and you should not invest more than you can afford to lose in any crypto currency, its really that easy.
What is there not to understand?
Absolutely, positively this. Crypto is new, largely untested for most use cases, and largely unregulated, in sharp contrast to most traded assets.
With any altcoin, you've likely got some exchange risk (Mt. Gox, BTer NXT hack, etc...), some tech/infrastructure risk, some risk involved with the devs, you've got risk of bitcoin price collapse, as most often they are priced in terms of bitcoin, you've even got some user risk involved (did you lose your keys? Screw up some 2FA? Forget your payment ID?). Alts are pretty much ALL in development.
If you don't think it's completely possible that your investment goes to zero, you honestly haven't paid any attention. But risk and reward are highly correlated. You can keep your money in your mattress, or in gold bars, or in your friendly local stock market. You pretty much know what that will get you from a return perspective, and I'd argue that inflation (due to central bank money printing) is a lurking hidden thief.
Personally, I believe that crypto has a good chance of breaking new ground over the next decade or so. My investment horizon is long term. I'm willing to devote a part of my investment portfolio to it. It's pure risk capital, folks, and if you think it isn't, you better think again.
When I'm making decisions with that risk capital, there is a lot to like about XMR. I'm not going to belabor the point(s) yet again because I think they've been made many times. But I have bought it consistently over the last 90 days and I bought some more today. I think it's unfortunate that there has been so much division in cryptoworld regarding Monero, but in my observation, none of that is related to anything the dev team has done. It's external factors.
XMR will have to continue to develop and show use cases as it matures. IF it does, I strongly suspect the return will far exceed traditional investments over the next 5-10 years...and likely will also exceed bitcoin gains moving forward.
Nietzsche pointed it out--that which does not kill you makes you stronger.
