To make it clear and honest from the start, I am in no way an experienced crypto-invester. But I have experience in investing in traditional currencies, stocks, bonds, p2p loans, crowdfunding; and I have used robo-advisor platforms. More importantly, I have been heavily involved in fintech and adtech industries in my professional career.
Most analyses of crypto-currencies online seem to treat them as bandwagons to jump based on their popularity. Otherwise they are treated as other asset classes like stocks, which is not consistent. Or even more extreme, many treat crypto-currencies as their favourite football team and defend them emotionally (surprisingly, this approach is actually value-bringing). I haven't come across many analyses based on what additional ease a crypto-currency brings to the end users.
From what I can see, there are four types of crypto currencies out there: Scams, opportunists, blockchain-value-adders, user-value-adders.
Scams: There are dozens, if not hundreds of them. Usually an analysis on the founders, their whitepapers and checking forums help to eliminate most of them; but there might still be sophisticated ones that might make it into your pocket. Tricky.
Opportunists: These are those that cause the bubble. They saw the opportunity in crypto-currencies, so they created their own. That's it. There is not a strong business case (or use case) to why this currency will bring any value. But the funny part is; as the developers are running it, they might actually pivot and make a real business case and become a real successful currency in the end, without even shooting for that in the beginning. But majority of them will probably fail either due to funding or security issues.
Blockchain-mania: Majority of the crypto-currencies that are founded by a popular tech person fall under this category. Blockchain is definitely an interesting technology; and I understand the value these currencies might bring to the world. Seamless transactions, significantly lower costs of storing/transferring data, taking out the middlemen from the equation. I get it. My problem with these coins is that they are not really affecting the end user IMMEDIATELY.
Coming from financial industry, trust me when I say this; end users will take an enormous amount of time before they understand this technology. More importantly, I know, blockchain is supposedly more reliable, but it is also less tested (this is why experts are STILL having discussions about this topic). I doubt end users will trust really soon. My reference point for "soon" is around 10 years. After that, consumer adaptation might be more likely.
User-powered: Now this is where things get really interesting. Some of the crypto-currencies not only utilise the advantages of blockchain technology, but they also affect the end users immediately, creating value out of the service they are providing.
Consider Steem. This platform enables content generators to get direct value from their content. End users therefore can enjoy more high quality content. Of course it has problems with upvote-mafias and sometimes low-quality content. But with enough data, comes more solutions to optimise the usage.
Another interesting crypto-currency I came across recently is JSEcoin. The security of the blocks are maintained by users when their browsers are finding the hashes and mining the coins. This allows webmasters to earn coins from their website visitors' browsers. I've been in digital media space for a while and I find this quite genius. One of the biggest problems in online media today is the constant fight between end-users who want to see as minimum ads as possible (I am one of them) and content-providers who want to maintain their costs via ads customised by marketing people (I am also one of them). This solution opens up a new revenue stream for the content providers. Not only this is a new "option" for end users when browsing, it's also a less-disturbing one.
Noticing the trend? These two examples are utilising crowd's direct activity, instead of just changing the company infrastructure from centralised to decentralised. And they generate unique value. Other interesting projects in my view will be those that are potentially using the crowd's interests and activities, or even their personal values. Sharing economy networks, user-data needing platforms, such as predictive algorithm platforms or survey platforms are some examples. While my knowledge in this space is limited, to me projects like Gnosis or MusiCoin or 21.co seem promising.
In my opinion, a regular business that's utilising blockchain to store and seamlessly transfer its data (instead of doing it slightly more costly in a centralised database) is less promising than a startup that solves a huge problem in digital-media space. This is by no means an investment advice; the last thing I would want to cause is a well-intending person losing money. But if I allocated a few cents to "crypto-currency investment", I'll put them into the currencies that bring value.
Everyone is chasing the money that doesn't require any effort. The cryptocurrencies of 2030 will be real value-exchanges. And "value" either gets created by humans through actual work (blogging on Steem) or it's exchanged by another human-generated value (dollar, gold, bitcoin, energy, computer power, or an asset like a machine). Without exchanging your EFFORT, there is no added value.
Let me know what you think in the comments; and also write if you know any other value-adding cryptocurrencies.