(Throwaway as I don't want people tracking me down but want to be transparent as I find it interesting when other people are) I'm a mid-30s senior tech person

(Throwaway as I don't want people tracking me down but want to be transparent as I find it interesting when other people are) I'm a mid-30s senior tech person in NY. I've been in and out of crypto over the past few years as a hobbyist speculator. Heard about BTC in 2012-ish and thought it was an interesting novelty but probably wouldn't amount to anything worthwhile. Tried to buy/mine some but it was hard so gave up. Bought some drugs with it in 2013 (a night out that "cost" me $70k at current prices hah). Made about $3-4K in the 2016 surge, got out for a while, got back in around $1,300 just before it went crazy again. I have a crypto portfolio worth about $20k, my cost was around $9k. It's about 5% of my net worth which I consider high, but I want to to try and get ahead by taking a few measured risks and this is one of those attempts. Most of my net worth is in boring investments like Vanguard index funds/401k and I have 6 months expenses in cash so I'm otherwise a fairly conservative investor. My crypto portfolio looks like: * 40% BTC * 20% ETH * 20% LTC * 10% IOTA * 10% Spread between DASH, OMG, LSK, NEO, EOS BTC has been the money maker (up 140%), IOTA was my "missed the BTC boat lets try something emergent" punt (not worked out so far, I'm down 40%), the other 10% are just to give me an incentive to follow the tech. I think I'm probably too late to get life-changing riches from crypto, but am buying and holding using money I can afford to lose until it either goes to the moon or goes to zero as there is a small chance I am not too late. I'm back to putting my monthly savings allocation into Vanguard now though. My brother (non-tech industry) put a few thousand into Bitcoin a couple of months back, I advised him not to. I'd stand by that advice. I think cryptocurrencies are the start of something extremely interesting, but I'm not sure if the current crop will be the eventual winners. I'd recommend people in tech picking up small amounts of various emerging currencies just to understand the ecosystem and how it works. It's a fascinating field.