As you know, the cryptocurrency world is a place where uncertainty rules. Try to find any "specialist", you won't, those who will tell you that are liars. There is no specialist, and I'm none of them, what I'm doing though is bringing objectivity to these fake enthusiasm rumors, I advise you to read whitepapers, publications of every single coin if you wanna master it all a bit more, that's what I'm planning to do, because only the creators of Ripple truly know everything about it, like the creators of another coin, but none of them can know about all the other coins and more particularly, about how their coin will perform compared to those ones, which is what you're asking me to predict.

Focusing your attention on one coin is very dangerous and counter-productive, in the best case, it will increase, but it takes years to become like bitcoin, and would you risk all your investment on one coin for that hope ? So my answer would be : yes, it is a good investment, provided that you diversify your investments, you have to try getting everything you can imagine that is promising and has potential at the lowest price possible. Put all your eggs in different boxes. As I said, Ripple is a good investment, I studied it a bit and found it is linked with the banks to get the movements between them and the cryptoworld easier. So for me, it is worth putting a few eggs inside it, whether 10, 20, or 50 dollars, depending on what you can afford to invest. This is all about your will to take the gamble, nothing else. I'm soon making an article about all the promising altcoins I want to get ASAP, but if you want the names : Electroneum, Iota, Eos, Ripple, Lisk, Cardano, Dash, Tron. Of course it's not easy to get those like you can't get them at the same place, it's gonna be a hell of a task to find the right sites that are actually working, trust me, doing that is in itself a huge pile of work. But once I will get them, I will feel blessed :D ; I will write an article about the best sites to trust anyway, or should I say the "least dangerous" , that's more appropriate, because everything is vulnerable in this world, so better have a hardware that can store what you gonna hold (I am soon gonna try this on an USB key, and post an article about it https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-bank-less-thirty-minutes-usb-drive/) and an offline wallet (blockchain.info is easiest way to create one, that's the 1st thing I managed to do and I'm happy with it for now).

Do your own research and combine it with what I found and what all the others say of course. You will end up with a list like that and this is all about the strategy that maximizes your chances of one of your investments being in the "right basket" (the one that will hopefully be multiplied by 1000, 10 000 or even 100 000, I don't know, if that wasn't possible, we weren't all here trying to get clues about this kind of evolution). But as for the fact if one altcoin will do this through 1 year, like only through 2018, I'm not convinced, look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are where they are because they had a run during at least a couple of years, with ups and downs as well, so you have to have the patience to believe your investment will grow in the next 5 years and just trust it without trying any withdraw. No crypto has yet made a big boom during 1 year, so just stick to realism too. Look how people overreacted to Ripple, look where it is now, going under 2$, some were already saying it was going to the moon.

What can advise you by experience is don't buy things because you see them growing one day. It's being emotional, and if you just see them growing without having made a research and knowing about their "stamina" to go all the way up, it's just useless, and you will most probably end up with a loss. Take Bitcoin for example : not so far away in time, it was keeping growing up, remember when it passed 10 000$, then people were just carried away, like "Bitcoin to 100 000 next month?", even more when it got to 15 000, anyone, even your neighbor which doesn't know anything about it, wanted to get it whatever the cost, and the thing is it never quite stayed above 20 000, didn't even reach it I think, now it's falling down, at around 13 000$, so all those people who bought it at 15 000 have losses now, and big headaches :D . So fix yourself limits, like you're gonna buy Bitcoin if it goes below some certain limit, like below 8 000 $, that could be interesting, because we all know now that it has the potential to quickly recover. Because even if you buy it now at 13 000 to hold it, it's an awkward move for me, because you would have to wait till it reaches 85 000 to have your investment only multiplied by 5 ! And not mentioning it takes time to grow past 20 000 then 30 000... So that's why altcoins are indeed interesting. When you locate one that is below 1$, if it can grow to 10, you can already have quite a lot of profit. Ethereum is one coin which is in an intermediate stage, no more an altcoin, but still a long way to go. Anyway, you're forced to buy either Ethereum or Bitcoin to get the other coins, so I'm recommending you to purchase Ethereum, hold half of it for years (because at only 700$, and with the potential it has-I will explain what I found in its whitepaper in another post- it can grow a long way) and put the other half into altcoins I mentioned before. So you have to add Ethereum to the list of course. That's a solid thing to rely on, but on long-term.

As for me, although I know what I'm gonna do, now it is really a pain in the ass waiting on those sites for verification, I'm looking for credit card purchase (fastest way) and not many sites do propose that. Not mentioning the fact coinbase is a joke with glitches even when you try posting your ID card photo on it. Defects of the crypto world I guess, these must be corrected soon and hopefully we will all manage to do what we planned. Pity the most important platforms to trade and get altcoins, Bittrex and Bitfinex are both closed for new signups until mid-January, DDOS attacks or simply too many demands. We gotta be patient. I will soon post an article talking about my bad experience with those sites so far too.

Sorry for the length of the answer, I wanted to be complete. Many of the things I said here are gonna be put in a clear article anyway.