Bitcoin

Apr 25 2017

Using Coinbase – A Primer for Bitcoin Newbies

We’re going back to basics today. And we thought we’d use this opportunity to share our Coinbase link – so, in the interest of full disclosure, we could be compensated if you sign up with this link. But, once you spend $100 worth on Bitcoin or Ethereum, you’ll get $10 worth of Bitcoin, too. Win-win.

Basics: What is Coinbase?

Veterans of this space might be surprised when they realize that Coinbase has been around since June 2012. Here’s how they describe themselves.

Founded in June of 2012, Coinbase is a digital currency wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with new digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We’re based in San Francisco, California.

And, oh my goodness do they have a foothold on this digital wallet space, having raised more than $117m from leading tech investors and venture capital firms. You can see a complete writeup on Crunchbase, one of our favorite tech info sites.

What’s a Wallet?

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth a mention nonetheless: a wallet is where you store your coins. Read this from Coindesk if you’re looking for more advanced info, but, for now, just think of the basic idea as an old school wallet, like the one you’d put in your pants pocket or purse.

In the typical American wallet, you’re likely to find cash – FIAT CURRENCY! – identification, and maybe some credit cards. Some of what’s in a physical wallet is innocuous, right? I mean, everyone holds onto a fortune from their last trip to the Chinese restaurant, don’t they? But it’s that other information that you guard carefully – your ID card is a pain to lose, and you wouldn’t just give out your credit card number or the CVC code on the back to any random stranger.

Your digital wallet can be looked at the same way – in fact, some of the information that moves Bitcoin (or Ethererum, we’ll use Bitcoin throughout this article as a catch-all for the digital currencies on the Coinbase system) back and forth is better thought of as in a safety deposit box or a safe.

The public component to your wallet is the Bitcoin address, and this is something you can give out to anyone and everyone. This is INBOUND. You can use it as a tip jar, you can ask your Uncle to send you that five bucks worth of Bitcoin he promised for your birthday (ha!).

Here’s our Bitcoin address:

1G8Ayc15sqoyGzN4DFUeheRkgFeS9t6oSW

And our Ethereum address:

0xf0940C79d93E88450aA366238ef8C298Da11EB74

Note that those two look different. Because they’re completely different languages and sets of code.

Adding to your account

Here’s where the FIAT CURRENCY comes in: you’ll need to send money to your account using one of a couple methods. One is to link a bank account, and then your Bitcoin will appear in a few days, once the banking systems talk to each other and confirm your account. The other method is to use a credit card. There’s a fee attached – as there is to the bank account method – but the upside is that your Bitcoin will appear almost instantaneously.

Using Coinbase as your “hub”

If you’re brand new to Bitcoin, you can totally use Coinbase as your online hub, your gateway to the vast world of cryptocurrency. As you see above, you can get the current price quote, you can buy and sell – trade – your Bitcoin, you can send Bitcoin to folks you owe money to, and request it from folks who owe you money.

Here’s a snapshot of some of our recent activity.

But, as you might have guessed from some of our other posts here, this is only scratching the surface of our cryptocurrency activity. You can use your account to send money into one of the trading platforms, like Poloniex or Bittrex – two of the ones we use. Or you can invest in an ICO, such as the Exscudo or Sikoba coin offerings we have talked about here.

Only Two Coins?

Despite what the rumor mill might tell you, right now only two coins are on the Coinbase platform: Bitcoin and Ethereum. So if you want to get into other coins, you’ll have to convert them via a trading platform (or an ICO; Gnosis used Ethereum tokens yesterday to raise a crazy amount of capital in their auction). But that’s pretty simple to do.

Pretty simple, right?

Yes, the fine folks at Coinbase have actually made this dummy-proof. Which is one reason they’ve raised so much capital and they’re the wallet of choice here. (It’s not just from that link up there that can score you a Bitcoin bonus with a qualifying purchase, and will also score us a Bitcoin bonus with your qualifying purchase. There’s that “win/win” again.)

Other Coinbase developments

This was mentioned by leading VC Fred Wilson the other day, and, given the growth of Ethereum as the backbone of blockchain applications, it’s probably worth checking out. Token launch from Coinbase.

Last month, we covered the GDAX launch from Coinbase – it’s an important institutional investment milestone for the company.

We’ll keep an eye out for other coins added to the Coinbase site, too.

Apr 23 2017

Four Coins that Could Quadruple by This Time Next Year

Okay, folks. It’s time. First, the disclaimer:

We don’t provide individual advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Seek professional investment, financial, and legal advice before investing in any asset, let alone cryptocurrencies, which are a brand-new, emerging class of assets. Read our recommendations and take them with a grain of salt, do your own research to back up your investments, and be prepared. Use this site at your own risk.

