well that is just wrong.
only people around here consider trading to be a form of gambling and they are mostly newbies who are only seeing trading from outside and have no idea what is going inside of it.
i suggest next time you check out what trading really is, for example go read some articles about trading and watch some educational videos on trading and after spending some time reading and learning you will laugh at this statement that "trading is like gambling"

doing that only shows you the coins that have had big changes in the past 24 hours and it means it is already too late to get in any of those or at least it is going to be pretty hard to join in.

instead you should look for coins that have been slower but with higher volume and preferably those coins that have a good future or a good news on the way so that you can buy when price is stable and low then sell on the rise.

all the good exchanges are like this. most of them even check out the coins code, developers and so many other factors to make sure fist that they are not a scam coin. but in the end all of them are looking for money.

but yobit adds literary anything to their exchange and they love a coin that is dead because they can fake pump it to make money themselves.

i am always keeping most of my investment in bitcoin. from my total money that i have put into cryptocurrencies i have 70% to 90% of it in bitcoin and the rest goes into altcoins and comes out.
it is a different percentage because in times like this i exit altcoin market and go to bitcoin fully.

the altcoins that i have invested in are LTC, XMR, Dash, ETH, and sometimes ETC.
some others i am looking at are ICN, Gulden, XRP and Shift and many of the newer coins if they have potential for short term trading.

as far as my different investments go and based on my experience, bitcoin has certainly helped me a lot, since it was a great investment and also when i found out about bitcoin i also found out about the world of trading. i always knew about Forex market but i never dared trying it out but with bitcoin it became very easy to start with a small amount and then learn things without losing much money. and eventually become good enough to make some profit.

i seriously doubt the $300mil will be injected in one day and on exchanges into bitcoin! that is a stupid move and causes them to be forced to buy high priced bitcoin.
any wise person would inject it slowly and through different channels that doesn't even affect the flow of things on exchanges and price wouldn't feel it.

but rising because of the news and also because of the ETF itself in the long term is another story.

pump groups are the oldest trick the trader scammers are pulling.
there actually used to be a topic created by a guy named ....pumper who used to sell information to others for 0.5BTC as sign up fee. and he was running his thing for a long time on the forum until the global admins found out about him and his hundreds of alt accounts and shut down all of his operations.

in the end it is all scam, and only the owner of the pump group is earning profit.

they always say there is good news for Lisk but all i can see is price dropping when i look at the long term change (zooming out of the price charts).

i have also bought some when price was much higher, i think it was around 60K but i was lucky and made some profit in total despite all the losses. i have been checking to see if there is anything good going on, and i hope we can see one too.

thanks for the link here. it was an interesting read for sure.

i was actually very interested in this concept because i always think bitcoin has all the features that are good and we have all tested and want but also ethereum has introduces some pretty interesting systems that would be great if put to real good use.

i just hope this project gets the attention that it really deserves and we can see it on top of the charts as number one altcoin soon.

well, if we assume there is a genuine one out there an you can find it to invest and think it can be profitable then yeah.
and about the price, it is an investment afterall. which means when you invest you are accepting both profit and loss. there is no guarantee for profit.
and this means if the price of that altcoin goes down you lose money the same way if price goes up you make money.

traders will surely dislike a very stable price but there is still lots of opportunities to make profit even in a market with a stable price. you can check so many other markets, and they are still being traded.

and besides don't forget that no price can stay stable for long. surely it won't be $50 change forever but it wouldn't be $0 change either. it will be a smaller change for example going up and down in $5 range.

the problem is not with how we explain bitcoin, it is with how bitcoin is used. we keep talking about the benefits of using bitcoin and all the features that bitcoin has. but in the end what people see happening in the reality is the price and nothing else. and as far as price goes they always look at the short term price changes so they figure it is not a good thing because of the volatility.

i have been watching NEM but i couldn't find a good entry point that could ever be profitable for me.

i also am accumulating litecoin pretty hard for some time now waiting for as long as possible until the SegWit is completed and it goes to the moon a while after it.

and ethereum although has been good and i think it can still be profitable but i can't see how it can rise again for the time being.

so in other words you don't have much experience in trading. you just buy anything and bet on them to go up or not!
that is not a good way of trading my friend. you will end up losing a lot in total.

there is always a way. they can never ban bitcoin the same way they can never ban VPN. look up all the new ways of tunneling some VPN providers off-shore are offering.
for example there is SSH tunneling which makes all the communication (traffic) look like same as visiting an https website. and unless they ban all the https websites (which will include half the internet such as banks,..) they can never block that kind of VPN and these VPN providers are off-shore, no log policy with bitcoin payment.

what do you mean by a professional trader because that definition can change everything.
you may consider someone who always makes a profit a professional trader or you may consider someone who is making a living with trading a professional trader.

for the first definition you obviously can have any amount of bitcoin as your balance and make profit on that an withdraw the profit taking small risks.

but for the second definition you certainly need a lot more. but in the end it depends on how much you need to earn as profit? 1 or 5BTC profit and what percentage you need to earn per month?
for example if you can make 30% profit each month and want to make 2BTC profit you will need 6.66BTC

if you read what OP is looking for you can see that he is clearly saying an altcoin with a huge pump with 1000% profit.
ZCash is 0.033BTC right now and it has been falling pretty hard with nothing to help it recover, now do you honestly think it can rise up 1000% and go to 0.36BTC? i seriously doubt it!

and remember it is always easier to pump a new coin and coins that have low prices than it is to pump a coin that is over the time of being new and has a higher price.

these older, more popular coins mostly have high hasrates and also high difficulty which makes mining them pretty hard and also their price is very low which them makes mining them even less profitable.

to OP:
check out this site: http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency
it has so many good information about mining all the cryptocurrencies. work with their calculator and read the details of each one of the coins and try to figure out which one is best depending on your costs.

this is not an issue, it is an opportunity.
whenever there is a dip like this, it can be a potential chance for buying cheaper bitcoins before it is back up again.
China is never going anywhere so as other 100 or so countries which have been buying bitcoin nonstop.

why is it difficult? it is the same as lending money. when someone files for a loan, bank reviews their application takes a collateral and gives the loan and then takes it back on intervals.
and price is no matter, because they lend bitcoin and receive bitcoin. and this can only happen in the future when mass adoption happened and price is already high and stable.

it is like lending USD and then USD price going down versus another currency!! that has no effect on how lending goes.

bad example. if someone has 20 mil coins it means bitcoin is dead since 1 person controls all the supply and nobody takes a loan

it certainly is possible. but it is no easy and i would not suggest it to anyone ever.

trading is hard because of how it works, with the unpredictability factor of it and also with the fact that prices for bitcoin and altcoins move in ways that are sometimes not at all logical. and all of that makes trading that much harder.

also you should forget about the gains being "constant". for example if you plan on making 1BTC each month you won't be able to do it the same each month. one month you make 0.8 and the next 1.5 and the next maybe even lose some. because market is good in some weeks and terrible in some others.