If you bought $100 worth of bitcoin at the beginning of the year, you'd be sitting on $200 right now. If you bought $100 worth of bitcoin at the beginning of the month, you'd be sitting on $125 right now. If you bought $100 worth of ethereum at the beginning of the year, you'd be sitting on $2500 right now. If you bought $100 worth of ethereum at the beginning of the month, you'd be sitting on $228 right now. CNBC and the like love to talk about bitcoin because they know you've heard of it. The other crazy altcoins? They don't even have time to explain what they are (If you bought $100 worth of ripple at the beginning of the month, you'd have $600 right now - WTF is ripple!??!??)This is one reason why I really don't like playing with cryptocurrency - the efficient-market hypothesis suggests that items being traded are priced with everyone knowing everything there is to know about the underlying values and if you don't know why something is rising or falling, it's because you're in the dark, not because everyone else is wrong. But you look at something like Bitcoin where fewer than 200,000 people in the entire world own any and some unknown quantity of it is in the possession of Chinese Tongs and where the world's largest holders are anonymous and the efficient market hypothesis is a joke. And then you look at number 2 Ethereum and it's a quarter of that and some chucklefuck like me, who bought in at 70 cents, can splash around big trades that spook people and move the market because there are so few players and so much inflated value. And then you look at number 3 ripple and the market share is a tenth that of Ethereum and those guys might as well be trading marbles except they never have to own any so they can have a virtual warehouse full of aggies and cateyes and trade them back and forth every twenty minutes if they wanted.