there is never been anything "top" about a coin that copies bitcoin in my experience. not to mention that there are a lot of more important events that you missed from 2008 to 2011 such as first bitcoin transaction, the Pizza purchase with bitcoin, first price ATH, first big bitcoin bubble, first big crash. these last two are important since you are talking about ups and downs!

it wasn't the first so it is not important.
more important were the much bigger companies such as Microsoft to start accepting bitcoin.

i think most people are answering this topic emotionally. the fact is we don't have any decent stats to say for sure all we can say is speculation and some small observation.
bitcoin used to popular a couple of years ago specially during Silk Road time. this is the time that many still mistakenly though bitcoin were anonymous. but as they became more aware of the reality and as some criminals were caught, everyone caught on to the fact that bitcoin is not anonymous so they went back to the methods they were using before bitcoin came alone.

the stats by investopedia doesn't look correct either specially as LTC is reported to have the highest percentage and monero the smallest! that doesn't even make sense as monero is the only decently anon coin that we have.
other coins such as ethereum and ripple aren't even considered currencies by anybody to be used for anything other than trading.

first of all it really depends on what your "projects and startups" are, nowadays i keep seeing people create tokens on different smart contract platforms and call that a "startup" while in reality they are doing nothing! if that's the case then forget donations...
but if you are really creating something that you know is going to be useful, like (Wassabi Wallet that implemented CoinJoin protocol in an easy-to-use manner) then sure, you will receive a lot of support including donations.
but you shouldn't really depend on donations, in open source community your goal should not be earning money in my opinion.

and secondly, it takes time to even be recognized and gain some popularity. you can't really expect starting from 0 and all of a sudden receive such a huge amount of money!

and who is going to pay you for things you already do? and what is he benefit in it for them to pay you?!
what you are saying sounds more like one of those micropayment jobs you usually see advertised on the internet which are a complete waste of time and could even infect your computer if you follow their instructions including visiting random sites! they advertise it like "things you already do" then you see you have to do mundane tasks for long hours to make a cent!

when you could just use google, its alerts,... the newsletters, some other twitter accounts,... and ton of other things there is no need to follow a random twitter account that was created recently. specially for getting the news. besides, bitcoin news is not that exciting to follow it like this anyways. we get 99% garbage news every day that they are quoting some random person about the price without even knowing what bitcoin is and then 1% decent news worthy of reading.
i think it is best that you spend your time doing something more constructive.

you should have said "continued using it" instead of keeping because if they keep it, it sounds like HODLing and that is not doing anything.

in any case this problem has always been with bitcoin. the price rise alone makes people want to "invest" in bitcoin instead of seeing it as a currency. that is why so many people are calling it store of value these days instead of a currency.

not unless someone finally comes up with some actually decentralized stable coin otherwise centralized ones are not even close to being 0.001% useful as bitcoin!

it is simply because when you use the term "top" you don't really mean top you mean "the biggest and most bloated market cap". and since market cap is equal to "supposedly circulating supply" * "price" any coin with fake huge supply (in this case 43.3 billion) gets to be on top no matter how low the price is.

if you check out altcoin graveyards over the past 10 years and see that the list currently contains tens of thousands of dead coins you can see what he says is not really a prediction, it is simply extrapolating the history to the future!

about 2 months ago people went crazy about a simple swing in the hashrate charts and some of them even panicked in the market and sold their coins for no reason! just because a poorly written block explorer had a bug!
i created a topic about hashrate and how hashrate, how it is calculated in reality versus what these sites do and why that is bad. it got buried under spam in main board though. here is the link https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5187499.0

this happened once before some years ago but since it is "testnet" the network was simply abandoned and new one was started effectively invalidating all the coins that were being traded!

the way that the rise to $1 million is going to happen is going to be different from what we have seen so far. i believe we will see another similar roller coaster trend like all the previous times such as 2017, 2013, .... while price reaches above $100k and possibly more with a smaller retracement that time and then the "shoot ups" are going to be a lot bigger and it will happen in a much shorter period of time because by then (which would probably be in 5 years) people have realized the true nature of bitcoin seeing past all the FUD that they have been hearing for more than 10 years.

there is no obligations to rise so you can't say "should" here. people are speculating it will rise based on two things.
first is the previous two halvings that bitcoin had in the past 10 years. each of them had a big rise before the halving and after a month or two led to a huge rise.
and second is the fact that it slows down the production of bitcoin by 50% and that injection of new supply in the market changes the balance between supply and demand and can lead to a rise.

you can not compare bitcoin with an altcoin.
bitcoin has usages hence "demand" while altcoins do not. so when their supply is halved there is no demand to help any rise. instead what halving of an altcoin does is that it reduces the earning potential of miners and as they leave the coin loses security and value over time.
there are also a lot of other things in play when it comes to altcoins such as their pumped bubbles bursting, their hype being over, ... and in case of LTC it is a copy of bitcoin so it really isn't something special to have that much potential!

sites go down for maintenance or update and stay down until it is finished. and they don't do it regularly because of the security reasons and the fact that they would lose business every day they are offline.
but same with DDoS, if the problem persists and is being repeated every now and then, it means you shouldn't be using the service at all.

everybody eventually reaches the same conclusions after a while. the time it took you seems a bit too high in my opinion (4 years). usually depending on the time people join this world it could take the maximum of one cycle of altcoin pump and dumps which is usually less than a year for them to realize the truths and start seeing past the "next bitcoin" advertisements.

small exchanges such as these two shouldn't have any server problems since they don't really handle that much traffic anyways and nowadays there isn't any kind of major pumps going on to lead to any extra traffic either.
the only possiblity is if they were under DDoS attack but that only lasts a short time like a day. if the problem persists then it may be time to stop using them specially since they are already too small and unknown to begin with.

only a miner or a pool owner can do something like that and only if they own all the private keys required to sepnd all those small dust outputs. because the miner can include a tx in his own block without a fee otherwise others have to pay a fee which may end up being higher than the total.

example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/bb41a757f405890fb0f5856228e23b715702d714d59bf2b1feb70d8b2b4e3e08

if the difficulty is supposed to increase then your starting post doesn't make sense anymore because we are back where we started (what bitcoin is currently doing).
and also what you said about "This would give miners the choice of how much work to do on each block-" is no longer true. a miner will always want to do least amount of work and get the most number of results out.

we are nowhere close to the halving which means we can not really speculate about the micro price movements before halving. and whatever happens these days is far away from halving and is not even taking effects from it. so if we see a drop or a rise it will be for a long list of unrelated reasons such as the adoption that is happening in France these days (which is gigantic positive news by the way).

here is the problem, how are you going to stop a miner (or basically any random person with a CPU) to choose the smallest target possible and flood the network will millions of blocks per second. remember that it is not just about the reward but it is about the now bloated blockchain for no reason which puts a burden on all the nodes to sync and store all these junk blocks.

i have been around for a couple of years and have read thousands of articles from before that time. i have seen lots of news about China banning bitcoin. if they wanted to ban it they would have done it already not wait for 10+ years and then do it!
the fact is bitcoin has been a very good thing for their economy. from the mining farms to mining pools and bitmain all the money they produce for the electric companies and all the jobs they create is a big economy of its own. the only reason why they shut down exchanges was their illegal activities and the only thing they have ever banned was ICO which are obviously scams and everyone knows that!

the real question is why bother with this much workarounds just to increase the security of something that is inherently insecure by design. in other words unless OP doesn't own a PC or has no kind of access to one whatsoever, i don't see any reason to take the risks of creating a wallet with a phone for storage purposes.
HW wallets would also require a PC so if he has one then he should use that to create a cold storage.