haha, obviously OP is just an altcoin bag holder who is wishing for more profit

there is only two cases where you use cryptocurrencies:
1. investment.
in which case there is no way anybody in his right mind to give up bitcoin for altcoins since we all can see the potential of bitcoin and how it is the only thing that moves in long term while others continue to drop.
not to mention that investors don't care about fees!

2. currency.
in which case if you wanted to spend bitcoin, the places you want to spend doesn't accept altcoins so even if you switch to altcoins they still don't accept it and you had fooled yourself and lost a lot of money for that conversion.

what about BitMixer?
it wasn't exactly a authorities kicking down their doors but the circumstances were suspicious in my opinion, they suddenly grew a conscious after years of giving service and mixing coins and shut down their operation and went away. there was a lot of talk about how they were under pressure from law enforcement.

yes.

p.s. i am not familiar with implementation of SHIFT but usually they copy whatever bitcoin does, in which case there is a possibility that the derivation path can be different. in which case you won't see your funds unless you change the derivation path.

bitcoin halving has always been a hyped up event from the first time it happened and because the first time price went up a lot, the second time the same thing happened even bigger. now that we are getting closer to the third halving in history of bitcoin, and because a lot of hype has been going into it, we can expect a real big rise this time.
considering that price is already on the rise  and the bull market has already started we can expect a new ATH even before the halving and much higher than that after it.

this is not necessarily correct. if he  created his wallet himself then he has the private key to it. so the only thing needed is to import that private key into the correct wallet to get his funds back.

right now he has a TestNet wallet so that wallet is only checking the Test "network" and doesn't see anything, if he imports the key into a wallet that is for main net, it will check the main "network" and can see the transaction.

i don't really have that much of a problem with banks controlling money so i don't mind using fiat and sometimes i don't get why some people are so passionate about killing the banks off.
but at the same time i enjoy using bitcoin because of the freedom that it gives me. which makes choosing between bitcoin and USD (or fiat in genera) that much harder. so i say both because each satisfy a different need in me.

because it is only you and you alone who things it is a good business concept where it really is not. it is just another project copycatting hundreds of other similar projects and releasing an enormous amount of tokens in the market (2.6 billion) so that they can make money for some time from their own premined stash before dumping it all and moving on to better things.

haha, not a chance.
as an information gathering source, Facebook is not going to add any sort of privacy to their token. it will be exact same as their platform, Paypal and any other centralized service void of any privacy.
specially when you consider the fact that Facebook is a company in US you can see that there is no chance in hell they are going to add any shred of privacy to their token. they want to gather more information and sell it to the 3 letter agencies.

but ICOs don't even have anything to do with cryptocurrencies or even "crypto vision" or whatever you want to call it. ICO is a trick for fundraising for a "company" (basically some people in their basement) that most of the times don't even have anything to do with cryptocurrencies not to mention that coin (or C in ICO) are not actual cryptocurrencies they are tokens that have no usages.

well since bitcoin is not some pump and dump altcoin that can change direction that easily at the whim of the pumpers, we can say that the "bear market" has ended for 10000000% certainty right now that price has already increased 145% in 4 months.

this is a decentralized market and it will always remain decentralized. the fact that some people choose to believe the scammers and give their hard earned money to them because they promised them big returns and millionaires overnight is their own fault and nothing can change their attitude. gullible people will always remain gullible.

as for your solution, you are adding a centralized power into the system which won't match anything not to mention that you are introducing a big corruptible entity. in other words your "Altcoins Investigation Team" will do their job perfectly for a little while then to earn money they will start accepting bribes. the scammers simply pay them to publish positive feedback for them so that they can easily scam people who are not trusting "Altcoins Investigation Team" not knowing they are the biggest scammers.

this is not new either. there has been lots of similar ideas like the ICO benchmark sites that initially were doing a good job ranking them and busting the scammers but soon enough they started giving high rates to obvious scams just because they were paid to!

dethrone is ambiguous because it doesn't really have any meaning and there is no "throne"! dethrone in what aspect?

in utilities, adoption and usability? not a chance. there is nothing that IOTA can do better than bitcoin.

in security of the network, and decentralization of it? not in a million years specially since there are certain centralized aspects to IOTA

in price? again not a chance because IOTA has a huge volume and unlike bitcoin it doesn't have that adoption that is needed for its price rise. so even if it reaches bitcoin's adoption (which it will never do) it still can't increase its price to bitcoin level.

in market cap? who cares but no for same reasons above

in other words another centralized company token that is going to be useless and obsolete soon but first it will generate a ton of profit for that centralized company and increase their net-worth by a couple of millions.
in time all these companies will realize that in this particular scene (the cryptocurrency scene) there is no room for centralized cryptocurrencies and the only thing they can hope to get out of it is a short term profit.

i always tell others the same thing but it is a very odd thing to say right now that price is starting to rise up! usually these warnings are for when two things are happening in the market (meaning the time when that quoted post came out).
1. the price is in a bubble because of rising nonstop for a long time and has gone above the intrinsic value of that time so buyers have to be more careful of bubble burst. (we currently are far below intrinsic value!)
2. there is a lot of newcomers coming in and also FOMO buying bitcoin. (which is not happening now)

what is ICO?
is it anything apart from a big bet that people made on an illusion that has a hyped up topic (blockchain) in its name?

with that simple definition change, you can see how they are not new at all. the same trend has been going on for a long time, people come in and see a lot of advertised altcoins telling them they are the future so they invest their money in them hoping to become millionaires.
whatever effects they have on bitcoin price will remain the same as long as people don't change.

the name keeps changing and their methods become easier, before they had to actually create a standalone blockchain but now they have platforms that do that for them with ICOs.

every time there is hack like this there is always a large number of users who leave that hacked exchange. you can clearly see this from all the previous hack cases when the exchange comes back but no longer has the same volume. that is normal human behavior to stay away in safety after a disaster like this.
but it is never all the users and the magnitude of the "migration" depends on many factors such as shadiness of the exchange, whether or not they are paying out their users, and a lot more. but basically it depends on how much people still trust that exchange, in case of Binance i don't think trust was lost that much but it was lost.

the answer to topics of discussion such as these are always my sympathy with the authors who have lost a lot of money by making bad decisions in bitcoin market because they went against the tide and tried shorting what was rising.
and now, in loss, they are lashing out by calling bitcoin names such as Ponzi scheme and news sites keep publishing their nonsense...

obviously!
all the FUD about Bitfinex and the hack of Binance have been huge negative forces that actually pushed the price down but the reason why price didn't go down was because of the much stronger buy force that acted against that push and crushed it.
a good lesson for all those who tend to keep going against the market and get crushed.

the answer is obviously No..... you'll loose your fund and that is a suggestion for you alone. bitcoin price will continue to rise and this time it will reach $100k at least but YOU will lose your fund because you are not familiar enough with the market to make important decisions on your own and you have to ask others and that never ends well specially when money is involved and a lot of FUD is around. next correction when price comes from something like $6900 to $6500 you will panic and sell , a couple of mistakes like this and you'll end up in a big loss.

in order for an altcoin to rise again, it first has to get dumped again and that is partly why Binance is going down at the moment so if you are hodling any of it then it is a good time to get rid of it before you end up with a big loss like -90%.
but Binance is not going to die just because of this hack, they still have the market in their hands and will come back although they have lost a great deal of trust from users who are now switching to other exchanges.