My thoughts on the future of cryptocurrencies.

in #crypto7 years ago

So this will be a bearish view on crypto. This post is simply my 2 Satoshi on the topic, it's my personal opinion and not financial advice. Consider yourself warned.

A little about me first. A goal of mine has always been to be financially free, and if lucky, also wealthy, now there is a difference between wealthy and rich, but I'll come back to that later. It all started around two years ago when I was invited to a contest. There was made a simulation of the Norwegian stock market and we traded against 20 000 other Norwegian traders. The contest lasted one month, and in the beginning, I was top 30 something (turned out it was because of a bug, so yeah) in the end I had less virtual money then what I started with. But this is what sparked my interest. Since then I have constantly been reading up and learning as much as possible on the topic investing. What peaked my interest was the tech sector, especially the Nasdaq. It was volital, and had a good upside, the tech sector is very much like the crypto space but its a lot milder. Here I did my first investments. Its important to note that while doing this I was also reading a lot off books on the topic and studing some great investors like buffet. Then I came over TA, and I feel in love with the idea of predicting the market, it wasnt before later on I realized it was all about risk management and probability. The best teacher is failiure.

After some succsess in tech, I came over crypto. As anyone else sane person I was sceptical at first. My first transfer was to coinbase and it was small. After seeing great ROI I simply fell in love with crypto, especially BTC. Now, at the time people where talking about how btc will be the world valuta and so on. Even tho that's a long road to take, at the time it seemed possible, unlikely, but possible. And in that way btc had a future, it couldn't be a bubble since it's not a company, its a currency, at least that's what I thought. In the whitepaper of Satoshi btc is explained as a digital peer-peer currency that´s a lot faster, cheaper and safer than anything else. But that reality doesn't exist anymore.

Fast forward a little and we see btc having transaction cost way over any other fiat transfers or Vica swipes. The speed is also terrible, there are times when it's faster to send a ledger with UPS then to actually do a transfer on the blockchain. Also, we have the mining problem, mining is incredibly centralized, and not cost, no energy efficient. Now there are some solutions to these problems like lightning network and so on. In my mind I could find coins that had already solved all these problems that btc are facing, so I said sure, I´ll invest in altcoins, and so I did.

Now lets get to the point, the end off crypto.

For me crypto is facing some real problems. For instance everything is so fucking overvalued. Take Tron for an instant. An amazing idea with great potensial, but at the moment, simply an idea. They havnt even rolled out a working product, they are an ERC20 token for gods sake. And simply on an idea and promise they were valued at 16 000 000 000$. Just think about that. Later on, they corrected to 3 800 000 000$. In the real world, they would have to find funding from VC, and VC would price them at a maximum of a couple of million $. Why? cus its simply an idea and a promise. In the real world its all about working product, results, and earnings. But here in crypto its just about future predictions, roadmaps, hype and competent teams. The same can be said about Ripple. In a week ripple made a man one of the worlds richest, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg. Then it all fell. Difference between ripple and Tron is that ripple has a working platform. The big problem is what is the use case of XRP, in other words, ripple the token. Well, there is pretty much no use case.I would love to have some shares of Ripple the platform, but buying XRP is simply buying a symbol that's supposed to be ripple. Its not decentrilised, it can be printed to eternaty, its pre-mined like crazy, and so on, the price is simply based on hype, hype and more hype.

Another problem we have in crypto is the fact that everyone is buying, and they are buying cus they want 10X, or 20X and so on. People want to be millionaires overnight. Why is this a problem? Well let me explain. This is a problem because for the price to move higher, there must always be a new flow of money so that the guys that bought in early and want to take profits at 20X can do so. This is not sustainable. At some point, there won´t be enough people/new money flowing into the market. And the way its looking now there is not a lot of people left. I see farmers, grandmothers, teenagers, garbage truck drivers, everyone, literally everyone is buying btc, and they are also acting as an expert on the topic, thinking they are a genius cus they have a 300% ROI.

And don´t even get me started on bitCONnect. I know people that are invested in bitconnect, they know its a scam, but they had a hope of making as much money as possible before it crashes, I mean where the fuck is the logic? And even when bitconnect was confirmed a scam, and the price dropped 95%-something, it still bounced over 300%, and landed the list of top gainers. I am honestly ashamed of humanity and its stupidity.

I started having these thoughts about a month ago, before that I always was afraid of a potential crash, but now I have reason and logic backing me.

I have made incredible gains in crypto. A lot of it is from hodling, and a lot is from trading (crypto is a traders dream). And this is how I will play things out. I am currently cashing out a lot from crypto, and with that money, I will buy an apartment and rent it out to students. The next things will be to diversify into stocks, mostly dividend blue chip, and some small-cap ofc. My goal is to build up several income streams. At the same time, I will keep around 30% of my net worth in crypto. Every time this net worth grows, I will cash out so that it stays at 30%ish. The end game will be to reinvest all the profits into more stocks, another apartment, maybe some gold, and so on so that I can live comfortably the rest of my life.

I am also changing up my crypto investing. Instead of holding a lot of coins that have great future potential, I will scorch the earth to find those few rare gems that have a potential off 50X, or 100x, in a short timeframe, yes they do exist. Then I´ll go hard in, and hopefully cash out big time. I might find them based on FA, or maybe TA, best case scenario will be a mix of both.

What I am doing is simply risk management, no sane person has 100% of their net worth in one sector, especially a sector as volatile and risky as crypto. I am just difersifying my portifolio, locking in huge profits, and seting the bar for my future. Right now crypto is correcting. And this was the second biggest correction in the history of btc. I belive thats a bad sign, I think hands are getting weak, and people are realising that the intrinsic value of crypto is far under from the current valuation.

But hey, let's end on a brighter note. What can crypto do to stay? First off all, we need use cases and a lot of them. Blockchain/tangle is here to stay, crypto, maybe. But one thing is for sure if we get more and more use cases, partnership, legitimate business models, then we can justify the current market cap. Also, I can see some winners inside the crypto landscape, some projects with revolutionizing tech. They are probably going to be here for a long time. So even if crypto crashes, btc goes down to just a couple of 100$, alts bleed, and don´t recover, there might still be some winners in the long haul.

I know I will get a lot of hate for this, a lot of crypto maximalists out there. And I might be wrong, crypto might just be the next thing. And that's exactly the reason why I still keep 30% of my net worth in crypto. There is still a lot of money to be made. But in the endgame, I believe there is a low chanse of me being wrong. This is simply my opinion, and how I want to protect my wealth. Remember the difference beetwen wealth and being rich. Being wealthy is being safe. You have several income streams, you are diversifies, you have a plan b,c and d. Being rich, well thats having a big account on binance, might not be that big the next day... I wish everyone good luck, and may the crypto gods be with us. There will still be future updates about TA on crypto at my twitter, stay tuned.

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I don't like your bearish outlook, not one bit lol... but I have to say you speak a lot of sense and I think your investment strategy is much better than just hodling crypto's and relying on continuous gains as the majority do.

You mentioned some rare gems... what are our thoughts on Sia, Golem and Ark?

If you do find a rare gem, be sure to share it ;)

Yeah, I know its bearish, and it's not my favourite scenario. I would love to be confident in crypto and have most of my net-worth, after all, thats where the gains are. But for me this is the reality. I bought sc at 70 satoshi, and flipped it at 88 for some quick gains, ended up have to buy back in the at a 2x premium. But thats not a hidden gem in my opinion. The project is good, and will go up in value over time, as long as crypto lasts at least. But a hidden gem is a 10 mill market cap with a bueatiful bullish chart, combined with great fundamentals.