Investing may not make you 100% rich but it will open a door for your next generation. Today there are two groups that make money hard and earn easily. Due to the negative effects of inflation, it is almost impossible to have something by working in my country. People invest in whatever they can invest in. Investing in the crypto market and stock markets is very attractive and is one of the main tools to protect our earnings against inflation. Therefore investing will always protect you against inflation.
You will not become rich by investing but you will not reduce your capital but it should not be forgotten that making a good investment causes your ambition to increase. When you become ambitious, you decide to invest more. But this is not correct behavior. You should stand by and proceed with Hodl in such a case. You should also be prepared for market fluctuations. Avoid investing if you have a weak hand. When investing, you should always be open to change and investment strategies from 15 years ago will not work.
The HODL concept does not necessarily work for "crypto" or "shitcoins," so anyone needs to be careful in regards to employing HODL with various scams, whether ethereum or any other shitcoin you need to consider your exit... stocks also might be similar.... of course, you could pick various index funds, and so if you ultimately determine that the stocks have long term fundamental value, then HODL would work for the various stocks that may well have long down periods.. and sure of course with any investment you might end up being wrong, so HODL would not work if the fundamental value and strength of investment thesis is missing or maybe if circumstances have changed with such investments in order to contribute towards a weaker investment thesis for whichever asset (stock, properties, commodities).
In terms of bitcoin versus shitcoin, then surely it should be quite possible to figure out that bitcoin has a strong underlying value and therefore a strong investment thesis, yet since we realize that it's upward price trajectory is not guaranteed, we have to figure out an appropriate size of our investment into bitcoin in which we are either able to HODL through difficult periods or to add to our bitcoin position. Those kinds of fundamental assessments are way less obvious when either speaking about shitcoin (crypto) generally, or even if we might go into each of the problems with the various coins that might have pump and dump possibilities, but not likely the same kinds of fundamental values (or strength of long term investment thesis) like bitcoin..
..so even though I personally suggest not to fuck around with shitcoins or to use vague terms like "crypto" when talking about what kinds of investments to make, if any of us do decide to have some allocation to shitcoins, we should be attempting to more particularly assess them.. and to figure out the extent to which HODL actually will work with those kinds of coins.. and not to be conceptually or descriptively lumping that crap in with bitcoin in vague kinds of uses of language.. because their is no such thing as investing into crypto - unless you really are getting distracted and involved in various scam products (ways of looking at the space) or even some of those crap "crypto" index funds that might cause you to falsely believe that you are investing better because you are "investing in more than just bitcoin," which likely just means that you really do not know what bitcoin is otherwise you would not be getting so distracted or lured into such products or ways of talking/thinking about how bitcoin relates to various shitcoins.