the purpose of altcoins for majority of the users is to make profit from and your topic is also looking for that purpose. in that case there is only pumps that you should be looking for all the rest do not matter. and if you learn how to find them on your own then you can make a lot more profit compared to when you bag hold a certain "big name altcoins".

for instance you keep on repeating XRP where in fact ripple is one of the shittiest altcoins that you can find for investment. it gets huge pumps from time to time but that is all there is to it. it is centralized, it is useless and 90% of the times it is getting dumped slowly but surely! this altcoin is never a good investment. it is only good during the pumps.

the worst part is even if profit is the only thing that they care about still market cap doesn't matter!
for example for the past couple of days the market was red, or was it? look where the money is going. the pumpers don't just stop because price of some big altcoin was dropping. they cashed out a long time ago and now are pumping other coins. in fact the smaller the market cap the easier to pump
and that happens every day

the meaning of "surpass" and being "no. 1" has changed a lot ever since ethereum was created. it was bent to satisfy the needs of their advertising team.
look at the ranking system for example it is purely based on market capitalization. and surprise surprise ETH has a huge supply to increase that number (mc=supply*price) and keep it that way.

ranking should be based on: usability, adoption, security, innovation, technology, ... instead and in such ranking system ETH falls down out of at least top 10 coins!

that's what happens when the dumping gets out of hand. even the manipulating whales get greedy sometimes and dump too much and the market is always unpredictable for everyone so a newbie wave can crash the market more than you wanted to and create stagnation like this. i generally don't pay much attention to RSI but it seems like i am alone in that. now i am curious to see what is going to happen next because of it?!

i think there are a couple of things that you are confusing with each other here.
1. those idiots who call themselves "company" and run an ICO to scam people and take their money.
this obviously improves nothing except the scammers financial situation!
2. real companies that talk about the blockchain technology
they will create centralized blockchains which also improves nothing
3. altcoins that are being created left and right
these can improve things but it rarely happens because similar to ICOs these are also mostly shitcoins and scams to fill their own pockets.

this is also two different things that you are confusing.
1. more people getting involved with the technology and using it as a currency.
which only happens to bitcoin and nothing else because bitcoin is the only "currency" that exists and others are virtual and without usage.
2. newbies throwing their money away in hopes of getting rich.
which obviously does nothing except wreck the market and make the pumpers richer.

you should never trust or rely on what other people say, no matter who they are. whenever someone is endorsing (but who are we kidding they are advertising it) something they are always biased and all the time they are thinking about their own benefits not yours. not to mention that most of these so called "celebrities" have no idea what they are talking about. they just advertise possibly because they are getting paid or have a big stake in that shitcoin.

many experts agree that the real value of ethereum is somewhere below $100 based on its utility and the supply that it has so if you ask me the $400 and lower is just a start and we will continue seeing the drop continue for a long time, unfortunately because of the bag holders who don't want to dump and let the bubble end fast like the small altcoins and how their bubbles end fast and then they can move ahead with their normal rise from the bottom.

no, they don't follow bitcoin graphs/charts. what happens is that when bitcoin drops the altcoins drop too so that may have created the illusion that they are following bitcoin but the fact is they really aren't. for example even in drops they are dropping so much faster and bigger than bitcoin. it is not just a small drop like bitcoin had, each of them dropped at least 10-15% where bitcoin dropped only 5%
and as for the other side of the chart, which is the rise, they never follow bitcoin. bitcoin rises while altcoins drop some times and some times they just stagnate until bitcoin stabilizes so they can take their chances for a short term pump.

the latest drop is because of pure manipulation in the market. it had nothing to do with mining, ASICs and cost of them at all. the evidence is also there for everyone to see. the charts never lie, if you look at them there was a sudden huge "offloading" on the market where some entity dumps a massive amount on the market to push the price down, it wasn't a nature downtrend this time.

there is a big hype going on starting from the day bitcoin was created but was intensified 10 times last year and as all these shitty ICOs raised a lot of money out of thin air and become rich by scamming people. now everyone wants to be a part of the blockchain technology revolution. from random individuals on the internet to the government and the banks.
El Petro in Venezuela raised a lot of money and the government is so happy about it so it is only logical to see others follow in their footsteps now.

