another difference is that crypto markets are global and they work 24/7 and there aren't anything specific to one country that can really affect them although they sometimes do. but in comparison the stocks market is mostly local to one country and it is greatly affected by the economics of that country. for example where i live the stocks market have been performing terribly in the past 2 weeks where everything was in red showing the end of a big bull run so far. but it was a good period  before it where things were rising and were profitable.

when people talk about altcoins and their prices they are talking about the price in BTC and altcoins have performed horribly in that front which caused their USD value also go wild with the swings.

in case of ETH nothing about it has been ever "stable", i don't know where you are looking but the swings are crazy. it started with a pump this year and went up from 0.01BTC to 0.15BTC in only 3 months (1400% in 3 months is not called "stable") and then started its downward spiral where it got dumped step by step to 0.02BTC (again 86% loss in 4 months is not called "stable") and not it is starting to rise up again with another pump.

nothing about it is unfair.
bitcoin has never been something secret that limited people had access to! that is altcoins with premine and ICO and all that crap. from day one you could mine any block you wanted and get the reward, or you could have bought bitcoin as soon as it started having a value and be traded. you could have paid $1 and be a millionaire today.

if you haven't done that, you only have yourself to blame. and in a couple of years from now you will look back at this topic and blame yourself again since price is $1 million by then and you still won't have anything

i think it is disabled now.
i have a transaction that i needed to be confirmed with low fee and i have tried their tool a whole day long (12 hours or so) every hour which the limit resets and also every half hour to make sure, and it always tells me the limit is reached. before even in the most crowded times i could have got my transaction in one way or another but it no longer works.

most of these coins mentioned in OP will be worth at least half their current value in a year from now because of how their supply is huge (such as Dogecoin and Bytecoin). that is their trend for years. they go lower and lower in long term, never recovering what they have lost.

i personally dislike long term holding of any altcoin but if you want to do it, at least do it with coins that have a big potential like WAVES, PIVX, GBYTE and maybe even IOTA.

there is actually no reason for this to happen no matter what the technical analysis may say. price can not go below $13,000 and will probably not fall below $14,000.
meanwhile there is a rising tendency in the market which is driving the price higher but also there is FUD around from the last drop which is creating some doubts and followed up by dumps.

but bitcoin is always unpredictable, with these high fees the rise has come to a halt. i am sure that if the spam attack stops right now, we can see $20,000 be broken in less than a week. and if it continues we will see more problem ahead of this rise.

when you create a fork of bitcoin, you can change literary anything that you like to change! for example you can change how bitcoin mining works by changing the algorithm. you can change the 21 million limit, the block time and size, and lots and lots more.
what they are doing is that they will invalidate some transactions and create equivalent amount in their token. they are also adding a 6 million premine b2x which nobody talks about!

but remember than any change will only work on that particular fork and will have nothing to do with bitcoin.

it depends on what you read but i am nearly sure that they do not control anything! they are beginners like yourself who are writing some thoughts on some blog and share it with others. and most of those that i have seen are full of shit.
of course sometimes what they say comes true!

it is good to check the timestamps you would be surprised to learn how many of them write something after the rises happen! for example some altcoin gets pumped then they write something saying it will pump and use a old price as if they have written the article before the pump!

it is funny how you are using bitcoin as an excuse to advertise two other altcoins and have your topic not-moved from the bitcoin board!

can BCH and LTC reach those prices? maybe but only if they are pumped. there is no usage for them. when you are talking about altcoins there are thousands of them most of which are so much better than these two with less issues. there is no reason for people to choose these two to adopt instead of those.
that is how it works among thousands of altcoins.
but when you compare bitcoin with altcoins things are always different.

the people who say bitcoin is "store of value" are either saying it because the fees have been high for about a month. or there is another group who is trying to force feed us this way of thinking and prevent bitcoin from ever scaling and growing. it only started this year before the bitcoin cash and all the forking drama.

but fees doesn't change anything about bitcoin being a currency or not. worst case scenario you can say bitcoin is an expensive currency to use. besides fee problem will not last long, bitcoin will either die or fixes the issue. it can not be "store of value" alone without being a currency!

actual quotes? https://www.coindesk.com/warren-buffet-bitcoin-currency/ Mar 3, 2014
bitcoin transactions were free in 2014

Ripple is one of those altcoins that gets pumped so often and it always has at least 4 or 5 major pumps each year. of course sometimes they last very short but they are always very profitable because Ripple has a very small value and that helps with the pump-ability of it since it is always easier to pump cheaper altcoins than it is to pump bigger ones. not to mention that Ripple is centralized and heavily manipulated which helps a lot with the pumps.

if i were you, i would invest only during the pumps and never a buy and hold strategy because i like my bitcoins actively in trading not sleep in some altcoin that may take a long time to back up.

on bitcointalk and most other social media we have two kinds of "prediction"s which you should not confuse them with each other.
1. those that are making a real speculation, doing some analysis and predict it with reasons. in this case there is no 100% correct prediction anywhere in the world. i'd say more than 70% accuracy is the best you can hope for.
examples are more found on https://www.tradingview.com/s/bitcoin/ than here in my opinion.

