Unfortunately, as is becoming more and more true in our pretty weird modern inter-connected world there's no substitute for getting your own hands dirty, reading primary sources and trying to understand what's true and what's bullshit yourself. Only then can you really evaluate who is worth listening to and what is actually interesting (I found the above stuff I linked to be good, but you should judge them for yourself).
The 'investment' bit is kind of secondary (https://soliditylang.org/), I personally think BTC, ETH, and Coinbase stock are the main long term bets - other stuff has extreme risk and requires a lot of attention to know if it's worthwhile or not. I do think the ZCash privacy model is cool.
Basically, I wouldn't invest unless you're going to sort through the nonsense yourself. Though like any investing the stuff where the value is harder to see is also where the bigger returns are (and the bigger failures).
DYOR (Do Your Own Research), don't fomo into coins just because they are pumping in price. Read through their code (or how many contributors, how much contributions it gets, etc) which is something that you can't do with current financial system and if any of those projects don't open source their code, stay as far away as possible. Inspect the on-chain data to see how much is it actually used, etc. Look at Google Trends, look at their community sizes, etc.
There's a lot of datapoints that you can use or you can find reliable people and rely on their judgments. Also, if you're simply looking for investment, you can't go wrong with BTC/ETH portfolio, they have been proven to work over many years now and most of the remaining altcoins are correlated with them in price anyways.
Honestly I would avoid asking Internet forums for advice, you paint yourself as a target
HN is probably fine, I just feel bad for anyone who learns about crypto on YouTube and asks a newbie question in the comments - they are swarmed by bot armies recommending “investment strategies” over WhatsApp
You can do a quick search to have the answers to all these simple questions, it has about ~200k transactions per day which settles about ~2B$ worth of Bitcoin a day (which is up very significantly since last year and down quite a bit from few months ago).
Are you trying to argue that transaction capacity is the most important metric?
If so, then you don't want Bitcoin. You can use Paypal.
However if you want to own an asset that can't be debased by central banks, where your transactions can't be censored, where you can participate from anywhere geographically, then you might want Bitcoin.
Those features come at a transaction capacity tradeoff.
I'm not trying to argue that transaction capacity is the most important metric, but it's a metric you yourself mentioned as important and it's a metric I have not been able to verify for many cryptocurrencies I've looked at.
If you say "Choose proven cryptocurrencies with transactions" I am going to assume you don't mean ten transactions/day.
I do not think it is unreasonable to ask "How many people are actually transacting with this cryptocurrency?".
Unfortunately, as is becoming more and more true in our pretty weird modern inter-connected world there's no substitute for getting your own hands dirty, reading primary sources and trying to understand what's true and what's bullshit yourself. Only then can you really evaluate who is worth listening to and what is actually interesting (I found the above stuff I linked to be good, but you should judge them for yourself).
The 'investment' bit is kind of secondary (https://soliditylang.org/), I personally think BTC, ETH, and Coinbase stock are the main long term bets - other stuff has extreme risk and requires a lot of attention to know if it's worthwhile or not. I do think the ZCash privacy model is cool.
Basically, I wouldn't invest unless you're going to sort through the nonsense yourself. Though like any investing the stuff where the value is harder to see is also where the bigger returns are (and the bigger failures).