Mega Disclaimer: This is simply telling you what I’ve decided to do with Cryptocurrencies, as an experiment more than anything else, and why and how I did it. Do not take anything in here as advice. I will try not to express any views but any that are expressed are merely my (largely uninformed) opinions, so please do your own research before deciding if you are going to dabble with the devil that is: cryptocurrencies!

They are the talk of the town, and for better or worse I’ve decided to stick some money into them. My thinking behind it was pretty simple:

  • Fact: In (say) 1 years time, Cryptos could either have stayed the same, crash horrendously, or be another 10 bagger
  • Question: Which of these scenarios would piss me off more:
    • A) I stuck in (say) £3000 into Cryptos and they crashed to zero
    • B) I stuck in £3000 and it roughly stayed the same
    • B) I didn’t stick in £3000 and they increase by a factor of ten

The conclusion was that I’d be more pissed off in scenario C so it makes rational sense to put some money into it and see what happens. Yes, this is FOMO 1 in action people. I also figure that a few grand is essentially play money in terms of our current net worth so losing it won’t hurt the overall FI effort.

It’s also worth pointing out these important facts before we go on:

  • I fully realise this is speculating, not investing. Anyone who says they’re investing in cryptos right now is deluding themselves.
  • I am almost certain that a great crypto crash will inevitably come, and I have no idea how bad that will be or what cryptos will survive and which will die out completely. The gamble here is to get in and out before it does.
  • Or maybe I’m wrong even on that account and there will never be a big crash!? But from my perspective it certainly looks like a bubble waiting to pop, it’s just will this be tomorrow (hopefully not!), in 3 months, or in 3 years. I think there are plenty of greater fools out there to keep it going for quite some time, but again what do I know?

Additionally, one extra reason I wanted to get involved, which may sound stupid, but I wanted to test my resolve as an “investor” in a market crash, which tends to happen quite often with the price of cryptos. Would I wussy out and sell out of my position or would I go back in at “bargain” prices? I may have to wait a while to test this out in the stock market because they have generally been going up since I got involved with investing, with only minor crashes happening in the last few years. 50% crashes in a day happen fairly regularly with cryptos! So I doubt I’d have to wait too long to see how I would react (spoiler alert, it wasn’t!!!)

I realise the corollary to a stock market crash is extremely weak if not non-existent, because the underlying companies of the stock market are (generally) still worth something whereas cryptos are only worth what people will pay for them with (in my opinion) very little actual underlying value. But still… it has to be said that if you look back at the charts, every time they’ve crashed, the surge has been even stronger, so buying after a crash does still seem to be a sound strategy.

Of course, I could be extremely unlucky and I could call the top of the bubble, and buying more after a crash could see them all continue crashing back down to zero, but personally I think that is unlikely for most of the big ones, at least for a while. So I will be treating any crashes like a stock market crash and buying more in the expectation that it will keep going up soon enough.

By the way, if you are wondering about the post title, I started writing it just before Christmas and I couldn’t think of a better title now so have just left it 🙂

 

muchos cryptos

As a quick aside it’s worth noting that there is 1300+ of the little buggers listed on coinmarketcap.com alone. The funniest named of which has got to be TrumpCoin… yep, no joke:

🙂

how to trade cryptos

There are many sites you can buy and sell Cryptos, the biggest and most well known of which seems to be coinbase but I decided to go with more of a trading style website called eToro(<– Referral link, we will both receive $20 on your first deposit if you use this link) as it offers more of them to get involved with, 7 of the largest known ones in all which are namely:

  • Bitcoin (BTC)
  • Ethereum (ETHEREUM)
  • Ripple (XRP)
  • Dash (DASH)
  • Ethereum Classic (ETC)
  • Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
  • Litecoin (LTC)

The 7 tradable Cryptocurrencies on eToro

It is probably worth stating that eToro is more of a trading site and it doesn’t seem like you can store any of the coins on a personal wallet or anything like that, although they do actually buy the coins on your behalf, according to this article which it’s very much worth reading before you open an eToro account:

The risks of trading bitcoin on eToro

TL:DR are these points:

  • Buying/Selling is too easy encouraging short term trades
  • Spreads are very high
  • High withdrawal fees

However seeing as I am just aiming to get in and out at one point rather than trade alot these factors didn’t really make much difference to my use case so it turned out OK .

So now that just leaves one thing and that was for me to get all aboard…

 

…the crypto rollercoaster!!!

The louder you scream the faster she goes!

Well, what a ride it has been so far.

My “portfolio” has been up $1,000 to -$1,000 within the space of a day:

Didn’t quite catch the -$1,000 as it ticked back up so quickly!!!

 

The above screen shot was taken in the midst of the crash just before Christmas where my I was almost immediately tested on my (half baked) trading strategy I mentioned above. I did what I planned and bought some more and was back in “profit” soon enough when most of the currencies bounded back somewhat. So… so far not much damage done there. Since then is hasn’t bounded back and forth but mainly been in the green, but it is crazy how much things change even from hour to hour.

