it has nothing to do with price of bitcoin. otherwise there are other altcoins that are actually worth a lot higher than bitcoin but they still remain useless.
 it is always about the utilities that bit coin is providing that that is giving it the real value and the potential it has. other altcoins lack this potential mostly because they are created for pump and dumping purposes.

it depends on your trading experiences and your strategies. for most traders this may not be the best time but it is still a good time to make profit from the coins that are getting pumped all around the market. but if you find it hard to make profit then you don't have to try. just go back out to fiat or bitcoin and wait until you find the market in better conditions and become more confident that you can make profit. then come back.

if you spent half the time you spend on day dreaming about a shitcoin that replaces bitcoin and used that time to accumulate bitcoin, you could have been a lot richer now instead of being in a huge loss because of bag holding shitcoins in hopes of a big rise!

you have to realize that you can't compete with a decentralized currency by creating pump and dump shitcoins. you have to first create something that does the same as bitcoin and has the same attributes and better ones then think about competing. so far we have shitcoins that get pumped, that's all.

i don't see anything changing in 2019 compared to previous years so my investment plan is still the same as it has always been. buying bitcoin only as an "investment" and only using altcoins as short term trading tools to make more profit on the bitcoins that i bought.
as for ETH i have it under observation to see if they are going to pump it or not because of the fork and the hype that it is is receiving these days but i won't busy myself with it because that would mean losing opportunity to make huge profits elsewhere as other coins are getting pumped left and right.

the loss is only high for bag holder newbies not for traders and certainly not for investors.

a bag holder is someone who has no idea what he buys, they usually fill their bags with a lot of shitcoins and start dreaming about becoming a millionaire while they lose about 90% of their investment.
a trader is someone who is still making profit specially when price drops!
an investor is someone who buys things after analyzing and with a well thought plan. for example someone who buys bitcoin because he sees the potential and he does it when the hype is not high (meaning below $4k last year) and he doesn't care about the short term fluctuations.

now the problem is we have lots of bag holders who think they are traders or investors which is why you see losses are high!

as for "experts", they are not giving you advice, they are making money by making those statements. if they say rise that means they want to sell and when they sell drop that means they want to buy.

Paypal, VISA,... are centralized companies that have an advertising team that does the marketing for them. bitcoin is decentralized and has no such thing and nobody is going to do it for you.
and i agree with BuyBuyBitcoin, bitcoin sells itself it really doesn't need any kind of marketing. we have a unique payment system that if people want to use it, they will and if they don't then no amount of advertising is going to change that. as it is evident with altcoins that kill themselves with advertising and then fail because nobody wants them.

if it was up to me, i would have put an end to all the ICOs. they are just too bad to exist and the damage they are doing to the whole cryptocurrency scene is huge. it is well known that majority of them are big scams out there to rob you. but  the rest of them are also pretty terrible to begin with because they aim to only make money from gullible people. there is company and no product. there is only fund raising to be rich.

Ethereum is not forking to a new coin! this fork is like an upgrade and i don't think there will be any renaming fork to keep the original chain (although it is possible) in which case the price is only changing based on how hyped up this fork is.
there is a lot of risks with hardforks like this so logically there should be a price drop prior to this fork because wise people who know better should technically stay away. but that is not how the pump and dump market works. people rarely care about anything technical so we may see a pump if pumpers choose to pump it!!!

i have seen a lot of these "solutions" and i have to say so far i have only seen fake advertisement of a flawed protocol trying to get pumped. as i said in my comment, saying your solution is scalable is one thing and actually being scalable is another.
and don't forget that any solution is always a combination of benefits and trade-offs. there is no perfect good solution. and most of the times the solutions have trade-offs that are not acceptable.

these days everyone who has been trading bitcoin is getting anxious and most of them are getting desperate because their money is locked in orders that are never being filled because of bitcion's stability. so they end up trying to FUD bitcoin into some action.
the Goldman Sachs case here is a good case of that FUD of some idiot trying desperately to get his orders which they placed at about 5-10% below market value, filled. don't read too much into these things!

