Investing in the Steem Age Part 5: Investing during the long crypto winter

Hello

"Where have you been Alan?"

You know, here & there. Around.

I've not been on Steem much because I have been disappointed by the lack of innovation from Steemit Inc, as a 'dirty protest' I've just been earning passive income from delegating my stake. We are a long way from the heady days of 2017. A lady who was taking a course that my colleague Sally Lloyd and I run made $650+ in a week of Steemit posting (assuming she'd sold shortly afterwards). Those 7 posts nearly paid for the 6-month course she was taking from us!

So what have I done during this psychologically difficult time? Well, to make a long story short, I continued to invest.

I'd been telling myself a story that I'd been investing in Bitcoin & alts throughout 2017, but had stopped during the massive run-up in the second half of that year. Selective memory, my records tell a different story - I just kept investing throughout.
2018 was similar, every month a chunk of money was invested. The values kept going down, I kept investing.

Call it bloody mindedness, call it foolish, I prefer to call it 'investing discipline'. I don't know where the markets will go. There's an argument that says btc is expensive at $1, and another that it's cheap at $100,000.

So, I've continued to invest throughout last year. I had to stop looking at the portfolio online, all that red week after week has a psychological affect. Instead I record everything in a little black book (literally).

So being 'in crypto' has been a bit bruising. Christmas 2017 back in Ireland I was swaggering around, Christmas 2018 I was more circumspect! Christmas 2019? Who knows!

As I've talked about before, I try to invest in a logical way. To build a crypto portfolio made up of diverse projects. Realistically, I'm not 'investing', I'm speculating. Most crypto projects are not cash generating... they are, literally, speculations on the future.

My portfolio (roughly)

• I still have my bitcoin, I add a little every month. No introduction necessary. I still believe that btc will be an important world currency in the medium to long term.

• I still have ethereum, I only keep it as a 'just in case'. It's struggling to scale, the massive run-up in price was just a side-effect of all the ICOs hype.

• BAT - this project is the only one of my holdings that held it's value throughout 2017. I still like it.

• Theta - don't ask. A silly punt on a tip from a YouTube 'guru' (who has vanished in the bear market)

• Steem I still hold, I've never sold a single one. I don't have great expectations medium/long term. Unless the ecosystem continually evolves and improves, competitors will win (my guess would be some eos-based project)

• EOS Wow! This has exceeded my expectations. It's a beast. 5 times more daily transactions than every other project combined. Continuing improvements by Block One. Continual releases of new Dapps on the network. I continue to add to my positions, it's amazing to get Eos at these prices!

• TenX - I'm always interested in projects promising income and real-world usage. I bought this to receive a small % of every transaction when people used their TenX credit cards. I should have been more suspicious of Doctor Julian and his lovely hair.

• bitshares & related tokens - This crypto endlessly disappoints me. I foolishly bought tokens in a couple of Dexs. Money loser! Good lesson that bitshares is a weird closed garden. I bought Eos on a Dex on bitshares, only to discover that I had actually bought a token paired to the value of Eos (in other words: it wasn't Eos). Eventually after wasting a few hours of my time I sold the token for bitshares (not easy with such thin markets), transferred the BTS to binance & bought real full-fat Eos there.

• Worbli - I'm excited by this one. Seems STUPIDLY undervalued. 'The financial district of Eos'. It's based on the eosio, but is more controlled. The block producers are selected (and vetted) by worbli, Dapps have to apply to be permitted on the chain, Worbli holders have to go through KYC/AML checks. The crypto-anarchists are running a mile! BUT this is a deliberately carefully controlled crypto so it can plug in to the fiat financial world. Currently the entire chain is worth arounf $6 million. Worbli announced last week that they had signed their first Dapp that will pay $100s of millions over the next few years to use the network. In a conversation last night on Telegram, the CEO of Worbli announced he's already signed contracts bringing $1 BILLION + to Worbli token holders. I'll repeat again, total value of all worbli tokens is currently $6 million. In my opinion, this has the potential to go up a hell of a lot. 1000x ? That seems absurd, but if the network has revenues of $1 Billion a year for example, how should you value the network? By a multiple of this number... what multiple? Depends on the market sentiment. If the market decides 6 times the revenue (a fairly conservative multiple) then we get to 1000x . I've only got a small % of my total portfolio in this project, but it is exciting. I don't recommend investing what you can't afford to lose.

Lessons? I think it is that you need Skin In The Game to succeed. Of course some people got rich in crypto by accident. It will also happen again. But I'm aiming for inevitable crypto success.... a method that if I persist for long enough, will almost certainly succeed. (By 'succeed' I mean - to earn a life-changing amount of money in crypto, or enough money that would mean I wouldn't have to work anymore). Take worbli this COULD be a project that explodes in value and brings me fortune. But if not, then being immersed in crypto means I'm exposed to other opportunities. Maybe I'm the perennial optimist!