It seems really disingenuous to talk about market caps in cryptocurrencies. The US dollar doesn't have a market cap. No currency does. Market cap is the markets valuation of a company. The term is used to contrast it against their actual valuation. The use in crypto is just a mechanism to dress them up like stocks.<p>If you call these currencies, then you need to recognize that they are extremely deflationary and will never be used as fiat currencies are. If you call them speculative investments, you need to realize they're not backed by any actual value.<p>I haven't done a deep dive on Ethereum yet, so this is mostly addressing Bitcoin and all its derivatives.
One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental impact. I am a bit surprised to see the environment-friendly silicon valley getting excited by such an energy-wasting protocol. If we have to burn CPUs reversing hashes every time someone makes a payment, we should start building new coal and nuclear power plants now.
Is there some meta-miner project you can use to mine a few of every not-obviously-garbage new coin, then stop, just in case they turn out to be worth something?
I invested a small (hundreds) into Ethereum and a few other coins earlier this year. They've since doubled in value. I can imagine if you were a very high risk investor and believed in crypto's right now you could be making a lot of money.
I don't mean to say that all coins are valuable. But it does ressemble another gold rush. Do some remember the domain name craze 20 years ago? Any kid smart enough to have bought generic domain names back then made lots of money.