the biggest difference is that when you trade altcoins you are trading thin air in a bubble. it can burst at any time and it is extremely manipulated. there is no way you can predict the altcoin market in long term and it is pretty hard to predict it in short term also. pump and dump may happen everywhere but it is the only thing happening among altcoins.

first you need to know that it is no longer 2010-2013 anymore. there is no Mt Gox that controls 80% of the volume and the whole market with it. we are living in a day where exchanges have barely 10% of the total volume and don't have the influence that you may think they have. there are lots of big exchanges now compared to older days.
with that said manipulations happen, there is no stopping them. they exist in all markets not just bitcoin. but the "impact" of them are diminishing as the market grows and we are at a point where we can say they are not a major impact anymore.

no and i used to be interested in it but with some calculations i figured that the risks are way too high for me to want to consider doing something like that. i prefer investing my money in trading and making a lot more profit with a lot less risk instead.

the risks is with the highly volatile market of altcoins. most of them will drop hard and that means investing a large amount of money in a master node can potentially lead to a huge loss. and i can't just shut down my master node at any time i want and turn it on again later, in trading i can dump at any moment and buy back at any moment that i like and see fit based on the market movement.

who knows!
the more shitcoins that are being created the bigger the total market cap is going to be. it doesn't matter what their prices are as long as each of them have at least 100 billion coin. so far there has been lots of them and they have been increasing the total market cap and if things continue like this we can hopefully stop using market cap once and for all when it reaches 1000 trillion trillion.

market cap = number of coins * price

no exchange is going to do this, in fact no exchange service should ever do this. simply because there is no way that you can prove you were actually hacked. from the exchange perspective if someone asks them to block some account (address) simply because the deposit came from some address they own, it may as well be a scam by the person saying this. for example you can sell your coins to someone and when they move them to exchange call the exchange and tell them you were hacked (lie).

it is all about timing when it comes to trading pump and dump altcoins.
even if you buy in the pump you can make a lot of profit still. but you will have to act very fast. there are stages to every pump and dump. the first stage is when price doesn't move much but the smart money (the pumpers) are investing then it is the first rise where the initial investors pump the coin. if you buy in any of these two you will make the most profit. the next stage is when the newbies rush in. in this phase you can still make profit but much smaller with a bigger risk. then it will all be dumping stages: first big dump for smart money to exit, dead cat bounce, newbies burning and dumping again, another dead cat bounce and continued dump.

bitcoin is not a centralized system for you or anyone else to decide who can use it and who can not. because of that there will always been all kinds of people using bitcoin, some of them for illegal activities. but it never means it is a "dagger for bitcoin" as you are putting it here. it is how the world works, there are always scumbags abusing any system but it never makes the system bad or never harm it.

you are a bigger fool that i thought if you really believe what you just said.
Roger Ver saw chaos in bitcoin thanks to scaling debate and used that chaos as a ladder to fill his pockets and become even richer.
and regarding slow down, the constant FUD that has been spread by him all over the media has slowed down everything more than you think. and it is not just slowing things down it is about all the false information that is circling the internet thanks to him!

the reputation of altcoins are already damaged beyond repair because of the true nature of them and also the fact that investors in altcoins care about one thing and nothing else and that is earning more profit. so when people are asking for pump and dumps to happen and are actually happy about it, there is no reputation to be damaged.

also i should add that if a project is really good, for example some altcoin outside of top 10 coins that is focusing on becoming a real currency instead of being pumped and dumped then nothing can damage its reputation ever. you can see bitcoin and the fact that even when they call it "fraud" nobody cares and they only laugh at the person saying it.

there is currently about 17 million bitcoin in circulation, by 2020 there will be 18 million in circulation capped at 21million.
there is currently about 98 million ETH in circulation and by 2020 there will be about 140 million in circulation without a cap.
need i remind you of supply and demand?