not really. so far only bitcoin has had real long term potential. and the altcoins have only had pumping potentials which means a temporary big rise which is always followed by a big dump down. sometimes bitcoin price rise makes their USD value go up which people sometimes confuse with actual growth of that coin but in fact the coins are dropping against bitcoin which is what matters the most.

they still are considered full node but i believe they shouldn't be. because one of the things a full node should do is to store full transaction/block data and be able to give it to you when you request it. and as far as i know non-segwit nodes do not store witness part of transactions which means although they still function but they can't give you "full" data so maybe we shouldn't consider them full nodes. they also don't relay SegWit transactions.
but as i said that is only one of the things full nodes do, they do a lot of other things which the non-segwit nodes are still capable of.

people need to start getting a better understanding of "size"! and it depends on the context. when you say $100 that can be huge rise or fall when price is like $200 but when price is $6500 that $100 rise or fall is considered a small one and since this is bitcoin and the price rise and falls are always bigger than normal changes in other markets, that $100 (which is 1%) is considered extremely tiny and is not even worth talking about!
not to mention that this price that OP got excited about a couple of weeks ago is not even to a major resistance line. not even close!

that's the thing about advertisement, if you watch TV and the ads there you can see that an advertisement never has to be accurate or even correct! an advertisement only has to be interesting enough to get people excited to buy the product so that your company can make profit.

in case of bitcoin-cash they have always played this trick by calling it "real bitcoin", "satoshi's vision", "more p2p", "solved scaling problem",... and a lot more. and they have always done it to advertise and pump their token to make profit.

a very good question and i hope more people start asking such questions.

there is a very serious problem in the altcoin market and it has existed from early days but it is only becoming worse and worse as the time goes by. the problem is that people care only about making money and nothing else. you can clearly see that the focus of majority of new projects these days is to make money and nothing else. this goes as far as killing innovation! we haven't had any good innovative project for a very long time and even if we have some it will be buried under the pump and dump coins!

wrong. bitcoin is pretty good and has lots of usages but it is far from perfect. there is a lot of room for improvement and that means there is opportunity for competition.

i disagree. i believe it is because others are not-trusted and bad.
otherwise i strongly believe that if some day we see a really good cryptocurrency that actually solves some of bitcoin's problems (instead of pretending in their advertisements) then it can become as big as bitcoin if not bigger.

i don't think he owns that much bitcoin to dump in first place and whatever amount of bitcoin he owns is his investment which he will never give up because despite what these people show publicly, bitcoin is the thing they truly believe in and know much better than you and me that it has a bright future.

their new fork is only an excuse for them to make more money. more money that they will then invest in bitcoin so that they can increase their stake in this limited supply and unique currency.

an investor never worries about an exchange being hacked! the only thing important for them is bitcoin being secure in a safe wallet and there are enough options for that from hardware wallets to paper wallet cold storage that they don't have to worry about anything.

the only reason why people are afraid to invest in bitcoin is the FUD that is always around and the fact that bitcoin is still new and unknown to many of them.

strange because every time that i hear one of their owners talk about their token, they clearly advertise it as a decentralized cryptocurrency! on their website they only mention the affiliation with banks they never admit that their token is centralized though.
 i don't know how you are saying this.

it is hard to say in my opinion mostly because none of them are that popular which means none of them are actually being used that much for us to analyze them properly. there are little differences between them too. for example they are all premined and distributed in more or less the same way with developer holding the same 1-5% of the supply to himself.
with exception of Byteball they don't have any transaction fees.
they all can handle more or less the same number of TPS or so they claim. Byteball: 100, IOTA: 500, NANO: 1000
the confirmation times are instant.
as far as i can tell there is a certain centralization about them, for instance you can not run a byteball witness node! the dev decides who runs that. not sure about others.

this is just things that i can remember from these coins. i would love to see some decent in depth and unbiased comparison if someone has it.

exchanges are not "cooperating" with anything. they are trying to make as much money as they can in a market that has not been as active as before.
when they support a fork like this, it means a lot of users are going to become active on their platform and deposit their coins and start trading that new forkfork coin. and more trades means more volume which means more fees aka profit for the exchange platform. so they are competing with each other at this point to get more people to deposit on their platform and trade.