I believe that Ripple rising up so much is also due to the fact that new comers see it as "being cheap", in the sense that it was only 1$ to own a coin a week or so ago. Other people analyzing that new comers would see it this way, they wanted to make some quick money analyzing the sentiment of the crowd and went in: Self-fulfilling prophecy. I would not invest in Ripple now. I don't own any. I used it to cash-out $50 because it was the cheapest & fastest option (I wanted to see how cheap/fast I could cash-out). But then again, who knows what it will be worth in 1 month. I never thought the black market would be this big. What you write makes me want to double down on one of my bet. There is this coin, Zclassic, that is going to transform into BTCP (Bitcoin Private), where each owner of Zclassic and each owner of BTC will receive 1 BTCP. So owning 1 Zclassic now is like predicting the price of Bitcoin Private if everything go as planned. The fork is supposed to happen before february. It's risky, but the market seems so big that maybe there is place for a new player.
One trend we're seeing a lot of is regulation. China clamped down, Korea is threatening to clamp down... those of us in NY and WA are already dealing with this; if you want to trade crypto, you have to trade in a house that's FDIC insured. It has to act like a bank, look like a bank, be regulated like a bank and have reserves like a bank. That means Gemini. And Gemini deals in BTC and ETH, and that's it. There may be other firms willing to step up to the requirements necessary but as other states clamp down on crypto (which they will do, the first time anybody loses their home or some shit because of speculating on BTC futures), it's gonna close out a lot of the weirder coins. One thing about BTC and ETH - it's not that hard to move around without an exchange. But for everything else, it's gonna be exchange exchange exchange. Even now most of the transactions aren't wallet-to-wallet, they're internal exchange.
That's right - I forgot they were okay to trade because my experience with them has been so bad. Just logged in for the first time in like a year and that neglible little bit of BTC I left in there 'cuz it didn't matter is now worth over $100. Crazy times.