Altcoins can be a very good way to get more BTC though. There is no reason to hold on to BTC just because you believe it will win in the end.
I'm not just talking about Pump and dump coins - many alts can compete with and beat BTC for long periods of time. The end goal is to accumulate more BTC as well as the few altcoins you believe in.
Altcoins are great for another reason - experienced traders have pretty much cornered the BTC market. If you try to trade there, you will end up losing your money, unless you make obvious trades like buying at $7000 the past week.
Pick a small altcoin (I choose Oyster (PRL)), and you can win in virtually all trades with just a mediocre amount of skill, since you're not competing against veteran Bitcoiners, but rather FOMO'ers who happened to pick something that didn't lose all of its value during the dump.
By trading during the alt-dump to acquire more alt, then selling the alts for BTC after a large pump (alts recover more), I have earned over 2 BTC in the last 2 weeks. It may not be impressive to some here, but 2 BTC is very decent money for me.
(I'm someone who frequented this thread recently - my password was changed though, and my account locked ?)
Get the fuck out of here with your alt coin pumping and your baloney about the supposed benefits of alts versus the supposed "professional" trading on BTC.
Yeah, you may be able to increase your BTC through alts; however, you might also decrease your BTC through alts- so you are suggesting some whimsical and non-specified advice for gambling with alts... and you have not even described how the technique is supposed to work exactly to both 1) identify the alt that you want to trade, 2) time the trading, 3) make sure that you do not get scammed because there are a lot of alt coin scams out there, 4) make sure that you do not get locked into the alt.. sometimes it can be easier to get into alts, but getting out might be more challenging and 5) any other alt coin trick that may be helpful in figuring out what to do and when to do it.
You have given me practical advice in the past (which was an psuedo-algorithm on selling on rises and buying on dips), so I will consider your advice.
Of course, it's not my intention to pump any alt or tell anyone that they must do this to make a lot of profit, and I fully believe that I would get beaten up pretty badly in trading BTC-USD pairings, which trading BTC-sub100 alts has been pretty good.
I actually do all of what you have listed - I go check out an alt and do quite a bit of research, especially on their community, and the hype of the coin. It's quite a bit of work, but after that, I get to trade vs. the FOMO'ers who are impatient and brand new to crypto.
This is particularly good for coins that have been around in only the past few months.
I have not had issues with getting locked into alts, since I am a small-time trader - I can offload my altcoins rather quickly.
This is an area in which I will have to burned first before I quit.
Well, all the more power to you, if you are able to trade alts and to gain BTC through such trades; however, such a trading alts to increase your BTC is far from a given, even if it has worked in the past. It remains difficult to recognize a pattern, and is likely a more risky and complicated a practice that is not even very relevant to this thread unless there were some obvious BTC/Alt/USD connection, which there is not.