Metacoin

Covering Bitcoin, the Blockchain, Altcoins, and Fintech

Airdrop

The SHTF Portfolio*, Part 2

We gave you a couple basic ideas in Part 1, including gold and silver, plus some cash, and — since this is a crypto blog, natch — ETH as your gateway crypto.

Now, in Part 2, time to go really in on crypto to round out your potential portfolio for…well, you know.

This reminder: We’re not responsible for your success or failure. That’s all you. This isn’t individual advice. Past performance isn’t indicative of future results. Bet with your head, not over it. We hope, though, that you succeed.

Portfolio Idea #5: Yes, Virginia, there Is a Bitcoin

You need a little BTC to make sure you have the Grandpa of Crypto. Not a ton, but some. This is where you’re assuming the coin will act as a bit of a hedge, and will move with the broader stock market — which it has done, at least a little — but you’re not banking on a 10x overnight.

You’re doing this for ease of mass usage on places like PayPal, for when people start adopting it.

It’s not our favorite right now, but it’s not to be ignored in a crisis.

Portfolio Idea #6: Join a YFI/ETH Pool on Uniswap

We’ve talked about LPs — “Liquidity Pools” — elsewhere on the blog; this makes a ton of sense as the crypto world morphs into the DeFi — “Decentralized Finance” — world.

Our recommendation here is to have some $YFI and put an equal amount of it and $ETH into a Uniswap pool. While the liquidity here is not where it used to be, you really want to be there because the next Uniswap “airdrop” (more on those in a second) will happen and you need to be using your Metamask account in order to get some sweet, free money. Which brings us to the next item:

Portfolio Idea #7: Get Airdrop Fever

Most of these will suck.

In fact, until Uniswap’s massive airdrop — 400 coins into EACH ETH account you used on their platform — we hadn’t ever seen one that was four figures worth of fun.

The rest may eventually be worthless — I’m looking at you, POW Token — or just a couple bucks here or there. But there are some gems if you’re willing to play around a bit.

Sign up for airdrop alerts from other blogs, check this site for some that we see, and — this is a great tip, in our opinion — get over to Telegram and start poking around.

Keep a spreadsheet and check back periodically on the airdrops’ sites to see if you’ve had any luck.

Portfolio Idea #8: Take a Couple Chances

Here’s where you can get creative, but don’t go crazy. For instance, we have a couple hundred bucks — in October 24 prices — worth of Taco coins, and, should a random small need pop up, we can cash that out and not feel incredibly bad about it.

You’ll want to consider having a few of these types of investments; probably not going to set the world on fire and do a 100x tomorrow, but may hold their value okay.

Some to think about:

Portfolio Idea #9: A USD “Stablecoin”

The best and easiest of these is DAI. Whether it is technically a “stablecoin” could be debated, but the general idea is to peg it to the US Dollar and it doesn’t fluctuate too much above or below that buck.

(Whether the US Dollar will continue ad infinitum to be the global reserve currency is questionable. But…well, that’s a subject for another day. Also, while you’re here, be sure to read our discussion with Carlos Baeza Negroni, who is building a stablecoin pegged to the Chilean Peso.)

You can get some DAI through this CLEARLY MARKED AFFILIATE LINK to Coinbase.

Scouts’ Motto: Be Prepared

Hey, we all hope that things remain semi-normal, but there’s a chance they won’t.

Consider these ideas to get you started as you prepare for the turbulence ahead.

Airdrop Watch: Here’s One Called…COYFI, and another called ARBISWAP

We found these airdrops and thought we’d send them along.

$COYFI is the name of the first one and it appears to want to offer some of the benefits of $YFI, but, well, it’s an airdrop, so they’re just getting going.

Here’s a screenshot:

Use this link and get 0.1 of these for free: COYFI Airdrop.

The other is called $ARBISWAP and the link *may* require a purchase in order to get free coins. Here it is: ARBISWAP Airdrop. You’ll be directed to Telegram where you follow a few steps.

Bear in mind, we’re not sure how any of these will fare.

* we take no responsibility for your success or failure with any of these. If you think you’ll get rich, we direct you to the “Rug Pull” of a couple weeks back.

How To Take Advantage of the Empowr Airdrop

While the crypto universe seems to be wondering why the price of Bitcoin and its brethren are going higher and higher during the past week, perhaps it’s time to take a break from BTC and the core coins and go after some sweet airdrop action. This one is courtesy of our friends at empowr.

