Siacoin

Dec 04 2017

Four For the HODL File

There’s a rather interesting debate going on in the crypto universe: whether or not “HODL,” the verb attached to the acronym for “Hold on for Dear Life,” should be pronounced like it sounds.

In one corner: boy, does it flow off the tongue as “Hoe-dil.” “I’m HODLing that bad boy, Bob.”

In the other corner, a very Pwn-like or Brett Favre-like desire to say “HOLD” when talking about “HODLing.”

We’ll let y’all argue about which makes the most sense; we’ll just weigh in with four coins you can potentially add to your HODL File.

Siacoin – $SC – Is It Back?

Our romance with Siacoin has been fraught with craziness. Is it going to upend Dropbox as the way everyone uploads files? Is it going to really use everyone’s excess computing strength in a way that the masses can understand?

Oh and, for the #HOLDers, is it going to get anywhere near its four-digit-Satoshi heights of earlier this year?

We’ll admit to being so lovestruck with this coin that we waited til the last possible minute to sell out all of our HODLings earlier this year, and we didn’t get back in until this weekend.

We saw support at 75 Sats and said “it’s time.” It inched up into the 100 level, pulled back to the high 90s, and we’re now along for the ride. Again. This time for good. Until we feel jilted at the altar of 10x again and decide to exit.

Crypto romance is like that.

Cardano – $ADA – Where Did THIS Come From?

We’ll admit to having been whipsawed by this one, which emerged in early October, hung around in the 300 to 600 Satoshi range, and then went like a rocket ship into the 1200s.

And, call us crazy, that’s where we bought in: again, seeing support, lots of trading, and a great-looking project, this one looked like it had 10x potential.

“Ethereum on steroids” is one way to look at its potential; more than just a slick-looking, high-market cap project is the hope. Take a look at the chart here and, as always, DYOR. (“Do Your Own Research.”)

Einsteinium – $EMC2 – Fork Coming

This could actually be less of a HODL opportunity for us, depending upon how this “fork” actually, uh, forks. But to take 55 million coins and burn them, with a current supply of 211 million, might actually bode well for the long-term prognosis. The fork date, as of this writing, is December 9.

Add that to the really cool “Wormhole” incentive – details about that here – and miners might find this one to be profitable, too.

We bought in at 7500 or so – after seeing it pop a little and thinking that it still has a ways to go. Potential for a run is pretty good – and potential for a drop to zero is also something that, well, is always a possibility. Tread lightly. Good luck.

COSS – $COSS – Singapore is Strategically Located

Our thinking here – and a reason that, despite the fact that we are still HODLing despite being down 80% from our initial stake – is that COSS is in the right place at the right time.

Singapore is a great spot for a trading platform; and, if there’s any noise in China – like banning ICOs again, or closing down exchanges – the money is likely to move somewhere else in the region quickly.

So we’re long. Real long. Like “we’ll buy more at these levels (700 Sats) and wait this one out, even if it takes us into 2019.

Final Warnings

We’ve been wrong before. We’ll be wrong again.

So we need to repeat: Do Your Own Research. We’re not responsible for successes or failures as a result of your use of this site. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose. Check several sources. Don’t give in to FOMO or FUD or any of that other stuff.

Good luck.

Aug 01 2017

Here Come the Altcoins

In the Bitcoin universe, it seems most everyone has August 1 circled, starred, underlined, and highlighted on the calendar. Today’s the day of the “Hard Fork,” or the “Soft Fork,” or the end of life as we know it, or the beginning of the Bitcoin bull run.

Strategies for investors have been all over the map: sell all altcoins – those other cryptocurrencies, ranging in size from billions in market cap (Ethereum, Ripple) all the way down to that one “crap coin” that might go 10x or 100x (or 1000x) – or buy this altcoin or that altcoin and hold on for dear life. And then there’s BCH – Bitcoin Cash – aiming to become that fork (hard or soft, we’re not sure) that sets the world on fire. Or gets sold en masse once we figure out who is holding what.

Carp Coins — We don’t use the word “crap” round here, preferring “carp.”

