“But… I missed the boat.”
“But bitcoin is sky-high.”
“But…when lambo moon?”
Have you been fantasizing of your new tesla, your new Lamborghini, or that cream coated cocktail on the bar in some tropical island, financially free?
Scenario 1: Whilst sat in oblivion, you beat yourself up as you wind down the window of your car, only to see bitcoin go from $2,500 to $18,000 right by you, in its bright orange lambo-flavoured jetpack.
Holy smokes. But the prices were meant to come down… weren’t they?
Scenario 2: Your friend picks up the phone to tell you he’s boarded the Ripple rocket to Jupiter. You frantically figure out how to log into Coinbase, get a Binance account, wiz past the identification, after 5 cups of coffee, no shower and a semi-divorce, at 3:00AM, you manage to buy Ripple at $3.40.
That big smile, soon turns into a Conor McGregor all time knock out as you finally plug your satoshis into Blockfolio and realize that after the 12th refresh, your $2,000 investment is now worth $958.9321. You start to notice the sweat on your forehead. Your heart is beating at lightning speed. You log back into Binance to sell at a massive loss, because you’ve realised you had no idea what you were doing, you essentially FOMO-ed (fear of missing out) into the Ripple buy order.
You soon figure out how to sell everything thinking at least you’ve sold and didn’t lose it all.
“Jamie Dimon was right, bitcoin was fraud! *@!* is cryptocurrency? F*** me!”
You curl up in bed and finally get to sleep for 2.5 hours before you have to get up to put your suit and tie to go to your regular 9–5AM job… and realize that your Blockfolio is still on, has refreshed, and Ripple is now trading 15% above the price you currently bought it at. You now realise that’s what’s called a market recovery. Or market manipulation? What’s wrong? Do I go and buy more? And… the emotional roller coaster goes on
(Source: reddit.com/r/bitcoin).
Scenario 3: You never learned your lessons. You still carried on after the wild Ripple night, chased more twitter rallies, followed McAffee’s calls, sold out super-fast on legitimate calls that shot into outer space 2 days after you sold at a $1.20 profit, when you could’ve made $500.
So, finally after a big ego-demolition, you confront yourself in front of a mirror. You tell yourself that a great trader is something that takes patience, research and discipline.
Now that you’ve sold your dog, cat, car and bike and blew it all on Tron, thinking buying it at $0.22 was super cheap, only to find out in 12 hours it was trading at $0.11.
Only now, did you realise these are the life lessons that turn a padawan into a jedi.
Only now did you realise that good traders go against all odds, against emotions, against human nature.
“But the ship has sailed..”
It has sailed… but you can still put on those fancy flippers you wore when you first discovered snorkelling and chase the waves. You’ll have to flip-dat-flipper really hard!
The good news? Bitcoin and its naughty alternative children are a mere fraction of the financial markets. Think Forex (trillion dollar market). Think crypto — still in the billions. Cryptocurrencies live on distributed ledgers. These ledgers are now heavily investigated and can offer solutions to various problems that financial systems face. To name a few, transparency, cost reduction, identification, supply chain management and data collection. There’s a lot more to it than that, but for the purposes of this blog, we’ll keep it nice and simple.
However, in the eyes of Antonopoulos, the shift in infrastructure will take some time. We are still paving the roads in horse-vile, for both cars and horses to utilise. Without the roads in place, the modern vehicles will not survive in mud.
Talk bubbles, talk tulip mania, talk bitcoin. In the past, bubbles have popped, bubbles have shattered, only to bring new highs and more innovation. Rewind back a few years, and you’d be considered schizophrenic for investing in an application which would enable you to see people across the globe, with a camera, on a thing called the internet. You invested in Skype? That’s fraud. That’s the future? It’s not anything we’ve seen before. Now fast forward a few years and ask them the same question. They’ve probably got in installed on their new iPhone X.
Tell the horsemen to drive noisy, polluting, monstrous cars. Tell the candle makers to close shops as we invent electricity. Tell the telecoms that their phone lines will be flooded with the internet. Tell the pessimists that self-driving cars are mere figments of their imagination. Tell them that cryptocurrency is indeed a bubble and it’s soon to pop. Tell them, tell them, tell them.
Yet, remind them that these figments are the things they spend their time on. Remind them of it all!
Okay, okay, I’m sold. Do I need a PHD in Astrophysics? Or an MSc in Finance? Or a 12 week boot-camp on technical analysis and trading? How do I make that mulla?! What if I only have a little bit of pocket money? Euuuuuugh!
Jon Snow knows more than I do when it comes to charts, what do I do?
No matter how much dollah dollah bill you own, you can still make worthwhile investments. All you need is a laptop, a credit card and a good slot of time to ingest some key information.
Not everyone will knock on heaven’s door and win the lottery in terms of cryptocurrency moon gains, but that’s still fine!
