all you can say is that forks can create crap coins but not all crapcoins are forks
otherwise there are a lot of exceptions to your forkcoin examples. there are forks such as "bitcoin new year" that didn't even survive long enough for people to know them. they are in fact crapcoins.

and about your last line i have to say a fork doesn't have to necessarily go in their "separate" direction. SegWit was a fork, so was P2SH fork in 2016 IIRC, and more. they didn't go their "separate" directions, they improved bitcoin by adding a new feature to it.

there is no useful product from Steem! they have a centralized platform which encourages people to spam and get paid to do it. if Stemit was decentralized form of Reddit and worked purely on blockchain technology then it could have been a good product but it is not! it is a centralized website which happens to pay you in a token.

and by the way having larger number of transactions alone doesn't make it "more valuable"
not to mention that the real value according to https://steemdata.com/charts is 325 TX in last 24 hour not 1.5 million and the highest amount is 3200 tx in 24 hour! never mind this part, it seems like the date is old on that source!

i am not familiar with any of these so you have to help me out here.
where are the merchants that are accepting these? where can i see these merchants? what can i buy from them? where can i get these tokens from? and why would i want to choose these tokens over fiat or bitcoin for paying these merchants?

bitcoin has never had any major bugs to this day, there were small bugs that were found in first year and solved easily and fast but nothing major.
and it is not 30+ years. 35 year ago the idea of cryptocurrency started but the real work was done in 2009 by Satoshi and with bitcoin. the time between 1983 and 2009 there were no significant work done!

the real question is mass adoption of what and by whom?

the focus of altcoins is on certain type of people and that is speculators and nobody else. and that is why they are pump and dumps and will never reach anything in real world. the speculators are only interested in making an investment which gives them some return on their money. in other words they are interested in money not in any of these projects!
and why would they be interested in a project that has no real world application? you named ICOs, can you show us some old ICOs that are currently doing something they promised for real in the real world?

just because they were created after bitcoin doesn't make them "new technology". it just makes them a copycat of bitcoin. and most of them are exactly poor copies, some of them are new with a lot of also new issues.
and calling something that is not even used "better" only shows you know nothing John Doe!

it has nothing to do with being "first mover" it is all about its usefulness. bitcoin offers certain features that people want and that will always create the demand and with it the huge rising price.
by the way bitcoin is not the first. there were others before it. which again shows you know nothing John Doe!

you first have to prove there exists a "better technology" then we can argue about other stuff. we won't just make the assumption that there is some better tech out there just because you fell for the pump and dump advertisement of altcoins.

if you start including altcoins like CLAM in the list of altcoins that forked from bitcoin then the list will grow as big as nearly 700 coins since all of them forked from bitcoin one way or another. and you can even include secondary forks like the fork of forks (eg a fork that was created from LTC) then the number grows even bigger.

i'm sorry but this is very dumb!
he lost his coins because he was an idiot otherwise we are all owning some amount of bitcoin and we are not getting hacked because we simply learned the first step which is securing our wallets.

not to mention that implanting yourself with a chip that has your funds in it means you will always have your money with you. this may sound like a neat thing but it is also a dangerous thing! imagine a gun to your head telling you to give the theif all your money, if you have 100 bucks on you, you will lose 100 bucks but if you have all your funds like 100BTC on you you will lose 100BTC!

somebody who says "the technology is going to work" just because he saw a price rise this month is not considered a "bitcoin expert". it is classic version of what we call a newbie bag-holder who sees bitcoin as a way to get rich quickly.

what i see is that the bear market has finished but we are not yet in a bull market yet. it is most like the purgatory in between where some are accumulating some are staying away and some are scared.

you are making a wrong conclusion based on irrelevant data. you say "Professional and Institutional money are flowing in" but you don't say "in where". and "where" according to your first paragraph is services such as exchanges. that is not related to the 4 conclusions that you made. it would be related if this money was going in the cryptocurrencies themselves not the services that earn money through them!

#1 is only true if these services were regulated and trusted. but we all know none of them, specially exchanges, are NOT trustworthy.

#2 unfortunately so far this only meant more money and more greedy people making useless projects crowding everywhere and pushing good projects down to the point where they are even ignored and overlooked while shitcoins are pumped and stay on top of the lists and people call them "top10"

#3 that is the problem! the leading altcoins are worse than those ignored projects that i said above! just because they have a huge supply that keeps their market cap in a bubble and keeps them on top of a chart doesn't make them "leading"

#4 another flaw in your logic is visible here. you said the capital is going in services then you are making the conclusion that the capital is going in altcoins. you are contradicting yourself!

this question is like asking "is it a good time to play a Dice game?"!!!

investing in ICOs is a gamble. none of them are real projects set out to contribute anything to the world. there is no product, development, utility, and in short usefulness. you buy a lottery ticket when you invest in ICOs and sometimes this ticket gives you some of your money back sometimes with a profit but there is no way of predicting it so it is highly risky and a gamble.