Note that Dave from Metacoin is part of the empowr Advisory Board; however, no affiliate commissions will be generated from this blog post.

empowr

How to Get Your empowr Coins

This is pretty simple, actually – which we like; some of the airdrops we’ve seen have had more onerous restrictions, so simple is best. Step one: You need an actual empowr account. That’s free – but you will need a PayPal account to confirm your identity.

Next, once you’re on the system, go to the Settings page and input your Ethereum address – and it must be one from a non-Coinbase wallet, like MyEtherWallet or Metamask.

And…You’re All Set…Provided That…

It looks like the date is Sunday, April 15 for this big airdrop. So you need to have 0.1 ETH in your wallet by 07:00 PST in the US by then.

Of course we’ll be watching this one closely…

The Other Airdrop We’ve Talked About

POW is a digital token and client of Metacoin; their airdrop continues until 1 billion users have taken advantage. So go there…and go there soon, as the team is putting finishing touches on the “bridge” between the web-based token and the ERC20 that is tradable on exchanges. (That link is an affiliate link, so we will get some tokens if you sign up.

A Presentation We’re Working On

Finally, we can present to your team on Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the blockchain. This is our first draft of the deck we’re working on.
Can Haz Bitcoin

Very funny, I know. But yes, we can come talk to your group. Reach out if you want more info.

Cheers!

My Morning Bitcoin Ritual

There’s a certain power to morning rituals, to routines, and to doing the same thing every day – you find yourself ready for a variety of challenges, and, if you’re a morning person like me, you can hit the ground running by 8:30, with your priority list or to do list on the road to being conquered.

Crypto The UnicornIf you’ve followed any of the self-help gurus on the internet over the past ten years or so, you know there is almost a cottage industry built around productivity. So take these with a grain of salt…what works for me may not work for you.

In any event, here’s the ritual I follow, with the specific crypto mantra that has helped me in the past eight months.

Before you ask “who are you and why should we listen to you?” – let’s just say that I’m pretty happy with the little crypto empire I’m starting to build. But I have a lot to learn…which is why you’ll see a good chunk of this devoted to research.

Step One: Fire Up a Specific Set of Sites

I have the following sites set to open up on Chrome:

  • Gmail
  • Google Finance
  • Metacoin – yes, this site is one of the first things I check, to get statistics, read any comments, etc.
  • Twitter – where, in addition to the Team Metacoin account, I spend most of my time tweeting under my Area 224 account, where I have tweeted for close to ten years.
  • Poloniex (more on that in a moment)
  • CoinMarketCap (which gets ripped on by quite a few people, I know…as it appears they really don’t vet their ads very well)
  • LinkedIn (checking in on professional network stuff there)
  • ESPN (well, duh), and
  • POW Token – as I’m semi-obsessed with this one getting off the ground. That’s an AFFILIATE LINK over there. Use it and I get some bonus tokens, but, if this one gets to a penny a token in the next year, they’re handing you a few hundred dollars.

Step Two: Open Up Your Spreadsheet(s)

You of course have a system for charting your holdings – I use Excel, but there are scores of ways to keep track of what you hold and that’s okay.

In my case, though, my Excel systems have helped me to chart everything that’s important in crypto:

  • What I hold
  • What I paid for it
  • What I sold it for
  • What revenue has been realized from any Passive Income Programs (PIPs).

YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS INFORMATION FOR TAX PURPOSES. IT IS PART OF YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

I’m an American: I’m not going to get into a debate here on taxation and cryptocurrency – and, as always, we have advised you to get professional help from an accountant and tax advisor. Don’t take this responsibility lightly – if you want the RIGHT to get into cryptocurrency, you have the responsibility to pay your taxes and do everything that is legally required of you. Soapbox speech over.

Step Three: Go Line By Line

Here’s where I go down the list and track where my investments are. The ones that aren’t PIPs can be tracked by a combo of Poloniex and CoinMarketCap.

My holdings might change, but my HODLings aren’t changing very often. Here’s a list of the ones that I track currently:

  • Bitcoin
  • Ethereum
  • Ripple
  • Litecoin
  • NEO
  • Walton
  • ChainLink
  • COSS (to buy this one, you need to go to coss.io).

Weekly or so, I update the BRED Portfolio – I’ll tweet results and sometimes update the blog, too.

