the same reason as other altcoin pumps: bitcoin price is stable once again.

regarding Litecoin it also is because bitcoin is building up a huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions and as a result the fees are rising so fast. that is a known cause for altcoin pumps this year.
additionally there is all the advertisement that LTC is getting these days as being the "better version of bitcoin"! believe it or not it is effective specially when the developer Charlie Lee is super active everywhere specially on Twitter promoting litecoin.

no reason is required for an altcoin to get pumped like this apart from the fact that bitcoin price has been stable for 2-3 days. (stable bitcoin means less than 10% fluctuation by the way )

and looking at Ripple charts you can clearly see that this recent pump is nothing more than a small recovery after a very long lasting dump from the gigantic pump that ripple had back in May. and it is still getting dumped to try and get out of that bubble which was created back then.

that is the problem with SegWit, and that is one of the main reason why SegWit2x (the 2 MB hard fork) was suggested. the problem is that SegWit will only work if people use it. and it is opt-in not forced. and so far in the past ~4 months we can see practically nobody is using SegWit because block size is still at 1MB with a little increase in it.
2 MB could have solved it until LN comes. but for now we have to endure the increasing fees and hope the damage it causes won't be huge and permanent. like hoping things like Steam dropping bitcoin doesn't happen anymore!

the best method of making money with cryptocurrencies is offering some service, running some business or something like that which you actually earn them like you earn fiat in real life. for example you can see the gambling sites that are offering a game and earning bitcoin and some of the altcoins sometimes too.
this method has the biggest potential for biggest returns with lower risks.

the most popular method however is trading them. but trading is a hard thing to do, it is very risky and you can lose a lot of money if you don't know how to do it.
this method also has the potential to give you high returns but also big losses. which means it has higher risks.
and one of the biggest problems with this method is that you have to use an exchange and they are not trusted at all.

well with bitcoin network being clogged up right now and transaction fees being ridiculously high it makes people think about alternatives. and one of these alternatives is bitcoin cash. i wouldn't be surprised if it takes some of the market out of bitcoin's hand and it is our fault if that happens not BCH being better.

and it can get pumped. i won't expect its price to reach bitcoin's value ($16k and rising) but it can have some serious pump in the near future.

coins like Ripple are old and outdated with a massive supply and nobody cares about then enough to buy them and not dump before the $10 mark that OP is looking for. we are talking about 100 billion tokens here!

in my opinion IOTA has the best chance. it is using the newest technology without a blockchain and it is pretty interesting. i do think this technology (DAG) will be the up and comer in 2018 and coins like IOTA and the better version of it called ByteBall will have a very good time and lots of investors and big rises next year.

yes. many of the will survive but the top altcoins, at least the top 10, will die with bitcoin and get dumped even harder if bitcoin goes down.

bitcoiners don't really have much faith in altcoins if you ask me. they all are interested in bitcoin that is why they invest in altcoins, they want to make profit on their bitcoins!

almost all of them have interesting possibilities but also almost all of them add more flaws than they solve any issues. you can see ETH for example. it has 13 second blocks but it still can not handle transactions when there is a growth like cryptokitties caused! and that is just a start.

selling or not at this point has little to do with futures trading in my opinion.
seeing the market movement, it dictates that it is already too late to think about selling since the bottom is long gone now and you missed the chance to buy in it. now you have to wait for another ATH to be reached and signs of the next correction before thinking about selling your coins and buying back in the dip.

futures trading has been an excuse so far for the manipulators to cause some panic in the market and take advantage of the "created" opportunity.

you need to first read what "inflation" means and then study more about supply and how that affects it and compare it with demand.

right now like always bitcoin is something that is called "scarce" because there is simply not enough of it. the supply is going to be limited. and meanwhile the adoption for this limited currency is increasing day by day. specially when it hit mainstream adoption.
anyone can see how bitcoin is underpriced now.

easy is a matter of perception!

let me try to put it into steps for you, using a virtual machine OR a live linux:
1.a. download a Linux distro that you like. it can be the popular Ubuntu.
2.a. burn the distro on a DVD or if you can just put it on a USB and boot from that.

1.b. download a virtual machine program such as VirtualBox (it works for all OS, Windows, linux, mac,..)
2.b. install it on your computer and then build a virtual machine on it (it will be a window which you open but it runs a complete OS)

3. download Electron cash and install it.
optional but preferable: move all your bitcoins to a new wallet (not just a new address since Electrum is HD and your seed is all your addresses/keys)
4. import your private keys or just use your Seed to recover your BCH in Electron Cash.
5. Spend?

i used to use bittrex and tell everyone to use them but since they have started to act strange and when i saw some shady stuff i withdrew everything i had immediately and then i saw i was lucky because they turned into a scam service and stole a lot of money. i even told my friend but he got stuck and now he has his money stolen by bittrex.
here is the bittrex owner profile on bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=96390

and now i am mainly using cryptopia but also i am looking more into decentralized exchanges to see if i can find something that is easier to use and i can get the same features. at least some of them.

just to be clear when i say a "bubble" i don't mean price is going down to $2000 like most FUDsters here who call bitcoin a bubble are saying.
what i mean is that i can no longer get a good feeling about the current big rise. and i think i am not the only one who is suspicious of the current rise to $19k in the past month. the correction already happened and price is staying at nearly $15k pretty nicely. i hope i am wrong and it stays here and proves there is real demand for bitcoin which caused the $19k but i wouldn't be surprised if it went back down to $10k and started rising properly like before.

