the main idea of it will remain the same even if it is not called "bounty campaign". these shitty ICO coins have been the same for a long time even before ICOs were even a thing. they created premined altcoins then "airdropped" a lot of tokens to random newbies who then dumped them on the market and some bag held and some hyped it up desperately trying to make profit....

so don't worry about it so much, as long as the altcoin market is a pump and dump market and there are gullible newbies who fall for these schemes there will be airdrops. and there will be a lot of people who will dump them as soon as they receive them because they are experienced enough to know there is no future for these coins and they just last for short term.

it is not madness, it is simply flawed design!
the network has never been capable of scaling but with all the hype it received thanks to non stop advertising and the huge pump that it had last year, there were lots of transactions on it all from useless ICO tokens which were just pump and dumping.
now when the network clogs up every couple of days you are forced to pay outrageous fees to get your transaction processed. and that's not all the problems! the bigger problem is the fact that the blockchain is gigantic now! so you won't even be able to download it if you wanted to run a full node which leads to even more centralization....

tokens are distributed as a way of advertising the ICO since they have no other way of getting people to participate in their useless project. so as a result the methods these ICO tokens chose to give away their useless token usually involves some sort of activity from the recipient so that they can also be advertised by that act. which is why all of them have some sort of bounty campaign, it can be a signature campaign on bitcointalk where you advertise for them, or a spam on some other social media like facebook, telegram,... and a lot of different things.

i agree with the first part but this part i can not agree with.
what happened in 2017 was not a pump, there was manipulation but the rise to $20k would have happened anyways and it is not because of manipulation, it was because a lot of money was coming in during 2017 and that kind of rise is what naturally happens when you have a tiny market with thin order books which can not have any kind of resistance against that kind of money so the price shoots up.
it was real demand, if you check the news reports you can see for instance coinbase used to have about 1 million new users every couple of days! and those people were coming in because everywhere you looked you could see bitcoin was discussed.

99% of the things you read from news sites is not written to manipulate! they are publishing those articles to get clicks and earn money from those clicks. they don't care even if bitcoin dropped to 0 or went to $1 trillion. in both cases their source of income is from those clicks aka the traffic they get.

with that said when the community is desperate for seeing positive news to justify the rise that we are having they start publishing positive news and quote people who said "bitcoin to the moon". and when the community mood is otherwise they start quoting those who said "bitcoin is gonna die".
it is more like moving with the wind rather than wanting to cause the wind!

the volatility in the cryptocurrency market has nothing to do with ETF proposal. it is purely because the altcoins in the cryptocurrency market has always been pump and dumps and this type of coins always remain highly volatile specially when they are coming down from a pump as they are these days.

that is about 10% drop and not a big deal really considering bitcoin usually has much bigger drops in the same time frame. not to mention price did not go to a low price but back to where it was. in fact about $500-$600 higher than the bottom.

ETF is bitcoin related and anything that happens to it will affect bitcoin price (for good or bad and small or big). the fact that alt coins get dumped is a completely different matter and even if bitcoin were to rise up they would still continue getting dumped and go down because they have been pumped and currently have fake values as their prices which needs to be corrected before they can move on.

best case scenario for an ICO is that it only has a good idea or "concept" in it and nothing else. and that means it fails in real world to gain any kind of traction and goes down as it is abandoned. and that is best case. normal cases for ICOs is the fact that they are only pump and dump shitcoins with no usage. they are created with hype in mind and hype is not something that can last. you can see the biggest one of them which is ethereum is eventually getting dumped.

it is just a start. ETH still has a long way to go in order to get out of its bubble. with all the ICOs running out and the money exiting and all the problems that it has been facing, the price will continue to decline. not to mention that the unlimited supply is a big downside to it too.

recently an article was published that opened many eyes that led to this dump:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/02/the-collapse-of-eth-is-inevitable/amp/

no it has nothing to do with that because the drop occurred in less than a day ago (24 hours) but these coins (which are not even obvious at all and it is pure guess) moved about 2 weeks ago. and on top of that neither the amount and nor where they moved to and why are not clear. it all started from a guesswork of someone on Reddit.

yesterday's drop was probably because of Goldmansachs news and the panic about that. nothing more.

how to make money and become a millionaire fast you ask?
you invest in a good cryptocurrency that has an obviously good future and will increase in price. aka bitcoin. now that you have a good amount of bitcoin in your wallet, you will not make money unless you sell your bitcoins. but you don't want to sell your bitcoins. 1BTC is worth $7000 today and it will be worth a lot more, possibly $1 million or more one day so selling 1BTC means losing $993,000.

