Assuming you are not basically just looking to "gamble" I suggest doing some tiny-scale hands-on learning.
In the
Galactic Milieu we work with a number of coins providing quite a range of characteristics.
Some of them just keep on minting new coins forever, some of them still have large holders from many years ago who might wake up any time and resume play.
Others, like IXCoin and I0Coin, have extremely small minting thus almost no inflation of the supply while also having nice high "difficulty" thanks to being merged-mined alongside bitcoin.
Those two likely have the largest amount ("volume") of actual activity nowadays but in general all of them are very low activity and at very small scale.
For example even though there might not really be anyone still actively doing the "spend 1 to 3 lumens on each of 1 to 3 of them each 1 to 3 days" it does still seem there are a number of people out there still spending 2 or 3 lumens or so from time to time even if not as often as every 1 to 3 days each.
So one has lots of time to observe and react usually, though from time to time some large movement is seen, especially for IXC and I0C on FreiExchange where they are paired against bitcoin.
The approach the Milieu takes is to treat the coins as "currencies" of some "civilisation" or "Corp" or whatever, which is to say they are regarded as IOUs, which is basically what money really amounts to.
The idea therefore is that each currency has its nation or civilisation or society or corporation or whatever whose ultimate idealised goal would be to "buy back" all of their "IOUs", since when you print money any of it that is still "out in the wild", not yet gotten back, is basically debt, IOUs that have been issued but not yet redeemed.
We use multiple layers of reserve / redundancy to try to ensure that our calculations of the value of the coins are very conservative; for example although we create for each coin a "treasury" in order to be able to calculate a value per coin by dividing the total value of the "treasury" by the number minted of the coin we deliberately do not count all of a coin's assets as part of its "treasury"; ideally the total value of various "slush funds" the coin also has at its disposal should add up to as much as or more than the value of its "treasury".
We used to figure put half your assets into your "treasury" and use the other half as slush funds both to earn with and to build buy-sides with on whatever venues the coin is traded on; but nowadays are thinking maybe for starting civilisations it might be better to put one third into one's "treasury" one third into buy offers on the trading venues and one third to fund whatever earnings mechanisms your civilisation hopes to generate earnings with.
When we "tokenise" coins, for example onto the HORIZON or Stellar platforms, we only issue tokens representing half of the coins we have so that we can use the other half to "buy back" the tokens without dipping into the coins the tokens represent, so that even after buying back our tokens the tokens still each represent one actual on-its-native-blockchain coin.
We also do not count planets, military units, cities, land, magic swords and armour, chests full of in-game coinage and gems and magical items, starships, deathstars, stockpiles of millions of pounds or kilograms or tons of various raw materials or manufactured products and so on and so on and so on as part of "treasuries", so the calculated values calculated by dividing the treasury by the number minted is by design extremely conservative, yet we nonetheless try if and when the spot market prices of a coin approach its calculated value to add more assets to its treasury to try to keep the value calculated by dividing the total value of the treasury by the total number minted higher than the spot market prices.
This is a long term project, you can see from the value tables linked from
https://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html that we have been tabulating the results since July 2012 though we actually started some time before we started generating those tables.
I suggest you take a look at the whole thing, watch some of the asset trading in action, and maybe get your toes wet with a few lumens here and there if you ever feel comfortable giving it a try.
As I mentioned above it seems like currently the majority of players actually playing the markets, at least on Stellar, are typically only venturing one to three stellar lumens per offer so it is very small scale still currently even though some of the intergalactic mining Corps rake in massive amounts of assets when their fleets of sometimes over a hundred deathstars carrying about a million units each deliver their "cash crop", so-called DEUterium, to the depots where Corps like General Mining Corp (GMC) buy it at the prices shown at
https://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.htmlWhen you look at all these assets, do not think of them as something one wants to build a hoard of and then "dump" that hoard onto the buy offers.
The profit is in the trading; if you play it right you end up with more and more and more "surplus" year after year after year, which is part of why it is so useful to have the "treasuries"; your great grand-heirs ought never to need to "dig up" your hoards of "surplus" assets because they should still be continuing to amass more and more "surplus" from the buying and selling and re-buying and re-selling of the assets that is where the real profit lies; digging up your hoards of surplus to put back on the market not only ought never become necessary but would if done simply dilute the supply, making the number still out in the wild to potentially be "dumped" increase.
Thus being able to file away your "surplus" assets into the "treasuries" of other assets helps keep them off the markets, in one huge co-operative economy in which all the assets all help uphold all the others and more and more of all of them gets locked away into "treasuries" and from time to time new currencies are launched with newly created treasuries to lock away yet more of everything while still having the value available to be traded in the form of the new currency/asset...
-MarkM-