Next, I check the PIPs that I’m currently involved with. Note that this list is MUCH SHORTER than it used to be:

  • Bitconnect. That’s an AFFILIATE LINK; however, I’ve begun divesting from my holdings there, using a three-step process to take profits. Instead of reinvesting daily profits, I’m (1) taking them in Bitconnect coins, (2) trading them for BTC, and (3) moving that BTC to another wallet.
  • Hexabot. We talked about this on the blog and had our AFFILIATE LINK REMOVED ON DECEMBER 5.
  • Chain.group. Another one I just heard about, and I have a small stake. Another AFFILIATE LINK.

I track all of my results in the main spreadsheet, and keep track of my total once per day – any more than that and you’re gonna drive yourself nuts.

One thing that I include on my spreadsheet is my tally on BTC Heat – which, yes, is a BTC game. Use that link to get started and it helps me grow my number of spins.

I mentioned POW Token above (still time to get yours with this AFFILIATE LINK) and one other thing that I’ve done to add to my stake is “validate” users. This can be an investment of a half hour or so; but, lately, they’re slowing down how many new users they bring in, so there has been less validation to be done.

I also check the price of POW on EtherDelta; if there’s more of a pullback or I’m feeling frisky, I’ll grab a few more for cheap.

Step Four: Twitter & Research

These two, believe it or not, can go hand in hand. That’s right: “Crypto Twitter” is great, and you can get great ideas about what coins you might want to research. Take it ALL with a grain of salt – you’re not going to get rich just because one random person tweets a coin’s cashtag and tells you it will “moon.”

People that I follow:

  • Sherlock – this guy is good, clever, and on the cutting edge with quite a few trades
  • Bambou Club – somewhere near the Adriatic; he’s also active on Medium with a periodic update on what’s going on in his world
  • Notsofast – trader, miner, lover of altcoins (though he uses a different word for them)
  • Tiffany Hayden – knows XRP backwards and forwards, but shares info about the tech side, too.

I could go on (and reserve the right to update this list down the road) but the point is that you pick a few people that share cool stuff and start hearing what they have to say. And, in my case, that means researching coins and platforms they are talking about.

Try to use a “10th Man” approach, too – if you see quite a few people talking about how great a coin is, or how this next ICO will make people rich overnight, figure out what could possibly go wrong with it. You might end up talking yourself out of making a semi-foolish investment.

A Note on YouTube

Right now, I can’t recommend any YouTubers that talk crypto. Why? My feed seems to be dominated by certain people who talk incessantly about their favorite passive income platform – it’s getting old, getting annoying, and extremely one-dimensional.

I’ll make more videos of my own in the future, but I actually want to add value when I do so – not just talk about my own multi-level marketing abilities.

AND…You Can Do All This In 30 Minutes!

That’s right, whether crypto is your day job or just a side hustle, you really only need to spend 30 minutes on this exercise. It will put you in the right frame of mind and get you ready to build your crypto fortune.

Go get ’em!

 

 

 

On Bitcoin $7000, Bitpetite SCAM, and Crypto Legitimacy

First of all, if you’ve been following this site, you know that we try to be as up front as possible. If we see a scam, we’ll point it out. We encourage you to do your own research (DYOR). We are adamant that you should not invest more than you can afford to lose. And we stress, sometimes in bold and italics, that this is all an experiment.

We took a break from blogging for a couple weeks – some of that was to be in our version of a decompression chamber of sorts. Let’s watch the action, let’s watch our baskets of eggs, and let’s ensure that we get our house in order in the background. In our absence – our last post on Bitconnect was on October 17 – we saw a couple things happen, and we’ll try to break them down for you now.

BTW, this might be as good a time as any for the only banner ad we can run on the site right now – that’s right, we’ll talk about how we, too, were scammed by Bitpetite and we’ve had to go back and scrub their ads. So here’s an AFFILIATE LINK for BITCONNECT. DYOR. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Thing 1: Bitcoin $7000

Hitting $7000 (USD) per Bitcoin seems like a really big deal, given our collective propensity to fall in love with large, round numbers.

Then, if you look back at past posts that talk about our BRED Portfolio, you’ll see that Bitcoin was at $4365 on October 1; this means that you could have brought home a 60 percent gain on your money in a shade more than a month.

That makes it a really HUGE deal.

Then, if you factor in the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price plus consider the fact that one Bitcoin on January 1 of this year was $973, you’re actually sitting on at least a 6x return.

That is HUGH. MONGOUS.

But, in some respects, it is beside the point – the price of BTC doesn’t matter so much as the number of BTC you are able to accumulate.

