Don't consider as investment advice, just my own thoughts:
1st of all, investing in crypto is 100% speculation, 0% investing. I still do it though just for fun, for now, it has been working but all could be 0 tomorrow.
Coins to watch for:
NEO coin: it's the chinese ethereum, there's some talks in ICOs getting regulated there and its looked upon on being the "regulated ICO coin" sometime soon, speculation, but definitely performing well.
Bitcoin: just invest in the most stable one, why not?
Ethereum: smart contracts, the most stable also. Much better than bitcoin, just not as popular.
Monero: bitcoin, but fully anonymised. It's not so hard to trace bitcoin tx, but monero makes it sort of impossible.
Ripple: wants to kill SWIFT and partner up with a lot of banks, basically the "playing in the side of the banks" coin
Also, do your own research. Don't trust anyone. Avoid small coins if you aren't the person doing the pump and dump.
The only thing I would invest in is the IDEA. Blockchain is there to replace tons of industries, we just don't know yet how much time it's going to take, or who'll be the winner. It's very likely that the winner doesn't even exist.
It does more than Bitcoin because it allows the founders to rollback transactions from the ledger if they feel like it.
Sorry, a bit trollish but am I wrong? In theory Ethereum does promise a lot but in practice, we're yet to see much in terms of useful smart contracts. And as we can see from the DAO debacle, they've broken their claims of "Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference."
Any model that involves counterparty risk can be disrupted by the blockchain. Custodians who hold on to stocks while trades are properly settled or the hold on that cheque you deposited in your bank account.
Ethereum or Bitcoin for investing. They have real intrinsic value. Most the other currencies are just spin offs of the original deal or overly ambitious white papers with nothing implemented. Stay away from NEO.
NEO has the biggest hype of all. Westerners call it the "Chinese Ethereum". Yet nearly all the trading volume comes from the West. It's a joke comparing it to Ethereum. The white paper is incredibly ambitious, 90% of it is unimplemented. The GitHub activity looks comparable to a hobby project at best. The CEO is conveniently an advisor to all the ICO's that will use NEO. It's a pump and dump scheme. The best one there is. It has no intrinsic value because it doesn't solve any problems. Nothing is implemented other than a token distribution system hosted on a few servers. If you're interested in a coin like this you get in before the hype blows up, take your profit and park it somewhere safer like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Going in now would be a horrible decision.
Some of ny picks: elastic is a supercomputer that will release product probably during the month, QRL is a quantum resistant ledger that will do the same, NEO is te new ethereum, Monero is the only super private one and Ardor will release mainnet in Q4 with very solid child chain tech.
Investing in crypto is fantastically risky. The premise under which almost all investors view the asset is that it will be worth some multiple of where it is today, or zero.
To invest in any crypto you have to understand what separates each of them in terms of security from their counterparts. There is a significant amount of buzz that has no relationship to the value proposition of a given alt. I can think of only three (perhaps four explain later) cryptos that have any real ecosystem that isn't 100% controlled by the founders. That is bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum. Every other crypto is really just a crypto in name only.
In order to be a crypto in anything except name only you have to be able to validate transactions as they are attached to the blockchain of the crypto. Without doing this, all you have is an expensive distributed database, and when I say distributed, that's exactly the problem. Bitcoin is distributed. Every node holds a copy of the blockchain, and it is fantastically difficult to get each of these nodes to adopt consensus rules changes, especially changes that reduce the network security. That feature makes bitcoin more valuable than all other crypto currencies combined, because even if the most competent crypto open source development team, i.e. bitcoin core, chose to put forward a proposal that the node owners thought would reduce security, it would be rejected. No other crypto has this level of separation from the maintainers of the system, and the developers of the system.
In my opinion, unless you are a sophisticated trader, there is only one crypto worth investing in. If you are sophisticated trader, there will always be pump and dump schemes for new cryptos, and I expect there is a lot of money to be made. But that seems little more than gambling.
It is possible that the offshoots of some of these cryptos might gain traction. Bitcoin cash provides no real security because its node decentralization is almost non-existent, and it is controlled by a small group of miners, perhaps only even one. They can change the rules at any time. Same goes for Ethereum really. Vitalik Buderim might just to modify the consensus rules, and there's very little anyone could do about it. People will blindly follow him. But with bitcoin cash, it is possible that the chinese government will capture bitcoin cash, given it would only need to capture one company that exists in its country, and dictate that that is the crypto that must be used. Maybe that will make it more valuable? Maybe it won't? Can't say. It seems a big risk to me though.
So unless you really understand or believe in the value proposition of a crypto, and understand how it can be protected from capture, it's best to steer clear of all of them. There is only one crypto, bitcoin, that you can reasonably download and run a node, and ensure that your crypto is secure, at least in the short to medium term.
1st of all, investing in crypto is 100% speculation, 0% investing. I still do it though just for fun, for now, it has been working but all could be 0 tomorrow.
Coins to watch for:
NEO coin: it's the chinese ethereum, there's some talks in ICOs getting regulated there and its looked upon on being the "regulated ICO coin" sometime soon, speculation, but definitely performing well.
Bitcoin: just invest in the most stable one, why not?
Ethereum: smart contracts, the most stable also. Much better than bitcoin, just not as popular.
Monero: bitcoin, but fully anonymised. It's not so hard to trace bitcoin tx, but monero makes it sort of impossible.
Ripple: wants to kill SWIFT and partner up with a lot of banks, basically the "playing in the side of the banks" coin
Also, do your own research. Don't trust anyone. Avoid small coins if you aren't the person doing the pump and dump.
The only thing I would invest in is the IDEA. Blockchain is there to replace tons of industries, we just don't know yet how much time it's going to take, or who'll be the winner. It's very likely that the winner doesn't even exist.