You might find there are less scams now as investors turn their attention away from the scammy ICO space to the more trustworthy IEO crowdfunding model, but if you're going to invest into these ensure you choose ones from the best performing launchpads only and don't bother with any of the smaller exchange launches as these usually won't involve quality startups with long term viability and an innovative product

To an extent yes and this is purely because the market has been flooded with too many worthless tokens from projects that fail to deliver on their roadmaps or have become superseded by a newer product or solution so always DYOR to avoid making the mistake of investing in these lower cap higher risk options as they aren't always worth it

This is typical of a pump and dump scenario or a large holder offloading their tokens quickly with no concern for the market or even selling them slower to fetch a better price for them, and there's always some lucky traders who place lower buy orders who benefit so its not all bad and if its a reliable startup the value will recover soon enough

For ERC-20 tokens MyEtherWallet is one of the most popular online wallets provided you use it with Metamask to hide your private keys, but if you're storing a sizable amount of assets its best to secure them with a hardware wallet like Ledger or Trezor

This is good advice because even if you do need to liquidate an asset in your portfolio for whatever reason, be it needing capital to diversify with or simply because its under performing it's always a good idea to hold onto a small percentage of it in case one day it does become worth something significant as you mention

Regardless of the fact they don't wish to share the specific location of their company headquarters, possibly due to security reasons the exchange does have a decent reputation of being a safe and secure platform to trade on but you still do so at your own risk, and alternatively they do have a DEX which you can use should you wish to manage your own funds when you are trading or investing

Facebook's cryptocurrency project called Libra is not a direct threat to the cryptocurrency ecosystem and in fact might have the effect of bringing a lot more new investors into the industry as they discover what stablecoins and other assets can do and this should have a positive impact overall for all top ranked projects

Bitcoin has been around a lot longer than these other networks and is considered a store of value or "digital gold" and this ranking evaluates projects based on the latest innovations and not how popular they are but even then these rankings don't reflect market value its purely from a forward thinking perspective

I would probably have to go with Ethereum as well not because of its market dominance, but because of its upcoming features and flexibility of smart contract development, popularity, and efforts with the global developer community to bring about standards for these types of technologies

You can use this service which appears to be legitimate and worthwhile to purchase cards to do your shopping with, and there are also OTC options for gift cards on Localbitcoins as well, which you can use in many different locations around the world and these major retailers in the future may support cryptocurrencies purchases direct which will be an added bonus

Ethereum would perhaps be better considered "digital silver" considering its market position and the number of use cases it will end up having and it is unlikely Litecoin will surpass its market cap ever unless it adds a lot more features to its current form

Next year should be quite exciting in terms of developments for the cryptocurrency industry with more technological advancements, regulation and infrastructure being put into place to support more serious types of investors requirements and projects like Libra seeking to further the adoption of cryptocurrencies world wide it should be positive overall

The alternative market has long awaited the next alt-season and has still been lagging in comparison to Bitcoins performance, but things may improve next year as the market matures further and more new investors arrive due to the more secure ways to invest becoming readily available and that should help the alt-coin market begin to revive

Bounty hunting is by no means over regardless of the downturn in crowdfunding campaigns in general, there'll always be the need for marketing services with no up front costs so you can be certain there'll be some profitable bounties often enough to keep you busy

You can revive a project if you find a new developer for it and create a marketing plan and organize exchange listings, but all this requires some initial outlay of capital so you'll need to have that at hand before you seek out the resources required to re-launch an old cryptocurrency that is no longer actively being developed

IEOs offer a bit more security to investors as there is generally less illegitimate offerings held by exchanges that have reputable launchpads and you'll be able to find statistics quite easily to help you identify which ones are profitable and which ones are not so just DYOR and you'll avoid losing capital on startups that aren't viable

For starters ICOs are not as popular anymore as a method of raising funds for a project its IEOs now that have caught most of the markets attention and if you're wanting to avoid the scams simply focus on reputable launchpads that have good quality offerings like Bitfinex, OKex, Houbi, Binance and Kucoin

Whether or not there'll be another alt-coin season depends on how much attention the top alternatives get from new investors as most of the hype is focused on Bitcoin these days and it should be as its the primary asset to have in your portfolio then you can consider adding some alternatives later once you've studied how the market evolves and can identify when an asset is in oversold conditions and represents a good value buy

Many DeFi startups already offer similar services to traditional banks and what you are referring to in terms of securing customers assets is custody solutions and this area including blockchain payment processing is still under development with a major project like Libra potentially offering some of these solutions

This is unfortunately true that not all alt-coins will survive especially not a lot of the smaller projects that will just become superseded by newer technologies so if you are investing ensure a startup has long term viability and is competitive in its category and these are mostly top ranked alternative assets