crypto currency resource starter toolkit + some of my initial thoughts

Jan31
by TFS on January 31, 2018 at 6:26 pm
Posted In: Crypocurrencies, Resources

 

I’m currently going through that phase where you first discover something new and exciting where you just absorb an absolute shedload of information, every waking minute of your the day. I’m sure you all know what I mean as you are reading a blog about FI, that lovely honeymoon phase where you can’t get enough information!

As a quick side note, that’s the reason why I haven’t done any yearly update posts yet! I will endeavour to get at least one overview of 2017 done once I’ve run out of steam on the Crypto info! And also one looking forward to 2018. Anyway… back to the main post…

However, with Cryptocurrencies, it seems there is even more information out there than most subjects that is either totally rubbish, or deliberately misleading. The barrier to entry to be a “crypto guru” nowadays is so low (i.e. click on YouTube, open account, film some crap with your phone camera) and the incentive to mislead people so large that this fact is not really all that surprising.

I’m still learning so my bullsh!t detector is probably still a bit off, so please take some of these recommendations with a pinch of salt, but here are a few YouTube people that seem to be shooting slightly more straight than your average ‘tuber. Also, I’ve got a bunch of links to some other websites you might find useful when doing some crypto research. Hopefully this will shortcut some of you just getting into the space and save you some time having to find all this stuff yourself!

Crypto YouTubers

  • Doug Polk – Is an professional poker player who’s now turned his focus onto cryptos. He seems to like calling out scams and other YouTubers who are promoting these scams which seems to give him some credibility in my eye. He also avoids all of the “TOP 5 COINS TO MAKE 1000% RETURNS” type videos, see here for his thoughts on that. He also comes across as intelligent, and tends to be rather entertaining, which always helps! Here’s a video about his current portfolio, which could be instructive (make of it what you will of course!)
  • Cedric Dahl – He instantly got a mark against him for having a few videos with “1000x returns” in the titles, but I’m glad I took a quick look anyway as it turned out that what he had to say was (or seemed to me) pretty good, sensible advice and wasn’t a load of hyped up BS like what I was expecting. Here is a link to the first one in that series so take a look and see what you think for yourself. Another one which seemed rather instructive was his complete trashing of Ripple!
  • Louis Thomas – He’s from the UK which is a plus point! And again he seems to just talk in a more level headed way than most about Cryptos without hyping any particular thing. Here are a few of his videos I found useful giving an overview of three of the biggest coins plans/possible outcomes in 2018: Ethereum, Bitcoin and Litecoin.

And here’s a bonus video which is the last two mentioned together doing a bit of a Q&A!

I won’t call out any specific ones to avoid but it seems that some obvious things to avoid are ones with ridiculous titles, anyone who recommends BitConnect, and I switch off pretty quickly if someone just seems to be looking at a graph and saying stuff like “well, you can see it’s gone up a bit here, then down a bit now, so it could be a good time to buy” and “This looks quite cheap right now, if it goes up to a dollar then you’ve made a hundred X”. I mean, come on…

 

Basic Website Resources

  • CoinMarketCap – Probably the number one resource and hopefully it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. You can look at a good overview of coin prices, market caps, volume, some mini graphs so on nice graphs. If you click through into a specific coin, you can see a bigger graph with more options, and there are also tabs for “Markets” i.e. where you can trade the coin you are looking at, social media accounts, and links to all the relevant websites where you can (hopefully!) view whitepapers and so on. There is also usually a link to the coins main thread on BitcoinTalk Forum (see below).
  • Coinwink – It’s a free price alerts system for any of the coins listed on CoinMarketCap! What’s not to like about that? 🙂
  • BitcoinTalk Forum (BT) – Some of the threads are hundreds of pages long so it’s not always that great to gauge exactly what’s going on with any given coin. But it’s definitely worth at least having a look and trying to skim a few pages so see if there are any disgruntled buyers/holders. Bearing in mind it’s very easy to set up fake forum accounts to either unfairly trash a coin (presumably people trying to lower the price so they can buy) or make it look like there is far more buzz than there actually is (presumably people pumping up the price who have got in much lower so they can dump it for a larger profit). Oh, here is the original BT thread about the Bitcoin pizza that I mentioned in my first post about cryptos. A piece of history right there!
  • Reddit – Most cryptos seem to have a reddit page as well, and the same caveats as BitcoinTalk above apply.
  • Coin Central – Is a website started by Doug Polk mentioned above, and seems to have quite a few beginner articles which I found useful. E.g.

