Sorry for the hot take, but if you can't afford the BitBox02 or Trezor Model T, something's not working out with those alt trades. If you can't make $200 in a reasonable amount of time with your alts, I'd personally recommend sticking to BTC..
Lol, I was thinking the same thing. I wanted to be easy on the OP and not berate him for shitcoining. Still, your post is
just diplomatic enough to get the point across without going overboard deriding shitcoins. Some alts have there uses, i.e Monero and hopefully, eventually, Grin. Some might be useful if you want to try your had at swing trading, but I don't know of any that worth holding.
I'm not an expert on alts, but most of the time someone mentions one, I check the price history against BTC and they almost always look terrible as a store of value. In this case, Monero seems to be quite okay, but Grin lost against Bitcoin consistently basically since its inception, from what I can tell.
As a store of value, yes I agree that Grin is yet another disappointment. I only mentioned it along with Monero for it's privacy features. I haven't messed with Grin for about two years now, so I honestly don't know what they've been up to recently. As far as I can tell, Monero is still the go-to coin for private transactions.
I also agree that Monero has held it's own as far as a store of value, but I don't hold any XMR for extended periods of time. I can't think of a single other alt that even comes close to bitcoin's superiority in that regard. With Segwit and now Taproot making transactions smaller and lighter, I tend to think that even Lighting's days are numbered.
Something Hal Finney wrote once does keep popping up in my mind, however. Once he suggested that eventually each "bank" would create it's own stable coin that runs on a chain with fast confirmations, and it would all be backed by hodling bitcoin. If Binance and Coinbase weren't so anti-bitcoin I could almost see BNB or USDC fitting the bill.