Now that we’ve scared you, here’s our post.

We gotta admit that this is a rather fun universe we’re entering here. Part dot-com boom (before the bubble), part options trading when it was just invented. And part gambling, because, let’s face it, some of these ICOs and emerging cryptocurrencies are like playing the lottery or playing roulette.

That being said, though, the idea of creating an entirely new form of money, based on computing power and solving code and a lot of stuff that’s way over the heads of mere mortals – well, that’s just plain thrilling.

So, as we jumped head-first into the pool with this post, we tried to think of the particulars that could make these coins actually go crazy in the market. Some of this is going to be a little too techno, and some of it is going to be real-world. All of it is mere speculation: I can’t see the future.

But if you take our “BRED Portfolio” post as an example of our ability to be soothsayers, we might be on to something here. (If you had invested in the BRED Portfolio on April 1, you’d be up 12.08% in just three weeks.)

Enough background. Let’s dive in: Four Coins that Could Quadruple By This Time Next Year.

#1: Litecoin

The first-ever #subway restaurant accepting #LTC! And soon there will be more. Make #Litecoin great again! @SUBWAY @SatoshiLite @slushcz @ pic.twitter.com/idpiV5hl8i

— Oldrich Peprla (@OldrichPeprla) April 21, 2017

That does it for me. Seriously, though, once you’re starting to see a coin used side-by-side with Bitcoin, you now know it’s got real-world functionality.

Litecoin (LTC) is about to hit its fourth birthday, and it’s actually well below, on a USDT basis, its all-time high of $50.27 a coin (achieved in November of 2013). It’s that factor first and foremost on our list of reasons why this coin could quadruple by this time next year.

Volume of late has been huge – 9-figures worth traded a couple times in April – but its utility, to the tune of transactions per day in the thousands (more than double the number of Dash transactions, per this chart), tells us that the coin is actually being used out there in the wild.

Over the weekend, the LTC/BTC pair was trading at .01 to .012-to-1 – support kept the price above .01 pretty much all day on Saturday. This is another good sign.

Expect volatility, though – I’d hazard a guess that it may bounce around in the .009 to .01 range for awhile. That’s a good price to jump in at.

Mandatory mention of Segwit here. LTC is moving toward Segwit. Segwit is important. Let’s all talk about Segwit!

Disclosure: We’re long Litecoin at the present moment.

#2: Dogecoin

Yeah, I can’t believe it either. A coin named after an Internet meme…you CANNOT be SERIOUS? Dogecoin. I’m serious.

DOGE had more than 10,000 transactions in the past 24 hours – more than Litecoin; third in the rankings behind Bitcoin and Ethereum – and its market cap is $50m+. So it’s legitimate.

What really jumped out to me? The average transaction value. It’s pretty low ($310 or so) when compared with others; the median transaction of around $3.28 tells me that people are using this coin as a Venmo substitute. (Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I’m guessing fewer lattes are purchased and more random paybacks and IOUs are covered with this one.)

Dogecoin trades around 35-38 Satoshi of late. Its all-time low is 15. I see more mainstream use in its future. I wouldn’t be shocked to see it in the 60s in a month or so.

#3: Digibyte

Did we mention Segwit above? We did. Here’s a link to the latest on Digibyte Segwit activation.

To the layman, this means little, but to those in the know, here’s the general consensus:

Segwit is important; its adoption will drive the price of the coin adopting it higher
It may never happen with Bitcoin, it might happen with Litecoin
It looks imminent with Digibyte.

Place your bets: with a current market capitalization of less than $10m, do you think the bargain hunters will start shopping for the coin that is the first to activate Segwit? Honestly, quadrupling might be a lowball estimate. We’d accumulate anywhere in the low 100 Satoshi range.

Disclosure: we’re long Digibyte right now.

#4: Bitcoin

Didn’t see THAT one coming, did ya?

Let’s assume that Bitcoin stays around $1200 USDT, giving it a market cap of right around $20B. Now, let’s also assume that Bitcoin becomes the word synonymous with all digital currency, crytpocurrency, and altcoins (even though it’s NOT an altcoin), sorta like “Kleenex” brand facial tissue is everyone’s word for facial tissue.

I was going to say that there’s all sorts of crazy economic stuff going on in the world, but heck, I’d focus on two things that should drive the value of Bitcoin way up in the next 12 months:

Brexit
The tenuous state of the EU and the Euro

Now, that might get folks moving toward the US Dollar – which is a fair guess – but if you factor in the dicey nature of the US economy and the role of the Federal Reserve in money printing…do you think the masses will want to start putting their money into the US Dollar? Especially when an infinite supply of dollars could, technically, be printed?

Do you think a $5,000 price point for one Bitcoin is out of the question?