 

3 other ways to potentially make money with cryptos

So you can buy some bitcoin (or any of the other big guns) and hope it goes up. That is the obvious thing that everyone and their postman’s gran’s cat is up to. This could still make you some decent money and is probably less risky than some of the other options available to you below. But on the other hand, I feel like the race for many of these could have already been run.[/ref]Not according to many in the space, who are predicting a market cap of 5 trillion for the whole sector in a years time, which still leaves plenty of room for Bitcoin et all to go at least another 10x![/ref]. So I feel that looking elsewhere for some greater value and greater potential for crazy returns is something worth putting a bit of blood, sweat and tears into.

Here are three other ideas:

  • Mining – I’m sure you’ve all heard of mining. There are different ways of doing it and to be honest I don’t really know all that much about this right now and as it seems hardware intensive, I am not looking into this right now.
  • ICO’s – Just like my good friend FI Fighter, I feel that trying to pick out the next ICO that could go 100x, while obviously challenging if not impossible, could also be fun and ultimately very rewarding (financially at least!). So I’m putting a fair bit of research into this right now. If you don’t know, and ICO is an “Initial Coin Offering” and is where a company ends up selling a tonne of their coins to raise money to get their product, service, or infrastructure blockchain project off the ground. The coins act as a pseudo kind of stock because if the projects go well and start getting traction and usage, their value tends to go up. Also a lot of them tend to have returns built into their system for the coin holders 1. A good website to get the nod on ongoing and upcoming ICOs is ICO Drops, although as you’d expect there are many others out there so have a look around and see what you can find!
  • Masternodes – This is my personal favourite, although has the biggest barrier to entry. And that is kind of why I like it. I think the harder something is to do, the less people will be doing it and therefore the potential returns should be higher because there are less people getting involved diluting returns. The idea is that you have to buy a big chunk of a given crypto currency, say 1000 coins at $5 per coin, costing you $5,000. You then “commit” 2 these coins to running your Masternode, which is either a physical which you own or a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that you can set up for around $5/month. This server helps with your coin network of choice by validating transactions and performing other similar functions. So you’ve stuck down your money, what do you get? Well you get a bounty for each function your masternode performs, paid in the cryptocurrency it is doing those functions/transactions for. The way I’m looking at it is like dividend income. I really like this idea because if you get into an “normal” alt coin you are simply hoping/thinking that the value of the coin will go up to make your gains. But with a Masternode based coin, you could make your money back within a couple of months anyway even if the value of the coin stays stable. Also, if the value goes up, you should in theory make more because you will have the holding of the original coins you bought to “buy” the masternode (which you can sell at any time, you just need to stop running the masternode) plus the dividend income of the coins you receive for running it, which are now worth more than when you put into it. So you could be making, say $500 a month from an initial investment of, say $1000. The other situation is obviously if the value goes down but again, you are in a better position here because although your initial investment has gone down, you are still receiving the dividend style income (albeit lower than it was when you started the masternode) so it also protects you from the downside of price drops. These are obviously all hypothetical figures but hopefully I’ve outlined why I think it’s better than just buying and holding/selling!

I realise there is a lot of information in there, especially about Masternodes, so here are a few more links for further resources and reading on that part of things specifically:

Masternodes.online – This is a great resource which lists most of the blockchain projects that you can set up a Masternode with. It has a table that tells you all the top line important stats such as the current: Price of the coin, ROI%, Masternode cost, 24 hour volume and so on. Some of the ROI% you can see here are actually insane (1000%+!!!), so the usual “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is” mantra most certainly should be applied here. Proceed with caution on those ones! On the other hand I wouldn’t immediately dismiss any of them just because of that, and am trying to get as much info as I can on the whys and wherefores of all those figures and how and why they think they can justify such ridiculous returns. See the video linked below about ROI/Volume figures by the way! There are a couple of other similar sites namely MNRank and MasternodesPro (and again I’m sure others are available that I don’t know of just yet).

What is a Masternode? – From one of the original and now biggest Blockchain project that users Masternodes, Dash

Finally, here are a couple of YouTubez from a very small (judging by views and subscribers at least!) ‘tuber that I found very helpful (he has a few more now which I am going to go and watch as well!):

 

As always and hopfully needless to say, be careful out if you are getting into any of this!

Also, I’d be very interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on any of the above especially those that might have had a dabble already! Let me know how it’s going!?

Cheers!

Notes:

  1. I do find this particular aspect alarming, as many of them just sound straight up like ponzi schemes, so needless to say proceed with caution when you read stuff like that!!! ↩
  2. Not sure that’s the correct terminology but we’ll go with it for now ↩
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