My wife always opposed investing money in the stock market.
Have you seen the movie "The Big Short"? Well, that's the cause: everything can happen in Wall Street, big money can manipulate the market and the small investors are always the one paying for all (or, in the worst case, public money is used to cover the debts).
Is the Crypto market so different? Yes and no.
Yes because the people who are investing in crypto are not there only to earn money; some of us believes in the technology, some of us are geeks that know that Cryptocurrency could be the future. It's different because the Crypto market is much smaller than the Stock (in terms of volume) and because we don't know exactly why some currency is going down 30% and others up to 40%.
But it's very similar to the Stock market because, usually, is the small investor that's losing money in this game. Maybe because of bad choices, inexperience or simply bad luck.
In the past months I saw a lot of people curse the crypto "X" because it made them lose a lot of money. Same thing happened during the ICOs, where people got tricked and lost their investment. I suppose that is exactly the reason why some countries are banning ICOs and why there is so much diffidence about Bitcoins, Ethereum and so on.
But the point is: there is no diffidence in the stock market. Nobody banned CDOs or questioned the Subprime loans where it was clear that was a scam. People is continuously losing money on the stock market investing in fake assets or wrong credit rating assessments. Why losing money on Crypto should be avoided "by Law" but you can lose everything in other forms of investments?
The second point is: it is not important WHERE you invest your money, there is always a risk in every market. So, please, think carefully about what you are doing when investing your son's college savings in EOS or IOTA. Please, only invest what you can afford to lose... and remember that if you lose money, you are losing it because YOU decided to invest.
Be safe and happy,
Gianluccio