this is a common mistake that people only look at a very short term change while they have bought a long time ago. altcoins have been getting dumped nonstop for a very long time now and it has not yet ended. even during the bitcoin price rise in the past 2 days altcoins have been dropping against bitcoin for the most part and the USD values are sometimes misleading. in other words if they kept their investment in BTC they would have made a lot more profit!

unless you think the whole bitcoin price is because a bunch of imaginary investors bought it, their imaginary exit won't have any effects on anything!
it is a market we are talking about and there is demand from a lot of different sources, from multi millionaires like Warren Buffet, to newbie investors buying $10 worth of bitcoin. the total result of millions of investors make the current price.

i completely disagree.
patience is a good thing but the key is using your head! bag holding in the name of patience is just silly. for example there are a lot of newbies who bought altcoins near the peak and now that we are at least 70% below that level they are still bag holding their altcoins and are calling it "patience" while they are still losing money and each dead cat bounce they gain some illusion of  confidence and continue bag holding while price falls down more.

using your head means even if you bought near the peak you should have dumped a long time ago and then only bought those coins that got dumped big enough to reach the bottom and enjoyed the profit those coins gave you while the rest of newbies continue bag holding and losing money.

no it  can NOT. because altcoins have no place in the real world and in world economy. the altcoin place is on exchanges and for pure speculation purposes and that is what affects their prices. altcoins depend on hype and in one word on "pump and dump" aka manipulation.

of course there are some other factors such as bitcoin price and it is even possible that economy is also affecting them since some newbies may come in the market thinking they have found an investment haven but in the end the reality will hit everyone and they know it is all pump and dump.

no, ALL of the altcoins acted the same. go watch the charts if you don't believe me. first find a bitcoin chart and see at what time exactly price went up. then find that same time frame on each altcoin's chart and check their BTC value during that time. they ALL dropped.

after this phase some of them went up though. but i am not talking about that. that rise was mostly because of the hype and the pump that came a couple of hours after the bitcoin rise happened. and also because bitcoin price rise stopped and money had to go somewhere so it went to pump some of the altcoins.

this statement is just as silly as those topics saying bitcoin will fall down to $1000 just because it went down to $6200. and it is just as wrong.

rises and falls are more logical than you may think. it is not random hype and FUD market. both affect things but not as much as you think and certainly not with a random dumb topic on bitcointalk! price was kept down so far and as the buy support built up grew big it couldn't be contained so it shoot up to $8000 but that doesn't mean it will continue going up to $20k just because we had a tiny rise!

did altcoins really rise?
lets see!

the thing about altcoins is that they are being traded against bitcoin not fiat. even if they have fiat markets, those markets aren't usually as popular as the btc markets.
take Ripple for example. yesterday when bitcoin was $6800 XRP was 7400 satoshi or $0.50 then in that hour when bitcoin went up to ~$8000, XRP went to $0.55 (10% rise) but its real price went down to 6900 satoshi (~7% drop).

checking the volumes XRP/BTC has nearly 6 times more volume than XRP/USD which shows people are trading XRP with bitcoin a lot more than they are trading it with USD. and that means altcoins didn't really rise, it was more like an illusion of rise.

that was just a 10-15% rise which is not that big a deal for bitcoin and by the way it broke the resistance line then it went up fast because of that.

you have no reason for saying that apart from making a random guess. the fact is there is no indication of such drops coming and this rise is not even big enough to bring bitcoin back to its real price (>$10k).

the other points i can see but i can not agree with this one at all.
long term ETH doesn't look good at all. first of all ETH has an unlimited supply which is never going to end. the more of it that is created the more ether is going to be in circulation and be dumped on the market. more supply always means decreasing price.
on top of it all, the only usage of ETH is to create ICOs and they are not having a good future ahead of them and as they die or be regulated and restricted heavily, this only usage will dwindle and with decreased demand for ether its price can not go up in long term.

because the main and only reason why real investors invest in any altcoin has always been to make profit on their bitcoins or make profit on their money so they could buy more bitcoin in its dips. so whenever bitcoin is making big move they dump altcoins to go back to bitcoin and get involved with that big move.

for altcoins that exist today? no, not a chance.
but if an altcoin were to be created that is not for the purpose of speculation and trading but for the purpose of being a currency (a coin) then it can flourish individually.

first the bubbles need to burst properly, this has already happened for a lot of smaller coins with a low price but it has not yet happened completely for the top coins which are bigger and have a much bigger price. they also need to get dumped a lot more before they can rise back up again.
this stage can take quite a lot of time.

then we need the whales to come back and start up their pumps. and they wouldn't just come back while the dumps are still ongoing and the weak hands are still in the market. they will come at the bottom and start making profit.
 this may start in the middle of summer as more kids are also in  the market as weak hands.