The altcoin crowd insists that people with a lot of bitcoins can and do "diversify" their cryptocurrency holdings by exchanging them for altcoins, thus making bitcoin somewhat of a "reserve" cryptocurrency.

This would also give those mining altcoins a nice market to convert their coins to btc and subsequently cash out.

I guess the question is, if bitcoin drops, will everything drop? Or will spreading your stake around the altcoin minefiled be enough to protect against huge losses?