Satoshi is a common name, so yeah Satoshis have envisioned lots of different things.
but Satoshi, the creator of bitcoin, was never thinking about "transfer of wealth".

that sounds like an investment to me!
where you store your money some place safe that gains value and also protects you from when "shit hits the fan"!

you say, "not as an investment", then use the word "money" for bitcoin then say "before it is too late"?!! late for what? late for price being high? that is contradictory to being a currency! because it is never too late to use bitcoin as a currency even if price is $1 million per coin.
it is too late however if you consider it as an investment instead. so make up your mind, do you want to introduce bitcoin as an investment that will make them rich (fiat rich) or as a currency that is decentralized?

price being high has nothing to do with the decision of any company about accepting something. it is like saying $1 billion dollar is so high so companies should stop accepting dollar! you know there is smaller amounts than $1 billion dollar like $1 or 1 cent. bitcoin also has smaller amounts such as 1 satoshi!

the fact that people choose to hold bitcoin rather than spending it has two reasons: the rising price which has nothing to do with how much it is. it can be $10 and rising to $20 (100% rise) and they still HODL it.
and also the high fees.

and nobody would choose BCH or BTG or even the shittiest of all BCD for a substitute since they are worse than bitcoin. if they want, they would choose something better. and something better is not among the top 10 altcoins i assure you.

the good thing about Litecoin is that it is old and a copy of bitcoin and also has a good development team. all these means you have lots of options, very similar to bitcoin options for storing long term. so your answer is the same as bitcoin for long term holding.

1. hardware wallets. i believe Trezor and possibly others support LTC.
#this is a costly method but easy and secure.

2. paper wallets. there is a nice fork of bitaddress.org called liteaddress.org which you can use to generate a secure paper wallet offline https://github.com/litecoin-project/liteaddress.org
#this is free but harder to use, you need to sweep it later when you want to spend and create a new one.

3. SPV wallet called Electrum-ltc which is similar to Electrum for bitcoin (a fork of it) which is light an small. https://electrum-ltc.org/ you can use the same cold storage guide from Electrum for this also: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html
#this is more flexible, but can be a bit complicated to use as cold storage. but very easy to use as your hot desktop wallet.

4. obviously the official wallet called litecoin core which is a full node like bitcoin core https://litecoin.org/#download
#this is hard to sync since the blockchain size is big.

when you compare bitcoin with an altcoin you should remember than there is one bitcoin but there are thousands of altcoins. for example in this case there are at least a dozen projects like ETH out there doing the same thing and some of them doing it even better!

ETH has a serious scaling issue which comes up every now and then when some ICO is having some transctions on chain or something like this new cryptokitties comes up and clogs up the network pretty easily and causes everything to turn into hell. and things will only get worse from now on. and when you are talking about long term, this can cause a lot of problems for the adoption and the price of it. and that is while other projects (even the original chain called ETC) have no issues like this.

maybe! but nobody was expecting $16,000 in 2017 either! back in 2016 and even in earlier this year, everyone was saying $1200 is the end and they were all seeing "Mt Gox 2013 bubble" all over again and were predicting $200 crash! and the bulls were predicting barely $2000 by the end of the year (now). and the rest is history.

the bitcoin rises have always been unpredictable. we may see it in 2 years or we may see a bear market for 1 year and then rise to it in 3 years. but i think it depends on how high the current price will go. if it  doesn't go crazy and stops to consolidate, it may be reached in 2 years.

your best choice (which also happens to be very risky since exchanges are not to be trusted like this) is to leave your bitcoin on exchanges to get the new coins and sell them on sight. because in order to claim (for example this one that you are asking) you must move your bitcoins first. and with current network state which has a very high fee, it is not financial sane to do this! and even if you do, you may not get as much as you are paying for fees since the price of most of these new coins are so small.

price has been rising like crazy, that means a large number of people will be transferring bitcoin, either from their wallets to exchanges in order to sell while the price is high or have bought bitcoin at some price and now want to cash it out to their wallets (cold storage). and that leads to a large number of unconfirmed transactions (currently at 220,000 transactions) and since block size is limited and still is small at about 1.1-1.2 MB they will all be stuck.

this creates competition over that limited block space, and the competition is with paying higher fee.

i have not checked the price of other countries for a long time now but Indian prices have always been much higher than normal. additionally some African countries started to have much higher prices recently also.
currently it is $16,500 in Zebpay and that is the lowest price.


i am afraid it is. and it is not a good sign in my opinion. we may be in a bubble now. and a bubble burst is never good.