You've made some good points here. I've long suspected that coins held on exchanges are not the real thing, merely placeholders backed by something else as you've mentioned. I also think it's time that exchanges find / create a way to buy alts directly without having to go through BTC. I can use @blocktrades to exchange quite a few different types of crypto (LTC, BCH, ETH, etc) for Steem if sent to one's wallet here, but a lot of the major exchanges force the user to use BTC to buy anything.

This creates a huge tax reporting burden for people in the United States (if people report their taxes like they're supposed to) since you have to report each time you buy and sell BTC (and selling now includes coin for coin trades now thanks to the scumbags in our government who snuck that clause in the tax bill in mid December 2017).

For people who dollar cost average in alts, this poses a huge burden since they have to report every trade that's made to get from fiat currency to the final destination (whatever altcoin you intend to buy). This has led me to buy less frequently because I believe at some point the exchanges will be required to report trading activity to the US govt (namely the IRS) and we'll have no choice but to report every single capital gain and loss even if we just held the bitcoin long enough after buying it to send it somewhere else and trade it for what we really wanted in the first place.

I think BTC dominance is BS. I don't have anything against BTC but I don't like that the whole freakin crypto market follows bitcoin's every move because of the ridiculous news cycle and all these high strung wanna be investors who panic sell at every little negative piece of news.

I remember six months ago it wasn't this way...alts tended to move opposite of BTC in general but now due to larger adoption they all move together. Idk if it's just dumb money that makes it this way or what but I don't like it one bit. Each coin should move on its own merits, not based on the movement of crypto version 1.0...