Second step into Crypto

How i didn't redouble my money

As i mentioned in my last post i got fairly lucky and doubled my investment in crypto fairly quickly to to the big pump in december. I have since begun researching a bit more and started to diversify more. I am still mostly relying on other people opinions and whatever on reddit an other places. This has worked fairly well but of course has been nowhere as "successful" as my first month.

Winners

Specifically i have had some lucky picks in Qash, NEO, XLM and VeChain. I know fairly little about these NEO i bought mostly on the "ethereum of china" premise, XLM from reddit hype and VeChain from a 15 minute video. Qash i bought based mostly on the fact that they seem to have an experienced team and have a pretty grand plan. I by no means understand it fully, but so far it more than doubled, so i am happy.

Losers

Conversely i also made some poor choices most notably i opened a BitGrail account and bought some Raiblocks at their alltime high. It has since dropped over 40%. Additionally i bought a bit Lisk, Verge and Request network. These have all dropped a bit. All these buys were based purely on hype.

Luckily i sold most my ripple while it was fairly high, so i didn't loose too much on that.

As i mentioned i have started doing a bit of research. I am still essentially gambling, but i feel like i am learning. First i learned that i don't believe in the Lisk project. I might not understand it completely, but as i interpret it. Lisk aims to it easier to launch applications that uses the blockchain and make it more accessible. However i don't really get what problem that they are actually solving. It seems to just facilitate the trend of tacking blockchain on to anything.

Due to this i sold of my Lisk again.

Next i have been following Verge. Its main selling point seems to be privacy. However it seems like have been a lot of over promising and under delivering. Verge had a pump recently but hasn't been doing so well since. Also it is apparently developed by a single developer. This is a giant red flag for me and i will be looking to sell it fairly soon. However, i am feeling a bit of FOMO on it so i am keeping for a bit since there is some talk about rebranding and whatnot.

GrinCoin

Ironically the coin i have gone most in depth with is not even a coin yet, and thus i don't own any. I stumpled upon grincoin from a random reddit comment and found it intriguing. What piqued my interest was the privacy by default, scalability and the lack of addresses. Grin coin uses the "MimbleWimble" protocol for transaction. This is a secrecy protocol that ensures that all transaction are entirely private, looking at its blockchain you cannot derive anything about who transfered how much money to whom.

I read the explanation on how this happens without fully understanding it. It aim to read through it again an maybe try some examples, but the main point is when a transaction happens noone but the sender and receiver knows the amount being transfered. Additionally when making blocks, all transactions are batched into a single giant transaction where alle inputs are listed and all outputs are listed. It might even cut out intermediate transaction. I.e. if A transfers money to B and B transfers to C, it is written simply as a transaction from A to C.

Additionally, specific transaction details are discarded, such that if A transfers to B and C while D transfers to E it is simply stored as a single transaction with A and D as inputs and B,C and E as output. No information about who sent money to whom is stored in the chain.

One big difference with GrinCoin is the lack of addresses. It seems (as i understand it) you need to have a wallet open and ready to do a sort of handshake in order to receive a transaction. This is due to the fact that transaction are created as sort of a handshake where both wallets need to supply something encrypted with their private key. This is radically different from all other coins i have encountered. I think this is quite a big hurdle in my opinion. This might present a real problem and might hold back the coin and the MimbleWimble protocol

If you want to know more checkout www.grin-tech.org

Now what

My next step is to understand the currencies i bought and decide which to keep. I will however start by understanding Ethereum properly as it seem many coins are trying to do similar things. I am still not clear on the concept of smart contract, but hopefully i will be soon.