Hey, SliverDJ.
'Have
any coins actually completely failed and gone to zero yet?
Answer:
thousands and thousands! Look up the 'necronomicon. list of dead altcoins' on Bitcointalk.com. That list had been abandoned even before the launch of Eth
et al. spawned who-knows-how-many 'smart contract' coins, certainly three or four thousand. The failure rate of alts has thus far been roughly 95%.
'What would it take for a coin to become practically worthless?' Posts on the community's threads dwindle to nothing. The volume on the crypto's exchanges likewise (and the buy-sell spread becomes insane as this happens). Then the wallet stops working. Here's an example:
https://www.dobbscoin.info/
And you guys will see that I am trying to make my bones on this site, So:
if you think cryptos have a future, you learn to pick a crypto that is way down in price/volume, but has good prospects. Then you get accounts on its exchanges, and a wallet, and some Bitcoin as 'fuel' for the project. Then you join its community, to stay abreast of events.
Now, the Bottom-Line Rule here -- it's surely the same for bullion markets -- is that you can't trade on volume that isn't there. You can only trade
vis a vis the volume that exists. Okay. Then you start trading the coin in question. For a couple of thousands bucks, you can sometimes buy a serious chunk of a crypto.
Then you just sell madly into every spike, and buy all you can when the price drops. And if you stick with it long enough -- three or four years -- you can make a
lot of money.