hopefully this trend ends soon so we can get back to what really matters: creating a decentralized currency not fill-our-pocket-useless-token.

first of all it did not recover. recover means going back up to its previous price or even rise above it a little and that has obviously not happened. so since the final price is lower than the initial one you can say it has dropped.
second, it is natural these days because the investors are fleeing the altcoin market. they have finally figured out that they should not keep on holding things that don't have a future at all. so as they dump the prices of  each of these altcoins (specially the big ones on top) is going down hard day by day.

what you are seeing is just a dead cat bounce not a rise, not a bull run and no happy days ahead. it is like taking 10 steps back (the dump) and then taking 2 steps forward (the dead cat bounce). this is not indication of anything other than the fact that altcoins are on the dump and you are best to stay away from them or you can do either of the following:
- short altcoins to make money
- buy them in the dip and dump them on the top of the small dead cat bounce.

i completely disagree with this because you can not see this on any charts. you can draw all the lines you want but it still doesn't show it. the fact of the matter is this drop was another manipulation in a long line of manipulations to dump constantly on the market and keep pushing the price down. possibly because of the Futures contracts and the profit that they are making from those.
whether it is going to go lower or not depends on how much longer the manipulation can last and also how much longer the real money from the rest of the investors is going to stay out.

the numbers you are reporting are not market "valuation". in fact they have nothing to do with value. these numbers are market  capitalization which doesn't show anything at all even though people are using it by mistake to rank different  coins!

the altcoin dumps have always been much more severe. and there is a theory these days that the altcoin dumps is actually pulling bitcoin down no the other way around.

a "small bull market" doesn't even mean anything because there was never a bull market to be small or big. the only thing that existed was a tiny recovery after a long and big dump. think of it as a small breath that the market has to take before continuing down its path.
this "small bull market" that OP sees is also referred to commonly as a "dead cat bounce" and that is what happened here. dead cats being altcoins, bounced a little before continuing their deaths and decay.

you say cryptocurrency instead of saying "bitcoin" so i assume you mean altcoins.
it is for good reasons to be afraid of the altcoins because anybody with eyes can clearly look at the altcoin market and see that it is heavily manipulated and there is no way you can work in such a market and the best course of action is to stay away from them.
although in reality that never happens because of greed and the fact that people usually think they can "beat the system" and win in this manipulated market. of course some of them will win if they learn how to do it but majority of them will only lose money and then stay away. as they are getting dumped on right now for example!

a pump and dump means you also DUMP after your pumped the altcoin. so far you have been seeing the pump of ethereum but not so much of its dump. of course the real dump when the wise money was exiting started months ago but most people are being hit in the face with the reality of the situation now after they have lost a large portion of their investments as ETH continues to lose money. and now the bag holders who face this reality are  starting to dump also.

this will continue until ETH reaches a more reasonable price appropriate to its gigantic supply and practically non-existent demand. and as ICOs are banned and lose their attractiveness that little demand will also vanish. at the same time as the ICO scammers cash out the free ethereum they have gotten the price of ETH will tank harder thanks to this new sell pressure.

that is one of the weirdest "predictions" that i have read in a long time. and it makes me think that you are stuck in some orders and want to sell your bitcoin but you still want the price to fall after you sold so you can buy back.

if price rises and reaches $10k  then there won't be a drop and downtrend afterwards specially if it takes until 2019 to reach the $10k mark. and the recovery to ATH may not take the same amount of time as last time. your problem is that you only know about the 2013 bubble and you don't care about learning about all the other bubbles and the ATHs before 2013 and how long their recoveries took!!!

- gold
- stocks
- bonds
- real estate
- other precious metals
- any kind of business with a good return.

altcoins? never!
when you want to invest  for long term you have to look for an investment that is not highly risky an also  more importantly something that is not manipulated. not to mention altcoins are in bubbles now.

there is nothing significant about this in my opinion. the trend is the important part.
our current All Time High is sitting at $20,000  and we may not see a new "high" for another year but we can see a bull trend of a slower but a much solid rise  from $7k towards that ATH and the number of days with a new high can grow a lot more than this. but would anybody mind it? no. a solid rise is more important than setting a new high every couple of months.