I bought monero because I liked monero. Unfortunately it refuses to do anything other than follow bitcoin around everywhere it goes like some sort of lost puppy. It's stupid and annoying but it is what it is. So anyway, the point being, it looks like its going to depend a lot on what bitcoin does. It might outperform bitcoin. We can hope it does of course. There are good reasons to expect that it will. But it doesn't look like its going to climb in value unless bitcoin does also. So you want to figure out how well monero is going to do in 2018? First figure out what you think bitcoin is going to do.
I almost wish bitcoin would die, even though the price of everything in the sector would crash, just so that everything could break free and we could have a dynamic and competitive market with internal relative price discovery. You know, so that the good projects could actually be separated from the bad. So that the crypto sector could improve based on bad projects dying and good ones absorbing their capital. Instead we have an entire sector that moves togather in one direction or the other irrespective of whether the individual projects are actually garbage.
Frustrating.
That's the whole market.
If bitcoin goes up like crazy, alts go down because everyone wants to jump on the btc train.
If bitcoin goes down like crazy, alts go down too because everyone is afraid that the world is gonna end.
Only when btc stays around a certain level for a while, that's when the alts seem to rally.
That being said, I think XMR is a great hedge against BTC, and also one that appreciates in btc value over time!