This ride is certainly not for the faint hearted!

This is how things stand as of 7:41 am 12th January 2018 (I thought it might help to put the exact time as things change so quickly… haha):

 

new strats

After reading a few more articles on the whole “bubble” subject, not least from your boi MMM, I have to admit I did change my tune somewhat and decided to get out if the whole portfolio hit $3,000, a nice round, totally arbitrary number.

Technical shit going down here, I think you’ll agree?

It came excruciatingly close after a ridiculous run up of Ripple to about $3.70 (which I bought at around 0.9 on average) but that’s now crashed again so I have decided to sell positions in tranches that have made over 100% (not including Ripple, I’m not really sure what to do about that yet) so I’ve only sold one position on Ethereum so far. I’m hoping by doing this I will make more use of the individual ups and downs of the different coins and hit the 3K profit mark fairly soon.

Then… I am going to use that as even more play money to invest small amounts in some “altCoins” – which pretty much just means any cryptocoin that isn’t one of the top 10 – i.e. the other 1300 odd listed on coinmarketcap.com – and hope to hit a 10 or 100 bagger. Sounds crazy but I think it’s worth a shot, especially seeing if (and that’s still quite a big IF at this point in time!) I can be playing with profit from the initial strategy.

Anyway, if/when that happens I’ll be sure of doing a post on that as well.

 

morals schmorals

Finally to address the well made and valid points MMM makes in his article on Bitcoins/Cryptos:

  • Cryptos are speculating not investing – I pretty much totally agree with this, Bitcoin in particular does seem to have nothing special about it that anything else could do, and for “free” 2 as it’s open source. Although some of the newer coins do seem to have specific use cases which might make them more resilient to the bubble popping, which is why I want to look into the altCoin space.
  • Huge amounts of energy are currently being wasted mining coins and calculating the blockchain transactions – Again totally agreed and this is something that needs to be sorted out. We can’t have a whole countries worth of electricity going to just sorting out these crypto transactions. There are other coins again that are far more efficient in this regard.
  • It’s a waste of investing time and energy – Indeed but it’s not like I’m sticking our whole Net Worth into it, and will try not to waste too much time on it either.
  • if you’re going to be an evangelist for anything, it needs to be purely based on the underlying merits, not what you hope it will do for your personal fortune. – Just to be clear I’m not evangelising any of this, I’m simply telling everyone what I decided to do and how I did it.
  • I am always going to tell you that price speculation is a bad way to spend your life. This part of it is ideological to me: You Must Earn Your Money By Creating Value for Everyone. – I’m actually calling bullshit on this. I can see the patently obvious difference between investing in a company and speculating on bitcoins, but don’t delude yourself that all of your S&P Vanguard fund investment returns are “earned”, pal!

So yea… basically as I’ve mentioned above quite a few times now, I kinda totally agree that this is a greater fool thing but I just think there are plenty more fools in the sea.

There is the morality argument to this I suppose, that if I fundamentally agree that the whole thing is a bit stupid then I shouldn’t get involved, but at the end of the day we’re all in this FIRE business to make some money and to live the good life as quickly as possible. People are all (supposed to be) responsible adults who can fully decide whether or not they want to get into this sort of thing or not, so I think that’s up to them if they want to go for it.

Yes it is most likely a zero sum game so there will be winners and losers, but hey, I could easily lose the shirt off of my back as well. If you don’t want to get your fingers burnt then don’t play with FIRE Fire 😉

Finally, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite stories about Bitcoin, which is the infamous Bitcoin Pizza, a.k.a…

 

Isn’t hindsight is a bitch?

I remember reading about Bitcoin way back around 2013 (could have been even earlier actually) and in particular the infamous Bitcoin Pizza which I recall at the time being “worth” around $1 million, which blew my mind. It was worth (or more correctly would have been worth, if the person who bought it had kept the bitcoins instead) $100 million as of November 28th at values of $10,000/bitcoin which means it’s worth just over that at time of writing (and we’ll get onto the volatility discussion momentarily!), but even just a few days ago with a high of around $20,000 it would obviously have been double that at around $200 million! An expensive pizza, right!?

Anyway I guess the point I’m making here is that I read the story, looked at the graph, thought well I’ve totally missed the boat on that one and didn’t give it much thought. And now here we are in 2017 and it’s a 100+ bagger since those halcyon days of the $1 million pizza story.

As they say the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the next best time is now… I think we need to update that for the cryptocurrencies age a bit:

The best time to buy a cryptocurrency is 5 years ago, the second best time was last week!

 

What are your thoughts on Cryptos? Anyone else dabbled with them yet? Anyone get in at the start of the year (or earlier?!) and are sitting on 1000%+ gains? Have you sold yet? Tell us your stories in the comments section below!

Also, I’m fully expecting to get some flack for this btw so don’t hold back and let your keyboard loose! I’m a big boy, I can take it! 🙂

Notes:

  1. Yes, this is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary apparently. *facepalm* (which is also in there).
  2. Development time notwithstanding