A quick screenshot from this morning, though – 8:15 or so Central Time in the US, well into first day of the new era in other parts of the world – tells us that maybe the “hold the carp coins” strategery might make a little sense.

Nice little run, right? Everything is green – positive growth for the most-recent 24-hour period.

Were it that simple, though, practically everyone would have chosen altcoins as their post-fork, August 1 and beyond strategy.

Making sense of the nonsense

I’ve witnessed a whole bunch of craziness during the past few days. To wit:

The creation of BCH – which was originally making the rounds as BCC, but BCC is the ticker for Bitconnect (where you can lend out your Bitcoin, sorta). (Use that affiliate link if you want to explore it, it’s an interesting site and the interest possibilities are rather crazy.)
The lending madness on Poloniex, where people have loaned out Bitcoin at rates of 3 to 4 percent per day, on average, as others borrow the Bitcoin for their margin accounts and plan on, I don’t know, conquering the world.
The resilience of Bitcoin itself – which, let’s face it, looks like a pretty stable investment right now, having really only oscillated between $2400 and $2900 USD during the past seven days.

Does this mean the Alts are back?

Maybe possibly.

We personally moved in and out of a couple during the past week – in fact, one of our favorites, Siacoin, dropped into the 250-260 range and we dumped it – with plans of maybe returning soon.

Bargains appeared to be everywhere: Ripple’s XRP token was in the 5000s, Library Credits opened its private beta to the public and still stuck around below 20,000 Sats.

Tea leaves are tough to read, but the diversified strategy might actually be the way to go here. Right?

One last word…

It’s August 1, and, honestly, your guess may be as good as mine or anyone else’s. Rapid growth of all altcoins? BTC’s re-resurgence, testing $3000? Flight into coins like ETH and LTC and XRP as large-cap alternatives? All of the above?

As always, do your own research. Seek out professional advice for things like taxes and legal ramifications of your moves.

But one bet: the whole space – all of crypto – will benefit from the attention. So sitting on the sidelines might mean missing out on an asset class that could get larger and larger from here.

Jul 11 2017

How to Catch a Falling Knife

Timing is everything in just about everything everywhere.

Case in point: the cryptocurrency markets of the past 48 hours. A bloodletting of epic proportions? Or just a slight pullback?

If your timing was such that you bought into the BRED Portfolio at the beginning of the year, and you didn’t sell, you would still be up 1718%.

So, if you did do that – and congratulations to you for doing that – you would not have paid any attention to the numbers from July 1.

Just ten days ago. The ones we link to in the blog post above.

These numbers.

Perspective, playas. One person’s OMG is another person’s $63,000 pullback.

Which brings us to the point of this post – as well as a music video.

Catch Me, I’m Falling

One man’s overrated pop tune from 1987 is another’s evocative trip down memory lane.

Pretty Poison was the band, and I don’t think they did much after this (and, considering I’m in the 99th percentile when it comes to 80s pop music knowledge, it’s a safe bet your trip to Wikipedia for the Pretty Poison discography won’t yield anything of note).

Story time: I worked at a mall clothing store, back when both were things, in the late 80s. I was successful enough to keep the job for most of a year, and I think part of the reason was that I kept things moving. I also kept the Top 40 station on and, during the holiday rush, that helped a ton. Dance-ish poppy music played on 2-hour rotation started to stick in your head, so even the bad songs became okay.

We kept busy because we had customers and there was merchandise that had to be moved and because the manager liked to joke “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.”

There was one point, though, when…whatever you were doing at the time, you had to stop doing and pretend to scratch a record like a DJ. That point was at 2:21 of this song.

I queued it up for you there.

To this day, hearing that song takes me back, and the 2:21 mark gets me pretending to scratch records.

Timing is Everything

I’m watching the markets closely because I’m ready to move in at such a point where I think it might be safe. But I won’t know exactly – and neither will you, and neither will the experts.

So all you can really do is guess, right?

Yes, and no.

Yes, you’re guessing that whatever coin you’re going in on won’t continue falling – the proverbial attempt to catch a falling knife. If you catch the handle, you’re okay, but anywhere else and you start bleeding.

