Buying a million of anything for a dollar is not much of a waste.

There are plenty of coins I would not bother buying, but I decided to stick with Poloniex and hold the coins they offer,
since they've obviously done some vetting and avoided the worst coins.  

I was wrong, they just have a different selection of shitcoins and even they don't think they'll ever be worth having.

But if any current altcoin still exists 4 years from now, it will be valuable.

And since there's no way to know for sure which ones will survive, I saw it as a superior alternative to a lottery ticket.

Most people will continue choosing the 2 pizzas, and at worst I'll miss a few pizzas and hopefully won't regret it much.

Good advice smoothie, that's why I'm changing my long-term strategy.

I wanted to buy small amounts of all the cheap coins, and I ended up with over 100 coins.

It's not realistic for me to store all those wallets myself for up to 3 years, so I thought Poloniex would be safe with Google 2FA Authenticator and all the rest.
But it's not safe from Poloniex and whatever they might do, or if they disappear.
I liked their history and the fact that they've survived hard times without running off with people's money.

I did actually have all my coins on sell orders, although mostly at unrealistic prices.  

But changing to my new strategy of holding in wallets is taking a while, I've been at it for hours and I still haven't withdrawn half my coins yet.

I admit, one thing I like about Poloniex is that they try to keep good coins and not bad coins.

But if these coins were all shit, as you say, then why did they sell them to me yesterday?

Why do they have to delist 17 at the same time, with no advance notice?

If they're trying to get rid of low volume coins and make room, why is CarpeDiem listed on the BTC market at 1 satoshi with 2 trades per week, and it's also listed on XMR?

Also I'm giving my family socks too, with the coins.  Alpaca socks.  Not really, but I did buy BTC wrapping paper.  If you don't think coins are a good gift, I'll be sure not to give you any.

My apologies for venting, but I hope there's some useful discussion somewhere in here.

Some exchanges let you know if a coin is being considered for delisting, so you have a chance to do something about it. 
But Poloniex just announced 17 coins that are being delisted today, no discussion allowed.

AEON, AUR, BLU, CRYPT, DNS, DRKC, EBT, KEY, LOL, MON, NAS, NTX, PMC, SHOPX, SILK, UTIL, and VOOT. 

"Please withdraw your coins by Dec 31st."

Thanks!  Luckily I wasn't on Christmas vacation for the next 2 weeks,
or I would've come home to find the coins I bought yesterday inaccessible.   

If I broke the rules, and they decided to cancel my account, what would they say?
"You are no longer allowed to buy or sell coins here, you have 2 weeks to withdraw all your coins" ?
Pretty harsh punishment to announce to all their users at the same time.
At least it's not ALL the coins, just 15% of the coins they currently offer.     

Since I was hodling all 17 of the delisted coins, and some of them are not traded on any other exchanges,
I have decided to rethink my altcoin strategy.  When I bought little bits of a hundred different coins,
I wasn't planning on downloading and backing up a hundred different wallets.

My basic line of thought was:
 "Everybody wishes they had bought 10,000BTC for a penny apiece.
 But what good would it have done them?  They didn't know cryptocurrency could trade for hundreds of dollars.
 Instead of waiting for $10,000,000, they would have bought 2 pizzas like everybody else.
 Since that opportunity is gone, we can learn from it and buy a few dollars worth of lots of different coins,
 and allow each coin the same 3 or 4 years it took BTC to become valuable.
 If this hundred million dashcoins is worthless forever, then I'm out $10,
 which is acceptable risk for a chance at thousands.  Or, if you just have to sell your $50 of dogecoins,
 would it really hurt you to save that last 50 cents worth in case it ever gets a lot bigger?"

But everybody else seems to think the only plan is to buy $100 worth, sell it for $150, and pronounce themselves market gurus.
The standard behavior is to treat all altcoins like a scam - not to be avoided, but to be exploited.

Now, I admit that I don't think LOL, EBT, DRKC, or NTX are likely to have big futures as worldwide currencies.
But who knows?  LOL could be a recognizable brand just as easily as DOGE. 
Anyway I'm willing to give each one .005btc for a chance, and all it takes is more people like me doing the same to make it happen.
Unless the exchanges have too much power over which coins survive and which coins don't.

Unfortunately, all it takes is Poloniex to override all the opinions of everyone who participated.
While some of those coins might be nothing special, what about KEY?  I think it has more potential than plenty of other coins I could name.
But since none of these coins can get very far off the ground without exchanges, and since there aren't many exchanges,
the exchanges have become a bottleneck for decentralization.  We need more P2P exchange solutions.

