I believe that crypto-currencies are going through somewhat of an evolutionary cycle. Bitcoin was what one may call the first 'form of life', but now that life is here and established, an explosion of life has occurred (currently like a thousand 'altcoins' floating around, with ICO's happening so fast it's hard to keep up-ICO stands for 'Initial Coin Offering', which is basically a lot like it's cousin IPO-Initial Public Offering-in the stock world). These ICO's will produce crypto's or 'tokens', and provide the funding for the company, and a supposed 'opportunity' for the investor to make a good profit. However, just like in nature, many of these new life forms will die off, taking huge sums of money with them!
It seems to be true that crypto-currencies are 'evolving' the way money is exchanged. A lot of people don't realize it yet, but the evolution of money that's taking place is from physical, paper money or so-called 'fiat' currency to digital based transmission/negotiation systems like bitcoin, ethereum, etc. The reason it may not be obvious to most yet is because the government isn't involved in issuing the currency, but all of that is yet to come!
Obviously, there is lots of 'money' to be won or lost during this evolution. Many will thrive and survive, many will fail and go bust. I'm no expert, but some of the things I consider are:
Does the project have a whitepaper outlining what the project is
about, a timeline of development, etc. (and does it contain info like pow (proof of work) pos(proof of stake) implementation?
Or what sort of hashing algorithm,etc. Bitcoin, for example, is based
on pow and sha256.
Does it have, as best as one can ascertain, a reputable team behind it?
Does the project make common sense to you, as in you can see a clear vision of what the project is about, where it's going in
the future, and whether there is any profit/loss potential?
Also, one other thing you should consider is the laws in your country, and how you invest your money interacts with these
laws (for example, in the U.S., we have the SEC-securities and exchange commission-and in China,
they are in the process of restricting ICO's in some way, if not all out banning a lot of them).
Another thing mostly unknown to people is just how easy it is to 'fork' a particular software coin implementation into another. It's not extremely easy, but it's also not rocket science either. All it really takes is a little programming know-how to copy an existing altcoin and create a new, unique fork of the code. So without solid ideas and concepts, and solid people behind it, all a 'coin' is is a piece of useless software created object! Github is a good site to browse through some of tthese forks.
So the future is bright, and we will continue to see this evolution for some years to come, until a far off future date when crypto-currencies will replace traditional currencies! And there is money to be made in these 'early' crypto-currency times, but one has to use common sense and good judgment, but also don't be afraid to take a chance on something if it seems right!
