The Psychology of New People Buying Large Supply Coins

Recently, cryptocurrency has seen a huge surge in coins with large supplies, these coins include Ripple, Stellar, Tron, Siacoin and many others. Especially in a time like this where a ton of new people are buying into crypto it seems that there is this trend. As it is infeasible to own a large amount of Bitcoin at this point many believe that they can strike it rich by owning a "bag" of Ripple or some other high supply coin. Many newer investors seem to believe that it's better to own 5000 of something such as Ripple than to own 0.3 of something like Bitcoin.

Power of Many

In any sort of investing there is this notion of what I call a power of many (PoM). PoM is simple really - it is the notion that holding a large supply of a scarce asset which has a growing demand will maximize profits. An example that is seen quite often is Bitcoin, a person who bought 1000 Bitcoin at $10 each long ago would of course earn much more per % increase in the price of Bitcoin than someone who has a much smaller quantity. The newer investors who buy large supply coins want to emulate this power of many but the problem with large supply coins is that they're not scarce so growing demand does not impact the value of the coin in the same way as in the case of Bitcoin.

Source

Deceptively Bullish Volatility

Everyone is a genius in a long standing bull market - many believe in the mantra, high risk, high rewards. Those that buy large supply coins on a skewed notion that they're taking advantage of the power of many may fall for what I call deceptively bullish volatility (DBV). For example let's say one buys Siacoin without doing any research and only buys on the notion of its large supply and rising crypto market - they could be falling for DBV in that in the scenario that the market suddenly becomes bearish each incremental loss on Siacoin in the event that the coin falls will hit them harder than say if they bought a low quantity of Bitcoin.

Blatant Scams

With a culture that promotes this faux power of many which in turn leads to the falling to deceptively bullish volatility blatant scams may also start to also entice new market players. For example a coin could have a very large supply and do a ton of premining and run something similar to BitConnect in which users are incentivized to lend and refer new users.

Conclusion

Owning large quantities of any asset for that matter has been desirable to investors since the beginning of time. It is always good to be vigilant of the pros and cons of such an approach and to do measured research and understand the risks before taking such a position.