"Method to the Madness"

“Method to the Madness”

6th February 2018

Let me get this clear before I start-

1. No, this post will not make you into a successful crypto currency investor overnight.

2. No, I’m not telling you to invest your money into anything and this is certainly not financial advice.

3. No, this entry will not even barely scrape the surface of how crypto currency works.

4. Yes, this is my honest opinion, along with facts and nothing more.

5. Yes, there is method to all this madness surrounding crypto.

Intro

I’m being fully transparent with you and wanted to share my opinion on the subject after being involved with it since 2014. I’ll provide you with facts and some information and you can decide for yourself and formulate your own opinion. If you really want to know more about the Crypto space I’d recommend putting hours of research into it. I’ll post some useful links throughout this entry for anyone that’s interested. I’ll also happily help anyone if you have any questions. I’m not doing this for my own personal benefit, simply for those who are willing to listen and have an open mind.

I’ve been involved with crypto currency since early 2014 when I made multiple purchases of Bitcoin when it was valued at $200 a piece. I’ve also made multiple investments into Bitcoin from 2014 up until 2018 and I’ll still carry on doing so in the future. Crypto currencies are a new concept to the general public, most having heard of it but not having a clue how it works or how it can benefit the world and society using its core decentralised technology. Believe it or not people have attempted to create crypto currencies since the 1990’s. It wasn’t until 2009 that Bitcoin was created and became the first crypto currency to function properly. There’s so much speculation and bullshit surrounding the crypto currency industry I’m not surprised so many people are sceptical about its legitimacy and whether it has a future.

More about the history of crypto currency/digital payments here-

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/history-cryptocurrency-eder-andrade

Information about Crypto Currencies

You should bear in mind that as of today there are over 1500 crypto currencies currently in the crypto market space. Most of which will have no use in the future, some are scams too. There are however several crypto currencies that have genuine business models and aim to infiltrate multiple centralised markets to create revenue and share wealth. I’ll run you through a couple of examples to explain what I’m talking about here.

Power Ledger (POWR)

Power Ledger is an Australian start-up company, backed by the Australian government whose goal is to infiltrate the energy sector and create a decentralised energy grid using solar panels, block chain technology and smart contracts. Most of the UK’s electricity is supplied by the “Big 6” corporate companies and prices of electricity have been rising year on year. Back to the Power Ledger platform, let’s say that you own your own home and you’ve had solar panels installed to help cover your monthly energy costs. You’ve paid your energy bill for the month using the panels and still have some extra electricity, you can then sell that electricity to other people within the Power Ledger network offering a much lower rate than corporate companies.

I can see the Power Ledger network braking off from the traditional energy industry and forming a self-sufficient eco system using peer to peer energy transfers in the form of crypto currency (POWR Tokens) I believe this type of business model will be beneficial for the future of electric cars, charging stations, small eco communities. I mean we’ve already got the Eco Warriors raging a war down at the Lune in Halton. They’ve set up a Water Hydro plant near the salmon count further towards Caton and are carrying on developing their community. I can see Power Ledger fitting in well with our local eco warriors. I might have to go and hit them up about this.

Bee Token (BEE)

Bee token aims to infiltrate the travel accommodation market, something AirBNB have already done. If you look at AirBnB as a company you should quickly realise that they don’t own any of the properties that are advertised on their platform however they do generate revenue via booking charges, other fees etc…

We’re starting to see more and more decentralised projects and companies popping up all over the world. To name a couple you can look at Uber and Airbnb, the list goes on. The Bee platform will enable crypto currency users and others to rent out their own property or rent a property from another person using the Bee platform. Why wouldn’t they just use AirBnB you say? Well, the travel market along with the world’s population is always increasing. Therefore, other companies just like “Bee” will enter the expanding market and be in direct competition with companies like AirBnB. If Bee were to provide a cheaper service fee for users then I can see a lot of people switching platforms. I believe that decentralisation will be a big part of our lives in the next 10 years due to the value of fiat currency declining plus a multitude other factors. People want more value. Decentralised projects have the ability to provide that.

Other notable projects include – Siacoin, EOS, Bitshares, Tron, IOTA.

Learn more about decentralisation here –
http://www.economist.com/node/14298890

More depth into Bitcoin and digital payments

To me, Bitcoin is the Ford Model T of cars. It’s the first one of its kind and it can be heavily improved and refined to create a much more efficient product like we see in the cars of today. This is where the market opens up for other Crypto currencies to provide a more efficient and beneficial service to the end user. For example, Bitcoin only has 2mb blocks on its block chain. This essentially translates to a small number of transactions that can be held in one block, this means that sometimes transactions can take up to 8 hours to complete when the network is busy. Obviously, you couldn’t use this system in real life to pay for goods because the transaction times are far too long.