bitcoin's usage is by millions of merchants around the world who are accepting bitcoin as a payment and it is growing day by day.
ethereum usage is in creation of shitty ICOs which are either being banned or ebbing away as we speak. by 2020 we may not see 1 ICO per month even! and that is the death of ETH price.

when value of some country's currency drops or as you put it "collapses" it has nothing to do with what people believe in. there are a lot of economical factors that go into that and it is always because the economy of that country has collapsed, it can be because of war, some other internal political issues,...

as far as pumps go the coins that are not as bloated as coins like ethereum can have a much better pump this year. also we have the fact that its price is still much lower so there is a lot of room to grow and that makes the pumps that much easier. but at the same time EOS doesn't have the manipulation power of the ethereum foundation so it may never get pumped as much although we can expect a very big pump this year from it.

because altcoins are pump and dumps and they are useless for anything other than that. this means they are best used in short term and for day trading during their pump and dump periods and nothing more. in long term most of them are going to be dead anyways.

in any case i do believe that anyone should be free to do anything they like. if you don't see eye to eye with what i said and think altcoins are good for long term holding then do that. it is always important to do what you think works best for you personally based on your own experience.

it is not just "a feeling" we have seen evidence that the drop has slowed down significantly and then reached the bottom buy support which was so much stronger than the amount that was dumped into. i don't say drop is impossible now but the evidence suggests that it is over for now and there is no indication of any more of it.

as for the growth, i think it is around the corner but the corner is a little far because it is way too soon to see a big rise. the transition from a bear market to a bull market is not something that  can happen overnight. it will take time.

the most important thing that you forgot is merchant adoption. you are talking about crypto currencies so they have to be adopted as currencies to be considered successful and their whole focus should be on that and that alone.

a decentralized coin does not even have a jurisdiction.

by seeing it in action and under load to see if it is actually solving the things it promised or it fails.

i don't think any of this matters really!

if it relies on another platform (like the tokens) then it is not a currency, it is a token. i don't think we can call it centralized though.

July is in 4 months from now! and a bull market doesn't come gradually.

what we are seeing now seems more like a dead cat bounce rather than being a bull market. the altcoins still need to be dumped more and go much lower than this and as you can see their rises are pretty weak too.
but i agree with the July part, during summer (June or maybe sooner) there is usually lots of pumps so we can see another pumping season even if small.

holders are people who stay away from the market (exchanges to be exact) and because of that they have no significant effect on prices!

to put simply in the market there are two forces, sellers and buyers. if one is stronger price moves in that direction and if they are at a balance price stays stable. so in other words the reason for price to be here is because there were buyers in the market that kept it up and not enough sellers to drop it any lower.... holders don't come in anywhere!

people aren't just sitting around for someone to tell them whether to buy bitcoin or not then rush to buy it if they were allowed!
those who wanted to buy bitcoin have already been doing it regardless of this news. and it was so easy to seek advice from religion experts and ask them whether bitcoin is "halal" or not and as i said those who wanted to invest have already been doing it and will continue to do so.
with that said i don't see any relationship between this news and the rise, it may lead to further rises down the road but not immediately.

what you are asking has nothing to do with bitcoin and the process is not at all complicated. you are overthinking it.
when you buy a house you are making a trade, you pay money and receive something in return. this money can be in form of digital money (a wire transfer from your bank, a check,...), traditional physical fork (cash), cryptocurrency (bitcoin), some other item with equal value (gold, another house in exchange, car(s), yacht, herd of sheep,...), .... in the end the medium of exchange doesn't matter as long as you are making a contract promising to pay an amount and receiving the house in return.
if either party in this contract doesn't honor it, they can be prosecuted by the law.

i think Bitmain took a big risk by doing this! they should have done it a very long time ago when the ETH fork was far away and they knew ETh will stay around for a while and give them profit when miners buy their equipment. however, at this point in time the ETH fork to PoS is very close so their window of opportunity to sell their ASICs is very small!
i wonder even if there is enough people to invest in something like that. maybe if they could mine other coins with it...