Bitcoin

Jun 13 2017

3 Ways to Make it a Summer of Crypto

It’s not even Summer yet. We’re a week or so away – I never remember the exact date and it seems to change each year anyway, so let’s just say “a week or so” – and, if the activity in a few sub-genres of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, and Cryptocurrencies are any indication…

It’s going to be a Summer of Crypto.

Since we need to do a list to make this go viral, but we also want to get outside and enjoy the weather, let us give you three things you need to know…

3 Ways to Make it a Summer of Crypto

1. Follow the (ICO) (Token Launch) Money

Alan Greenspan would have called this market “frothy.” ICOs – “Initial Coin Offerings,” a/k/a “token launches” – have all of the excitement of the dot-com era IPO days, with none of the cocktail-napkin business plans.

Instead, business plans are replaced by teams of coders, programmers, and marketers taking advantage of the fact that ICOs don’t really need investment banks to get companies access to capital.

Yesterday’s ICO for Bancor set records: the equivalent of $150-plus million collected in record time (three hours) for a business that is in the process of launching, but isn’t fully there yet. No matter, VCs, iBanks, heck…anyone with a few (hundred) Ethereum tokens was all-in.

It’s actually a business that has a good chunk going for it; and it’s no surprise that their ICO was successful and that they seemed to be poised for success. Note that the

How to potentially profit?

Watch for new ICOs or their equivalent that – like Bancor – have an interesting story to tell, and a management team behind it with business success.

We especially like CivicKey – Vinny Lingham is one of the Influencers we have had our eye on, and his token launch aims to solve a real problem – managing and verifying online identities.

2. Hedge Your Bets on the Big Boys

Again, we’re not providing trading advice or investment advice; what we do suggest is that you keep tabs on the big players.

Ethereum hit $400 yesterday, then pulled back, now is back in the $350-375 level. It could be volatile – but it also could have more eyes on it and more money thrown its way since the Ethereum protocol/Ether token is used as the backbone for so many token launches.

And then there’s Bitcoin, which has still more than doubled YTD.

This reminds us – if you haven’t yet gone to Coinbase, go do that, use our AFFILIATE LINK, and get some crypto. Bitcoin. Ethereum. Litecoin. Make it happen. (You get a bonus with a qualifying purchase, and so do we, so it’s a win-win.)

How to potentially profit?

Gosh, people, you could just use the BRED Portfolio we’ve been tracking. It’s on fire – and the four coins don’t necessarily move in lockstep, serving as a bit of a hedge against market volatility.

Sortof. Be prepared for “BUBBLE” talk all summer, too. And don’t invest more than you are prepared to lose.

3. Be on the Lookout for Altcoins

“Altcoins” are those non-Bitcoin coins. (We used “coin” three times in that sentence.) Some have tiny market caps – heard of Ripto Bux? It’s been on our radar and currently trades in the 200-400 Satoshi range; market cap of $2 million or so – and others are meandering near the top 20, poised for a panther-like jump into the stratosphere.

OR poised to stay at a low level and not make much noise.

OR…

How to potentially profit?

We’ve shared plenty of ideas here. Plenty. We invite you to do your research and look at these coins and tokens, see if they are used in the wild, and see if there’s a reason for being. Are they solving a problem? Is there a good business case?

We can’t stress enough: do your research. If you want to take a flyer on the potential of a small altcoin with a tiny market cap, fine. Don’t be surprised if your risk capital goes down the toilet.

And even if you’re taking a chance on something in the $500-million market cap range, THAT COULD FIZZLE, TOO.

There they are: 3 Ways.

Get ready. For the #summerofcrypto.

Jun 12 2017

Breaking: Ethereum $400

How crazy is this space? How quickly does it change? Well, for starters, we were up way too early AND worked on a post about Ethereum hitting all-time highs. THEN IT BROKE THROUGH THE $400 BARRIER.

Ethereum = Fire.

Or do we say “straight-up fire?” Any way you slice it, Ethereum is looking like a rocket these days. And it’s a head-scratcher, too: why? Can it be sustained? Should you get some at this price because next thing you know it’ll be $1000 – then $3000?

Here’s the screenshot and graphic thingy that we whipped up…right before the $400 level.

This is starting to look seriously crazy. And perhaps unsustainable. Still…

Flippening?

This is a term that you might not have heard yet – especially if you’re new to cryptocurrency. In brief, Bitcoin is the market cap leader, and Ethereum is second. Flippening refers to the moment when the two flip places.

