I had played with crypto about 5 years ago, since then it has changed enough that i really could care less. If you want a secure anonymous way to send money to someone, stick to the folding type. As far as I am aware, there is really only one crypto that is secure enough that you wont be able to track it back to someone and that is Monero(xmr). Bitcoin especially is a giant ledger that you can see anything going on in the chain, so if you know who owns a particular wallet address you can track other wallets by association. You also have to watch out for new coins that have nothing behind them, they are there just as basically a scam AKA Sh!tcoins. Probably some are still around,
Anyway, investing in just a coin is fine if you have money you don't care about. Personally i wouldn't invest anything into the market but that is just me. I have made a little bit of money trading coins back and forth but stopped when they started to introduce the know your customer donk. Basically unko Sam wanted his piece of the action and under anti money laundering measures if you wanted to use the trading platforms you had to supply your personal info. Crypto was supposed to be founded on anonymity. I had done some mining on my computer via coin pools, even tried some ASIC miners and picked up a little bit of coinage that way. There were also things called faucets, it is kind of like the samples or lure to pull you into sites. They would give you small amounts of bitcoin for clicking or doing simple tasks. Enough to add up to almost nothing.
You can still use coin trading platforms, a lot of them went out of country because of regulations and some do not let users from the US of A use their services. Bittrex and Polonix are 2 big ones, one of which runes like wall street complete with margin trading. This is where you can make or lose big money. A lot has become computer driven trading, unlike it was in the beginning. Early platforms weren't too trustworthy, search Mt Gox and Cryptsy.
There was also automated funding systems set up at one point to act as a catalyst for new projects / innovation which fell apart pretty quickly, it had used etheruim as the medium, I forget the name.
Any how, it you want to invest do so at your own risk. I wouldn't recommend buying altcoins like doge, etherium, litecoin etc but it is your money and this is just my 2 cents. You can try coinbase, they are a fiat to coin exchange.