like anything else this is also all about supply and demand!

supply is increasing day by day as miners produce new coins and they enter circulation but the rate is slow and also the supply is capped.
at the same time the demand meaning the adoption for bitcoin is increasing day by day which means there are more people buying bitcoin and investing in it.

the result of these two forces mean a rising price.

just make sure not to make bigger new mistakes.
for example i have seen in the past, in real life, that some people who list the chance to buy bitcoin before were getting to enthusiastic and investing more than they could afford to lose and that meant they lost sleep over it and have been experiencing a lot of stress which finally led to making bad decisions and selling what they have bought because of FUD and a small correction and lost a lot of money. then price went up and their regrets were even more!

nobody uses altcoins even before LN, with LN things will remain the same! the only difference would be the fact that the altcoins can not longer be advertised as faster, cheaper,... in an imaginary competition with bitcoin where in reality they are just advertising it.

what bitcoin does, doesn't really influence ICOs in any ways.
the only indirect effect that it can have however is that when bitcoin's adoption increases and more people invest in it some of the newbies who start with bitcoin would want to try their luck with alternatives which means they may invest in ICOs.
unless we see a huge rally like 2018, the number of these newbies is not that large to have any significant effects.

to be honest i don't really think that ETF on its own can do anything to bitcoin price apart from a small and slow increase in adoption so  the small increase of in-flow of money and as a result a slow and small increase in price.

but in reality ETF is such a hyped up event which can act as an ignition to the marke so that it can shoot the price up. in this case we can even see $10k be broken in less than a month or two.

you are being too emotional about the market in my opinion.

it is true that you should never bag hold any of the altcoins because they don't have any future. but at the same time it doesn't mean they are going to die just because they got dumped. the pump and dumps have been happening from the starting days of the altcoin market.
in fact they are created to be pumped and dumped.

what you need to do is to throw away emotions and only stick to logic and look for the pumps. only stay in the altcoins during their pumps not any longer.

top 100 is such a big space to enter or not enter. and the list of coins OP provided all can enter it. because any altcoin can get pumped hard or release a large number of new coins that can push its market cap a lot higher so that they can enter top 100 or above even.
for example you can see how Stellar (which was already in top coins) got pumped and now has increased its rank to basically top 10. that is thanks to its huge supply.

not really!
the "need" for this kind of privacy coins have only been from those who want to conduct illegal activities with them like those who visit dark markets need this kind of anonymous coins and that "need" has not grown really.
the privacy that normal coins such as bitcoin offer is more than enough for majority of normal users.
the only thing that happened was that we had some months of over hyped period where the anon-coins were hyped then pumped hard. that is all.

it is interesting how fast and strong cryptocurrencies are growing in some countries such as Korea while some other  countries are still struggling with the basics not knowing what to do about them!

knowing these Korean exchanges some of them are known for pump and dumps and also for fake volume. it is interesting to see if they change their ways now that they are under observation by the government though.

Btctalk name: BTCLovingDude
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so am i rejected or have you not reached page 17 where i posted my application? because i see last accepted member was from page 13

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4509006.msg42131537#msg42131537

reapplying with updated info.

edit 7/16/18: removing my application since i am not yet accepted...

please keep me under consideration for this campaign or any future campaign with same rules and rates.

Btctalk name: BTCLovingDude
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Now is not a sinking ship, it has Always been a sinking ship.

they just dust it up a little bit last year, started advertising it, started attacking bitcoin and a lot of other social engineering to fool the masses of newbies into investing in it while they pumped it by pouring money into it.

obviously when there is this much hype + price rise people start paying attention to it. but the problem is that you can't keep an illusion alive forever.

majority of ICO investors are gamblers. this type of people don't research about what they are investing in, they just make the investment like a gambling game in hopes that they can "win" and make a lot of money. and since sometimes their luck is there and they win, they continue doing it although they get scammed by many of them and lost most of time.

why didn't you ask this same question last year? "why crypto go up".

most of last year we were witnessing altcoin pumps where they went up by manipulation and fake pumps. this is not something you can to until the end of the world. at some point you need to stop, and start the dumping phase.

this is the dumping phase of last year.

you can not call that an investment. when you take a loan or even without a loan and buy a home where you live in, that is not exactly an investment it is buying something that you use. it is like buying a laptop. you bought it to use not to trade. so it is not an investment even if price of it goes up. you won't sell it anyways.

anyways i think if you can do both then it is the best solution. it is diversification after all and that is always good. and as you pointed out real estate goes up in price specially if you buy it in an up and coming neighborhood.

so you already know about coinmarketcap... that is a good place to start. when you open the link to each altcoin there and visit their pages you can see there are multiple links on the top left corner of the page above the charts. these links go to the (1) official website (2) twitter and other social media links of the official devs (3) announcement topic on bitcointalk, (4) and a bunch of others like explorers,...
you can use (1) or (3) to find the link to  the wallets that are legit.

you can never predict the pump and dump altcoin prices. they are unpredictable because they are manipulated so they rise when there is no reason for them to rise and they fall when there is no reason for them to fall bu the dumps by the pumpers.

logically ETH price should be around $200-$100 based on a coin of these attributes such as its supply and demand. but the pumps have kept it up until now. depending on how much they can do it, price can remain here or fall down hard if they fail to pump it more.

when you talk about cryptocurrencies it is so wide that it is hard to just narrow it down.
speaking of Scaling, it depends on the project. for example a centralized altcoin can scale up to whatever level you want it to. just like VISA, Paypal,... are capable of processing a lot of transactions! so of course there are altcoins that are more scalable...

but when you talk about a decentralized cryptocurrency then you can not speak about scaling and not its decentralization because you have to scale it in a way that you don't harm the decentralization.
in that case bitcoin is still on top. but i can see the potential in altcoins that are using DAG. they have been reported to be able to handle larger number of TPS but i personally don't have enough information about their pros and cons.