I myself put in a couple of hundred dollars, and I’ve made a few thousand. I have friends who have invested $1,000 and are now sat on $100,000. Would you be happy with a few extra bucks? I certainly would!
But a nice pair of warm shoulders to lean on would also be nice. Let’s call one long term strategy; let’s call the other patience. — it’s a virtue!
Think of it as an extra source of income, an extra salary, an extra bit of fun.
What I want to do is pour some knowledge in a bowl for you. This knowledge will not consist of astrophysics, or finance, or charts, or boot-camps — that I can promise!
In return, I have one hope. I sincerely hope you don’t go sell your dog, cat, wife, husband, house and business to follow crypto-currency investment. Only put in what you can afford to lose. If you’re willing to carry that pair of shoulders with you on your journey, you’ll come out as a wizard.
Googles & Noodles!
Remember the dot com bubble? I don’t. But what I do know is that out of innovation, came a Froogle, a Boogle, a Noodle, and a Google. Surely, a large percentage of those innovators failed.
Aside the noodles, we have the Googles… one of the greatest innovations of our time.
Did we flinch when the others were gobbled into the abyss? I doubt it. From trial, error and failure, the Googles survived as the fittest, and they’re still here to change our lives.
Personally, I cannot speculate on what the future of cryptocurrencies will look like, but I can assure you, the noodles will be gone!
In the realm of cryptocurrencies, people now have the ability to become investors. People have the ability to invest in initial coin offerings, make choices of their own, make portfolios without paying asset managers hefty sums of money to do all the dirty work! This is one of the greatest opportunities to test the waters, test the shoulders, and reap life lessons and rewards.
So, can I split a small sum of money in different coins and increase my chances to board the shuttle to the moon?
Certainly. But a wise choice is better than a blind choice.
So how do I make a wise choice?
From experience, I can shed some light on my research strategy and tell you what I look for, when scouting out for coins.
The holy trinity
- The platforms
- Programmable Money
3. Utilities
(This is ordered to my preference. It is by no doubt the right way to categorise the market, but it’s a good direction).
1. Platforms for Decentralized Applications
When I say platform, I mean a decentralized application (dApps). The ‘engine’ of the car, to keep things simple. A platform is the logic of reason behind an alternative currency. As the engine, dApps can fuel things such as smart-contracts, enable a transparent voting system as well as be super cool and verify our identity. A great starting point would be www.ethereum.org to get the ball rolling.
Ethereum, has a first mover advantage in the dApps market. I personally hold around 70% of my portfolio in Ethereum due to its innovative potential to disrupt financial markets. On one note, it is challenging for the team to handle scalability, experience, security and integrate computational languages such as Solidity and React.
Once the engine can fuel the system, there is great upside potential to revolutionise the way the internet is used.
As the market evolves, new competitors in the dApp market reveal themselves. We now tap into the secrecies of third and even fourth generation blockchain. If you think of Ethereum as the engine, or the foundation, it’s little baby competitors are hybrid, alien engines which now have tentacles to help them out carry out their tasks.
Take a platform like Icon Network (ICX) for example, it has the power to use AION and WAN (yet to be released) to help it carry out various ‘cross-network’ capabilities (side chains). For instance, Blockchain ID can be issued by financial securities community and be used for ID verification in all other communities. Likewise, ICX issued by hospitals can be used for payment & exchange in all other communities.
Alongside this, other players that have sprung up to test the waters are Dragonchain, Ark, EOS, Waves, QTUM, and China’s favourite- NEO, in attempts to use dApps to build a smart economy. With reputable teams at hand, a clear vision, a wild road map ahead and a level of certainty with regards to delivering their services, I am highly optimistic there is a bright future for platforms in the cryptoverse.
“Much wow! Carry on.”
2. Programmable Money
Essentially, programmable money, in ‘apples and bananas’ terms, can be called a currency.
What’s a currency? Well, if I trade you one apple for one banana, we have a medium of exchange! By using programmable money, we can attach a perceived value of the cost of these apples and bananas and move forward.
You can also hold currency if you don’t wish to exchange it, and lock it up like gold. In other words, a store of value. If you hold gold as a store of value, fingers crossed, it’ll rise in value due to basic economics — supply and demand. (The less gold there is in the world, the more the value goes up).
Now, as we’re super tech-savvy, let’s use good ol’ Bitcoin, and attach the term ‘digital gold.’
Bitcoin — deflationary, 21,000,000 coins in existence. 70% already mined. First cryptocurrency to ever exist. Most well-known. Hold it. End of story.
Other strong currencies that have different features that have proven to be strong and deserve bagging are Litecoin, Dash, Digibyte. Fast, efficient, Bitcoin’s younger siblings if you like. Strong communities, big ambitions, bag ‘em all.
“Someone told me that bitcoin is open source. That means everyone can see my transactions. Can I not send my funds privately?”
