that's the thing though. you are working a job already. i don't know about you but most people when they say they want to give up their jobs they are thinking about living of bitcoin that they already have!

otherwise giving up one job for another riskier one such as mining, trading, ... is not really worth it in my opinion.

the level of cryptography used in bitcoin is good enough that will make it unhackable for many years. things such as Eliptic Curve cryptography that it is using and also hashing the private keys using SHA256 gives it the security that it needs.

can these be broken? yes but that doesn't mean it will happen. these are not simple stuff created yesterday. it has been years and they are being used elsewhere too.

there has been another surge of ICOs some of which have been huge. there is a possibility that these fund raisings caused this recent pump of ETH to current level. it was very unexpected though. i have to admit i didn't see this kind of pump coming from ETH with all the recent issues it had.

things are very interesting these days all around the market anyways. we have been seeing another similar pump in DASH too which was the accompanying altcoin when the first ETH pump started this year. maybe the same group is behind both pumps again.

looks like bitstamp and bitfinex weren't that ready for this rise, they are both  limping along specially bitstamp with the dumps that has been going on over there. i think the bear-whales over there aren't happy about the current rise and they feel trapped and decided to go against the market.

they are losing lots of money though... it is interesting to see how long they can keep this up. last time it lasted a week.

that is a dump excuse though!
it may be easy to hack their website and put some fake thing up there but it is impossible to hack github to place the fake thing there too. the only way they could have done it is either by having commit access already meaning the developer team of BTG or they lost their password which to be honest would be another excuse. a so called "developer" should know how not to lose his password! specially when we are talking about lots of money here!

nobody is preventing you to invest in Stocks market and nobody put a gun to your head to only choose one if you did invest in one of these. in fact these days with all the mainstream attention to bitcoin there are many big investors who are diversifying into bitcoin. they already have their bulk of investment in things such as stocks and now they also have bitcoin in their portfolio.

and why? because bitcoin is a revolutionary invention that has changed the world. many don't see this yet but when they do, you will see the why of it.

you need to reach a balance between only holding until the end of your life and holding until you are filled with fear and dump everything. and sadly people sometimes seem to be one of these two not anything in the middle! there is always a big ground in the middle which you can walk too. you buy some and then price goes 10x higher you sell some of it like 0.1 of total to get your initial investment out and have the pure profit in.
yeah that 10% may one day worth millions but at the same time what would you do if price never went higher.

bitcoin:

• has solid rise with real adoption all around the world
• everyone is talking about bitcoin when they think about cryptocurrency
• bitcoin has real usage as a currency and is actually accepted in real shops.
• the long term is always rise.
• there is a logical supply and distribution planned for bitcoin

altcoins

• they get pump and dumped. there is no solid rise, they go up and then crash in less than a week
• nobody apart from those who already have bitcoin and want to trade knows about altcoins
• there is no real usage for any of the altcoins. some like XMR have few use cases but not enough to call them a currency
• the long term is not looking good for majority of them
• most of them have huge supply, and weird distributions such as premindes, no cap, big block rewards,...

one of the things that i have found out about altcoins and their rises is that most of them (specially bitcoin cash and the like of it) are getting pumped whenever bitcoin has some kind of issue!

it is like a competition, where there is bitcoin, a runner that is in front of all the rest with a huge distance between him (#1) and the next (#2),...
the rest can not even reach the dust of this runner, but there are bumps on the road which hit his legs and slow it down so the distance between #1 and the rest is reduced just because it slowed down not because they ran faster.

that is the the reason why alts get pumped. at least that is the feeling that i get.
the first alt pump was when there was a fear of split and bitcoin was $1200. the second alt pump was when there was a huge backlog and fees reached ATH. now the BCH pump is again because of high fees and slow bitcoin!

going mainstream requires bitcoin to be considered mainly as a currency then as an "investment vehicle". if we say bitcoin is not a currency, then we are just investing in some hashes on our computer without any meaning.

and this is a very bad thing for the future of bitcoin if we start seeing bitcoin as a store of value alone. it will first kill the currency part and all the adoption and growth of bitcoin then will start pushing it all towards an altcoin instead. bitcoin can simply lose its position if that happens.

it is clear that you do not understand what pump and dump means.

pump and dump is a process where you increase the price of an asset which is worthless, to an unrealistic price with purely manipulation. the best example of this is if you look at the altcoins that go up in price. they have no usage and no real value, but they go up in price purely based on manipulation.

a pump never lasts long, because you are artificially increasing the price against the market. and market tends to correct itself at all times, keeping it up requires a lot of money and everyone wants to make money not to spend.
and as the name suggests it is called pump and dump not just pump. the dump is inevitable and soon after the pump not years after it!

with this explanation if you look at bitcoin price, you can see it is a solid rise with drops which are not as big as the rise aka corrections.

it is none of anyone's business how you pay for something you buy, whether it is a house or a pen! you can pay with bitcoin or cash or wire transfer through banks.
as long as it is a legal exchange, the money is not dirty, and also if you pay  your taxes there is nothing wrong with using bitcoin.

the problem is finding someone who is willing to spend their bitcoin. or others to accept it.

have you ever thought maybe OP has already invested what he can afford to lose and now he is planning on selling before the possible dip to be able to buy even more with the profit?

that's the strategy anyways.

