According to CoinGecko, there are over 2.5 million cryptocurrencies (read more here:
https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/how-many-cryptocurrencies-are-there).
Whilst these are classified as cryptocurrencies, the reality is that the majority of these are actually just tokens, primarily on the Ethereum or Solana Blockchains.
Almost all (99.9%+ based on my opinion) of these are coins or tokens that have no purpose, and provide no value. They are centralised, have often unlimited supply or have been pre-mined with distributions allocated to the owners. The only intention of these projects is to make the creators richer, and take value away from everyone else.
The 1000th cryptocurrency by market capitalisation is GYEN with a market capitalisation of $13.38M according to CoinMarketCap (read more here:
https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/). Therefore, these 2.499m remaining coins clearly have any negligible valuation in the market, and should just be considered trash.
Whilst it can be easy to see that a significant portions of these coins are either scams, pump and dumps, or have had their daily volume manipulated to appear like speculative investments, there are still a lot of other coins, even in the top 1000 that you should be cautious of.
Some of the highest market capitalisation alt coins, still do not provide the real world value that their white papers have intended. Whilst yes there may be a few examples of real world use cases using the technology, how many holders of the coin actually use it for its desired functional purpose, rather than just sitting on it and hoping the price increases so they can sell? These are speculators and traders, and not investors. You do not want to hold something which others are primarily speculating on.
Let's also take BNB as an example. A market capitalisation of $86.74 Billion and ranked as the #4 coin overall. It is developed and owned by a private company, Binance. Their objective primarily is profit for their company. Yes the owners have alterior and philosophical plans, but ultimately they need to keep their company profitable. They have offered some technologies, like Binance Smart Chain, and they have their own exchange, but we cannot forget that they MUST turn a profit on their projects as an organisation, and releasing a coin like BNB is to benefit THEIR interests primarily. They can and will change things as they please, you do not want to hold something where the rules can change at any moment.
The same applies to many other top coins even with $100m+ market caps. You must ask yourself when you are investing your money, is the intention of the project to actually make a meaningful difference or change to society, and is it following through in the current day on that objective?
Currently the only option to invest in and hold over the long term is Bitcoin. It is the only truely decentralised cryptocurrency, with a finite supply and being used for its original intention on a regular basis - a storage of wealth that is not impacted by inflation, and the ease of making borderless transactions.
What I am ultimately getting at here in the theme of my post is that there is no other coin besides Bitcoin, which you can trust can be held over the long term. What are your thoughts?