no not really. there are some handful of them that actually banned them. i think there is either 2 or 3 countries. the rest have banned illegal activities such as money laundering and ICOs not cryptocurrencies.

you are wrong again.
there has been many people who invested in them but at the same time many of them were idiot enough to invest in bad things such as ICOs and lost a lot of money.

because they have NOT banned anything.

not at all! i have one coin and one coin only, the one that i understand, i educated myself about even at technical level, and i own a decent amount of it and that one coin is bitcoin. i have checked others but nothing has interested me as much.

as for altcoins and investment and making profit, i only do it one or two coins at a time. my theory is how much am i going to  make if i have all my investment in one coin that is getting pumped real good versus if i had a small amount in it and i was busying myself with 10 others that only get tiny pumps? obviously all in the big pumper coin is giving me the biggest profit so i do that. then i cash it all out and invest in those other coins one at a time and enjoy their small pumps as well.

to answer this question i have to start with some basic facts.

when we are talking about bitcoin for instance we are talking about a decentralized currency. this may sound just like another random word but it has a deep meaning. a decentralized thing means it does NOT matter who created it, there is no owner, there is nobody with the "say" in how it will go and change in the future. there is a whole network that does all that. so when we say Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto can be anyone and it still wouldn't matter. it may be even a group of developers. in the end it is the decentralized network that decides what will be going on for bitcoin. and last year proved that perfectly when different proposals for scaling came up and the decentralized network decided its fate.

it also doesn't matter because it is open source and we can all see what bitcoin does. there is no trusting the creator here. it is trustless.

most of those projects that keep advertising about their developing team and creators are doing that because their projects aren't that good so they need a way to say "we have a strong team so our creation is good" but the reality will always triumph. for example ethereum is one of the worst altcoins that was created so far so the creator of it, Vitalik, has to go around and promote it  constantly to hype it up and get people to foolishly invest in it.

there has been a lot of news like that coming from all around the world from people, companies and even governments running their own ICO, raising funds and making lots of money and then create some useless token that will never be used and enjoy the free money they receive.
the latest huge news was about Venezuela government and their coin which also had an ICO called Petro!

ICO has turned into a very easy way of making a lot of money if you know how to advertise it properly. and as a big company with a big name (Telegram in this case) you can advertise it very easily.

if you are talking about the recent drops (multiple of them) in the past 20 days, well those weren't exactly crashes, those were corrections that needed to happen because of the fast rise from $6000 to $9000 and they in fact keep the market healthy and they assure the rise continues upward as market takes a break and refuels for the continuation of the rally.

a crash is what happened from $10k to $6k and $6k was the price that everyone should have bought at because it was the bottom.

it is usually called blockchain analysis, you can take a look at walletexplorer.com to get a feeling of what it will look like although that is already a preview of what the company behind that website is doing but it should be enough to see how it is done. it is basically linking addresses together (from the blockchain itself) and with all the other information you can find from the internet then try and link it to individuals. it is based on amounts, timing, transactions, ...

why has nobody mentioned this yet: bitcoin is already legal in United States of America! it has been for many years, i don't remember when but it was probably somewhere in 2009 or 2010 at most. that is how all these companies such as Coinbase, Circle, Gemeni,... have been working for years there!

it is the pump and dump-y aspect of the altcoin market that is causing this. in fact there is a good chance that a big part of bitcoin price drop is because of these pump and dumps as the newbies panic sell and want to run away back to fiat they have to go through bitcoin so they sell their shitcoins for bitcoin and then sell bitcoin for fiat which is creating crashes in bitcoin too.

this is just a small correction to keep this rise healthy. people shouldn't really want the big rises with no corrections, those type of rises are never healthy and they always end up with a big bubble (like $20k) and then create a bear market afterwards. but with a solid rise which is slow and has proper corrections you can always expect the price to stay and never go lower than the strong buy support that is created because of it.

this is always going to be the problem with web wallets which is why they are always considered the least secure of all types of wallets. but unfortunately for ethereum there aren't any good options like there are for bitcoin. for instance we have Electrum for bitcoin which is a light wallet which is fast, secure and easy to use. but for ethereum there aren't any easy to use wallets that are fast and secure and don't take up all your hard disk space and bandwidth.

