Are you looking for a fast buck or a long-term investment? If you want to be a trader and flip the coins to make some quick cash it's a pretty dicey time for that and play at your own risk. If you want to invest and hang on to it for a year or two then it's a good time to buy. kleinbl00 has some great advice -- especially his point that anyone giving advice should be sure to include: invest knowing the price could go to zero. When I buy I always expect the price to drop right away and it doesn't bother me when it does.

Here's some advice I posted on cryptocompare last week:

You can be a trader or a holder. Trading is very stressful. When the price is going up you don’t want to sell because you’re sure this is “the big one.” When the price is going down you don’t want to buy because you’re sure it’s going to go even lower. You miss the top point. You miss the bottom point. You feel like you’re wrong about everything. You can make money on it (and we hope you do!), but it’s pretty damn stressful.

Want less stress and less risk? Commit to medium- to long-term holding — you’re probably going to do well and won’t need to be worried when the price jumps like crazy like it has been.

Here’s my advice for my fellow holders:

1. Pick the price you want to cash out at and decide on a reasonable and slightly pessimistic time frame that you think it will take to happen. Maybe $1000/eth is your goal and you figure it will happen at the end of 2018. Great! Whatever happens between now and doesn’t really matter.

2. Don't feel like you've "lost money" every time the price drops. It’s a powerful psychological effect you need to be aware of and fight against. You don’t lose money unless you cash out at less than you bought for. If you bought for 100 and later watch it drop from 400 to 200, you have haven’t lost 200/eth, you’re 100/eth ahead. Yeah, you could have sold at the top, but you didn’t. That’s ok, stop kicking yourself. Just wait. And if eth is worth less now than when you bought it, realize that the quick buck you hoped you would make will just take a little longer. Eventually you will see rewards on your investment, and the rewards will almost certainly be at much higher percentages than you find elsewhere.

3. Ether will surprise you, good and bad, but it’s still on track. When ether jumped from 10 to 50 earlier this year suddenly it was “game on” and there was a lot of talk that it would go to $550 by the end of the year. That seems very reasonable, still. And we can expect to be surprised again and again.

4. There’s lots of talk about ICOs cashing out, draining the buyers and sending the price down. That may be, but then that means that there’s a lot of talent that are now very motivated to go out and make many many fine products that will use ethereum. Within a year we’ll be seeing user-friendly ether browsers and dapps with exciting functionality, all of them running on ethereum and using ether. When that happens, your ether is going to be worth a whole lot. Think of the price drops now as paying in advance for to be able to realize the ethereum dream. And then not only will you reap the financial rewards, but the world will have some great tools.

5. Obsessed with the ups and downs and wishing you were taking advantage of them? Try a little day trading with a small percentage of your ether. If you play around with 2% and lose a quarter of that in bad trades you’ve only lost 1/2%. And if you guess right it’s fun to earn a free dinner or a free vacation (depending on how many ether you’ve got). But keep a chunk of ether reserved for your target price and don’t touch it.

6. Enjoy the ride! As a holder you can laugh when you the price drops and you say “I just lost $X today!” You can also laugh when your friends say “The price is all the way up to $Y, why aren’t you selling?” Nope. Let it ride, relax, and enjoy being part of this experience.

I would not invest what you cannot afford to lose.

I would not purchase without the understanding that the value of your purchase can go to zero.

I would not speculate on the assumption that the gains ETH has experienced so far will continue.

I would not throw money at a thing with no marginal utility if there are things with marginal utility to throw money at.

I would not purchase into the cryptocurrency ecosystem because others are, or because the hype is driving you, or because there are crazy riches to be had.

I would keep in mind that many responses you will get here will be from people that, like myself, invested in ETH when it was effectively a penny stock. Our investments are now large but our exposure is not. We can afford to be dispassionate about it because our money is "potential money" without ever having been "actual money." It's a lot easier to be casual about something when you can afford to lose it all.

THAT SAID

The intrinsic value of Ethereum, as a technology, is non-zero.

The technological innovations of Ethereum, as a technology, are open and promising.

The community around Ethereum, while young, naive and outspoken, is also talented and innovative.

The network effects of the Ethereum Network, while modest compared to existing banking networks, are robust and expanding rapidly.

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You should read this. I tell anyone who asks me about cryptocurrency that it's a wretched den of scum and villainy. I have zero evidence and nothing but speculation but that speculation leads me to believe that the Russians caused the Flash Crash because they could (put in a bunch of super-low orders on one side, dump a giant market order on the other side, collect everyone's tears and put it in your wallet). There is circumstantial evidence that an outage a month or so ago that saw the market cap of Ripple spike above ETH was due to coordinated DDOS and market withdrawals. Cryptocurrency manipulation is real, unregulated, and unstoppable and if you thought beating a market that's nominally "fair" was tough, try it when there are no rules.

But I still hold ETH. I intend to keep holding ETH. I think its value will increase. And frankly, the crypto nerds don't sound half as crazy as the goldbugs.

I told my father I'd made some money in cryptocurrency. He advised me to sell everything now before I lost my shirt.

"Now" in this instance was March and ETH had yet to broach $15.

Bitcoin went to $1000 before it went back down to $170. If I'd bought Bitcoin at $1000 and it went to $170 I would have been quite bitter. ETH could easily go to under $100 again. Like next week. Or tomorrow. But I don't think it'll ever go back down to where I bought it.

And I bought Bitcoin at $170.

Your mileage may vary.

It's a gamble and a waste of time. Hype will result in bust.