so what do you do?
you double the amount of bitcoin you own by creating a shitcoin fork from bitcoin and call it bitcoin cash. now you have the same amount of bitcoin on BCH and you can sell those to make money.

what if you weren't satisfied and wanted more money?
you fork BCH again to double the amount you already have and sell those to make more money.

not to mention all the pump and dumps that happen all this time where you make even more profit each time you pump your own shitcoin.

this is how people make profit in the altcoin world. not by bag holding some big pumped altcoin that has a big name to it.
they move around and go from coin to coin, pump them for a day or so and then take their profit out and leave for the next coin to pump. as you can see AU was one of the thousands of coins out there, it got a pump that lasted one day and now the money has already moved on to at least 5 other coins that they pumped nearly the same way but at smaller 500% profits instead of 6000%!

ETH is not a scam, at least no in the conventional meaning of the word. it is just a centralized shitcoin with a lot of money to spare in order to advertise and pump the  coin. there are also banks involved with it which are supplying some of that money as an investment and are making a lot of profit from it. they will eventually dump it and move on to the next thing as shit hits the fan and they can no longer prevent the crash.

the transactions are verified by the full nodes (also called full verification nodes), they are the ones receiving transactions, processing them and propagating to other nodes if valid.
the the miners find blocks by "working" and include those valid transactions in the blocks they find. then they send the found block to the network.
after that again nodes verify the blocks they receive and add it to their blockchain and make it longer.

so the network is not all miners. it is miners as workers and nodes as consensus rules enforcers.

i would make sure to stay away from investing in any altcoin until the ETF decision becomes clear. of course you can always trade the pumping coins that are getting pumped every day even for the past 9 months of altcoin dumps but you have to find them on your own and on a daily basis.

in any case the reason for it is that there is no scenario that altcoins can go up in my opinion. if ETF is rejected and bitcoin has a drop then there will surely be a much bigger drop in altcoins which is the most possible scenario.
but even if ETF is accepted and bitcoin has a rise there can still be a big drop in altcoins since the money will move to bitcoin to FOMO buy it so you can again lose.

if you wanted to create a shitcoin to pump and dump and make money you shouldn't create a fork coin you would start an ICO scam and rip idiots off just like thousands of others that are doing it these days.

creating a fork coin is a only profitable if you can silently add a premine to it like what BTG did or if you already have a huge amount of the original coin like what BCH did so that you can make a lot of money by creating that shitcoin fork.

but if you wanted to create a real project with actual utilities then you wouldn't even ask this question in first place, instead you start from scratch and build a strong system based on the technology not based on some other coin.

ethereum is still struggling hard to stay near $300 and is failing right now to keep its $280 price.  every bitcoin price bump sends it on a bigger drop. for instance we had a 0.25% drop in bitcoin price which made ETH drop 2%
i wouldn't really call this a "positive trend". unless you see a big ass pump to above $350 and rising, you shouldn't call it a rise either. there is still a high chance of more dumps coming.

the worst suggestion that you can make to traders is "patience" specially in the altcoin market which is pump and dump. i will tell you the same thing that i told the other dozens of topics in the past 9 months of dumping cryptocurrency market which were telling people to have "patience":

don't become a bag holder of altcoins. you will come to regret it when you look back and you have lost 90%-98% of your investment. that is what happened to all those "patience" topics so far who have been bag holding altcoins that kept on going down because of dumps.
learn how to trade and make better decisions instead of bag holding and wishing for profit.

wrong. there are 3 types. bitcoin, good or decent alternative cryptocurrencies, and then shitcoins.
the shitcoins are used by traders to make profit on their bitcoins that is why you see them as "dominated by bitcoin" it is because people dump them immediately when they see bitcoin move.
the decent altcoins are always overshadowed by these shitcoins because the shitcoins get all the pump and dumps and hide the good coins by pushing them to the bottom of the lists.

wrong again.
bitcoin has not been in a bubble for at least 6 months now.

not to mention that you are just contradicting yourself in the second part. you say here that bitcoin is a bubble then continue to advise people to invest in bitcoin! if you truly think something is in a bubble then you shouldn't be investing in it until its bubble pops.

it is already moving towards centralization of mining. a lot of coins can be mined with ETH ASIC so there soon will be big mining farms that will switch in case ETH died or they flipped the PoS switch!!! but meanwhile they will make money by taking the whole ETH network in their palm.

as for the cost of transactions they are already high every now and then that ETH network becomes congested again it has nothing to do with cost of mining.