You could possibly say that about dozens of coins or tokens – yes there will be some wheat and lots of chaff, but the super, blight-resistant, able to feed millions with one stalk kind of wheat that will emerge will be so valuable that the kings and queens of this new economy won’t much care the USD price.

Seriously – there’s a oft-repeated belief in the Bitcoin world that BTC is, indeed, going to $1 Million. Won’t be next year, in all likelihood (though stranger things have happened), and may not happen in the next twenty years. But it will happen.

We’ve had people ask two things: (1) is it too late to buy? and (2) is this a bubble? I’ll answer the first: no. Actually, let me be more emphatic: NO. If you’re not in the game, you’re not in the game – and because of the beauty of Bitcoin, you can drop $100 and get started and maybe trade a little or sock it away or whatever. (We recommend Coinbase, here’s an AFFILIATE LINK, and your $100 investment will get you a $10 bonus, something we’ll also get.)

But, wise sages at Metacoin HQ, is this a bubble?

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. In some respects, that is not the point here – the point is that we are in accumulation mode, it’s a landgrab of sorts, and whether Bitcoin goes to $1 Million or drops to $1 might be beside the point. Here’s why:

Because of the way Bitcoin itself was set up and is structured and governed, 21,000,000 is the cap. No more will ever be issued.

While some are asking the bubble question, others – countless others – are building businesses and services and solutions that keep the Bitcoin movement alive and thriving. Bitcoin may end up being used to pay for cups of coffee, or it may end up being used to buy SUVs, or it may be replaced by an even better coin that is ubiquitous. In any event, if the price crashed today, the entire system wouldn’t immediately crash. Miners will still mine. Traders will still trade. Speculators will still speculate. If you think of Bitcoin as a country that has launched a brand new currency, maybe ask if anyone is using that currency or has the potential to use that currency. In that respect, we are just getting warmed up.

In other words…get in the game. Now.

[QUICK “SPONSOR BREAK” – If you haven’t signed up for the POW Token “Airdrop,” it’s not too late. Use this AFFILIATE LINK – POW Token Airdrop – then get ready for the next airdrop, coming next week.]

Thing 2: Bitpetite SCAM

Did we mention lately that this WHOLE THING is AN EXPERIMENT? Well it is.

As we’ve told you here a few times, we’ll put some of our own capital at risk with some of these Passive Income Platforms that we discuss. And, well, there seems to be a pretty below-average track record for these. Is it our luck? Is it the nature of the beast? Is it a combination?

The latest to go belly up is Bitpetite, and we’re annoyed – but not surprised. In fact, because of our experiments with Ambis and Control Finance and Bithaul, we have made it a habit of taking coins and tokens out at every opportunity. We encourage you to do the same.

We’re going to keep experimenting and putting our money at risk AND STRESSING THAT YOU SHOULD DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND PAST PERFORMANCE DOES NOT INDICATE FUTURE RESULTS.

We now have just one PIP that we’re using – Bitconnect – but we’re looking at a few more. Stay tuned.

Bitpetite is gone – and we apologize for linking to it and promoting it. As we said, it’s an experiment. These things could fizzle.

This gives us an opportunity to suggest that you spread out your risk. It’s really the only way to go – multiple baskets, multiple investments, and multiple streams of crypto income.

Thing 3: Crypto Legitimacy

Honestly, there may not have been a better piece of news than the CME group announcing that Bitcoin futures would be available by the end of the year. In fact, that alone might drive the legitimacy that the Winkelvoss brothers were waiting for when they applied to have their ETF traded.

We cannot underscore enough that, even if there’s a large pullback in the price of Bitcoin, and if Ethereum and Litecoin and Ripple and a bunch of altcoins follow…it might not matter a ton because Bitcoin, blockchains and cryptocurrencies are, indeed, here to stay.

We’ll give you one brief example: we’ve been talking about POW Token a bit, and one of the things that we’ve done on the site is “validate” users. We do this for small numbers of tokens – but we’ve also learned a ton about where these folks are coming from.

To validate folks, we have to click on their Facebook profile and find evidence that it wasn’t a Facebook profile that was just recently created to get free tokens.

And…they’re not. But that’s not the point: these folks are from everywhere. Asia. South America. Europe. The Middle East. Even a few Americans!

Whether or not POW Token will become the next world beater is not actually the question to ask: it’s whether or not cryptocurrencies have hit critical mass (they have) and whether or not there’s the potential for value to be exchanged and these things are easy to use (they are).

The takeaway? Folks, with all this…the belief is that we are just getting started. So glad you’re along for the roller coaster ride.