I still think Poloniex is the best exchange, but what good is that? 
Even the best exchange shows with their actions that they see these coins as worthless and only good for 6 months.
How much was Bitcoin worth when it was 6 months old?
"Well, we gave it a good 6 months, now we need to make room for other coins that are also trash to be discarded after 6 months."
If that's all these coins are, why would you ever buy any of them?
If these coins are so worthless that they won't consider keeping them listed, why did they sell the same worthless coins to me yesterday?

So I asked these questions at the Poloniex trollbox. 
They have an XMR market which is great even for coins that trade for under 1satBTC.
Why are these being delisted?  Can't you move them to XMR for a probationary period?

The mods said the coins have no volume.
I pointed out that I've been trading ALL of these coins this month, some of them YESTERDAY.
KEY had .3BTC volume yesterday and jumped over 100%, and not all from me.
There are several coins with LOWER volume that are not being delisted.
Therefore, low volume doesn't get a coin delisted, and increased volume doesn't save it.
So why are these coins being delisted?

Then they said it's because these coins don't have active dev teams.
I pointed out that they're delisting DNS, which has the dev team at Bitshares,
which just printed a billion coins with their snapshot that Poloniex participated in. 
So having an active dev team doesn't save a coin from being delisted.
I also pointed out that some coins have been completely abandoned by the original devs,
but those coins continue to thrive and are still traded.

I personally revived the dead Fractalcoin network recently,
and I'm just one average person who can't even program and knows nothing about mining.
I saw it, bought it, then couldn't get a transaction through.
So I rented an X11 rig in Amsterdam or somewhere,
I didn't even know how to do that or set up a worker in a pool,
but I mined my own transactions and the guy I rented the rig from
said he'd had a pending FRAC tx he'd been waiting on for a week.
Then multiminers hopped on, I paid a small bounty to 2 people in the trollbox to mine a little,
I put up a small buywall for price support, and now it's back on.
One person can keep a coin going.

So why are these coins being delisted without a chance?

Then they said it's because there's no community support,
and someone from the community can request the coins to be kept on market.
I pointed out that I am part of the community of all these coins,
and I'm requesting some discussion before they're delisted.
The mods said it's already settled, no use talking about it.

Then they said not to worry, the coins could be relisted later.
I pointed out that Poloniex has delisted over 100 coins,
and never relisted a single one yet.
That's when the mods said to stop talking about it or I'll be banned.

So I came here.  It was enough that I bought coins yesterday and I'm not allowed to trade them today.
But now they also have the centralized authority to keep me from speaking.
My solution is to avoid the situation in the future by not giving them that power over me.
If I buy another coin there today, they have the power to delist that coin tomorrow.
So why should I buy any more coins there?

I opened a support ticket for each of the 17 coins I had a problem with,
and after a few hours I see that all of the tickets are gone and nobody ever replied.
At least they fixed the coins they said I had to withdraw immediately but didn't have working withdrawals.

Some of my coins aren't traded anywhere else and I can't find a working wallet, so I had 18 hours notice to dump them.
I am not happy about that.  I have never sold any of my coins for a loss before today, and I've hardly sold any at all.
And the only reason I had the 18 hours notice was because I woke up to go to the bathroom at midnight
and decided to check Polo real quick before going back to my much-needed sleep.
That was 20 hours ago and I haven't been back to sleep yet,
because I was canceling over a hundred buy and sell orders that I spent hours and hours structuring, just on those 17 coins.
Then I had to start downloading wallets, finding other exchanges,
then I had to go to work, which I spend about as many hours at as I've spent at Polo during the past month.

Then I had to look at the 40 little coin certificates I had already printed up as Christmas gifts for friends and family,
with little 32X32 color coin logos next to each balance,
telling them they're the proud holders of the following cryptocurrencies in the following amounts,
just download a wallet (lol) "or sign up at poloniex.com and send me your deposit addresses".
.01BTC
.1LTC
1.0XMR
10.0VTC
50.0OPAL
100.0CURE
etc. etc.
all the way up to 1,000,000DSH - impressive, right?

Not that I really want to give away .4BTC at one time, I only had 9BTC total value in my Polo account,
but I would be surprised if 10% of the people I gave it to actually sent deposit addresses.

Anyway, I can't give that to people now.  No big deal, Poloniex left me 2 or 3 days notice to come up with 40 new Christmas presents.
I used an entire color ink cartridge though, so I might film a live coin burn of those Poloniex certificates so I'll get something out of it.