Cryptovestor, this is a very well-written piece. As an old-school private investor, I too came into the bitcoin world a few years ago and "mined" some XRP back when Jed McCaleb was running the show and paying out Ripples for contributing to decentralized protein genomics projects.
Whenever one of my younger cousins or my friends talk about "investing" in crypto, I always make sure to correct them that they are "speculating."
As I tell them, there is nothing wrong with speculating, but you need to know that you are speculating.
Discl: Long BTC, ETH, VEN, NEO, EOS, ZRX, ICX, KNC, OMG, XLM, STEEM, QSP, XRB
Well said!