i am honestly surprised by this statement!
would you mind giving us a list of these big merchants that are accepting altcoins as payment every month? i am curious to know them since i have not seen any new big merchant adopting bitcoin for some time, let alone do it for altcoins!

people don't want that kind of anonymity and possibly because Monero is associated with illegal activities it can't get that kind of adoption.

and it is centralized in many ways since the processing of transactions can not be done by regular people.

LTC is the only coin that has actual usages and has some potential in the future but the problem with it is that it is a copycat coin.

not at all. when market is down it means you should sell. what makes it good time to invest is reaching the bottom or being close to it not just dropping. for instance $15k was also a "down" for bitcoin but it wasn't the right time to buy. but the bottom or close to it is these days near $6k to $7k and that makes it a good time to buy bitcoin.

you can not call "short term" an investment.

short term is purely trading related which can even be referred to as day trading. in short term you can find even shitcoins are profitable because they get pumped. but the long term only belongs to something with a real future not an altcoin that is filled with fake advertisement and pump and dumps.

not everything is about money making and profit you know.
in fact that is the main reason why bitcoin has remained the top cryptocurrency and to this day and for many years to come it will be growing at a fast speed. it is simply because it is offering a lot of features that people want and use. decentralization for starters.

in comparison other coins are profitable, sometimes altcoins ere ever more profitable than bitcoin but as you can see you can't sustain profitability when they are useless.

things like MEW are not exactly a wallet, it is just a program that you run inside your browser that has limited capabilities of a wallet such as creating a new key pair and signing transactions and broadcasting them.

for staking you need to run an actual wallet and stake your coins. you basically earn money by relaying transactions and verifying them,... and get paid based on how much coins you have while doing that. it is not exactly free money for just having the coins!
and since it is based on how much you have it doesn't matter if you do it with one wallet or multiple ones.

that is just another example of how easy it is to pump altcoins that have a small market. for example in a million years you will never be able to pump ETH 6000% anymore because it is big but you can always every single day pump a small coin like AU 6000% in less than 24 hours and it has been happening every single day because it really doesn't need much volume or manipulation. you easily pump it with a small amount of money.

it is true that we can not predict bitcoin like that ever and it may take a short time to recover from a drop like it happened before or it may take longer. but at this point i believe that the shorter time is more possible because of two things. the first one is the fact that we have already hit the bottom and second one is because the market is so much bigger now and it makes things move a lot faster.

all of these numbers are pure guesses and that makes them unrealistic. not because the number itself is big but because the person making that guess didn't make it based on much else but his guess.

for instance $1 million is nothing for bitcoin, we will reach it eventually but McAfee saying it was because he wanted to gain attention not because he made some analysis can made an educated guess!

very true. we no longer see or hear Craig Scammer Wright apart from him creating a fork of BCash and calling it Satsohi's vision and still claiming to be Satoshi although not being capable of providing any proof whatsoever

one of the biggest problems with having an income in cryptocurrencies (altcoins) is that they are extremely volatile thanks to all the pump and dumps that occur in each of them.
so if you for instance earn 10000 coin of some altcoin today and it is worth $10 today it may be worth $1 in 24 hours! so you are not really making a real income, you are only earning something.
and that is the main reason why i never do it.

of course bitcoin is the exception and everything that i gain i would exchange to bitcoin because i do believe that it will continue to rise. so every income today will be worth a lot more in the near future.

there is no right answer or "correct solution" for what you are asking! there is only speculation and mostly guesses that people make.

all we know is that bitcoin is useful and also has a limited supply. for these two simple reasons you can be sure that people want to use it more and more of them will come, and with rising demand and limited supply price should shoot up.

in my opinion the effects of ETF are diminishing.
people might have gotten super excited about it once but as SEC continued rejecting them, everyone started rethinking what they get excited about and changed their opinion about ETF. now their rejections won't even matter, it is turning into any other event that happens on a daily basis.

a lot of things are possible to do, including all the things you can do using the blockchain technology but only being possible doesn't mean it is a good idea to do or those who do it end up with a useful thing.
for example you can multiply 2342342342342 with 8987897385734 by hand but you can also use a calculator. similarly you can use Facebook as your social media platform or you can use a decentralized version of it which you would have to install a new application (run a full node) download a lot of data and be restricted to limited platforms (PC not mobile for instance),...

- bitcoin isn't anonymous
- people aren't laundering money using bitcoin. they do it using fiat
- bitcoin has been around for 9 years and it has being adopted all this time, nobody tried to "squash" it.
- and finally bitcoin is a decentralized currency that nobody can "squash", in fact it is designed in a way to resist any attempt.

that is why you use cold storage!

for ease of use and if you have a considerable amount you just simply buy a hardware wallet and make yourself safe.
if you don't want that they you create a wallet offline and then use that to always sign transactions and then broadcast them online. you can even use MEW for this. there is an offline use section in it. you just have to download the website's source code and have it offline then move between the two systems.

of course it goes without saying that you should always double check everything and never install things you don't know or visit sites that are shady.

Ps. BIP21 that bitcoin has can prevent this
you just click a link and it fills the information inside your wallet without using clipboard or needing any copy paste.

don't confuse optimism with stupidly bag holding.

so far these two has been the same thing in most cases. for instance in the past couple of months there has been at least a thousand topics talking about how the price of that time was the end of the drop and they were all encouraging others to HODL!
the result is that a lot of newbies got crushed under the dumping coins that were being sold on the exchanges every day ever since and has not yet stopped.

optimism is when you have some logical reason based on educated analysis that the market is at the bottom.
idiotically bag holding is when you hold on to altcoins that are losing value because you "hope" the dumps have stopped.

i think now everyone knows how bullshit speculations like these are. it is funny that sometimes it comes from news sites like Coindesk,...
we all know that bitcoin is volatile and its fluctuations don't mean rise or fall. in other words going down to $6000 does NOT mean going further down. and going up to $6595+ does NOT mean it should rise up. as you can see price has been above that price for more than 2 days now and we have not yet went above $7k.

at this point the market is still controlled by the fear and is supported by the strong belief that $6k is the bottom. and as long as these two are around we will stay in the same range: between $5.9k-6k and $7k-$7.5k and it is neither a rise or fall worthy of mention, when it goes up and down within this range.

true but the real winners are those who understand what bitcoin as a  decentralized currency means. otherwise those who only see the "profit" and the "price rising" as their only goal will surely do irrational things such as panic selling. for instance someone who doesn't even know what bitcoin power is will panic as soon as he hears the first FUD about bitcoin and someone tells him it is "dead"

the only thing strange and worth discussing about this topic is that 10 merit that was given to OP which seems pretty weird

in any case all i see in bitcoin market is "UP" not  down. specifically in the chart that OP himself shared with us. it doesn't get any clearer than that. bitcoin has been rising in the long run and there is nothing stopping it now either. from time to time there is this downtime in the market where accumulation takes place for the next rise.

bitcoin price is the same, bitcoin supply is more or less the same so its market cap which is price * supply is still the same.
now you see its "dominance" increasing which is bitcoin market cap / total market cap.
altcoin supplies is increasing a lot, the total market cap is decreasing.

it is simple elementary math! all of the above means altcoins are losing their price. aka they are getting dumped hard. this is a red signal for altcoins which is telling you to get out fast