Man, you must be old! ha ha ha! Anyway, the major difference between cryptocurrency and stock market is the government. Everything else is the same. Think about it this way - Ethereum is "McDonalds", Litecoin is "Apple Inc", Ripple is "IBM", and Bitcoin is "US Dollars" - and then Poloniex is "Nasdaq". So just like the good old days, you would pick a stock of your choice and then keep it on your portfolio, wait for the price to climb up, and then sell... and then wait for the price to pull down a little bit and then buy back. You see it is not very much different from the stock market, is it? - Though stocks and exchanges are regulated by the SEC; cryptocurrency on the other hand, is a punk - nobody regulates it. Verily, the only risk for you grandpa, is once those exchanges decide to go out of business, your coins go out of business too.