an interesting question that i have been wondering myself ever since i saw a surge in number of ATMs around the world recently.  i think the profitability of it depends on a couple of factors. for starters the country you live in and the laws of it. in some places installing an ATM may cost you a lot more than it can make you not to mention the problem you may face legally. like that dude in India which tried it recently without a license and was arrested for it.
the other issues is that ATMs have a certain clientèle. not everyone wants to use an ATM, only those who want the maximum anonymity use them and since the fees are already high that limits the customer base a lot and with it the profit that you can make.

you seem to have bag held and lost a lot of money in shitcoins that you have started thinking bitcoin is the same as all of those useless tokens you were bad holding.
no dude, it is different. they lost their value because they were useless and people were only interested in them to make profit and when that ended they all got rid of their bags. with bitcoin, there is always usages whether you know them or not. and that means it will always keep its value and not just that, it will rise up too.

i don't think you can call such a coin "deflationary" just because its supply is capped. it is like saying grains of sand are deflationary! it is already inflated and they haven't even released all the supply yet!

you can not decide whether or not to buy some altcoin by reading about it and its technology! we are in a manipulated pump and dump market and "research" like that won't help you one bit.

you are correct, you can't print more XRP since it has a fixed cap. it is maxed out at 100 billion tokens and about 40 billion of it is already released and is "supposed to be" in circulation. so if a bank wants to transfer money using XRP tokens they will be limited to the number of tokens they can get their hands on which is a lot less than that since you can't buy up all the tokens! and also they will be subjected to the pump and dump caused volatility of it and lose a lot of money.

that is why nobody uses XRP and if a bank talks about ripple they mean Ripple or in other words the technology of it which they  want to adapt for internal usage without needing XRP at all.

that has always been the biggest problem with these smaller exchanges. they don't have that many users and they can do whatever they want sometimes without any consequences. if the maintenance was an unscheduled one and they had no other reason to perform it either then it was a clear scam and you should stay away from them. but it might have been scheduled already and you missed it, in which case there is nothing wrong with it.
in any case we have no choice but to accept these problems if we want to continue trading on centralized exchanges and if we don't like that then we have to accept the shortcomings of decentralized exchanges and switch to using them instead.

one of the biggest negative sides of the pumping season that the altcoin market has every other year is that it creates an illusion for a lot of newcomers that they begin thinking they are good at trading. in other words when for example you buy some random shitcoin with your eyes closed and that shitcoin gets pumped and gives you a lot of profit, it can mislead you into thinking you were actually a good trader that you could make that much profit. but the reality is that you got lucky. and if you start thinking that way then there comes a time like 2018 when the dumping begins but you continue choosing shitcoins with your eyes closed thinking the strategy you were choosing is good.
the result is losing not only all the profit you made before this but also losing a big part of your capital.

maybe i am being too harsh but i say there is a clear distinction between "speculation" and "guesswork".
we can only call something "speculation" if it is actually speculating something based on at least some amount of analysis and is based on at least a couple of facts. the analysis can be technical or fundamental.
but when people start throwing random numbers at each other and make guesses that should not be called "speculation". although it is the most common around these parts.

this news like many other news that we have read about Steve Wozniak  is most probably pure bullshit. and looking at the source of this news, the site is known for posting a lot of bullshit clickbaits and OP is known for shilling for them. so my assumption is going to be pure bullshit news unless proven otherwise.

the thing is, for the past  2 years the media has been using Wozniak as a source of fake news. we have heard things from him losing all his bitcoins to thieves, to him being a whale and accumulating bitcoin. the reality is that he only showed interest in bitcoin and claimed he owns some bitcoin and sold some in 2017 when price started rising from $900, probably sold around $2000-$5000. nothing else.

it is not impossible for ethereum to switch to PoS or any other algorithms but nothing is going to solve its problems including scaling, in other words it has a lot more problems than just scaling that needs solving and some of them can't even be solved for example like the fact that it is not immutable and a non-immutable blockchain is worse than shit.
unfortunately other alternative platforms aren't good enough otherwise they would have replaced ETH a long time ago. but they have less problems for example some of them are actually decentralized so unlike ETH they have a big advantage.