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the thing about FUD is that most of the times it comes out when there is need for a drop and never when there is a rally going on. currently with CME news i say the market is more ready for a rise than a fall. so we may not even see anything till the end of the year.

the scenarios that i can think of are:
- this recent Tether drama
- bitfinex closing down or something
- there is always China!
- one of these big altcoin exchanges like bittrex scamming and running away with thousands of bitcoin.

then you are misinformed my friend!
there has been lots of attacks against bitcoin in the past few months from August 1 12:20 against bitcoin. from social media childish attacks to serious damage-causing attacks when they pumped it.

i just explained in this comment how the difficulty worked with BCH, that means they took bitcoin's hashrate and when you do that bitcoin blocks are found with a longer delay than normal. since the hashrate was big the delay was also big.
this delay meant transactions were stuck, a big backlog was created and fees began to rise ridiculously high. something that has not yet been fixed because were still recovering from that attack.

if bitcoin cash never existed or used a different algo like bitcoin gold, this problem would have never happened for bitcoin.

difficulty magic

they made bitcoin cash so that its difficulty is adjusted faster than bitcoin (the original pan for difficulty adjustments) and called Emergency Difficulty Adjustment. it was done in order to keep the chain alive because they know in the fist days they wouldn't get any mining power and the fork should have happened.

this EDA was abused by miners. the difficulty was adjusted (dropped) to very low levels so that the low hash power of BCH is capable of mining it. but that also meant that a big mining pool with a huge hashrate could start mining that low difficulty coin and find 10 times, 20 times more blocks than it could find in bitcoin with the high (normal) difficulty.

and they surely did do that. there was a time when they found 1000+ blocks per day instead of 144 normal amount!
more blocks, more mining reward (12.5BTC per block), more circulating supply.

it depends on what you have in mind when you say "need"!

altcoins are supposed to be alternative projects to bitcoin that try and do things that bitcoin can not do. for example bitcoins algorithm is Poof of Work. you can't just change that, so you create a new project and start developing different technologies. PoS comes in. then Proof of Space, and a couple of the Poof of ... that i do not recall right now. then you get technologies that are different, sometimes better, sometimes worse.

so do we need them? yes we need them to create new things. possibly even something better than bitcoin someday. hopefully.

but if we consider the current state of altcoins, the answer is no. we do not need 90% of them. because they just copy paste each other without any improvement or anything.

as a trader's perspective, yeah we need them. the more the merrier. we get more pump and dumps and lots more profit.

you seriously need to stop comparing two things that have nothing in common.
bitcoin is a currency which has been decentralized for the most part. and it has been acting as a currency so far too. it had no premine, no ICO, and no other kind of shenanigans for the developer to gain free tokens and dump for money. it is handling lots of transactions daily and when that number goes up nothing bad happens!

ethereum is a token that must only be used in smart contracts, it is a bloated blockchain that can not handle transactions properly and fails under pressure. it has been impossible to sync with the network if you start anew for more than 6 months now and things are getting worse. it is centralized with a huge premine which is nearly 77% of it.

bitcoin's difficulty has nothing to do with bitcoin and bitcoin cash movements. but bitcoin cash difficulty does. when BCH diff. drops, it becomes easy to mine it and then the miners with those behind BCH like Roger Ver, pump bitcoin cash to create incentive for miners to switch and surely enough they do.

but the thing you forgot is that with this switching back and forth the difficulty of BCH also skyrockets. for example when it had a higher hashrate than bitcoin the difficulty went also higher than bitcoin!!! that means a harder coin to mine with a price 1/8 of bitcoin.
result? miners dumping BCH and going back to bitcoin.

when it  comes to selling to get the profit out, in my opinion it doesn't matter if you sell at $100 or even less, what matters is what you are going to do after you sold.

for example in case of buying at $10 and selling at $100, how much did they sell? did they buy back after the correction or after seeing $100 heading towards $200 and $1200?
these may seem like obvious actions that anyone reading this may say they will do the same. but in reality most people who sell after a rise and rise continues don't buy back because they think price will fall down so they wait a long time and miss out on a lot.

an exchange is just a place where you buy and sell bitcoin, a place for traders. it has nothing to do with bitcoin's growth. and the future of bitcoin is only determined as a payment system that it is, the better it works the bigger it will get.
all these scam exchanges are third party filthy people who want to get rich by robbery not by honest work. and in time people learn how to deal with them by doing things such as never keeping anything on exchanges. and eventually every cryptocurrency exchange would become decentralized and all these scammy centralized ones will join the history.