• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Metacoin

Covering Bitcoin, the Blockchain, Altcoins, and Fintech

  • Start Here
  • Links
  • Disclosures
  • NFTs
  • Collezione

Archives for January 2018

Jan 17 2018

Bitconnect, Sadly, Crashes Down

This is a sad, sad tale, but one that’s all too real. Bitconnect – the lending platform that most called a Ponzi scheme – came crashing down yesterday.

Bitconnect Drop

This is nothing to celebrate. Nothing at all.

What Went Wrong?

Whether or not this was a Ponzi scheme is a question folks can debate: Ponzis rely on money from new investors to pay the old investors. Bitconnect certainly had elements of that. Ponzis also make it very tough for you to get out your original investments – and, since the “lending platform” locked down your funds for as many as 299 days, that’s also a pretty telling sign.

However, proponents of Bitconnect – and several remain – will tell you that the coin is in good shape (despite a perceived drop in value of upwards of 90 percent) and that the ICO for their new coin (which will do…what, exactly?) means that they’re poised for great things.

No “We Told You So”

On this site, we went through the “stages of grief” with Bitconnect – and you can visit our Passive Income page to see how that unfolded. First, we thought it was really really cool and continued our experiment. Then, we backed off a little, wondering if it was too good to be true. Finally, a few months back, we made it a point to get our money out (from “lending profits”) every chance we could.

Whether we did or didn’t get back everything we put into it is a question we’ll have to do the math in order to answer.

But, with all of these, we’ve done a “warts and all” experiment on passive income platforms such as these. Sadly, we’re now officially an “oh-fer,” 0-for-10?

Again, Those Caveats

We’re seeing awful stories on the darker corners of the internet: from folks who got in way over their heads, invested more than they could afford to lose, and are now left picking up the pieces.

The caveats in this space need to be repeated, in bold, which we’ll do now:

  • Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose
  • Don’t borrow to invest in cryptocurrency
  • Do your own research
  • Spread out your risk so that you’re not completely reliant on one investment
  • Get legal, tax, and accounting advice from professionals
  • You are responsible for your own success or failure.

Our Next Steps

On this site, we’ll update our own 2018 Crypto Investment Plan – we need to investigate more “Passive Income Programs,” but, to be honest, those will likely include only mining and staking opportunities; any “lending” or “high yield investment program” (HYIP) will likely be a scam and should be avoided.

We’ll also update the Passive Income page to reflect the fact that Bitconnect is a scam.

#DYOR is our favorite hashtag/acronym in crypto. Do Your Own Research. Don’t trust just one site for information about cryptocurrency, don’t rely on just one YouTuber or blogger, and investigate everything. If it looks fishy, it may well be fishy.

Written by David Van de Walle · Categorized: Bitconnect, Scam Alert

Jan 17 2018

Our 2018 Crypto Investment Plan

2018

EDITOR’S NOTE: With the activities of mid-January, such as the sharp pullback of pretty much all coins, plus the crash of Bitconnect, we’ve updated this post on January 17.

Anyone else feel really blessed and ready to make it a phenomenal year?

Frankly, we feel like we hit the ground sprinting in 2018. Part of it was due to a little bit of luck, part of it was due to some planning, and part of it was due to the discipline to just hang tight for a while.

For instance, we made our own luck with a couple of timely picks; we also called ourselves HODLers on at least a couple of occasions – ones where weaker hands might have folded up the tents.

But we screwed up a couple places, too: our first ever trade with DASH meant that we took profits of 25% off the table and closed out our entire interest. Let’s never speak of this again.

Starting with a Bang

My #crypto portfolio is only up 55% since 12/31.

What am I doing wrong? pic.twitter.com/BxAqbDmFeX

— Dave Van de Walle (@Area224) January 4, 2018

We’ve gone on and on about Risk Management here. And we also feel that we’ve experimented at least enough with some concepts – you can read a whole bunch more over at the Passive Income page on this site – to at least have a firm understanding of what could work, what won’t work, and what things are worth our time.

Finally, we think we’ve gotten a good chunk of knowledge from some others on the web – especially “Crypto Twitter,” which has been a wonderful world for us so far (with thanks to some characters like @BambouClub, @crazy_crypto, @haydentiff, and @BryceWeiner, who all share their approaches to coins and tokens and various crypto ecosystems – and all bring rather distinctive POVs).

