your biggest problem is that you don't yet know what you are doing. you have not made up your mind. you have a goal which is profit but you have not yet decided how you want to reach that profit.
for example you talk about "investment" then you talk about "trading" and then you talk about buying the "dip". just make up your mind and decide what you want to do.
if you want to invest then it is entirely different from when you want to trade.

as a trader who wants profit you must be active in the market. there is no "altcoin with potential" for a trader and there is no "invest and hold" for a trader. as a trader you want to go in and out of the market and take the profit with you. for example when there is a dip you buy it then you sell it shortly after before the  dip continues. for example yesterday you should have bought ETH at $190-$180 and dumped it as soon as it went back up to $200+ which means you could have made 11% profit in half a day. now calculate how much 11% means based on your investment ($1000 meant $110).
then you move to another coin and do the same and every day repeat the process.

unless you have been living under a rock bitcoin reached $5700 about 6 months ago and ever since that day we have not seen that price ever again so far. and meanwhile it is altcoins such as ethereum that are getting dumped hard.

as for your HOLD question you should look at prices, as you can see if you continue holding altcoins you will also continue losing money. and as a trader you should never hold any altcoin during its dumping phase unless you wish to lose a large portion of your money.

look at the history. it will tell you all you need to know. we already have 9 years of history and in this period of time we have had tens of thousands of altcoins that have been created, pumped and dumped and eventually many of them died. there are years that they create more of them like last year since the altcoin pumping market is booming during that time but in the end the fate of shitcoins is always going to be death and their short life and death will never affect bitcoin in any ways.

no i disagree because so far all the things that were actually launched based on blockchain technology have mostly been hot air and was done for fundraising purposes not to use the benefits of the blockchain technology or even to improve it in any way.

not to mention that bitcoin has nothing to do with any of these! bitcoin is just a currency, it is not creating any market or anything like job.

there is no bloodbath, there is no purge. it is just pump and dumps and it has never killed any coin so far. the coins die on their own when they become over used by the pumpers and when the pumpers decide to move to newer coins for their big pumps. even then these coins may not die as they start moving to smaller exchanges  and get big pumps there out of nowhere!

the market may be overflowing with coins but there still room to grow more since there are billions of people in the world and all of them want to make easy money and creating a useless altcoin is so easy these days. it doesn't even cost that much to create one in some cases.

that is the key. the "demand", it was not a sustainable demand which is why it started vanishing as the ICO hype started to vanish so now there is no more demand for ETH and the only ones remaining in the market are the whales who are shorting it to make money on each dump and there are newbie bag holders who are holding it tight because the same whales told them to hold while they are dumping!

100% premining an altcoin has been considered a scam and the projects have always been shitcoins. but that didn't kill premining altcoins ever. the same with ICOs, they are all scams and the tokens they create are shitcoins but that won't kill them because their livelihood depends on how many people are still investing in them and are greedy enough to close their eyes on all the issues they have. that doesn't mean they will always continue to be the big thing though. for example this year we can see how the number of them has dropped drastically leading to huge dumps in ICO platform tokens such as ETH price.

it is not about size of the miners, the small ones can stay too. in fact it is more possible for smaller miners to stay even if price goes down. for example if you are a hobby miner who believes in the future of bitcoin and are mining with 1 ASIC at home you usually don't even sell the coins you earn and hold them as an investment.
the main factor determining who leaves first is the cost. if a miner (big or small) is somewhere with cheaper electricity they will remain active even when price falls.

in case you missed it this topic and the news of it belongs to about 1 month ago not last week. and even then it had no effects on price whatsoever. the price didn't even move downwards. in fact there was even a rise right after that ETF rejection that happened 1 month ago.

apart from such projects being pure scams and ponzi schemes you should also consider the fact that paying that much profit to people will crash its market! imagine you have some token that you receive 3% profit on it on a daily basis. by the end of week 1 you would have a huge amount of that token which then you can simply sell (dump) on the market and get the pure profit out without even touching your tokens.
and you are not going to be the only one doing it! so what happens is that this dump simply crashes the market.

in other words even if it wasn't a scam, such plans wouldn't even be profitable because of that crash.

all the fluctuations, corrections big and small rises that happened months before the halving (llike the 10 month rise you mentioned) can not be attributed to halving! if you do that then you are saying that bitcoin has nothing else going on for it, adoption is nothing, ... and it only has halving and price only rises because of it! that doesn't make any sense to me!

