The main thing with any crypto"currency" is that you have to get in early and get in fast. it's faster to get "coins" (or whatever their units are called) early on. As more people jump on board, it takes longer and longer to "mine" coins, and the value shoots up. At which point, people who bought into it earlier will cash out, allowing the value to fall a bit. And seeing the downward spike in price, speculators will jump on board, then the price will go up as that attracts more "miners"; the value goes up, some of them sell- the chain repeats.
by all accounts they are a speculative ponzi scheme. One thing about them that annoys me is that so often when I criticize them I am told I am simply "jealous" that I didn't get in early. The reason I didn't "get in early" is because I don't think it is ethical. If you cash out with thousands of dollars in profit, that's thousands of dollars that some other person either already lost, or is going to lose at some point, and it's just as likely that you can become one of those people for whom their "investment" was a wash. If you want your money to work for you you use an investment that gives stable returns, you don't go to a Casino.
I'm not really saying that the people who mine it are unethical or immoral, just that- well, I don't like the implications. Just Knaves exploiting Fools as usual, and I'd prefer to be neither to be honest.
At this point the draw is so large that you've got malware and website scripts and even apps that specifically seek to use your processor time to mine cryptocurrency for them.
The irony about the whole thing is that the entire reason that they never seem to be usable as a currency is because of their wildly fluctuating market value which is a direct result of there not being any sort of regulation, even though one of the popular bullet points about them is that they are unregulated and uncentralized. It's almost as if currency systems are centralized for a reason.
Basically, they are something of a modern version of
Tulip Mania. Apparently I'm not the only one to make this connection- behold,
TulipCoin