LOL, Bitmain is the creator of Bitcoin Cash which is why they hold a lot of it. it is also because they own almost all of the hashing power of bitcoin cash and have been mining it from the first day.
and in case you have forgotten in the early days they manipulated the difficulty in a way that they could find more than 1000 blocks per day (as a comparison bitcoin normally finds 144 blocks per day). so based on the fact that the article is old and BCH was worth higher and the fact that each block rewarded them 12.5 BCH they only needed to mine it for nearly 2 months to accumulate that much! as i said they have been mining BCH for a year now.

in short this is not an investment, it just happened this way and they had no way of dumping it without killing BCH price. so they held most of it to dump slowly.

what ICO developers believe in is the fact that they can get a lot of newbies fooled to invest in their useless token they have just created after putting the least amount of effort in. that is why we keep seeing new ICOs and as time goes on they become less and less useful.

the best way to survive in this market (not just the bear market now but generally even during the bull markets aka pumps) is to day trade altcoins. in my experience the biggest amount of profit that any altcoin can give you is when you only get involved with it for a short time and the biggest loss that it can give you is when you get involved with it in long term aka when you hold it.

what you need to do is to modify your strategy and while doing that eliminate the mistakes you previously made and choose a different route so that you don't make the same mistakes again.

the only thing that you need to realize is that both ETH and its tokens are speculative "things". and being speculative means their prices are not real, it is based on faith of investors in the profit that they can potentially gain in the future as these things get pumped.

so when the "faith" in a pump is shattered or as the investors come to realization that the pump has been over and the dump has begun they start dumping everything and price of all of them come down together.

eventually everyone will come to this simple realization.
you can always hide the fact that altcoins are pump and dumps for so long before newbies gain experience and stop falling for their tricks. last year brought in a lot of newbies who thought altcoins were all going to be as big a bitcoin so they started investing in them and that created the illusion that they may be right. but as this year started and they got dumped they figured out the reality and now everyone like OP is starting to realize all of them are worthless.

it is like a cycle that we keep seeing every year or 2 years at most in the altcoin market.

these suggestions are very good but i don't think they can stop the bear market from happening now or in the future. simply because a bear market is also a part of the whole market cycles and it needs to happen from time to time as it happens in any other markets.
these suggestions in my opinion would increase the adoption and in the long run increase the price more than it already is happening.

there will be pumps and there will be dumps. they are kind of a duo and they are inseparable when it comes to altcoins.

instead of worrying so much about the past and the mistakes you have made so far, you should learn from those mistakes and stop making them. stop by not becoming a bag holder. start trading instead of holding altcoins and you will see that the profit will start coming in easier.

these websites such as coinmarketcap.com and about a dozen others, are only reporting what is happening on exchanges. they should not be the ones deciding what coin is listed and what coin is not. if a coin exists on some exchange out there then they must report it and if you want something to be delisted then you should talk to the exchanges to remove the coin not coinmarketcap.com they are nobody in this world except a reporter.

these days nobody really cares about ICOs being scam or not. they all know it is a gamble and the only thing they want in return is a bigger profit. so even if it is a ponzi scheme with obvious signs they would still invest in it if there were a chance for making a profit.
in the end what is scam? is it not a token that has no usefulness? is it not a developer that received money for doing practically nothing?

this just means that the market is working as it should meaning the the bubbles are bursting and everything is coming back to its real value in the market. bitcoin to the bottom and altcoins like ETH heading there.

unfortunately white paper has turned into another form of advertisement for altcoins these days. before, meaning a couple of years ago. the white paper was only used to give the users an abstract of the idea behind the project but these days the shitcoin creators go as far as hiring people to write their white paper for them because they are either kids who don't even know what to write or are some Russian or Chinese kid thinking they can become rich like this but can't even speak proper English.

it has been very interesting to read some of the answers here. most of them are so positive about the altcoin that are getting dumped the hardest. but the funny thing is that it is all pretend! they keep saying how good some coins and how everyone should buy them but at the same time in reality they are not buying themselves. otherwise why would the price of that  coin drop if all these people advertising the same thing were buying it?!!!
i bet all those who are doing it are either bag holders who are in such a big loss th at they don't find any reason for selling or want the price to recover a little so that they can dump!

i completely agree with the first part of your comment that this has been purely pump and dump and i should add that it has always been like this. the pump and dumps are not new in this market. since people know there is no usage for the altcoins specially tokens they only stick to making profit from them and have no long term faith in them.

the second part where you talk about "product" is nothing that i can agree with. because i have not seen any of these ICOs produce anything so far all these years and i have not seen any of them work on anything either!
if you know any, feel free to show me the actual product not the promise of product....

its price is extremely high to the point that it is now considered overpriced. and this is the main reason why it is constantly getting dumped even though the bag holders keep advertising it on the forum and despite all the efforts by the whales to put up fake buy walls to prevent the crash, it happens nonetheless.

this is the oldest trick in the book my friend. it is called capacity not reality. for example there are altcoins that have such fast blocks but as long as these blocks are empty having fast confirmation means nothing. the same with block size. it can be 100 kB or it can be 100 trillion MB (capacity) in the end they are still producing 100 kB blocks (reality) so yeah everyone will sync happily and newbies feel awesome.

did you know BCH had 8 MB and now 32 MB blocks and also it has produced more blocks than bitcoin but still bitcoin blockchain is bigger than BCH blockchain?

crypto market is just too large to narrow it down like this with a silly question.
bitcoin market? nobody. there are whales who can influence the price in short term but the long term is not changeable.
altcoin market? depending on the altcoin it can be a great number of people. for example in small altcoins you can even be the one controlling it if you have something as small as half a bitcoin! but in large altcoins if they are centralized then the foundation behind it like ethereum foundation controlling ethereum.

i don't know if it is the psychological pressure of losing a lot of money bag holding altcoins or is it your naiveté thinking it is a good time to buy altcoins because they are going to rise and you want to scare others into selling....
but let me tell you that this market is not going to die. it will remain the same pump and dump altcoin market forever because it is unregulated and it is too easy to do it and too easy to make money if you know what to do. if you can't accept it or if you can't understand how it works and how to make profit then simply stay away from altcoins.

bag holding and never selling AND staying away are both wrong extreme actions that you do emotionally.

i don't know what you mean by "money washing machines" but altcoins have always been pump and dumps and the market had always looked like this. it is not really a big deal we all have accepted this which is why people don't have faith in altcoins despite what they say publicly and want others to believe. and this is exactly the main reason why majority of these altcoins are being created in first place. the devs know it, the investors know it and newbies will also figure it out at some point.

i don't think we can prefer one over the other. both are good algorithms and both have pros and cons of themselves. there simply isn't some perfect magical algorithm that you can use.
for example PoS in my opinion has a bad design when it comes to distribution which is totally unfair. and i am not alone in this. and that is not all the algorithms out there. there is a lot more. in fact someone recently made a list of all of them here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4776600.0

i don't have such a coin and i think it is impossible to choose one because they are all getting hard pump and dumps but what i have is the opposite of what you are asking meaning i will disbelieve 100% and will sell the coin that is being advertised the most. you can see it in this topic too, when you see the name of an altcoin repeated a lot that is usually a bad sign.