SPONSOR BREAK: IF you are new…get yourself some coins – Ethereum, Bitcoin, or Litecoin – through this link at Coinbase. You’ll get a bonus, we’ll get a bonus (with qualifying purchase); but, most importantly, you will be in the game and not on the sidelines. You can start with a tiny amount if you’d like. Now, back to the post.

Flippening is being tracked here. It used to be a pie-in-the-sky idea: hey, Ethereum COULD be bigger than Bitcoin. Then, it started to become a real possibility. Now, at 70+%, could it happen this year? THIS SUMMER?

Post-Flippening Idea Number 1

This could end up being much ado about nothing, and that’s our first Post-Flippening idea. Let’s say it does happen, and it happens this year. There’s a little weeping, gnashing of teeth for a while, and maybe there’s UASF and hard fork and Segwit discussions that are over the heads of mere mortals like me.

Post-Flippening Idea (PFI) Number 1: ExxonMobil vs. PetroChina. (WHAT? I’ll explain.) In the 2000s, the largest company by market cap seemed to flip-flop: it was ExxonMobil, then it was PetroChina. Back and forth they went. No biggie.

The world may be big enough for two large players, and Bitcoin and Ethereum each have their own role in this world. This could happen. Pretty feasible.

The question is: which one is ExxonMobil and which one is PetroChina?

Post-Flippening Idea Number 2

Apple. One of these two is Apple.

Once Apple took over as the top company in the world by market cap in the third quarter of 2011, they gave up that spot in only two quarters that followed. Nineteen out of twenty-one quarters had Apple in the top spot.

Apple has been number one since the third quarter of 2013, and it shows no signs of relinquishing that spot.

Is it possible that…well, that Ethereum is ExxonMobil (the only other company since Q3 ’11 to be number 1) and Bitcoin is Apple? I mean, really, Bitcoin IS the dominant coin, it was first to market, and it shows no signs of slowing either.

Or is it possible that Ethereum is Apple, will take the throne, then give it up, then take it back…and not look back?

Only certainty: rapid changes.

Since we started typing this post – a span of about 20 minutes – the price has fluctuated from $380 to $408.12 on Poloniex, and now back down to $382.

Volatility is certain. The Flippening? Not sure about that one.

Jun 02 2017

How’s Your Bitcoin Hedge Fund Doing?

We like the concept of diversification here – so we’re never going to say to put all your eggs in one basket. In that spirit, we launched our own “Bitcoin Hedge Fund,” which aims to provide a combination of established and emerging cryptocurrencies that can act at least a little like your own index fund.

You can read more about our Hedge Fund here – it’s hypothetical, of course, and you should certainly get professional advice and counsel when coming up with something of your own.

Yesterday, we shared the June 1 update of our BRED Portfolio, which is on fire this year. It had a four-month head start, so of course its results – up 19 times – will be better than our one-month-old Hedge Fund.

Hedge Fund Investment Recap

Here’s what the numbers looked like on May 1.

Now, here are the numbers from June 1, with Coinmarketcap.com‘s prices at around midnight GMT.

The fund tripled – and then some – in just a month!

This leaves us with a few questions:

Can Digibyte keep rolling? Obviously, a 16x multiple is not really sustainable, is it? (If you compare it to, say, Ripple, whose YTD multiple is 36, it looks paltry by comparison. However, Ripple has kept chugging along.)
Ripple, Dogecoin, and Ethereum – not bad one-month performance for each, right? The worst of the three tripled. Can those continue, too, or are we in a bubble?
If even the laggards like WeTrust and Dash are up 30-plus percent, ARE WE IN A BUBBLE?

And that’s the point behind this “Hedge Fund”

The idea is that it’s NOT your entire investment portfolio. Is it 1%? 10% 25% or more? That’s up to you…but, really, the point of any hedge fund is to hedge your bets. One asset class goes up, another goes down, and your overall portfolio weathers the storm.

We’ll keep tracking this, and our BRED Portfolio, and there’s much more coming. For now, though, if you haven’t gotten some Bitcoin, what are you waiting for? Visit our Coinbase AFFILIATE LINK and you’ll get a bonus with a qualifying purchase (and you can buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin there).

Jun 01 2017

Turn 10K into 193K in Just Five Months

It sounds too good to be true, right? Make a small-ish investment, of only $10,000, then let it sit and ferment. After five months, sell it all and find yourself with a 19x return: something that others might wait decades for, accomplished in less than half a year.

Welcome to the crazy world of cryptocurrency, and the even crazier concept we created called the BRED Portfolio.

If it sounds too good to be true, are we in a bubble?

Great question, and not one we’re going to answer with this post. Instead, let’s just go to the videotape and talk about exactly how this came about.