Disclosure: We are currently long Bitcoin.

Additional notes: we do not make any trades in any of the listed coins here for 24 hours after the date we publish this report.

Apr 14 2017

Is it too late to invest in Bitcoin?

Time to get back to the basics, friends. Seriously, we think we might have jumped the gun on this site: while we’re out here talking about “Initial Coin Offerings” and “Coin of the Week” and PIVX and XRP and the BRED Portfolio, we’re likely getting quite a few blank stares from y’all.

bitcoin and coffee — “While you’ve been sipping your espresso, I’ve made $10,000.”

Fine. We get it. There’s an audience of cryptocurrency devotees out there, and there’s also an audience of “what’s this about bitwhatnot?”

Have you missed the Bitcoin boat?

Short answer: NO.

Longer answer: probably best described with that old proverb about tree planting.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time to plant a tree is right now.

So let’s plant that tree, folks. Here, then, are the basics, along with our case as to why Bitcoin is just getting started, and why you should be prepared to dive in like immediately.

Getting Started

To buy Bitcoin, you’ll need a wallet. Start with someone reputable that has been in this space for awhile. We recommend Coinbase, and, in the interest of disclosure, if you sign up and make a qualifying purchase of Bitcoin, you can get a bonus and we’ll get a bonus.

Coinbase works pretty simply: you can transfer money from a fiat currency like the US Dollar into Coinbase, and (as of this writing) choose from two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin or Ethereum.

You’ll end up with an account that has something called a “wallet” – which is exactly what it sounds like – and the wallet will have an address attached to it. One that looks like this:

1G8Ayc15sqoyGzN4DFUeheRkgFeS9t6oSW

That is the public wallet address, and, as explained rather eloquently in this Reddit thread, you can think of it as the INBOUND address. (YES…IF YOU WANT TO SEND ME BITCOIN, YOU CAN USE THAT ADDRESS.)

The machinations behind the private key are kept by folks like Coinbase, so your Bitcoin is safe.

Other folks might like to use QR codes and put their Coinbase wallet on their mobile phone. This is totally cool, too.

You can get started with a tiny, tiny amount, too. Our first Bitcoin purchase was a whopping $25 worth of BTC, and we were charged all of 37 cents in transaction fees with Coinbase.

If you follow those steps, you now own Bitcoin. Good for you! Now, what do you DO with it? We have two ideas…

Idea 1: Buy and Hold

Some who are really deep into this space will call this “HODL:” “Hold On for Dear Life.” If you were to look at the 2016 chart we produced from Coindesk, you can see what would have happened had you bought Bitcoin on 1/1/2016 and kept it for the entire year (our chart oddly cuts off price on 12/30, not 12/31):

Wonderful, right? All you need is a time machine – which you’d set to bet on the Cubs while you’re at it – and here comes the money rolling in!

Well, not so fast…probably need to understand the economic fundamentals of Bitcoin in order to make your decision. Because, in the case of the Coindesk chart, it’s compared to the US Dollar. And, at a very basic level, if Bitcoin goes up, it’s going up against the value of something that is going down. In this case, USD.

The total value of all Bitcoin being used and transacted in the global economy right now is a bit more than $19 Billion US. But here’s the thing…actually, here are three things:

This is nothing by comparison. For instance, the total of all assets in the US is around $130 Trillion. So the amount of Bitcoin relative to US assets is about 0.015%. Or it’s like finding a $20 bill in an abandoned $130,000 house.
Five years ago, roughly 6,600 transactions were made with bitcoin per day. Today, according (again) to Coindesk, that number is around 250,000.
The number of Bitcoins that will be mined EVER is capped at 21,000,000.

Without getting into the particulars of mining, hashrate, and all that fun stuff, think of it this way: If 21,000,000 pieces of gold were all that were ever going to exist, do you think the value of those pieces would go up – perhaps exponentially – as more people used the gold…and realized how easy it was to use the gold…and found out that there was a finite number of gold pieces in existence?

This is why, when analysts throw out numbers like $500,000 per Bitcoin, those in the know don’t bat an eye. It won’t happen tomorrow. It may not even happen for several years. But…the chances of it happening are pretty darn good.

And this is why some folks just think they’ll HODL their Bitcoins. And who can blame them?

Idea 2: Trade your Bitcoin

This is where you get into the world of speculation. Bitcoin ushered in a host of other coins, tokens, digital currencies. Some of these are also going to change the world in their own little ways. And some of them aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

(That was a joke. They’re not printed on paper.)