actually bitcoin-gold has been one of the only fork coins that i held some of my bitcoins on exchanges prior to the fork so that i can be able to dump them as fast as possible. if i am not mistaken i sold them around 0.2BTC per BTG on Yobit but i can't be sure, it has been a very long time ago and i have sold a ton of shitcoins like that.

in any case, as it is with any useless fork coin they are only good in two cases:
1. when they are released initially and have a high price on the first exchange
2. when they get dumped about 90% and then after a while start getting a big pump.
other than that, they are worthless and not even worth the rest of the pumps.

you can not really compare a big name such as "bittorrent" with the rest of the ICOs. in fact it is not the "ICO" that raised that much money, it is the big name which is also associated with another legend called "Bram Cohen" and that has led to the big fundraising.

but people are missing the fact that Bittorrent was sold a long time ago to another small person who created Tron and is no longer the same. i actually was always wondering why they bought it, now i know they had 7.12 million reasons to buy it

to be fair a big part of these so called "hacks" weren't actually "hacks" when the funds are stolen by an unknown hacker. in fact many of them were inside jobs or the exchange itself faking a hack to steal its users' money. it is a cheeky way of making a big sum of money without having to pay the customers back because the exchanges are not regulated and they don't abide by any kind of law.
other cases such as Yobit for instance are just a joke since the exchange itself is a shitty one to begin with, it has no security so hacks should technically happen on a weekly basis, the fact that they are not common can be because they don't have that much capital to be stolen since people don't really use that platform.

the market is not a game or a predefined loop to be repeated over and over just because it has occurred once (or even more) in the past. if anything the fact that last year price dropped in January and continued dropping most of the year should mean that this year it is time for the rises to begin because no market has ever remained in one direction forever specially something new and constantly growing such as bitcoin which can't really be kept down like this for long.

when talking about early years (specially the first couple of years when mining was possible with CPUs alone) you should also consider the fact that the only way of obtaining bitcoin was not buying or investing a lot in mining equipment. the easy way was to simply mine it with your computer. so it was easier to get some BTC by just running bitcoin-qt and get some block rewards.
so many of those who got bitcoin in early years weren't exactly taking big risks of "investing" money.

the price is always going up and down, sometimes like 2017 it will be exaggerated and the big size of it causes a big dramatic downtrend afterwards but in the end the adoption is going to continue to happen no matter what the price looks like in short term and that is why in the long term we always see a higher price for bitcoin and a death for altcoins that are useless.

you are missing the point with altcoins! there is no "natural" rise in altcoin market and if there were then it wouldn't be worth investing into such coins because they wouldn't really give you much of a profit.

what we have in altcoin market is pump and dumps and that means unnatural rises that happen fast. so the only thing you have to do is to adapt to these types of pump and dumps and be fast about getting in and out of these shitcoins for the most amount of profit.

i would never invest in any ICO under any circumstances because it is obvious to me that they don't have any future and any profit that they may give you is based on your luck not based on their success. in other words you can only make profit from investing in some ICO only if the ICO can fool a lot of people into giving them their money and gets pumped afterwards. otherwise you are throwing your money away in a gambling game with bad odds.

you know sometimes it really doesn't matter if we have reached the "bottom" or not as long as we are close to it. for example back in 2014 price was at the bottom when it reached $250 and if you bought then and there while it lasted for months then you could have been a big winner in the long run. but guess what, the $250 was nowhere near the bottom! the "bottom" was $150 but would you even care if you bought at $250 or $150 when price went up to $20000 afterwards? not to mention that this "bottom" at $150 only lasted a very short time so if you blinked or were asleep at that time, you would have missed it!

it never had any "rep" to ruin it! maybe some newbies were fooled into believing the lies they told but the majority never believed a single thing.
the only thing that BCH had was hype and it is nothing new with pump and dump altcoins. it literary happens every single day in the market. the altcoins get hyped up, they get pumped so they increase their price unrealistically then they get dumped.
that can be repeated multiple times before the coin dies for good, the number of p&d periods different coins have, and the size of it may differ but all the altcoins have the same patterns.

i think you need to check out all the places that accept bitcoin before making "assumptions" like this here. there are some airlines that are actually accepting bitcoin payments. you see it is not about how big or small the payment amount is in USD, it is about whether someone is willing to accept bitcoin or not. there are many huge sales taking place using bitcoin, even real estate deals worth millions.