as for the rise itself it was in no way exponential in the times you mentions.
10 months prior to halving meaning first half of 2016 price went up slowly from $400 to $500 this is a 25% rise in 6 months in a bull market after a very long downtrend from Mt Gox bubble. this had nothing to do with halving.
then the real Halving Rise started on May 25-26 (1 month and 2 weeks before halving) and price went up from $500ish to $770 which is a 55% rise in 1 month. then fell down about a week before the halving.
the 2012 halving was similar although not as big. by that time price was recovering from a similar bubble of nearly the same size as 2013 bubble but it took much shorter time to recover (something like this year). then the halving hype started and pushed the price from $9.2 to $12.99 (41% in about 1 month) then we had a correction to about $10.90


that is exactly my point! it is the hype of Futures that made the big rise. halving hype is no different. the real effect of halving which is different from hype comes afterwards with at least 1 month delay.

you are naive if you really think ETH is/was dead but also you are even more naive if you kept bag holding ETH when all the signs were pointing to a massive dump. people need to start becoming more realistic in altcoin market in my opinion. these centralized coins with millions of dollars to spare are not just going to vanish one day. they will continue to be pumped and dumped but for every pump there will be a dump so plan accordingly.

ps. your signature is defying your comment by the way

what am i doing?
i have a portfolio instead of a bag! a portfolio is a basket of valuable assets that are unrelated, have low risk and good future for return. altcoins have no place in that basket, if you start building one containing altcoins then you can not call that a portfolio it is a bag you are holding which loses value over time.
my portfolio has bitcoin, gold and some stocks in it and i am starting to add real estate to the mix too.
besides what you are calling bear market is not even a bear market it is an altcoin dumping period which all the coins are getting dumped.

price being in a specific price range is not called "bubbled"! where did you come up with that term anyways?!!

those comments are actually good at the end of all this because they are some sort of purge on the market, those spreading FUD don't know it themselves but they are cleaning up the market from newbie weak hands and that leads to decreased volatility and as you can see from these days it ends the drops

well these tokens are created to make profit so you wanting to use them means you want to go against their purpose. it is like wanting to use a butter knife to cut your meat! you can do it but it is not sharp enough for that purpose! these tokens are made as a form of gambling. they raise some money, get pumped and then everyone exists as soon as they are listed on some exchange. those lucky lottery winners are those who dump first and it gets late as more people dump until the token (gambling game) is abandoned and everyone moves to next ICO (game).


they we don't need this many coins and tokens! there are nearly 2000 of them. do we really need to use all of them? of course not. we only need a handful, or even one that actually works. which brings us to the first thing i mentioned above: they are not meant to be used for anything other than speculation.

in a perfect world this could have been the case but in the real world that we live in this won't happen ever. what we are going to see is that (assuming this news is actually real and not fake like 90% of the news we read on yellow news sites) we will start seeing every scam ICO try to disguise themselves as being from France and being legit and also another wave of identity fraud when they start asking for KYC and steal people's documents and sell them elsewhere.

they are both equally good and bad at the same time because they are both centralized altcoins that had and will continue to have pump and dumps. what this means is that you can make profit by investing in them ONLY if you are familiar with the pump and dump market and know how to make profit in different situations in the process of P&D.
for instance you need to know when to buy and you also need to know when to sell. but if you are one of those people who buys some altcoin and then gets caught up in the hype and ends up bag holding and never selling then you should not invest at all because you will go broke waiting for a pump to come.

when talking about bans and the decentralized exchanges it is not about how you use them to circumvent the bans it is about whether people want to even use them. for example if bitcoin was banned you should ask whether people would still want to buy it or not. and the answer for most of them would be no, specially at this point.
but if they want to do it, then there are many ways of doing it, which are already discussed here. and people will do it even if they are harder methods or cost more, as we can see in real life cases in some countries with some bans in effect.

i mostly disagree because looking at the previous 2 halving cases i can see that the talks may have started a long time before the halving (like your topic for instance) but the real effect on the market and the price  started about a month or two prior to the halving itself. all that "talk" may be considered the build up towards that point but without any effect themselves.

not to mention that we will have a lot more going on for bitcoin and a lot more rises before we even reach halving. think of halving in 2020 as the Futures market in 2017. price was already $9000 when the Futures speculation came and price went up to $20k but it had gone up from $900 (10x) already before that.... halving will be the same. we will have rises then the halving will be a big shoot up and a mini bubble.

coinmarket cap never had any influence over the market to want to lose it now. it is just a price reporting website with no more than that. they don't advertise any particular altcoin or force them on anyone to have any kind of influence. if you chose to interpret that data in some particular way and be misled, it is your own fault.

as for bitcointalk it is just a forum and it is still the same forum with the same influence. the wiser people use the information they get there and think about it before wanting to believe or disregard it and idiot newbies take it as facts no matter what it is.