fastest way is to try to get in early on altcoins and then dump them.. lots of money to be made that way for those with the right hardware... these people who have $20,000 setups are capable of easily making quite a bit of money mining crapcoins.. for everyone else not really. Buy, hold, and hope the coin gets hyped otherwise.

It was possible to make huge money accumulating dogecoins before it spiked way up. Unobtanium and veritcoin are two examples of coins that just spiked in the last couple days. It seems to be a crapshoot as to which ones will spike sometimes. Just have a bit of coin in both cryptsy and bter and make some educated guesses or visit forums and see what people are saying.... it doesn't take a lot of money chasing a coin to get it to spike in price... a high market cap in bitcoin benefits all altcoins and vice versa.