I am starting to realise how much altcoins are affected by 'buying the rumour and selling the news.'
Cryptos have no business right now realistically speaking. It's
only speculation driving the prices. The speculation that some of this technologies might have a business some day, some utility, that most certainly they don't have right now.
Outside of Bitcoin you can use in some online shops and few anon cryptos used over tor, there's little to no use of cryptos.
The technology has still very serious problems for mass adoptions and is absolutely not practical.
We're the new dot com bubble, there's a giant over valuation over stuff that has
no business, no use, no applications.
Dapps, smart contracts, it's all a mass of bullshit in its embryonic state.
99% of the coins we mine and buy will fall, very hard. Only few will remain and if you know which will then you may be a millionaire in a decade even investing a modest sum.
But chances are most of us won't have shit, and the people that made money are those that speculated well in time before the crash will come.
This is a terrific time to speculate (as you basically point in your post), it's a terrible time to invest.
Because be real, 99 % of people buying this stuff doesn't even read the white paper, doesn't read the code, doesn't make sound investment decisions.
I invested few thousands in cryptos and I mine a bit, I'm confident that I
may make some very good money, but there's a huge chance all of my investments will be worth few hundreds of dollars and I'll lose pretty much everything.
And we didn't even start speaking about possible regulations that may come when and if governments will start tackling and regulating cryptos and be sure they will.
Cryptos will be the new economy, someday, but in what form, how, that we don't know for sure. There's plenty of believers and people that tell you that they know what will be big, but they don't know shit.
They dream and speculate.
As Benjamin Graham (Columbia's finance professor of Warren Buffet say) markets tell you the price, but not the value of a stock (replace stock with coin).
The value of what we are investing is extremely hard to understand. Because this "new economy" isn't generating anything of use at the moment.