I something bad happens to bitcoin, altcoins are the least safe place to get hide. Haven't you figured that out yet? In a bull market, altcoins (certain) are making the most money, in a bear market it is the opposite. If you have concerns, stay with FIAT. No altcoin is safe.
You are correct mindrust - and there is wide-spread faulty logic that alts are going to be a safe haven in the event that there is some kind of bitcoin demise.
Probably the odds of such a bet is less than 20% - even though there a lot of folks taking that bet, as if it were a lot more favorable, such as 80%
Alts are not safe. Bitcoin will be the canary in the mine. If bitcoin proves to the clueless masses that a decentralized form of money cannot work due to social dynamics and essentially human psychology than do you think they will continue to have faith in these altcoins that operate on the same basic principles of dynamic social co-operation as bitcoin? I doubt they will. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and it will be held as a reference point. Eliminating the "human psychology" risk from any structure built by humans and used by them is going to take a genius of epic proportions. Maybe in the future when we'll have AI this AI will hopefully be nice enough to build for us a cryptocurrency or at the very least manage it, cause everything we humans do is messy and we're bound to fuck it up somehow, someway, and sometime.
The other thing we must keep in mind is that the only reason some of these altcoins exist is because the entry into the btc sphere is so expensive - ie some people just cannot afford to grab a stake in btc. If btc tanks the average Joe is going to be thinking "well shit, if this bullshit can happen with bitcoin the same thing can happen with my shitcoin too! I better sell right away before I lose my entire life savings that I invested in this shitcoin in the hope that I will be a billionaire!"
So in a more verbose way I am just basically agreeing with you guys on this one - altcoins are not a safe haven if the bitcoin titanic crashes into an iceberg.