if the choice is between holding bitcoin and splitting it among many altcoins then the choice is clear: hold bitcoin.

you can however buy some altcoins, while keeping the number of them to a small amount so that you can handle their ups and downs better. unless you have a fully automated super bot that can does that for you!

i personally prefer only trading altcoins for short term and never holding them for longer than their pumping period. that way i reduce the risks i am taking while making the most profit i am capable of. and i don't believe in the future of 90% of the altcoins anyways, specially the top 10.

haha, they don't have to!
all they need to know (which is also kind of obvious) is that you can manipulate bitcoin because of large number of newbies who are invested in it. you just have to have a good timing, that is all.

a simple FUD by a well known bankster (J. Dimon) caused a dip and let them buy a shit load of bitcoin at ultra cheap prices. obviously now everyone wants in. everyone soon will start having an opinion about bitcoin and by extension altcoins. you can see that ranking bullshit by Weiss as an example of one...

no because we are way past that point.

you see when bitcoin was new and it was the only thing around, this is when the misconception about bitcoin anonymity was still strong, by that time bitcoin was used more for illegal activities than anything else. although it was very very negligible compared to criminals using USD.

then slowly people realized bitcoin is not anonymous and never was and never was advertised as one either!
also real anonymous coins with focus on this were introduced. coins such as Monero and they are now satisfying that purpose. but it is still negligible compare to USD

i can't tell if you are joking but i have to say you are not the only person doing this. there are lots of people who either fall for the FUD that is flying around and sell or don't buy, or they wait too long to do anything generally whether it is to buy in the dip or it is to sell while price is still high.

the solution is simple too. you have to stop being  greedy and make up your mind. if price has dropped and you speculate a bigger rise on the horizon (where the boat is headed) the buy it already.

it is like asking why doesn't the barber shop fix my computer!!!

Amazon is not in the business of creating exchanges, and their business is not even remotely related to exchanges. so why would they want to get into this business out of nowhere?
and it is not like this is an easy thing to generate them a lot of profit! it has LOTS of problems including KYC/AML, taxes, fraud, competition, and also the fact that by the time they get into it people have already moved on to decentralized exchanges!

they may however end up creating their own coin (Amazon-coin) and add one more useless coin to the sea of altcoins.

this seems to me more like a sideways action still and i still can't see a big breakout coming. the $12k plus that OP is so excited about is nothing! that is just a 4% rise which falls well within the daily fluctuations of the market and it is not at all a major resistance to be excited about in my opinion.

if it were $14000 or higher then it was a different story.
that price level is more of a resistance and breaking it means a proper breakout and the indication of a good chance for a rally to be followed. and i believe it will happen in 6-7 days (in February)

try googling "mining calculator". tools such as this one: https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency are helpful with determining how much you are capable of earning through mining different cryptocurrencies.

the bottom line is, there is an initial investment for buying equipment (either ASIC or even simply GPUs and all the rest required such as motherboard, risers, power supply,...) and then there is the question of cost of the operation which is practically the electricity cost. and the cooling of it all which you may have trouble with if you are living in a hot area and it can cost more electricity.

the thing about litecoin is that it is not a useful coin. despite all the development and all the efforts of them. this year it had a huge rise which remained up (like most altcoins) only because bitcoin started having a lot of troubles in the past year and also because most altcoins kept their alt/btc value up which meant increasing in USD value even if they were dropping hard against /btc.

and when they activated SegWit and started the rest of the things coming with that such as LN, they gained an edge which helped with the rise of it. but that edge is no longer there anymore. but the "bitcoin has high fees" edge is still there just like it is there for most of the altcoins.

with that said i think rise is possible but probably not that high. specially when bitcoin starts gaining more efficiency and goes back to having lower fees.

it is the money flow, so if you want to understand how things work, you need to follow the money so to speak.

try and figure out where it is going. in or out, and where. for example each time bitcoin is rising you can see the same drop in altcoins and if you check the volume, you can see the "money" has gone to bitcoin and has dropped out of altcoins.
and during the bitcoin stability periods, the "money" is going into altcoins. but if you look closer you can see that the money is spread but the smart money is focused only on 2 or 3 altcoins tops which will be getting pumped as a result and then that smart money moves on to the next 2 or 3 altcoins. rinse and repeat.

