it is a bad thing for the market as a whole but not for individual projects.
it is bad because a lot of coins means a lot of shitcoins because there is no way you can create 1000 altcoin in a couple of months and all of them be good. and we have seen so far that this is true.

but an individual project that is already good (for example Bitcoin, Byteball,...) they don't care whether there is only one other altcoin or 1000000 altcoins out there. if they are really good then they will be adopted and grow in the long run and the shitcoins will grow in the short run.

yeah, it is a big news and all that but people are lazy so when you make a random topic, (specially when you add this weird color to your comments), and don't include a trusted link (like linking to the tweet by Coinbase or on their website among their announcements) they will usually ignore you.

so did they specify any times for it? i want to know if i have missed the chance or not.

Litecoin is one of those very old coins (i think it is the oldest but not sure) that is not going anywhere and that is only because it is a copy of bitcoin (the code is the same except a couple of things like time between blocks and supply) and also because it has a very active developing team behind it.

after this dumping period in the altcoin market ended i am expecting LTC to be among one of the biggest coins that sees one of the biggest pumps.

that is not called "use", it is called speculation. and although you can call trading for short term  aka pump and dump some sort of usage but it really isn't in the real world.
what happens is that people only get involved with altcoins because they want to make profit, and when they see pumps they get more excited to join because there is a bigger profit to be made.

only newbies with a little money are ruled by emotions like that and they wouldn't care if it is red or not. they will also have the same way of irrational thinking even during the rises. for example after each correction during a rally they panic sell!

no year is ever going to be "altcoins year" unless we start seeing legit altcoins be created that are real cryptocurrencies not just some virtual tokens with no use but speculation.

and until that time we are going to continue seeing altcoins be pumped every single day of the year. so in a sense every year is an altcoin year.

bitcoin is not anonymous so no.

there may be still some use cases for bitcoin on the deep web, the cases that you saw when you visited and possibly used but it is not that much. they are rare cases that you happened to have found there.
people are either using cash which is the ultimate anonymous currency or they are using anon coins such as monero and zcash.

if you really have to ask this question then the answer is not you should sell your bitcoin and go away.

in case of bitcoin gold altcoin that you are bag holding i have to say it was a disappointing project. i was thinking it can  have good pumps but it failed. specially since the successful 51% attack against it, this coin tanked hard.
what to do now? it depends on how much you have. if it is a small amount then i think holding it is best because it may have a pump since it is super-dumped right now but it is still a shitcoin and you will be taking a huge risk anyways.

it will happen the day that price of a grain of sand passed the price of gold.

there is finite but a huge number of grains of sand on the planet. there is also a huge number of ETH and an infinite amount of it available.
while bitcoin only has a small supply which is capped at 21 million.

sometimes some damages can not be undone.

in case of ethereum the damage is already done. the blockchain is already too huge and out of hand which has increased the centralization of  ethereum. nobody is going to buy a 2 TB hard disk to dedicate 1.2 TB and growing of it to run a ETH node. that means it will be centralized to one or two places which can be run by the government even. and that gives them full control.

its funny that when Ethereum foundation did the same spam advertising all over the internet, nobody was talking about how bad that was and how they should have been punished!

bitcoin is already recognized legally in most of the world! but not always as a currency but when it comes to accepting it as payment that doesn't concern businesses much. only the fact that bitcoin is legal.
for instance bitcoin is not a currency in US, it is a commodity instead but yet Microsoft (which is a huge company!!) is accepting bitcoin payments.
so i don't need to even argue about the taxation problem that you are mentioning here because that is a non-issue otherwise they wouldn't be accepting it in first place.

when the price drops, newbies like OP rush to sell their bitcoins but being a newbie means they sell too late at the bottom. i am willing to bet OP sold at $5700 yesterday.
that means they are now kicking themselves in the butt

being a newbie means they think if they start up topics like this, they can somehow get that lower price back again so that they can buy back what they sold at that same price so that they can fix their mistakes.

interesting but there are certain reasons that can also keep them well alive.

1. they don't cost as much to run as the big exchanges. while the big ones need strong servers and need to spend a lot of money these small exchanges can be run so much easier with a lot less money.
2. the volume may be low but it is not zero and it can cover their costs.
3. these exchanges sometimes have coins others don't and they can manipulate and pump those coins and make a lot of money.
4. finally the most important reason: with the big exchanges scamming their users like Cryptsy running away, Mt Gox scamming, Bittrex scamming,... people will use these exchanges more. for example the most recent one was bittrex which pushed many users to other exchanges. for example cryptopia had a surge of new users. Binance came out of nowhere and got the market by the balls.

bitcoin drop has been a small one compared to the dump of the altcoins. while bitcoin went down about 7-8%  the altcoins each lost 12-20% of their value in the past day.

in other words they are experiencing some severe dumping case and while the drops become bigger the panic sellers come out and start dumping their coins.

at times like this you should only invest IF you want to catch a dead cat bounce because a lot of these altcoins like those losing 15% will rise back up 5% then drop another 15% so you buy at the bottom of first 15% drop and then sell after the 5% recovery to prevent getting dumped on.

well if you think something doesn't have any usage, like if you think there is not millions of merchants that are accepting bitcoin then you are right it is a "fools paradise".

but again it raises another question. what are YOU doing here?

none of the above it is simply natural market movement.

imagine a party balloon that you fill with air. obviously it can hold a certain amount of air, but you keep on blowing in it and make it bigger than it should be, then you don't stop there you continue blowing air into it.
eventually you will reach a stage when the balloon can no longer hold that air and bursts and when it does the balloon is ruined.

that is what's happening to altcoins.  they have no usage so they have no real value. it is pure speculation. first they went up and things were fined, then they started getting pumped (that bubble that i told you about) then the pumps became a huge bubble each. eventually there comes a time when you can't hold that price high any longer and it needs to come down.

the difference however between an altcoin bubble and that balloon is that when the balloon bursts it goes to zero in a second but in a market you can't have such a fast drop because there are lots of people buying and selling at all times so the process will be slow. which is why you are still surprised each time you see another dump which is the same dump that was started a while ago.

so far you have only mentioned one thing and called that an "issue" but yet you claim there are "many issues"!

that one thing is not an issue that bitcoin is facing. it is mostly fake and in some cases it is an issue that some governments are creating for their people.
to begin with bitcoin is legal in most of the world. there is only 2 or 3 countries that have actually banned bitcoin and even there people don't care and they continue to use bitcoin because it is a censorship resistance currency and that is why i say it is not an "issue".

i honestly don't see anything devastating about SEC though.

sadly we have proven that we can not get rid of the scams in this market on our own. we created ICOs and made them big  on our own and couldn't handle them to prevent the scams. so we need someone else from outside like SEC and in other countries their law enforcements equivalent to SEC in US to come in and clean it up for us.

the lawsuits are good. the arrests that will happen will also be good. all the regulations and the restrictions that will be put on this market are going to be good because they will eliminate or at least reduce to nearly nothing all the ICO scams and shitcoins.

like any other technology out there bitcoin will also be someday obsolete and will be replaced by something new. but talking about that NOW is the dumbest thing that anybody can do. bitcoin is the newest technology in this field and it is by far the best option out there. in comparison altcoins look like shitcoins which is why we call them that!

the problem with people these days is that they think just because some useless shitcoin like ethereum got pumped that means it is competing with bitcoin
but if you start looking beyond your nose you can see that a whale is filling his pocket with money to invest in bitcoin... that is how absurd things are in the altcoin market.