Quote from: pooya87 on December 10, 2017, 05:12:37 AM

altcoins are so funny. and i keep saying all of these alts are pump and dumps and they don't believe me. there are still so many people who think altcoins are the good for long term investment!

i mean look at these two screen shots!

bitcoin rises, they fall
bitcoin falls, they fall again this time harder

[]

Agreed over any long enough duration that is true for virtually all altcoins, but altcoins can appreciate very fast w.r.t. to BTC at some junctures and that is when one can increase their BTC if they are very astute about trading.

When I said buy LTC at $6, some people thought that meant HODL it until $150, but we traded in and out several times including selling at $85, re-entering at $44, selling some around $60s, buying more in $50s, then selling some (not all) again $150 (at 0.01 BTC). (Some think and maybe correctly that they should just HODL because LTC at $7 billion mcap is still very undervalued w.r.t. BCH and ETH, but they have been decimated w.r.t. to BTC as LTC had declined from a 2017 peak of 0.022 to 0.005)

For example, on the recent high some were selling BTC for LTC, and they doubled their BTC if they traded back.

Trading alts has tax implications. See also.

Quote from: CornCube on December 10, 2017, 08:22:43 PM

P.S. given the potential gain for BTC from the current level is ~3X (or maybe 5X at an extreme to $100+k), the altcoins are likely to moon soon and gain on BTC, because most of them have 10+ X gains potential before the next crypto winter.

Quote from: illinest on December 10, 2017, 07:04:10 AM

I'm pretty confident that Bitcoin will remain dominant in the cryptocurrency space. But not all altcoins are pump-and-dumps. And if you think that money will only flow into Bitcoin, I think you're mistaken. For every 40 or 50 coins that are launched, there is probably 1 or 2 long term protocols/suites that will become groundbreaking. Most 10,000x gains are not pump-and-dumps.

There are a lot of use cases that Bitcoin won't or can't address -- privacy, decentralized exchange, decentralized governance. There are entirely new methods for consensus that can, in time, compete with Bitcoin. I wouldn't write them all off, even if I think Bitcoin will capture more value than all of them in the long run. The market is diversifying, and I'm happy to go with it.

Agreed and there are two facets to this:

Investing in alts when theyre microcaps such as when I was saying Byteball had a unique consensus mechanism when it was a $1 million mcap and then it went to $250 million mcap.
Very special altcoin which would potentially exceed Bitcoin's mcap without killing it, might emphasize something other than the cryptocurrency and even we may already have an example.

Btw, I think decentralized governance is a lie.

Quote from: the_poet on December 10, 2017, 12:58:39 PM

Absolutely. I have always thought of alts as parasites that live on the back of Bitcoin.

Sorry but I must scold you for being egregiously myopic.

They grow the ecosystem! Just think how many people got interested in speculating on BTC because they were interested in speculating on an altcoin. All the PR on altcoins contributes to the snowball of market mass for crypto in general. Come on man! Not everyone are only interested in HODLing a better gold. Some are interested in smart contracts, decentralized blogging, Crypto Kitties, etc..