"down for the year" as if we are halfway through the year
only 22-23 days are past from 365 days. and the "down" started at 15th January.

and so far it has been the same pattern each year, when price is dropping like this in January (the beginning of the year) and then starts picking up and initiates the rally in February with ATH being reached by the second or third month.
and right now things are getting ready for the next month.

yes it is alarming if you have invested more than you can afford to lose, which seems like you have. in which case my suggestion is that you start selling part of your investment until you reach a reasonable amount-invested that you are more comfortable with.

after that you will not be "alarmed" each time price drops.

cryptocurrency is a currency. in fact they are designed to be a currency. for example bitcoin is a currency and all the effort that goes into it is in order to make it a currency. the fact that sometimes these efforts are not capable of catching up with the changes or attacks against bitcoin does not mean bitcoin is not a currency.

regarding altcoins, they are mainly short term speculation assets and on very rare projects they do try to be a currency. none has succeeded much.

none of these had anything to do with your title though, i don't know why you started your topic with it.

obviously bitcoin!

because it is the most well known, and most adopted cryptocurrency around the whole world. if anyone has any cryptocurrency they have bitcoin.
bitcoin is the most tested code which makes it the most secure cryptocurrency to use with nearly zero chance of serious bugs whereas altcoins are considered high risk and they have already caused millions to be lost.
bitcoin has the biggest network and with the huge hashrate has the most secure one too.
bitcoin, unlike majority of altcoins, is decentralized so you know that it won't  change overnight if someone decided to.

regarding fees that everyone is scared of these days, you can start running a Lightning Node which has been out a while and you can start accepting payments as small as 1 satoshi without any fees and without any kind of delays. by the time you open your coffee shop and start setting up the node, it will be battle hardened too.

this is how it will look like buying coffee from StarBucks using bitcoin and lightning network
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

increase your amount so that it covers the whole order on the platform that is making the arbitrage opportunity.
if it is a small order like 0.001BTC worth of it then it is not worth trying it. but if it is bigger like 1BTC for example, then trade with that much and when it is filled there is no more arbitrage opportunity so you don't need to transfer bitcoin back to platform 1 and also if you make enough profit then paying something like a 0.001BTC transaction fee for bitcoin should not matter.

and if you are not making enough to cover a transaction fee then it is not even worth bothering with this type of trade because the risk is high, so the reward must be high enough to create the incentive for performing it.

we currently are seeing a weak FUD move
practically after the bottom and as soon as price went back above $10k and continued rising, all those who sold at the bottom with panic and some other bears who want to accumulate more started their FUD campaign against bitcoin spamming everywhere how they "expect drop to $5k and around that number".
all these ban-news is a byproduct of that.

so your suggestion to these newbies is to hold the shitcoins they are holding even if they are losing value and are dropping hard just because if they sell "they give their money to millionaires"!!!

that is the dumbest suggestion i have ever heard!
people should never continue sustaining losses just because someone else makes money if they sell. when the price of a shitcoin which was pumped is getting dumped you MUST sell it to prevent losing a much bigger amount.
then... if you really believe in that shitcoin you can always buy back at the bottom when the dumping was done. but never hold it during the dump.

first of all this is a decentralized and free market, "ban" means nothing here.
secondly the current altcoins that exist are more than 90% shit, and if you want to do anything we should start banning these altcoins starting from top 2 altcoins that are causing the bloat in total market capitalization.

not to mention that good projects may finally come out after this altcoin fever ended and everyone got tired of losing money in the pump and dumps and they started focusing on the technology.

if you don't mean 5% profit on 10000BTC then yes it is possible to make 5% profit every day in altcoin market through trading them in about 90% of the days all year long.

but the first problem is knowing how to ride the pump and dumps and when to enter and exit, conversely "to day-trade". usually people mess things up in the exiting part and sometimes in the entrance by going in way too late and getting dumped on or sticking around for a long time and not selling their alts.

the second problem is sticking to 5% and not getting greedy and wanting to increase it. usually when you make 5% profit consistently you start thinking why not invest more and increase the % so that i can make more. and increasing it usually doesn't end well.

i have never used this myself because i only invest in ETH for short term profit and for that i only keep it on exchanges for a short time before i dump it. but you can use MyEtherWallet.com to do that.

- you clone the repository to take it offline: https://github.com/kvhnuke/etherwallet
- then open it online to https://www.myetherwallet.com/#offline-transaction and enter your address to get the transactions and make your new one.
- go to offline and use that tx you created to sign using your private key using the repository clone you made in first step.
- take that tx to online computer and open https://www.myetherwallet.com/#offline-transaction again, scroll down to the bottom and pate the raw hex there and click Send Transaction.

use this at your own risk, i have never tested this myself. better try with a small testing amount first

not necessarily uncertainty or sideways since there has not been any kind of drop ever since the recovery from the drop discount.
this can very well be an accumulation phase for getting ready to start the next rally upwards. and with the volume still pretty high i'd say it makes sense. if we see a testing dump we can take that as the indication of the beginning of the rally.