Doge coin was one of those altcoins that was pumped recently while the market was not moving at all. there were actually a couple of them that started getting pumps at those times. and whenever an altcoin is pumped they will have a dump coming for them. you can never escape the dump of a pump and  dump ever.
and what you are seeing today is the dump part of it. it may be slower and not as severe since price of bitcoin is rising but it is happening.

bitcoin is rising and it has entered a new bull market and that is a fairly certain assumption so far based on the evidence that we have. if price breaks $10k and stays above it at least one day then it becomes more sure that this is not going to stop.

for the altcoins that are getting pumped and dumped still many of them have traps because their bubbles are not done yet. it may continue for a while but they can not be sustained.

it is interesting to see how these countries which most of them are actually under developed countries are adopting bitcoin so much faster than some of the bigger developed countries in the world. they see the potential of bitcoin and this new technology so much better without all the drama and they want to be in the front row of it.
i wonder how their economy will change in a few years compared to others.

there is absolutely no reason for you to choose any altcoin over bitcoin when it comes to long term!

IF when bitcoin price went down, that altcoin you have in mind could hold its price up then the question that you are asking here would have made sense because you had a way to choose between them since they would have performed independently but the reality is that whenever bitcoin drops altcoins such as ETH will get dumped hard.

and of course there is always the issue with supply and demand. bitcoin has a tiny supply compared to ETH, bitcoin also has a limited supply compared to unlimited supply of ETH and on top of that bitcoin has a huge demand which is rising every day.
low supply + high demand of bitcoin means bigger potential of rise
huge unlimited supply + no demand of ethereum means bigger potential of dump.

everything about the drop was out of the ordinary! it was nearly a 70% crash and it is never normal to see something like that even for bitcoin! a correction is natural but the size of it matters. the drop below $10k was last straw that broke the camel's back and basically removed the buy support but only temporarily. now that buy support is coming back and with it price is rising back up to normal levels.

it IS a less risky option but try not to limit yourself to only top X coins. all the altcoins that exist can have the potential of getting pumped and giving you profit and the lower they are on the ranking system the bigger their profit is going to be.
it is simply because most people think like you. they stick to topX coins but the market makers don't. so when a coin outside of their topX is getting pumped they jump in way too late and the market maker make a lot of money from the huge pump that their FOMO buy caused.

meh, they are just pumping their coin! they know they can never destroy bitcoin or inflict any damage that lasts long term. these are just drama in the social media and while everyone is busy arguing about it, they are making a lot of money from their pump.
don't forget that Roger Ver may have created BCH but he is still one of the biggest bitcoin holders of our time

it is neither of those!
OP is trying to be vague about it for some reason. the real news is here: www.businessinsider.com/sweden-cryptocurrency-e-krona-riksbank-2018-1
and it is saying they are creating their own cryptocurrency which is only based on bitcoin and the blockchain technology.
and contrary to what the article says Sweden is not at all the first country! they are at least the 5th one. there is already Venezuela with their own cryptocurrnecy called Petro, there is India with their own called Lakshmi,...

nobody is stopping you from buying back!
you sell then you see the pump coming, so buy back as fast as possible before the bubble reaches its peak. then you wait for the pump to slow down and speculate the end of it and the highest price and then you dump there. this way you still make some profit from the pump.

well this fork is a joke fork because they are increasing the block size of something that is not even used. they currently have 8 Mega Bytes of empty blocks with only a handful of transactions in them and they want to increase that size to 32 (if i am not mistaken) MB!

with that in mind this current rise is pure 100% pump and nothing else. and like any pumps it is impossible to tell where it is going to end. for now it is just starting and the price of BCH is rising so enjoy the pump and make as much profit as you can.