Ultimately what makes for a successful cryptocurrency is security and network effects. Now security not just includes the quality of the cryptography but the q

Ultimately what makes for a successful cryptocurrency is security and network effects. Now security not just includes the quality of the cryptography but the quality of the network, and the design of the currency to allow it to be used reliably. This factor is all about engineering. And the thing about cryptocurrencies is that they are so novel and so new that there are a really small number of good cryptocurrency engineers. I've worked with a lot of second raters (I'm maybe a third rater myself) and talked to the first rate people. This is not a skill people will be getting with a class or two at a MOOC. (Or I wouldn't be a 3rd rater) On both measures: Security and Network Effects bitcoin is the king. The second most popular is Ethereum which is starting to get a lot of holders but seems to be constantly engineering its way out of disaster (the blockchain is already bigger than bitcoins and it's growing faster and new code is being thrown in all the time.) Move fast and break things makes sense for facebook- they can fix any problems trivially. This is not the case for blockchain systems and thus the risk for ethereum is pretty high. To their credit they have been able to avoid catastrophe so far, but it's a lot less safe in this regard than bitcoin. (And theres some fundamental problems with Proof of Stake that may be exploited when Ethereum goes to that mechanism.) Right now there's money to be made trading between these alternatives to bitcoin and bitcoin, but that's mostly trading on hype, not utility. Bitcoin itself isn't even yet having its value follow utility, though it's adoption in situations like Venezuela is starting to prove some of that utility (and here again Ethereum has done good by being GPU mineable, something you can do in probably any country, unlike Bitcoin which requires expensive and mostly-single sourced ASICs) I don't see where Crypto hedge funds have any advantage. They can't engage in the kind of market manipulation or derivatives trading that typical hedge funds seem to make their money with.