Think of an some service apps and get them developed. The simpler the better. Cutting out the middleman can create self-running money machines.

Here's some ideas:

-People post pictures and pay a few cents to get them edited. You take a cut.
-People post homework questions and pay ETH for answers. You take a cut.
- Truth or dare that pays LTC for doing the dare or telling the truth. You take a cut. (could get dangerous lol)

Up front cost for an mvp is a few BTC. Not bad for passive income.

The factor that's going to completely change the way we operate a business will be adoption of blockchain. Free transactions, which are becoming real right now through proof of work and proof of stake, allow any business to share revenues. This means that in the near future (hopefully) people will be able to earn money via cryptocurrencies for doing all of the things that they already enjoy doing like browsing the internet, watching TV, and ordering food. I'm glad that this discussion is being had and I'm glad that things are changing.

From the perspective of the team running an ICO, airdrops are a pretty nice tool. They are a great way to pull more supporters to your project and community. However, I think airdrops should be saved for after the ICO has completed using unsold tokens or reward reserves. This way, everyone who didn't participate gets their tokens or coins at market price (so you're in it for the long run) and the developers can also burn some giving you a nice incentive to stick around.

Honestly I think investing in any ICO comes down to the team. If you think the idea is good, the team is going to be the one that will make it happen. Not just development either - if they are good at marketing their ICO, they're going to be good at marketing their product which will drive up demand. The last 10 ICOs I invested in I approached this way and have seen a lot of success. Luckily, listing sites like ICObench can help you navigate all projects but beware that many projects have paid listings. Look at others like ICOalert to compare and trust your own judgement.

The meteoric rises and drops in these markets have always been from mass exposure. Q4 last year was fueled by widespread news of adoption by major financial institutions, retailers, and governments - all became mainstream stories. The big turnaround happened after several consecutive bouts of bad news: more aggressive regulation, banning of social media ads, denial of adoption from several services.

With all of the money that flowed into ambitious ICOs, many of them are bound to create great products that pull a mainstream audience in under a year. Once two or three of these create news or major institutions publicly accept crypto the market will likely go full bull again.

I think $1k3 is a definite by the end of 2018.

I agree with this 100%. If regulation becomes too intensive, it can simply be ignored, at which point regulators will have to compromise. For example, if Litecoin developed widespread usage and developed overly strict regulations, users could simply migrate to an unregulated privacy coin which would be a nightmare for the regulation bodies. The democratic ownership of crypto really evens the playing field.