@TPTB: Isn't gambling on alts very risky long term since BTC could crash anytime ? I'm always scared into putting money in ETH or XMR because while I see them increasing in BTC price at certain times, they could also decline in term of USD... I missed the latest XMR rally because of that. I saw it coming but I thought : yeah it can go x2 but btc could go down to 150...
The only speculators who are consistently winning on altcoins are those who buy/mine them when they are worthless, and then selling them when they get pumped.
Long-term if you believe a particular altcoin has a feature set and adoption direction that will drive it to compete with Bitcoin, then perhaps you can justify a long-term holding and just ignore the gut wrenching volatility.
I believe perhaps the Chinese felt Ethereum would be a major coin and thus I believe they have thrown BTC at it. And I think many people mined ETH because it can be mined with a GPU, thus there are many people willing to evangelize it. So it was a self-fulfilling bubble because so many people got interested in it. I do believe it will end up like Litecoin and BTS did, because fundamentally AFAICS it doesn't add anything realistic that is a huge market. But it might be good for another move up to perhaps a double-top before we are done. Right now is maximum pessimism because Vitalik admitted he sold 25%. And Homestead hype is already released. But there is still the hype coming before the release of Casper (if we haven't preempted it with the Ethereum Paradox thread, but I doubt we have that power here in this obscure forum).
Right now all the CCs have to be analyzed in terms of what speculators want to buy and mine. The speculators are like a hive of bees and they move from one arbitrage to the next, not only on price but also on mining hash functions, etc..
There is a lot of game theory to analyze in this speculation ecosystem comprising Bitcoin and the altcoins.
I don't really know what to advise you. I would not short BTC. I am not that confident of a crash.
What I am doing is moving to cash USA dollars (because upside on speculation is limited to perhaps a 100% gain and I am more interested in preservation of capital for the moment and the US dollar should give me solid 30 - 50% gains if I hold to late 2017) and I want to buy an altcoin very cheap later this year or early 2017 to aim for 10 to 1000X long-term gain (not a pump). I think you can guess which altcoin I would want to buy because I would have the most confidence in my own role as a lead dev.
The lack of timeline in the fall of BTC makes me miss alot of profit !!!
It is easy to convince ourselves of the profit we would have made, because we ignore all the wrong speculations we would have also made. In retrospect our performance is perfect, lol.
@TPTB: I have a theory regarding ETH. We all thought wallstreets would wake up to BTC at some point and they would end up buying it from us. We all thought we were front running them. What if Wallstreet has another strategy ? they back coins such as ETH, and use their enormous positions to pump the price to agitate greed inside us so we give them our rare btcs for their unlimited eth ?
Excellent! Yeah the game theory is complex.