changes. Then maybe look at the top few alts and see how it works for them, particularly how their price changes in response to bitcoin price changes, and also check price performance over a long timeframe and see when it rose and why.
After this you can research a few coins and see what they are trying to do and where they are going, roadmap, team etc. You also need to familiarise yourself with the broad types of coin/token, eg smart contracts (Eth etc), privacy (Monero etc), fast payments (Dash etc), useless money-grabbing forks (bitcoin cash!, etc).

Main advice is don't try to do too much too fast - that's what I did at first, and it's a mistake. Just scale it back a bit and learn slowly. You're fine putting everything in bitcoin until you're more comfortable with the other coins.

I have a mixture of both. Both I think are very strong long-term coins.
Volatility can be very good though if you're trading, particularly if it's volatility around a stable average.

I am just waiting for proper official announcements. Be careful if you're browsing the web for solutions at the moment, as there will be scam stuff out there. You need to be patient and vigilant, same as if you are wanting to download a wallet for an airdropped altcoin. And don't give away private keys!

If this is for beginners only, then I would say go with Bitcoin at first. Then once you have acquired some knowledge and expertise, you'll be more able to see the pros and cons of individual altcoins and be able to make your own choices amongst them.
Bitcoin is the sensible first choice for newcomers.

Not really. This sort of thing is entirely dependent on personal preference. Some people hold and hold and hold and never sell (yet). Some people sell as soon as they have a profit. And there are plenty of people (most people I think) in between.
It's entirely up to you, and depends on whether you think the coin will continue to rise or whether you want to take some profit out

I think the main reason for failure is a basic lack of credibility. A lot of people saw it as a get rich quick scheme trying to jump on the early success of bch, plus there was the developers-only early mining period, plus fears such as lack of replay protection, plus inevitable early dumping... all adds to a drop in price.

I think this is the right decision as well. NEO is a good coin to hold, just give it a couple of years. Also it should shoot up once the China ban stuff gets sorted out - I'm sure that is temporary.

I don't know if it's a scam or not... I followed for a while, but wasn't able to participate because my account here was too new and I missed the cut-off. It is a shame though if they are deterring potential new investors by handing out most coins to existing holders. Perhaps they think it is distributed enough now and they don't need more holders. But that is indeed how some other coins work.

In my opinion ETH increase has nothing to do with segwit2x cancellation - the outcome of that is mainly the BCH increase.

ETH has recently had a successful fork , which might account for the gains, and it is still well below its ATH. The parity issue seems to have passed without any real price impact though, which surprised me.