It was BambouClub himself who challenged us to put a plan to paper – and stick to it. We had the plan to paper part sketched out – but we needed to formalize it and put it in writing.

And the “stick to it” thing we’re also going to TRY to do. More to come on that…

Enough Background: SHARE THE PLAN!!!

Behold, our 2018 Crypto Investment Plan. With the usual caveats:

  • This is not individual advice
  • Invest at your own risk
  • Seek professional help for things like taxes, accounting, legal, and the like
  • “DYOR” – if you learned one acronym last year, it’s that one. Do Your Own Research.

Let’s get started with the $1,250,000 question:

Should BRED Be Part of Your Plan?

How quickly can we answer that with a resounding YES?

If you read our post from New Year’s Day, you know how well you would have done with BRED – that combo of Bitcoin, Ripple’s XRP token, Ethereum, and Dash – to the tune of wild, crazy, insane returns from buying and holding for one whole year.

BRED 2017

This was, and still is, probably as close to a Bitcoin Mutual Fund as you can get. But, for 2018, it needed to be tweaked, to accommodate for a couple things, including main Bitcoin forks, the Ethereum fork from more than a year ago, and the crazy returns from Ripple (meaning that you are buying fewer XRP tokens than you had a year ago, because they’ve gone from penny stock to blue chip holding rather quickly). Hence:

2018 BRED Allocation
Reweighted to start the new year

We’ll answer the “how much?” question a little later; but now that the overall yes/no question on BRED is settled, we probably need to agree on an altcoin strategy, too: everything down the totem pole that could make sense to be part of the mix.

What About the Altcoins?

Our approach to altcoins isn’t random – we spent most of 2017 learning which sorts of projects appealed to us, and which ones had the potential to turn into something that replicates the success of the BRED portfolio. They’re somewhat diverse – big and small, different kinds of projects – and, as you can see from this chart, they also run the gamut from multi-billion-dollar projects to tiny-but-poised. Here’s a snapshot of our eight coins – but remember to DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

Alt Portfolio

As we revisit some of the highlights and lowlights from 2017, we know that our biggest mistakes were when we chased quick returns and weren’t in love with the project. In these cases, we think these projects have tremendous potential, and it’s likely a rather diverse enough group to spread out our risk.

And we lucked out on a couple: ADA and HTML have both gone up at least 5 times since we bought in, and TRX was a gift courtesy of a Binance airdrop, so we held on and bought more.

Where we think we might see some real growth, though, is toward the bottom of the list. We’ve held COSS for long enough to be officially called #HODLers – “Hold On for Dear Life” – and our stake has allowed us to realize gains on a USD basis from Bitcoin’s price spike. And BURST has us so crazy excited: we were working on a blog post IN JUNE about the potential for that coin…before all of its developments.

There needs to be room in the portfolio for more, though. Let’s briefly address Passive Income next.

Our Changing Passive Income Approach

Well, the breaking news as we update this post goes as follows:

Bitconnect Scam

We took some lumps and lost some BTC (and ETH, and even some LTC) investing in passive income programs that went belly up. One saving grace: we have investigated mining and staking, and that’s where our Passive Income for 2018 will take us.

Genesis Mining will be where re reinvest in this category, and we’ll also invest in coins where there’s passive interest that pays – like HTMLCoin, for instance – and also check out inexpensive mining for coins like BURST.

There’s one more bucket, but what do we call it and what do we use it for?

Take A Flier, Please

We were able to confirm on Investopedia that we’re using the term correctly, so we’re calling this category “Fliers.” This includes:

  • Coins that we invested in, lost interest in, but didn’t totally get rid of (LBRY is one)
  • ICOs or other projects that are either thinly traded or haven’t fully launched (Exscudo, POW)
  • Airdrops (we’re still finding coins that we were granted that…maybe might be good projects eventually)
  • “Others” – serving as a catch-all term for anything else that doesn’t fit neatly into a category.

We now have four different buckets – so it’s time to figure out the right allocation for each.

