network | Wisdom from the Stache

I would say the summary of my trading practices thus far can be summed up into, “I’m an idiot.”

It’s up. it’s down. Oh, my gosh I could have made $10k. Oh, no I’ve lost $300. Ack! What does everyone else think?… Just an average day in a Cryptocurrency trader’s life. But not for the above average trader’s life. Much of the same advice you’d get from a financial planner is applies to Bitcoin and other currencies.

Research the Company

Who are the developers of the Currency you’re thinking about buying? Who are their investors? Have they successfully launched a currency before? Have previous projects they worked on failed in a spectacular fashion?

There are a lot of motivations for attempting to create a new Altcoin. Notoriety, solving social or economic problems, or greed are some of the most popular themes of Cryptocurrency. Following the successes or failures of a development team will guide you in figuring out what motivates them. Don’t get stuck into thinking greed is bad motive. Several self-interested projects made a lot of money for the development team and early investors who knew when to sell.

Research the Product

The development teams are going to market their Cryptocurrency to garner investment interest, adoption, and higher trading prices. That makes it easy to find information like what problems are they trying to solve or new Blockchain technology are they trying to introduce? Are they trying to bring a solution to Apple products or Mobile devices where others aren’t?

Invest for the Long Term

If you’re full time job is staring at charts and day trading, you can still do that with cryptocurrencies. You just need to adjust to the increased volatility. By Volatility I mean 40% up or down in a day… 30 minutes even. But if your trading on the intraday bumps you might find a higher portion of your profits going to fees and splits. So, I say invest for the long term. If I had followed the advice in these sections, I’d have a lot more disposable income.

Personal Stories

I met a guy while working at Dell that told me a story of the $300,000 240 MB Hard drive he bought. Yes, MB. Well he cashed in some of his employee purchase plan stock for a new hard drive when the stock wasn’t worth all that much. At the time of telling me the story the Hard Drive was worthless and the amount of stock he sold for it was worth $300,000. Oh, how we laughed. And now I’ll relate for you the story of the guy who bought a pizza with Bitcoin when it was worth pennies and now that Bitcoin would be worth Millions. You’d think I’d learn from others, but I too have purchased a $700 tablet for $4,000 worth of Bitcoin at today’s prices.

But I think more disappointing are opportunities I missed due to fear.

Stratis is an Altcoin someone pointed out to me in December of 2016. The price was under $0.05. I thought well let’s wait and see what happens. The interesting thing about Stratis is the development team’s partnership with Microsoft and building their platform on the .NET framework. This means that the products a developer would write to interact with their Blockchain technology can run natively on Windows Operating Systems without a lot of additional translation code or “wrapper” code. The price went up to something over $0.07 and I said, “Ok I’ll buy some.” And invested $300. I woke up one morning a few weeks later and the price is over $0.30, and has been hovering between $0.40 and $0.50 the last two weeks. The currency had a lot of earmarks of something I thought was a good investment, and I kick myself for not putting in $1500 or more at the $0.07 price.

DASH, which was launched as Dark Coin, I used to mine. The name Dark Coin certainly sounded cool to the kids and it was marketed as the first truly anonymous currency because the network had the function called mixing where your bitcoin cold be split up and mixed with fractions from other Dark Coin on the network without additional entries in the blockchain thus removing the traceability of the transactions. When fintech investing in Blockchain technologies started becoming serious business they grew up and changed the name to DASH. I had mined 8 DARK when I had a hard drive failure and said well I won’t both with that currency any more. At that time, Dash was only worth around $1.00, so I was out maybe $10. At the same time Stratis had its big jump DASH goes to $100 and has stated above $50. Now why didn’t I keep mining when the difficulty was low and amass a vast fortune? I was able to restore my Dark Wallet from a backup and retrieve my 8+ DASH, but I could have had 100 over the course of that year.

Check out the stellar raise of PIVX. I looked at it when it was less than $0.03. It’s trading at $1.38 today… $1,500.00 would be worth over $100,000, and it happened extremely fast.

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/

Surprise! Bitcoin is not the only Cryptocurrency available, and that’s a good thing.

Within two years of users joining the Bitcoin network and mining coins with their CPUs competing currencies appeared developed by other teams by augmenting the open source code provided by the Bitcoin developers. Namecoin was the first and used the same protocol, SHA-256. In fact the two networks are so closely related that miners can submit the same work for both currencies. Litecoin came next and introduced the Scypt protocol.

Since then the number of Altcoins has grown to over 700, and there are over 10 different protocols. Several Cryptocurrencies never gained any popularity and because users did not maintain nodes, mining, or trade these currencies their projects have been abandoned.

Bitcoin can be thought of as the base currency. That same sort of role the US dollar plays now as an internationally accepted currency that many other currencies are traded against. Bitcoin was first, most widely accepted and most widely traded. But there are some inherent issues with Bitcoins design. In “The Bitcoin Network and You” I mentioned how the size of the Blockchain is over 110 GB. This is limits the type of hardware one can maintain a Node on. Not everyone agrees with the number of Bitcoins that will be mined before finding blocks will cease to generate a reward, some argue for less and others think it should be unlimited. These arguments usually playout in the creation of a new Altcoin.

The concept and implementation of a “Blockchain” itself has a lot of applications beyond making coins. Within each transaction is the ability to create messages. Some developers have taken this to the complex level of creating contracts, like Ethereum. Contracts between two addresses are forever part of the Blockchain once verified by enough nodes. In my work, I’ve considered Blockchain technology the logical choice for IoT applications. The distributed network allows for sensor recordings and commands to become part of the system without relying on a central server to manage the communications. That way allowing for remote devices that only need to communicate with 3 or for devices near by and not have full internet access. As long at the remote devices eventually daisy chain to all other node on the network, some other server can explore the Blockchain for the various messages to facilitate reporting and management.

The Altcoin phenomenon has motivated the team of developers of Bitcoin to consider making various improvements to the Bitcoin network to address some of the issues. These proposed changes involve a large amount of discussion and campaigning and ironically usually fail to be implemented. Bitcoin was designed without a central controlling authority. Changes to the Blockchain or the network are approved or denied by miner votes. Conflicting proposals and the option to not change are voted on by placing a vote message in the work submitted by the miners. When a clear majority opt for a decision, that change will become part of the code that makes up the currency and its network. Implementation of new code in the Network is called a Fork, and all nodes need to implement the new visions of the Node code in order or operate on the Forked code (continue to mine and trade).