First up, in early April – so no, WE didn’t invest in our basket of cryptocurrencies on January 1 – we thought that this world needed something similar to FANG: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. These four companies are all synonymous with some sort of internet, web, social, digital, or online business. But they also are a bit – or a LOT – different from each other.

Bringing us to the BRED Portfolio. We needed a catchy acronym, but we also needed four currencies that each had a little bit of a different angle in this emerging space. Enter BRED:

Bitcoin, the ne plus ultra of cryptocurrencies
Ripple (ticker XRP), which is taking on SWIFT and starting to win
Ethereum, and its smart contracts and backbone of a whole host of other launches (like Golem, for instance)
Dash, probably the most “consumer-y” of the cryptocurrencies.

Our idea: what if you had gone back in time to January 1, bought $2500 of each of the four currencies, and left it alone. What would that portfolio look like today?

If it sounds too good to be true, you need a time machine

Here are the results:

Oh. My. Goodness.

What if you waited until April 1?

We re-weighted the portfolio accordingly, buying $2,500 each of our BRED coins. The result is also quite staggering.

So now what?

You probably have a couple questions, and we’ll try to answer them.

First of all: I can’t say whether or not we’re “in a bubble.” No one knows. For each prognosticator that says there’s too much of all of these cryptocurrencies out there, there’s someone else who says that we’ve just scratched the surface.

The answer – as is normally the case in probably just about everything – is somewhere in the middle. Like the dot-com bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s, if it pops, there will be quite a few losers. There will also be a few winners: companies like Google or Amazon that kept it going and emerged and are now beyond dominant.

As for coins, whether there are too many and whether there’s too much supply of all of them: that is another good question. Ripple is a great example – to the casual observer, supply in the billions vs. an all-time capped supply number of 21 million for Bitcoin might sound like it’s a recipe for disaster for Ripple.

But, as has been discussed quite a few places, maybe Ripple is managing its entire currency plan extremely well.

There will be volatility. There will be craziness. There will be a roller coaster ride. That’s expected.

And, if you haven’t gotten started yet???

What are you waiting for? Seriously, you need to think about getting started with at least Bitcoin and/or Ethereum. You can do that by clicking on this AFFILIATE LINK for Coinbase and getting started. You can start small. But we recommend you get started.

May 30 2017

When Bitcoin Volatility Is Your Friend

How ya holdin’ up there, kiddo? Enjoying the markets? Did you find the thrill ride known as Bitcoin to be exciting? Are you still in okay shape?

Still doing okay? (And if you’re still new to all this, hop on over here to this post and learn all about how to get started.)

Your mood might depend upon a few variables. First of all, whether you believe long-term in Bitcoin (which we’ll use in this post as the catch-all currency) and what it means for the economy. If you do believe, you may have bought in at lower numbers than what’s above. And, if you did, you probably didn’t look to sell at the first opportunity.

Another mood enhancer may be whether or not you tried to buy the dips. BTC at close to $2700 (above chart from Poloniex, so your experience and trading platform may vary) wouldn’t have given you a dip opportunity, but BTC dropping into the $1900s, then $1800s, then below? Any of those would have been buying opportunities for the long-term trader.

If you think Bitcoin is going to $5000 this year, then $2000 is a buying opportunity. $1538 is a golden buying opportunity.

Finally, again here’s our magic word: “Fundamentals.” The fundamentals of Bitcoin are strong, in our opinion here at Metacoin (that link is to our Facebook account and we would love your “likes”), so we’re bound to look at these moves as means of testing our hypotheses. Is Bitcoin strong enough to weather a drop into the $1500s? Does the volatility actually work in our favor – weeding out “panic sellers,” and bringing in long-term investors?

If there were a “State of the Union” for Bitcoin, we think that moving from a May 1 price of $1435 to today’s price of $2200 or so means that the state of Bitcoin is strong. Volatile, sure…but strong.

Leveraging Volatility Through Bitconnect

One more thing about volatility, and this last part is an Affiliate Link; since this whole site is a learning experience, we’re planning on…learning together.

We’ve just signed up at Bitconnect, and it’s a rather unique program. You lend Bitcoin through their platform, they trade it, using highly specialized bots and algorithms to use volatility to your advantage. The interest rates are compelling as heck – compounding daily at a half a percent can mean that money starts to add up quickly.

You can sign up for free – use the link above so this site gets credit, and we’ll get a bonus for your signup, should you eventually lend some of your hard-earned Bitcoin.

Our plan is to start lending in the next several days, then kick back and track the results. It could get pretty interesting – and we’ll share our results, warts and all.

Til then, stay strong.