I do think the biggest lesson when you first arrive into the crypto world is to pay careful attention to what is happening. The second biggest lesson is to avoid social media as lets be honest 99% are idiots shilling their own bags and there is so little information.
The quicker you become more knowledgeable and aware the quicker you are to eliminating the risk in crypto. Every investment has risk involved, but there are definitely different categories. We often here the term the "higher the risk the higher the reward" which is not necessarily true. If a project has no use cases then it is not a risk, but a liability doomed to fail. Short term you may earn some profits, but a long term hold will only end in tears.
I firmly believe if you spend the time studying crypto projects you will start to understand which projects are viable and which ones are not. Over the last year I have averaged a good two hours every day dedicated to studying various crypto projects and to be honest what is so shocking is how few are investable.
There are too many red flags with a majority of the tokens yet so many have invested their hard earned money into these projects. I have often wondered why this is the case and believe in the last bull run things were just too easy as everything went up and it didn't matter if there was a use case or not. Those days are slowly changing however and there will be a clear difference from those that have a use case and those that don't.
There has to come a time when a project starts to increase in value from pure demand and not whether Bitcoin increased in price. If companies need x amount of a particular token to do business on a blockchain performing certain tasks they will just purchase them out of need. This is a need by creating a demand and is the real purpose of a blockchain and where these real every day use cases are going. Price will have no baring on the purchase as they are not investors as such as they will not be holding these tokens, but burning them paying for fees.
You often here the ignorant mention market cap with token values and this has nothing to do with what we have seen in the past. There is no reason the proper every day use projects could dominate the top 10 in overall market cap valuations as they off more dollar value than 90% of the rubbish projects.
Any normal business that had a failed business plan would soon be found out and what amazes me is so many are invested in these projects. Time will tell as who will be standing come 2030 will be an eye opener and how many "investors" have lost their early advantage by backing the wrong horse.
The time spent researching will pay off 100x or more when the certain projects start to take off. This will not be down to luck as there is no luck when you are informed as you have eliminated a huge percentage of the risk.