What I noticed in the last weeks, maybe month, is that many people getting into cryptospace with a couple of hundred Euro's. Over the holidays and new year I've spoken with so many people who made that statement, next to the statement they dont know anything of trading, but trying to play around with a little. In trollboxes at exchanges, I see the same questions over and over again wrt how to transfer money to this and that, how to buy a coin, how to...essentially all the questions you would ask when having no experience at all.
What I think is going on is that the larger volatility is caused by all these newbies who will jump on hypes, and react immediately to the news, whatever news it is. Look at for instance what happened with Ripple, and TRON. TO me, good reasons why Ripple went up, although it is not a decentralised coin, that doesn't really matter IMHO, but they have potential to cut deals with commercial businesses. Than after news that some prospects mentioned is denying it, BAM 40% down. Why? Ripple is still big in the financial world with all there products and therefore the cards the can play are pretty good to get deals with their current customers and others in their business segment.
The real value of a coin is in the end the level of trust we as a collective have that the coin will be relevant in our lives, now and in many years to come. With so many coins and tokens around, it is hard to define that level of trust, the real researchers start looking at how good the blockchain is, what it allows to do, what try to predict what the potential is for future use, and try to base our decisions on that. At least that is what I do. Such evaluation is more like you would evaluate a company to decide if you like to buy their stocks. I do realise that the coin/token itself is not directly linked to the services of and around the blockchain, but indirectly it is. When a blockchain is not able to do certain things, it will very likely not make it in that particular market segment, therefore it will have lower value in our lives for that particular purpose. I think you know what I mean, but still a very simple example. Bitcoin will not make it in the payments market, it is too slow and with the network being this big already and the recent history with all the misalignment between the decision makers (the miners), we cannot expect Bitcoin to become super fast. Therefore this coin could serve as store of value. But the moment some other coins are out there with extreme high level of security, and maybe a better de-centralisation, this could mean even Bitcoin will suffer from that, because we start using some other coin to put our crypto in 'savings'.
I think we will have some turbulent years ahead of us. Many more people will enter cryptospace with their savings, and also traditional financial investors will enter this space more and more, therefore increasing the total crypto marketcap tremendously. But I'm afraid we also will see a higher volatility due to the so many newbie 'traders' who dont know this space at all, and who do not know how to trade, who get scared easily.
Anyway, only time will tell :)