But there are other coins you can trade your Bitcoin for. To do that, you’ll want to set up an account on one of the exchanges – we use Poloniex – and then you can have at it. Putting it very simply, you’ll take your Bitcoin and trade it for another cryptocurrency that is valued in Bitcoin – platforms like Poloniex have hundreds of trades; a small portion of them are in US dollars – “Tether,” or “USDT” –

And you should also be prepared for violent mood swings, for volatility, and to possibly lose your shirt.

Let’s be honest here: this is closer to gambling unless you know what you’re doing, you’ve studied the charts, and you’ve done some heavy analysis on the underlying fundamentals of the coins.

And even then, it’s likely close to gambling.

If you’re going to trade Bitcoin, we recommend – and again, we’re not investment advisers, past performance does not dictate future results, bet with your head (not over it) and don’t blame us if something goes wrong – the BRED portfolio.

Not too late to start

As of this writing, the Bitcoin price is hovering right around $1200 USDT. So, had you gotten started on January 1 (or so), your stake would be up right around 25%. Which isn’t too shabby, right?

But that growth doesn’t mean the gains are behind us. Prognosticators see nothing but blue skies ahead long-term for the currency. And even if the 21,000,000 Bitcoin only take up 1% of household assets in the USA in ten years, that amounts to market capitalization growth of 65 TIMES where we are now. Meaning a Bitcoin price of $78,000.

Start now.

Apr 07 2017

Quadruple Your Money with the BRED Portfolio

When we stumbled upon this idea this morning, our first instinct was to play it rather cool with the headline. Something like “Introducing the BRED Portfolio: A Buy-and-Hold Bitcoin and Altcoin Investment Strategy.” And that sounds very straightforward, by the book. It’s also boring.

So we went with the clickbait headline.

Read on:

Why “BRED”?

There are a couple reasons behind this one – and it’s not just because these four letters fit together nicely. (They do, though. Props to us.)

Think about one of the best business and investment acronyms out there: FANG. Jim Cramer claims to have created the acronym several years ago, used to put four “new economy” stocks into one nice bucket. Facebook. Amazon. Netflix. Google.

It’s easy to remember, but it also includes four really solid tech stocks – and four companies that are, you could argue, doing quite a bit differently while still being in the same category.

We thought the same thing when creating this portfolio strategy: let’s get four of the biggest cryptocurrencies out there and put them in one bucket.

BUT, let’s do this with an eye toward the ones that have the best chance of long-term staying power.

While “BRED” works nicely as an acronym, these are also four coins that have managed to stick around in the crypto space.

We’re not just rationalizing…

B is for Bitcoin, and you couldn’t have a portfolio like this without Bitcoin, since it started this whole shebang, right?

R is for Ripple – which, for some reason, doesn’t have a ticker symbol that starts with “R” – and Ripple’s USDT price developments of late don’t tell the whole story; consider it the best chance of becoming the backbone of all crypto transactions throughout the world.

E is for Ethereum, whose “smart contracts” were, you could argue, the first yin to Bitcoin’s yang.

D is for Dash – “digital cash” is a very easy and consumer-friendly value proposition. We will argue that this one could win out based on the strength of its community alone.

Look at the rankings, though – if you visit Smith and Crown this morning, you’ll see that these are four of the five largest cryptocurrencies – in terms of market capitalization – in the world. In fact, going back to January 1, you would still have been picking four of the 7 largest cryptos, as shown in this chart from CoinMarketCap.com.

Argue with us if you’d like, but we’re going with this acronym. You’ll see why in a second.

Structuring the BRED Portfolio

To keep it simple, we used January 1, 2017 as our starting point. And, as opposed to weighting the portfolio by market cap – which would have had Bitcoin at about 92% of the portfolio, defeating the purpose – we went with a straight 25% invested in each.

To get the prices, we grabbed a chart from TradingView.com – our first-ever visit to the site, which is bloody easy to use, we might add – and use their figures for open price on January 1.

TradingView BRED Chart — Thanks, http://tradingview.com

So there we are, a simple portfolio with four of the biggest crypto assets. But…how did it perform?

Quadruple. Your. Money.

What will remain to be seen here is whether or not this is an aberration – past performance not indicative of future results and all that.

But holy buckets this thing is on fire.

$10,000 invested equally on January 1 in four cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, and Dash – would have grown to $42,567.69 on April 1.

So…Now What, Smart Guy?

Yes, hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, the woulda-shoulda-coulda factor with the coins that aren’t named Bitcoin is pretty huge. And the volatility is such that today’s number on the BRED portfolio is more like $44,000 – and that’s due in part to the Ripple developments over the weekend.

But here’s our take – and we’re not investment professionals, nor do we provide legal advice – on what to do with this information:

Buy and hold. It doesn’t have to be these four cryptocurrencies, but you should consider having a few coins or tokens that you simply leave alone. Don’t trade them, keep them in cold storage, and worry about them only a little.