RE: A Casual Guide to Investing in Cryptocurrencies
Thanks, Kevin, got some helpful information from your post. With the recent high price of SBD, I've used the opportunity to take first steps with some small investments in other cryptocurrencies.
One thing that seems pretty noticeable is how much together all the coins move. For example, on coinmarketcap.com, you can see in the prices graph how recently there was a dip for practically all the coins at the exact same time. And after that they all went up. To me this suggests that the prices are driven by speculation and hype, rather than the actual products the companies behind the cryptocurrencies (blockchain technologies) are developing. If that's the case, I will make a prediction that there will be a crypto bubble similar to the dotcom bubble. After the bubble bursts, the companies that don't have any real and useful technology will die, and the ones with real solutions will remain. And in the process people will say that it's the end of crypto/blockchain, just like they said it was the end of the Internet after the dotcom bubble.
Another noticeable thing seems the relation between circulating supply and price. The more coins in existence, the lower the price. Bitcoin was able to achieve this high price because it has a very small circulating supply. You wouldn't expect a coin like Ripple, with its much bigger supply, to reach such prices. So, yeah, the price of a single coin seems pretty irrelevant (and the result of design decisions), although that's what most people focus on. (I just find it so unfortunate that scarcity equals profit, while giving an abundance of coins to everyone on the planet would make the coins worthless. :( )
What I was wondering about is whether you look at the underlying blockchain technology protocol that the cryptocurrency you're looking to invest in runs on. Do you ask questions like: What problems are they trying to solve with the technology they're developing? What approaches do they have to tackling the problems, and how do their approaches compare with others?
One other thing that I personally (and I think many others) would find helpful is workable strategies for storing the coins. There isn't any one app for all the coins, so it can be difficult. Just throwing it out there in case you are interested in making a post about it.
Man,reading your comment felt like reading a post in itself! But I find it helpful, as much as the post itself.
Glad to hear you found it helpful. :)
It's a great time to be doing this trying it out :)
Many coins are reliant on either Bitcoin or Ethereum, which is why it all seems like they're in sync. But I agree, it's largely influenced, mostly by social media these days.
I wonder.. cryptocurrencies are rather different compared to company stocks. There's worldwide access to this thing, and we're getting a slice of a network and growth could potentially remain open ended. But yeah I guess in the end is if people are actually using the currency.
Oh yeah, thinking about it I should've included this part, but maybe I've described it in "usability / productivity / resonance". For example, I recently got into Substratum as they seem to have an elegant solution to net neutrality with browser-agnostic solutions for mainstream adoption, minimum software for node operators, and all without the need for politics.
I'll try to look out for an article on this, remember coming across a really good one.
Btw, thanks for the awesome comment @borislavzlatanov. I've been seeing your comments, even promoting steemstem and have always thought that you should post up more stuff!
For sure the world is changing (even in such a short timespan since the dotcom bubble) and I definitely don't think history will repeat exactly.
Glad you liked my comment - I haven't been posting because I encountered the issue with high-quality content remaining unnoticed, and at the same time a lot of low-quality content reaching great popularity. And the other thing is that I have the impression that even the high-quality content that gets popular doesn't really get read by most people, it just gets upvoted. So I haven't been motivated to post, and I was wanting to do something about these underlying issues first.
There are curation groups and all. I think the issue will mostly resolve itself when the communities feature rolls out. Since this is proof of stake, and highly staked users doesn’t necessarily mean great curators, sometimes it’s really difficult to align incentives. What are yours thoughts on the possible solutions?
Curation groups like curie have made all the difference in the world for me, and I am very, very grateful to them. So, I guess the more help they get, the more the platform as a whole will benefit. In a way, they are trying to find gems among all the massive amounts of posts published each day. So I'm thinking in the direction of arranging things so there is much less low-quality posting to begin with. How do we achieve that?
Firstly, with the coming of Communities, there will hopefully be so much less content within a given group. So the people in that group will find it easy to go through all the posts and vote on the ones they consider worthy. Like on most forums. But, if there is excessive posting from people who are looking to just make money without contributing to the purpose of the group, and it becomes difficult to go through all the new daily posts, there could be moderation or various other arrangements. (Not to be confused with a lot of on-topic, beneficial posts being made each day, which could be solved by creating subcommunities within the given community.)
Secondly, SMTs suggest some very intriguing possibilities. If we see the Steem blockchain as a very rudimentary socio-economic system, then from my understanding SMTs will allow each community to create its own socio-economic system by altering the parameters of the parent one (hopefully, without having to create their own cryptocurrency). There isn't any one correct model that all the people have to operate under (like it is with current countries and governments). It's more like - make it flexible and people will hopefully (but not necessarily) find a model that works in the context of their group and its purpose. One thing I really like about this is that the rules of the game (parameters of the system) are written in computer code, not in legal language like today.
So we have a very good starting point. Then, in order for a community to be successful in fulfilling its purpose, I would suggest they do the following:
What do you think? Do you see things in a similar way, or differently?
Good thoughts on the success metrics. One of the easiest metrics would probably be from capital generated and distributed in a community. How would you define a metric for altruism by the way?
Communities will almost certainly make curation better as there'll be moderators and more focused pile to work on. I'm pretty sure the devs are delaying the release of the communities feature for a reason. I think there are a lot of good community suggestions that are being considered like what you've mentioned for SMTs and rewards pool parameters.
Wrote something about communities and UI/UX yesterday that relates to what you're talking about, with some inspiration from @thevenusproject. Would love your thoughts on it: https://steemit.com/asksteemit/@kevinwong/how-would-you-map-out-steem-s-community-in-an-organizational-ui-ux
I wouldn't try to measure altruism. I would try to set up a system and measure the performance of that system. The social sciences often try to measure people and their "qualities" and it gets very, very difficulty and messy. I see the way forward as building a system and measuring how it performs. Then tweaking it continuously.
A community can have projects. If somebody wanted to know about the community, they would look at the projects pursued by its members. If the goals of the projects are directed towards meeting human needs, then it would be clear to people what that community is about. And they could call the community altruistic, humanitarian or any other word they prefer to use. At the end of the day, it's the goals that matter - and those goals have to be measurable so the people can know if they are meeting them or not.
For example, if I initiated a project about creating a new website on the Steem blockchain, one with educational materials that enables people to both learn and make money, some goals of my project might be to have people successfully complete sections of the content, keep them coming back and going through more and more advanced materials, etc., etc.
Hoping to learn to this post as i am new in crypto. I will follow you and make to read your article in crypto.. thank you very much hoping and wishing to guide me on this. @kevinwong
Awesome, i never really thought of looking at the actual qty of coins to price as a metric. Thanks for the info.
THIS WAS A GREAT HELP
There is a difference in price appreciation of alt coins. Even visible on CMC if you watch closely.
The coins that are real, working today, blockchain is cranking through blocks, the chain is being used. Those coins are slowly heading higher.
Coins that are just play toys, but not real or not aligned to long-term goals elaborated in original whitepaper, are slowly losing ground.
There will be a big shake out. Just like dot com boom and bust.
There will be few survivors. ADA will be one of the survivors.
XRP token will survive, but it will be 1/10,000th of current over pumped value.