2. those that are making bullshit up, adding fake analysis and fake reasons which sometimes make sense too. but they are idiots who are trying to spread some FUD because they wish the market moves in their favor. i'd say their real accuracy is less than 10% and that is only because even a broken clock is right sometimes. but if you check what they say you see them claiming to be always right!
examples: kwukduck, iamnotback and all his alts: Hyperme.sh, CornCube and about a dozen more, freightjoe, shortcoins, also lots of brand new accounts with 0 activity.

long term bitcoin and only bitcoin and nothing else.

short term bitcoin but also at specific times bitcoin cash. and also by extension all the other altcoins out there.
now this "specific times" that i mentioned is the times when the whales are advertising these altcoins and pumping them hard. in 99% of the times, this happens during the times that bitcoin price is stable. like right now that bitcoin moves up and down less than 10%. during times like this every trader looks for altcoins to pump and make up for the time by gaining a huge profit.
they move from coin to coin, so don't get stuck with only one all the time.

whenever someone is talking like this they are always missing a couple of important things. sometimes even intentionally they choose to ignore the facts.

lets say this Mr. A. who you are talking about invested a large amount of money in bitcoin when it was $1 and then it dropped down to 0 and disappeared. would you be making the same topic and sympathizing with him about the large amount of money he lost? of course not. then why are you talking about him when he has already taken a huge risk and gotten the reward for that risk he took.
the worst part is, you could have done the same but you chose not to! and now you are paying for it.

the other thing you are missing is the fact that someone who has let say 100BTC is not going to sell all of it. he may even add more to it over the years and only sell a very tiny amount if he ever needs to.

it is a funny thought because people like Bill Gates don't need the money that such actions can give them. they make that money so much easier with so much less risk in a short time. they don't need to do it with the high risk bitcoin.

and when you remove the monetary goals then you have a free mind to see only the real potential of the technology that bitcoin has. the power of decentralization that bitcoin introduced to us in form of a digital currency which is gaining more support every day.

since you have to ask this question and your account is brand new i am assuming this is your first time investing in any cryptocurrency. in which case i should warn you to stay away from investing in any of them because you need to first understand the risks and be able to answer this exact question you just asked here on your own to some extent.

if you start investing now randomly or even based on some random suggestions you get here you will soon find yourself holding a lot of useless tokens which are losing their value slowly but surely. you will become a bagholder.

there is no "what if" in what you are asking. shorting have always been happening during each drop for years. in fact i do believe that a big reason why the drops happen and all the FUD is being spread to intensify the drop, is because so many people are shorting bitcoin, big players or small fishes alike.

no because the way these futures work is that they will close down trading and all positions if price is dropped more than 7% which means they should have closed it back at $18,289.38 when the first drop happened.

your title is pure bullshit. becasue simply when bitcoin was created, it was not in order to become a trading object, an speculation tool or in other words something you use only on exchanges.
when bitcoin was created and until today, it has always been a peer to peer currency. you don't go buy USD, you earn it, you trade goods for it also known as selling something for money. that is how bitcoin is supposed to be gained not by trading on a centralized exchange with fiat. that is how a currency works and bitcoin should work like that too.

as for trading which is inevitable i agree that we need more decentralized exchanges but when you want to trade with fiat, you have no other option.

you add popularity, decentralization (so there is no central authority to answer), and monetary value together and that attracts lots of attackers who want to scam other people and take their money away.
the monetary value is more than enough for them to come though.

and the good thing about cryptocurrency (at least bitcoin) is that it is very simple to protect against all these attacks and prevent them from even happening. and in comparison protecting against credit card frauds is impossible and they happen so often that it is starting to become ridiculous!

it actually began early 2017 when bitcoin was adopted as a legal way of payment over in Japan and people realized cryptocurrencies have always been serious despite what the FUD used to tell them every day.

and the part of history that will repeat itself will unfortunately be the bad part. the part where a lot of newbies see the success of bitcoin and dream of getting rich by investing in an "alternative" which has a lower price since they think the low price can go up like bitcoin. but what they miss out is that there is a reason why they are low and then they will also face an ugly truth called "pump and dumps" and lose a lot of money. and losses like that lead to bigger bear markets in altcoin market.