Here It Is: Our 2018 Crypto Investment Plan

 

18 Portfolio

Let us explain what’s going on here. We decided to allocate in more of a “barbell strategy” – heavily weighted toward core coins on one side (40% BRED) and toward alts on the other (the 40% Alts category). The “Target” column is the amount we want to see our allocations get to – but, as you can see in the “3-Jan” column, in some respects we have a ways to go.

Coins that we specifically hope to make up ground with we’ve highlighted in pink: we will add where we can, either through profits on something like Bitconnect, or, if we end up with an extreme winner, taking some profits from that coin or token.

Right now, we need to reweight a little away from Alts (59%) and toward BRED (22%); we also know that the Fliers are not an exact science, since some of those airdrops aren’t worth much – but could be worth a ton someday – and others don’t hit the market for a bit, so pricing guesstimations are just that. (In those cases, by the way, we have simply used the value of the investments we’ve made as the value of the coin right now. Exscudo, for instance, claimed to sell at an equivalent of $2, so we calculated the BTC price and offset that for any re-distribution of tokens that occurred later.)

Why They’re “Goals”

We agreed to put this on paper, but we also didn’t want to upset the apple cart. That’s why we’re calling them goals: we aim to get our overall crypto portfolio as close to the weighting as we can by February 1.

But we also give ourselves the leeway to make changes as we see fit. For instance, TRX cannot possibly sustain its run, can it? XRP can’t have anywhere near the run it had last year, could it? And so on, and so forth: while we don’t think we’ll deviate from BRED, we might make a change or two to the Alt portion of the portfolio.

And we can’t be held to a strict “40-40-10-10” formula. (If, in theory, we did that in 2017 with BRED but decided to reallocate each quarter, who’s to say what that would have done to our approach?)

Our Suggestion For You…

Again, this is not individual advice, and seek the counsel of those wise folks in your spheres of influence.

However, this has been a great exercise for us, the act of getting things on paper. We’ve questioned a couple of our own assumptions, and we’ve also had to ask ourselves just how much risk we want to shoulder.

In this vein, we think we’re prepared for 2018, come what may.

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

 

 

Written by David Van de Walle · Categorized: Bitcoin, Bitconnect, BRED, COSS, Dash, Ethereum, Exscudo, HODL, Investing, POW Token, Ripple, Uncategorized, USI Tech · Tagged: 2018 Plan, Burst, Cardano, Tron

Jan 01 2018

The 2017 BRED Portfolio…Would Have Made You Rich

Some crypto assets had staggering gains in 2017, that’s for sure. If you want to play the “woulda shoulda coulda” game, you could do it with a good chunk of any of the top 10 – or even a good chunk of the top 100 – assets on CoinMarketCap.com.

Top 10 Portfolio

Yes, we know – to have invested in the Top 10 coins of 2017, you would have had to (1) correctly guess which ones would enter the Top 10 and (2) in the case of IOTA and Cardano, know that they were going to exist before they existed.

When we created the BRED Portfolio, we decided to take four coins that were already in use, but we did backdate the portfolio to 1/1/17. So we spent pretty much all of 2017 asking ourselves “WHY DIDN’T WE ACTUALLY DO THIS???”

BRED 2017 Recap

Simple enough, we wanted to diversify but we didn’t feel we needed to diversify that broadly. So we created a hypothetical portfolio that included $2,500 invested in each of the four currencies (ones that didn’t just make for an easy acronym, but also were selected for a reason):

  • B – Bitcoin. Well, duh. Also, it’s really the centerpiece of cryptocurrency; whether or not it retains its dominance in 2018, we’re not sure.
  • R – Ripple, whose XRP currency aims to beat out SWIFT as the interbank transfer protocol.
  • E – Ethereum. Most of those token sales were built on Ethereum’s smart contract concept.
  • D – Dash. We thought then that it was the most consumer-friendly coin; it may still be (though Litecoin and some others might be on its heels).

With an equal amount allocated – and then a similar number of each Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold added after the forks – we ended up with something that looks like this.

BRED 2017

You Could Be Backing a Truck Up Now

The next question: whether your 2018 could be as good – or better? – if you went with this portfolio strategy for the year. We’ve decided, for this blog, to track two BRED portfolios: as opposed to retiring BRED from last year, we’ll keep it going, but also add BRED 2018.

First, the 2017 Allocation.

BRED Allocation 17
How we originally allocated our BRED portfolio

Next, how we’d allocate a brand new BRED portfolio.

