When people talk about trading bitcoin does anyone just literally buy and sell at the right times rather than deal with futures like shorting etc..
When people talk about trading, they usually mean spot trading, i.e. buying and selling with your own money, without additional liquidity and long/short positions.
You can sell and take a big loss or face having to stay off for a few weeks until price recovers
To my mind, it's better to stay off for a few weeks or months or whatever it takes instead of risking much. No one should turn trading into gambling because both of these are different with different discipline.
Altcoin in futures, for me, is risky because of the high price movement compared to Bitcoin. Usually, what I see is that there are more retail traders who do futures with Bitcoin than altcoin because it is less manipulated than altcoin.
If you are one of those who trade with altcoins in futures, you are one of those risk takers, but if they are successful, the potential profit is massive.
Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized crypto currency. Every altcoin is a dangerous option for futures trading because all of them have centralized power at some point while Bitcoin is massively adopted, has unknown creator and has the highest market cap, which makes its manipulation very hard at greater level.