Actually it feels like gambling
…you pick a coin/token/ico that has been promoted/mentioned somewhere on the social media (reddit/twitter/youtube/slack etc.)…you navigate to the website… website must be looking very very cool …you start reading the whitepaper and you might think that’s interesting…then you look at the team members and try to make something out of that team…check also the advisers on that team (their role is to boost the potential investor morale and increase credibility)…later you might check the github repository and look for activity…commits/contributors etc…and then maybe you buy some coins/tokens and hope for a moon ride 😊
If all of the above were carefully analyzed, there is no way to guess if the project will hold in the future…promises and milestones on the whitepaper will be delivered, team members will not lose interest, the team will hold together will get stronger and will not migrate to other more interesting projects, functionality/scalability/sustainability matters will be solved and of course the ultimately success, an eventual mass adoption based on practical use cases.
With all that said, I do believe that the so called crypto revolution is actually happening and it is obvious that the most innovative and smart people in the world are working into this space…however we are still very far away from mass adoption and we are left only with speculations. After all, HODL might not work at some point…but this is the risk and the people who embarked onto this journey should be aware of that.