2018 BRED Allocation
Reweighted to start the new year

We promise to continue talking about this – and one of the things we’re working on is holding ourselves to a “buy and hold” mantra on some of our portfolio.

Not all of it, because we do have to be ready to chase altcoins that might pop, or to move into some of the larger coins – like the Top 10 above – that might be poised for another breakthrough.

What about you…what’s on your list for 2018 crypto investments?

 

Written by David Van de Walle · Categorized: Bitcoin, BRED, Dash, Ethereum, Ripple · Tagged: BRED

Primary Sidebar

Search This Site

Most Popular Posts

Up Arrows Are Nice

Up Only In 2024?

So far so good for the 2024 Growth Portfolio. Here we are, on the way to another wacky crypto year. And things are looking...up. If … [Read More...] about Up Only In 2024?

Liquidity Machine Go BRRRRRR

If you have a hard time keeping up with the latest in crypto, fintech, or any of the other things that keep the economy moving, join the … [Read More...] about Liquidity Machine Go BRRRRRR

Tweets by TeamMetacoin

Recent Posts

  • Q1 2025 Crypto Update
  • The Ten Best Crypto Investments for 2025
  • So You’ve Made A Little Money…
  • Up Only In 2024?
  • Who Needs an ETF When You Have a Growth Portfolio?

Recent Comments

  • pgxp.fr on UPDATED Control Finance News: Site Down, It’s a Scam
  • Victoria Tegg on Using Coinbase – A Primer for Bitcoin Newbies
  • Victoria Tegg on It’s Not Too Late To Invest in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or…
  • Victoria Tegg on Is it too late to invest in Bitcoin?
  • Victoria Tegg on ETF News: Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or Both?

Archives

  • March 2025
  • January 2025
  • November 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • September 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017

Categories

  • 5-coin challenge
  • AI
  • Airdrop
  • AMBIS
  • Ampleforth
  • Antshares
  • Avax
  • Bancor
  • Big Banks
  • Binance
  • Bitcoin
  • Bitconnect
  • Bithaul
  • Bitpetite
  • Bitshares
  • Blockchain Startups
  • Bloq
  • BRED
  • Bytecoin
  • CAPY
  • Cardano
  • Celer
  • chatgpt
  • Chile
  • Coin News
  • Coinbase
  • Coinreum
  • Collezione
  • Compound
  • Control Finance
  • Copihue
  • COSS
  • Creditbit
  • Crypto.com
  • CryptoCrash
  • Cryptotini
  • Curve
  • DAI
  • Dash
  • DeFi
  • DeFi Kingdoms
  • Dego
  • Developer
  • Dice
  • Digibyte
  • Dogecoin
  • DYOR
  • Economy
  • Einsteinium
  • Electroneum
  • Empowr
  • ENS
  • EOS
  • Eryllium
  • Ethereum
  • Exchange
  • Exchanges
  • Exscudo
  • Fetch
  • Golos
  • Growth Portfolio
  • Hedge Fund
  • Hexabot
  • HODL
  • ICO
  • Inflation
  • Interview
  • Investing
  • Kimchi
  • Lending
  • Library
  • Liquidity
  • Litecoin
  • MAGIC
  • Manifesto
  • Marketing & PR
  • MCO
  • MegaCryptoPolis
  • Meme Coins
  • Meta
  • Metamask
  • Microhash
  • Mining
  • NFT
  • Non-Fungible Tokens
  • Not Investment Advice
  • NXT
  • Origin
  • Pancake
  • Passive Income
  • PAX Gold
  • Pickle
  • PIVX
  • Portfolio
  • POW Token
  • Quadruple
  • Ripple
  • Risk Management
  • Rivetz
  • Scam Alert
  • Segwit
  • Shrimp
  • SHTF
  • Siacoin
  • Sketches2021
  • Steemit
  • Stellar
  • Stratis
  • Sushi
  • tacos
  • Tax Day
  • Tierion
  • Torcoin
  • Trading
  • Treasure
  • Trezor
  • Tulips
  • Uncategorized
  • Uniswap
  • USI Tech
  • VeChain
  • Vesper
  • Video
  • Whenhub
  • XRP
  • Yearn Finance

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2025 · Altitude Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in