I see that you are new here.
Most ICOs do have an announcement thread on the Announcements section.
If they don't, you should probably not invest in them.

The discussions here should be able to help you understand the offerings and the potential upside. There is a lot of noise ofcourse, but among all other options to access the right investments, this is probably the best.

This is apart from the fact that you should understand the whitepaper. It is a big bonus if you are able to work out the technical details of the paper. Blockchains in general have a lot of open questions and active research going on. Many whitepapers (that i have come across) promise a great deal that isn't practically possible yet. If you understand the tech, you might be able to make a better informed guess as to whether it will work.

If you don't, run it through a friend who does understand.

To answer your specific question, move your coins to ones which you feel have a solid value proposition and a tech to back it up.

Cheers!

Bitcoin is not just Economics. However, i would love to see educational institutions start teaching this new paradigm.

Crypto-economics = Cryptography + economics + game theory

I'd like to know if professors exist who have deep understanding of all these fields, and are teaching this as a course!

In the spirit of Bitcoin, however, such a course should be online and not in a classroom - "Accessible to all"

I do not think there is a solid answer here.
This question demands the worst answer - "Depends"

It really depends how you are  looking at the situation.

Making the wealthy richer This is true at two levels.
 - People who can afford to build huge machines to mine coins, will be rewarded with more coins.
 - People who can afford to buy more, get more rewards (if the price goes up). This is true for investments in general.

Redistribution of wealth
 - Bitcoin allows people in countries under an oppressive government to keep their wealth safe. This is redistribution in the sense that it is not controlled by the government
 - Bitcoin now allows easy flow of transactions across borders. Now, i can do some freelancing as a developer for a client on the other side of the globe without losing half the earnings in wire transfers
 - People can invest in Bitcoin even if they are not accredited investors. This allows a person with modest investments to take part in what would be otherwise considered a risky investment.

Just like if the market (say NASDAQ) falls, most companies' stocks fall.

This is likely to happen because of what is called the herd mentality.
People start losing trust in the market and cash out before they lose too much.

The same tends to happen in the crypto space.
Once the market starts falling, all the coins start falling. This holds especially true for Bitcoin and Ethereum, as we saw during the preempted Segwit2.x fork - Bitcoin fell (because a lot of miners moved to BCH) and hence all cryptos fell during that time period. This is because most people still hold Bitcoin/Ethereum as the representative for crypto coins in general.

Both seem to be solid at this point.
You should diversify your investments.

Personal opinion is that Bitcoin is at an inflection point with the introduction of lightning network. I would assume bitcoin value starts shooting north once lightning gets traction.

Ripple is working on its decentralization schemes too. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

I meant you keep making Bitcoin transactions. If your purpose is to just send one large transaction, i point out that you wouldn't set up a lightning channel just for that payment.
It works if you already have a channel which has enough funds.
Apologies for the ambiguity.

Do you have options for BTC/ETH payouts?

Yes you are absolutely spot on that there will be large hubs. Most estimates say there will be about 2-3 such hubs that will form.
This is a general critic of the lightning network being centralized.

However, this is NOT why lightning supports microtransactions and not bigger payments.
You can continue to make bigger payments on the lightning network as long as the channels have that much funds.
The reason why lightning is suitable for micro transactions is that there is little (or no) transaction fees for smaller amounts.

Lightning is best suited for making multiple "repeat payments". It is unlikely that you have multiple HUGE payments.
Setting up a channel and closing it requires 2 on chain transactions. If you make only one payment in the channel, you'd be paying the transaction fees twice (once for the setting up and one for closing). You could rather make an onchain transfer, paying the transaction fees only once.

Most of the whitepapers i see are more business plan than technical details.
I am looking for blockchains that base themselves on truely innovative technology, for that is when i think an alt coin actually has any value.

The only 4 good technical whitepapers i have come across are
1. Bitcoin ofcourse http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
2. Ethereum https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf
3. Filecoin http://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
4. Orchid Protocol http://orchidprotocol.com/whitepaper.pdf

Is there any other blockchain that presents a whitepaper of their tech, and not management?

If there is what are the things you look for before investing in such projects? What do you look for in the papers?


Keenly looking for some help!
Many thanks, in advance

It is possible to provide services in exchange for cryptocurrencies.
In a marketplace, there is always a scope of a scam. (Buyer underpaying or seller overcharging)

Some examples are
1. Orchid Protocol (decentralized selling of bandwidth) allows leechers to underpay, but mitigates the larger malice by requiring every user of the network to stake some coins before enabling any transaction. This reduces the number of people who will be able to perform leeching by means of a sybil attack. https://medium.com/@gustav.simonsson/you-describe-a-viable-dos-leeching-attack-1cf01436974b

2. OpenBazaar (decentralized Ebay) maintains a thread of scammers and a set of moderators who do some basic validation. This does allow a cheap adversary to make some quick money by "selling" something and never shipping it. https://www.openbazaar.org/scam-prevention/

What are some other examples of marketplace related dynamics to avoid buyer-seller scams from happening?

Hello,
I am referring to the orchid protocol as defined in the paper here : https://orchidprotocol.com/whitepaper.pdf

The paper does mention a way to make probabilistic micro payments, but what is the amount that is to be paid?
If a relay node is to bill the customer based on number of packets relayed, how does the billing occur?
Does the relay node issue a bill by monitoring the data that it is relaying? If yes, how does it protect the customer from a malicious node that over charges?

In other words, how does the customer pay for exactly what she/he is using?

The protocol is lovely and i'd love to see it implemented soon!

Cheers!