Some picks – DYOR*

So we went live with a few potential bargains the other day and…they’re all still bargains. Even moreso than they were when we posted.

Siacoin is up 3x and then some this year, but it has dropped precipitously over the past couple weeks. Floor may have been 253 Satoshis yesterday. We actually took some coins back. But we’re still HODLers.*

Stratis dropped a bit, too, and it’s below the “hey you should buy up to 200k Sat” level that we talked about – let’s be honest, it’s WELL BELOW that number, and sitting at 130k Sats. (HODLing that coin, too.)

We’re long on those two, but we took back SC – actually made a profit, if you believe that – and moved that into Bitconnect. It’s a lending platform coin thing and we’re watching it rather closely – even if our coins/funds are locked up for a whole ten months. [THAT’S AN AFFILIATE LINK. So if you try it out, we might get compensated. To be honest, we set up an account there two months ago, and kept watching the action. Yesterday was when we pulled the trigger.]

* DYOR = Do Your Own Research; HODL = Hold On (for) Dear Life. A HODLer is one who exhibits HODL-type behavior.

Next?

Well, that’s the other point – we don’t know what’s next, really. We keep watching ICOs, we take a look at some of those coins we invested in that we’re waiting to see trade – like Exscudo, for instance – and we’ve got one eye on the August 1 Segwit hubbub that we honestly don’t totally understand.

This knife-catching stuff is tough.

And this market? Well, it’s like…pretty poison.

Jun 09 2017

Low Satoshis, High Returns

In today’s lesson, we’re going to explain a concept that may seem foreign; once you learn the concept and the lingo, you’ll be in a position to not only know what we’re talking about, but to potentially profit from it. So, it’s time to meet the Satoshis, look for low numbers, and potentially score some high returns.

Who is Satoshi and how did he get a number?

Satoshi Nakamoto is the maybe-pseudonym of the person or entity that created Bitcoin. Does he exist? Is he a she? Are he or she they?

His identity doesn’t really matter, though, because Satoshi created Bitcoin and thus gets a number attached to his name. (And for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to use the “he” and “his” pronouns.)

Satoshi decided to take Bitcoin and denominate it all the way to 8 decimals. In other words, you could buy 0.00000001 of a Bitcoin. (That’s one-one-hundred-millionth, right?)

But it’s not really easy to say “hey, I have zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one Bitcoins.”

Enter the Satoshi as a unit of measurement. 0.00000001 = 1 Satoshi.

A Sat Is Born

Once other coins started entering the crypto space, especially those with lower values than Bitcoin, it was time for that unit of measurement to really take hold. You have a coin that you want to trade your Bitcoins for, and it’s only worth a fraction of Bitcoins, say .00000125, it’s much easier to say “here are 125 Satoshis.” (Digitally, of course – there’s no such thing as an open outcry cryptocurrency trading floor.) The lingo ended up taking on a life of its own: “Sats” became an abbreviation for “Satoshis” and we were off to the races.

So, now that you know what a Satoshi is, and what Satoshis are, let’s talk about the point of this post: how to find coins that are cheap, or even really cheap, and separate the potential winners from the losers.

Art and Science

There are certain disciplines that are straightforward, like biology and medicine. Others are a little more artistic: political science, for instance, isn’t really a science and…oh gee, I’m not going to let this devolve into a political discussion, am I?

My point is that there’s a combination of the two – art and science – that you’ll need to put together when looking at a potential low-Satoshi coin that could give you high-Satoshi returns.

For instance: let’s look at poor Quatloo.

The numbers aren’t bad, right? I mean, a coin trading at 2129 Satoshis is certainly better than a coin that trades at 200 Satoshis.

That’s the science.

The art, though, tells a little different story.

I will give them credit for updating their webpage, which used to be awful, but, if you visit the site, you don’t have a feel for what it is. There’s no “art” – I’m not talking about images on their webpage, I’m talking about whether or not they can tell you really what they do, and do so in a way that inspires confidence.

In other words, while we traded the coin a while back, it was just “play money” and there wasn’t really any chance of it turning into something big.

