Quote from: nolimitnp on May 01, 2017, 10:37:02 AM

With few exceptions, why would anyone invest in altcoins that can only be traded with Bitcoin? That is to say like Golem can also be traded with Ethereum for example, or litecoin which can be traded with Monero and the USD. It's no secret spikes in Bitcoin are tired almost perfectly inversely proportional to to Altcoins.

Just remeber for markets to work, for everyone who's getting wealthy, there also has to be someone going broke. Right now you wake up to see seemingly ever market is green with a few exceptions of shitty volume altcoins. ZCash, Dash, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and litecoin have all seen insane spikes in price over the last few weeks. I realize there are more people entering the market, but not that money. Something isn't adding up. It wouldn't surprise me to find out whales are also running the exchanges. It also wouldn't surprise me to find out some of the exchanges are completely insolvent, that it is to say, they're trading more in cryptocurrency than there is in money to back it up.

I know most people are like shut up don't talk shit about cryptocurrency. Remember this all still incredibly new and 100% completely unregulated. Most of you probably have cryptocurrency on a wallet just refusing to sell it because you just know the value will increase. Will it, will it really? I truly hope you're right, but it's all still, your entire wealth is just 1 and 0s. The only reason it has any value is because we believe it has value. If anything ever happens to shake our confidence, like an exchange becoming insolvent, the value could decrease to $0 overnight. Be safe, take some profits on the way up and put it towards gold and silver. Avoid trading too much in altcoins.

Thank you for your wise warning. It's very important to remember never to invest here more than one can afford to loose.

Having said that I think that the value of BTC as well as any altcoin's is based not only on pure believe in its value. Remember that to produce one coin you need to invest money and time. Money because of the electricity and mining equipment costs, time because you need to learn how to mine, how to cool your equipment and so on. That's why the price of any coin if its being run seriously will never go down to 0, the miner will just stop mining or selling what they have mined. Only in case of a catastrophic event, something you can see in the Hollywood films or read in sci-fi books, the cryptocurrency can become obsolete, but even in that case the price will not go to 0. The trading may basically stop because the infrastructures may be destroyed, and still maybe the people who have the cryptocurrency will be more lucky that those who have the fiat, for instance think about PPC, which seems to be created with a catastrophic scenario in mind.
Another possibility for the cryptoworld being destroyed is the active attack from the governments, but here we are not seeing any sign of movement in that direction. Think about Ethernish blockchain adopted by Russian and Chinese banks, while the Russian and Chinese government officially declare that they are not that happy with the cryptocurrencies. Think about USA senate that has once approved the use of BTCs or about EU commission that has officially declared BTC and any cryptocurrency a mean of payment.
It's still possible that a group of hackers creates a supercomputer to destroy the BTC blockchain? But why? Maybe once they have a supercomputer they could mine with it and make a lot of profits instead of destroying the blockchain without any benefit for them?
Maybe some critical issue with BTCs might be discovered. In that case we have hundreds of altcoins some of which are based on other schemes so maybe some of them will survive, or the BTCs issue may be patched quickly. And in any case the BTC structure has almost 10 years which is comparable to the existence time of internet. And I guess that nobody is seriously concerned about the possible internet collapse.
And of course if some of exchanges fail it's not a big issue for the whole cryptocurrency system. Think about MT-Gox, that was managing 80% of al BTC at some point and after its failure the cryptoworld seems to go on as before.