Anonymity and privacy is something that we all like. Thus, we’re lucky to have Zcash, Zcoin and Monero as the most well-known vendettas. I won’t go into the knitty gritty of how transactions are privatized, but imagine a blanket layer that covers your identity. Therefore, when transacting, you remain highly anonymous. You can see more details here: ghttps://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-zksnarks
“Cool beans. Moooooore!”
3. Utility
A utility token in the crypto world, is of little use at the moment. This is until the platforms develop enough to be able to facilitate a home for these utility tokens to find a use. For those reasons, I hold little bags of utility tokens.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s some fascinating tokens out there, so I can take a beating for listing them third.
Take big corporate banks. The big dawgs. These dawgs that want to send money over-seas at less fees, instant speeds, peer to peer. If you try send bitcoin at lightning speed… you’re better of using the mail (not that much exaggeration, but you get the picture!). Things move fast and utility tokens such as Ripple and Stellar Lumens have taken the lead when it comes to speed.
However, the massive McAffee shills, and the lack of education in the crypto-markets has led newbies to think — large supply equals cheap buys equals lots of shares.
Hence, the Jupiter-esque moon shot in ‘cheap’ (high supply) tokens recently.
However, high supply simply means there are more tokens issued, so price action will equally make you gains or losses. Don’t let high supply deceive you.
So, in the past high supply almost enforced low volatility. Nowadays, with rocket launches to outer space, investors have begun to question the capabilities of transferring money which wildly appreciates or depreciates in a matter of days, hours, seconds!
The only question about Ripple is how much it actually rises in value over time. Hard to say but good to hold onto anyway.
Bag ‘em? Can do. But in my eyes, they don’t deserve a big pocket.
Le Grande Conclusion
There are several other very promising projects out in the cryptoverse I’m optimistic on. To name a few: Omisego, Stratis, Ethos, Wabi, Raiblocks, TenX, Cardano, and the list goes on.
There are plenty of coins to choose from. I won’t take a deep dive on them here. But, to put things into perspective, I shape my optimism on the likeliness of survival of the coins I select. Alongside reading the white paper, understanding the concept and making decisions, there are some keep points I look out for when I dive deep into my qualitative analysis.
I do this as the markets are highly speculative. Thus, this helps me filter the good from the bad.
– Does it solve a problem?
– What’s the solution?
– How capable/reputable is the history of the team?
– Likelihood of delivery?
– Community?
– Roadmap?
– Social Media presence? (secondary, but this may affect marketing)
Another secondary factor, as we’re all in here to make profits, is ‘Does the project have a likelihood to list on any major exchange in the future?’
To get to these conclusions, I too was once a padawan. I spent countless hours of research, doing my homework, studying crypto, obsessing over it and hunting it down. If I didn’t understand something, I’d stare at it until it makes sense. I love it enough to make a career out of it.
Okay okay, that’s a step too far! For the average day investor, the obsession part aside, it’s crucial to follow the statements above.
Another list of considerations:
1. Do your own research
2. Invest Long Term — HODL!
3. Have patience
4. Don’t invest what you cannot afford to lose
5. Do not FOMO. (Fear of missing out — Scenario 2, previously mentioned)
Young padawans, wizards, and future Jedis…
I hope this has been insightful. The coins I recommended are not guaranteed to reap rewards. I have solely invested long term as I am optimistic about their fundamentals, after following the key steps during my research. They only showcase a small portion of my doings and I will always carry on researching as there is always something new to learn!
By all means, this is not financial advice. The cryptoverse is a hell of a ride. It is highly volatile, but with high risk comes high reward. I am grateful to be living in a time where blockchain technology is making innovative changes to the way we see and experience the world.
As the internet changed everything, I see no reason as to why the blockchain won’t do the same.
Some great sources for news and insights:
– /Reddit.com/cryptomarkets
– Medium
– Bitcointalk.com
– Coin telegraph
– Coin Desk
Here’s a picture of what I use the most:
Boom diddy bye bye!
That’s it for now. Feel free to ask about anything you want. Here to help! That’s what communities are here for.
Fill yo’ bags, fill yo’ pockets, hodl long term, ride the waves, ride the storms, and invest wisely.
Some have retired, others have rode their lambos, others have made careers, supported families, made amazing friendships and last but not least learnt a whole deal about themselves, their emotions and the markets!
As opposed to before, bigger dogs are coming into the industry, yet, bigger minds are coming to solve the blockchain too. More establishment equals further adoption. If there ever is a pop, I still believe the majority of coins will crash and burn. However, the strong will survive.
I don’t flinch with market movements, the coins I chose to hold, I’ve stored safely in their wallets, in cold storage, far away from my sight. I’ll look back in a few years.
We’re all in this together, and will hopefully reap nice rewards!
Amen.
“So… I have lots to learn as a young padawan… but… when lambo moon?”
by Jacob Papageorgiou
Head Of Education at London Block Exchange
Founder of Bitmera – Simplifying cryptocurrency through education.
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