It's based on nothing by hype and speculation. People may argue that "it's based on the founders and how reputable they are, based on their future usage". But it's all pure and utter BS used for marketing.

This. Even Jordan Belfort said something similar. It’s something that has absolutely no value.

it's all pump and dump, so you pick the newest one, buy low, then sell a day or two after it has went to the moon, and repeat with a new one.

I remember 3-4 years ago, a new altcoin was being released like every 3-4 days and people would dump their BTC and ETH into them during their IPO only for 95% to end up as scams. The dumb "investors" lost their BTC and ETH while the fraud founders took off with them into the sunset

hi OP

crypto fanatic here.

You can approach this in two ways:

Fundamentals: You need to understand crypto inside and out and fully geek out on this chit and develop a thesis on why you think a certain coin will appreciate in value in the future. To be honest, this is just speculation, there is no way around it. Imagine you are in 1996 and you have all these new internet companies popping up and you're analyzing each one of them trying to see which one will blow up in the future. Pretty damn hard to do. The vast majority of these companies failed. However, if you're real tech savvy and smart, you can probably see something most people don't see. That being said, with the number of investors in the tech bubble, it's hard to really say whether the successful ones succeeded as a result of intelligence and knowledge or pure luck.

Pump & Dump: This is pertty much gambling. Go on reddit or any other crypto forum and see what everyone is talking about. The coins that everyone is hyping up will likely go up in the short term. If you're lucky enough to enter a trade at a good time and LEAVE before everyone else does, you can make money. This is basically gambling, srs. The best way to go about this is to trade money you don't care about losing because when you do that, you will be less emotional about things and will more likely enter and exit trades at a good time. That being said, there are perhaps millions of crypto traders in the world right now, but only like a dozen to a few hundred who actually got rich from it, so do the math.