Intro: (Remember, I can't give you investment advice. This is my interpretation of the crypto market as of Jan 2019.)
I'm now convinced the bull market of 2017 was initiated not by Bitcoin but by Ethereum's ICO bubble. In order to buy Ethereum people had to buy Bitcoin for a long time. In order to participate in ICOs people had to buy Ethereum for a long time. As a result most crypto new volume would have had to go through either Bitcoin or Ethereum. As a result Ethereum and Bitcoin were considered safe bets, long term holds, etc.
Now we see Bitcoin is in a bear cycle. This bear cycle could last until the next block reward halving (2020). Analysts are even saying it's time to GTFO of BTC. I do not think these analysts are wrong. I think it is time to GFTO of BTC. Specifically, I think it is time to GTFO of BTC and into crypto using a diversified portfolio strategy. In a market where BTC dominance is over 50% I have to assume it's a manipulated market (particularly when BTC price activity drags down viable/profitable crypto projects). I do not see this state of affairs of BTC price manipulation dragging down the industry through maintained BTC dominance lasting for all of 2019.
Maybe Bitcoin is dead for 2019-2020; what to do about it?
Bitcoin probably is dead for most of 2019 and into 2020. The problem with Bitcoin is that the main use of it is speculation. The problem with that is that speculation waves come in cycles (boom and bust, bubble and winter, bull and bear). Crypto (including projects like Steem) actually do have potential real world utility far beyond speculation. There are projects like iExec, Enigma, Steem, Tron, EOS, Ethereum, Tezos, which can do things Bitcoin isn't design for and can't do in 2019-2020. The main thing holding back the growth of these alternatives is the fact that most lacked scalability.
Bitcoin is now in a long term down cycle and the market at this time appears to still be in the panic phase. Eventually panic wears off and panic fatigue sets in. At some point an alt project is going to take Bitcoin's place as people get out of BTC.
Right now BTC market dominance is over 50%. This to me indicates market manipulation because it's not an organic 50% and it is very correlated with the initiation of the bear market trend. In other words I don't think the mainstream investor who bought altcoins in late 2017 only to then put it into BTC in 2018 but more likely leveraged professional investor types and traders. I also see unusual volatility beyond what we could expect from mainstream investors (wild price swings which appear to be from leveraged shorting and similar activities).
Eventually the people shorting BTC will get out of BTC entirely (capitulation) and that is good for the market. Eventually the professional traders will get bored of BTC and leave it alone. But the crypto market as a whole being tethered to BTC is in a way making it easier for manipulation of the industry and entire market. Just by shorting BTC (with leveraged funds) it can draft down a market overly correlated to BTC. Just as we can see a BTC crash (Bitcoin Cash War) draft down the entire crypto market.
I predict sometime in this year the majority of incoming investments will stop flowing into BTC. In fact some pro investors already are saying it's almost time to get out of BTC. This doesn't mean get out of crypto, but out of BTC. This means a new crypto might finally take BTC's place this year and I have no idea what that will be. It is also possible that BTC might just stay around the same price for most of 2019 and altcoins and side projects take most of the incoming volume.
The Flippening is coming
I think the Flippening is now inevitable. BTC dominance at this time is 52.9%. It is only this high because the other crypto projects until very recently could not scale to take on the load (Ethereum, etc). Now we are seeing scalability problems being solved at an increasing frequency not just for Ethereum but for the entire crypto space. At the same time we are seeing improvements to privacy, to security, to development (with wasm). In my opinion the only thing holding back the Flippening is the fact that scalability and privacy needed improvement.
In a matter of days Ethereum will bring the Constantinople upgrade online. This upgrade is the first phase toward the necessary scalability improvements for Ethereum to reach in my opinion a potential 100 billion market cap. Currently the Bitcoin market cap is around 62 billion. Institutional investment will have an on-ramp into Ethereum due to custody solutions and platforms like Bakkt. Ethereum in my opinion has much better economics for a huge bubble and I base it on the ICO bubble we saw.
ICOs are just one app we saw on Ethereum and it brought crypto to almost a trillion dollar market cap. Now there is the gaming market where people can earn and spend crypto, the financial derivatives market (far bigger than ICOs), there are all sorts of potential supply sinks for Ethereum via auctions. I don't just think Ethereum could take the spot but the top 6 could be shared to include Ethereum, EOS, Tron, Tezos, Ripple, etc. The point is, I think it will be the dapps and these platforms which drive volume back into crypto.
I do not think the market will wait until 2020 for the BTC reward halving (although I could be wrong). I don't think the market will wait because I don't see from the adoption data that adoption is waiting on Bitcoin. As long as more people are using crypto regularly, and as long as the technical barriers are removed (scalability, privacy, security), then I see it only as a matter of time. Speculators follow the money, and the money flows to what the world finds useful at the time.