> ChainCoin has no value proposition, nothing to differentiate it, and the dev team abandoned it a long time ago, so why would anyone purchase this crypto? It's the same with stocks; you have to be able to understand the financials, product, roadmap, etc. of the company you're investing in.

Same reason people buy deep out of the money call options or do leveraged FX trading - they just like to gamble. The whole FX brokerage business (and that includes crypto) is basically run like a casino.

My current picks are siacoin (devs seems smart, but had a few missteps, storage could be a real market in the cryptocurrency space), monero (seems like they're doing anonymity right), litecoin (potential for LN first mover advantage) and bitcoin (pure network effect). Care to share any of yours?

From what I understand, SiaCoin has almost no customers.

Yes. To put it in startup terms, SiaCoin has an MVP and is post Series-A but is still building out the product.

Storj, which is in the same space, is a couple year ahead and is just starting to try and get traction (but had a management shake up)

The most serious alt coins are very much like startups.

Factom, which is sort of a digital notary service, seems to have been working for several years on their platform and only just recently picked a market- Mortgages- Claiming they want to prevent the problems that happened in 2009 by making auditing and verifying mortgage documents better. They closed their Series A last year, but did their ICO a couple years before that.

For those that didn't pick it up, this is sarcasm - playing on someone giving pithy reasons for stock tips.