Well check this out:
And the Google Sheet linked in the article:
This experiment shows that you could be right, that it’s worthless to invest in cryptos by market cap, most of it will land into bitcoin, ethereum and ripple anyway. But investing 1% in each of the top 100 cryptos already looks like a sound strategy. Somebody even wrote that this is the strategy that some small venture capital firms use. They put a little money in every business idea to increase the chance that one of them will turn to be successful.
So, I don’t know, maybe I’ll just put 100 in each crypto from the toplist. I’m aware of the risk that you mention (artificially pumping market cap). I guess looking at liquidity might also not be too helpful, because it might just be the issuer of the crypto making transfers between his accounts. But at least this could be spotted by someone.
But even if a few of the top 100 appear to be scams, that’s just $100 lost. You just need one to succeed.