Just throw money at cryptos, eventually you'll make a profit

This is what I keep hearing from people. There is an honest belief out there that all one needs to do, is buy some coins or tokens and hold (HODL is becoming a cliche) and eventually you'll make some money. With just a little amount of research, this theory can be proven to have some problems.

I'll give an example and a few reasons why this theory is doomed to fail.

Veros

If you hold 1000 tokens of Veros at the time of writing, it would be worth about $0.154, yep 15 cents. If you had purchased those tokens on March 18th, 2017 you would have paid $40.

Let's do that with some other numbers. If you'd put $4000 into this token, you'd have $15. 'Just HODL though, seriously, it's that easy'. No, it isn't.

If you were thinking about buying stocks in any publicly listed company, each one has a lot of information on it. You could find the CEO, the earnings for last year, who the senior employees are and so on. A wise investor would do this because having competent staff increases the success of a company. But how many ICOs, tokens and coins have no information about their core team available. They have a white paper, but often hide their most valued asset, the development team. Others do, and we see some of those tokens doing well.

What can we actually do with these tokens, today? Well, there are some applications. Ethereum is certainly functional, Bitcoin is starting to be accepted as a form of payment in some places, as is Litecoin. However, most ICOs are concepts, ideas, start-ups and so on. The current price is pure speculation on future functional use, in some cases the product isn't even developed yet. The core development team is therefore crucial for the token's success.

BitcoinDark's development team all jumped ship and now work on Komodo. How do you think the future looks for BitcoinDark? I hear a lot of talk of Ripple with its substantial price gains of late. When I ask these people how many coins will ever exist, they don't know, yet they confidently project $10 a coin. Just to let you know, there will be 100 billion of these coins.

It has been easy money on cryptos. You'd have to had been unlucky to lose money so far, but these gains won't last. Coins do drop off, Veros as an example. The best analogy for cryptos is the dotcom crash. Companies like Amazon came through it, if you'd held their stock you'd be laughing today. The merger between AOL and Time Warner shows how it's not just about buying and holding.

The price surge in Ripple is being driven by the hype of the market because anyone doing their research can see Ripple, the coin, is not being used by banks as much as investors expect. Banks are testing an improvement to the SWIFT network using Ripple, the company's technology, but this is independent to the coin.

If you disagree with me, please go purchase large amounts of Veros, with a non-existent development team or Leafcoin, also no development as far as I can see or get a mortgage and throw it all on BitCoinDark and let me know when those coins go 'to the moon' (to the moon is becoming a cliche).

What can happen is that people making gains now, will give it all back due to lack of research. I work in trading, I've seen this happen many times already. Someone doubles their account to then give it all back the next day.

Do research. Are the core development team intelligent and experienced people? How many coins or tokens will ever actually exist is crucial for predicting future price. Are the core development team actually active? Do the social media posts of the coin or token focus on development and functionality or are they posting gifs of a rocket going to the moon?