Visa and Mastercard can process millions of transactions per minute for example, which is why they are two of the main providers of digital payment gateways. There are Crypto currencies that exist in the space such as Verge (XVG) which have transaction times of around 5 seconds which is a vast improvement on 8 hours. Because of the fast transaction times the Verge blockchain provides, it could well be adopted for mainstream use as bitcoin is simply not suited. This is also the reason people view Bitcoin as a store of value rather than a currency, which I’d tend to agree with. Verge was just one example however there are literally hundreds of projects that are providing users with super quick transaction times not to mention the implementation of the lightning network we’ve been patiently waiting for.

The reason why there are a limited number of Bitcoins that can ever be mined (21,000,000) is to avoid inflation. Think about it, our government and every government world wide are constantly printing money and our banks are constantly lending money to generate revenue off the interest rate they set. This all drives down and dilutes the value of said money. Can’t buy a Freddo for 5p anymore can ya.

So what does it mean? Well, once all 21,000,000 of the Bitcoins have been mined no more can be created, therefore there will be no dilution to the value of the bitcoin unlike traditional fiat currency.

More depth into block chain technology

Blockchain technology is basically a fully transparent ledger system in which anyone can see everyone’s transactions. The ability to see everyone else’s transactions is what makes the system transparent and decentralised.

For example, we all have bank accounts. We can all see our individual balances however we can’t see one another’s. With Bitcoin you can see the cryptographic address’ of peoples accounts and how many Bitcoin they currently have however you will never know who that person is. Rather than having your personal identity tied to the account, Bitcoin uses a cryptographic address which consists of numbers and letters like this “1BfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPL”
This is a unique address that belongs to you, which you can deposit and send bitcoin to/from. Just like a bank account.

More on how bitcoin works under the hood here-

Regulation

2018 will be a big year for regulation in the Crypto currency market, and rightly so. You have to understand that by regulating Cryptocurrency it means that governments are accepting of Crypto currencies and that will give on the fence investors more confidence in the market. Governments would also like to know who’s using cryptocurrency and make sure its not being used for any illicit activities. Which is fair enough! When the day comes I’ll happily hold my hands up to the UK Government and say, “Yeah, I’m a crypto currency investor, here’s everything you need to know about my investments” Why? Because this is legitimate and I have nothing to hide. People bang on about Bitcoin being used to purchase drugs blah blah, what do you think cash is used for in real life eh? To purchase drugs.

More about regulation- http://uk.businessinsider.com/anti-money-laundering-cryptocurrencies-regulation-eu-uk-identity-2017-12

Using Eliott Wave Theory, Fibonacci and other indicators to confirm trends.

People talk about the volatility that’s involved with Bitcoin like it’s a bad thing. It all depends on how you look at it. In my opinion the volatility provides me with an opportunity to make an easy profit if the indicators are confirming a trend whether it be bullish or bearish.
You can use Eliott Wave theory and Fibonacci ratios to keep a close eye on the market and form predictions based upon the raw data that’s in front of you. To be honest, it takes a while to learn and can be very difficult and frustrating at times. I am no means an expert whatsoever however I have learnt a lot from practising these techniques. Practise makes perfect no matter what activity you’re doing. I’ve learnt a lot of stuff from a couple of guys in the game who are both excellent investors and wave counters. Funnily enough they’re both Asian too! Nothing like Asian mathematics, Philakone if you read this its’ all love. From Aari to Luna. These guys have some amazing content that you will really benefit from studying. I still find myself re watching their videos and continuously improving my skills. Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than these guys.

@Philakone - https://twitter.com/philakonecrypto?lang=en
@Haejin - https://steemit.com/@haejin

Feel free to follow my Instagram – @accidentalanarchist
I post regular wave counts and updates for quite a few promising coins.

The Future

Personally I’m a mid/long term investor that also dabbles in some day trading on the side. Like this morning when Bitcoin bottomed out at $5900 and rose to $7000 within an hour, I hope you managed to get in on that play too! I truly believe the market still has an incredible amount of growth to go. To put it into perspective, the “Dot-Com” market bubble managed to exceed 10 Trillion dollars before there was a major correction. The crypto currency market cap currently stands at 350 billion dollars, a tiny fraction of 10 Trillion. If you think Bitcoin is a bubble, then so is the entire economy. With regulations approaching I truly believe this is a good and accepting sign on the governments behalf. I’m excited to see what 2018 brings in the terms of crypto currency and life in general. I expect exponential growth over the next few years in general. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a 40k Bitcoin at some point this year.

More on the “Dot Com” bubble- https://writepass.com/journal/2012/10/2001-dot-com-bubble-its-causes-effect-and-lessons-learnt/

Crypto Projects I’m interested in for the start of 2018

Verge
Tron
Bitshares
Power Ledger
EOS
Cardano
Litecoin
Siacoin
Substratum
Poet
Electroneum
Ethereum
Neo
OmiseGo
Digibyte

Thank you for taking the time to read this entry, hopefully I’ve given you a better insight into how I think and my opinions of the crypto market. Please make sure you upvote the post in Steemit and feel free to share if you thought this post was useful in anyway. Feel free to send me any questions, always happy to help.

Luke