So, now that you’ve seen the less-than-desirables, let’s take a look at three picks from the low-Satoshi category; ones that meet an “art and science” test, in our opinion. (**Not investment advice. Use this site at your own risk. Returns not guaranteed. Talk to your advisors.**)

(**ALSO HERE’S AN AFFILIATE LINK FOR COINBASE. You should really consider buying some Bitcoins, Ethereum, or Litecoins to get started in this game.)

Our First Low Satoshi Pick: Siacoin (SC)

We’re in love with this project here – in fact, we’re actually quite amazed that we haven’t talked about it on this site yet. (We HAVE talked about it ad nauseam on Steemit – you should totally follow Dave over there.)

Our understanding of Sia is this: “Your decentralized private cloud. Welcome to a new era of cloud storage on the blockchain.”

That, my friends, is art meeting science. They have the elevator speech DOWN. I immediately get it.

A deeper dive tells us that this could really take off: you rent out space on your computer and others take advantage of that space. Plus, since it’s a distributed network, there isn’t a single point of failure.

Sure, they have a LONG way to go to take out Dropbox, or Amazon Web Services.

SC has been trading at right around 550 Satoshis for the past couple weeks. It’s up, though, from a low in late February/early March of 25 Sats.

Disclosure: We are long on SC.

A couple other things to note: pronounce it “Sigh-uh” with a long “i” and you’ll score serious points. Also, it’s a top-15 coin by market cap right now. Don’t let that persuade or dissuade you.

A quick sidebar on psychology

The psychology behind a low-Satoshi coin, in our view, is this: you can get in at double-digits – such as a 25 Satoshi pick of SC – and feel as if you’ve hit the lottery if it goes into triple-digits.

You can STILL get in at triple-digits and feel as if you’ve hit the lottery if it goes into quadruple-digits; and the price point in US Dollars of a triple-digit Satoshi coin such as Siacoin is still around 1.6 cents. So, mentally, you’re still in “penny stock” territory.

You can even get in at quadruple-digits and STILL see that there’s room to grow: XRP was in the 2000-Sat range for a few months this year, and the project is such that people are still getting in, because the US Dollar value then was pennies and now is around 30 cents.

AND…if you lose it all on a pick, you might tell yourself…well, it was a low-value coin anyway. And you’ll dust yourself off and move on to the next one.

Second Pick: Bytecoin (BCN)

We’ll admit this one can be a head-scratcher. Especially if you’re new to the space: who would name it “Bytecoin” if there’s already something called “Bitcoin” and there’s a “Bitcoin Plus” and a “Bitcoin Dark?”

And, what gives, really, with the price? 5 Satoshis early this year, to 25 Satoshis, up to 175, and now floating around 125 or so?

AND the supply is such that the market cap of this coin leads to a situation where it’s possible that there are way too many of these in the universe.

But this coin is business-focused, cryptographically sound – they say “impossible to crack,” though I say that might be a stretch – and it looks to me like a project that is attempting to go after Ripple.

What might be most important for the active traders: once it hit triple-digits, it has pretty much stayed there.

We do not currently own this coin.

Third Pick: Stellar Lumens (STR or XLM)

Confusion with this one – two different ticker symbols (and that tripped us up a few months ago). Stellar is listed as STR on Poloniex. XLM elsewhere, including Bittrex.

But, if you think of this as, with all due respect, “Baby Ripple,” you might see its potential.

It connects “banks, payments systems, and people.”

It looks like Ripple on the surface; its coin even mirrors Ripple in the markets.

And, if you bounce around the internet at least a little, you can find out that there’s…shall we say…”friendly competition” between the two? (Bad blood?)

That being said, it has the art-and-science thing down, and also falls into the “quadruple-digit-Satoshi” category, trading at sub-2000 for a few weeks now (after bouncing from triple-digits earlier this year).

We do not currently own this coin.

There you go…

Three picks that could be poised for some growth, and ones that are right now low enough on the Satoshi scale to not break the (psychological) bank.

Let us know what you think in the comments, or on Twitter – use the hashtag #lowsatoshis with your picks.