Why I bought NEO today

Hello fellow Steemians and fellow Crypto Enthusiasts!

Disclaimer: This article doesn’t constitute financial advice, this is purely my opinion and perspective as a cryptocurrency investor. Investing carries risks! Never invest more money in the crypto market than you can afford to lose!

I am writing today to express why I chose to buy NEO today. But before that, for those who are new to NEO I would like to explain some of the benefits that NEO offers, and why I think the current price of NEO is an absolute steal of a deal!

NEO is a cryptocurrency that is similar in traits to Ethereum, and it has been called “Chinese Ethereum” and the “Ethereum Killer” by several notable sources, but that is beside the point. NEO has an operational network with functional “smart contract” features which give it quite a bit of versatility. A “smart contract” essentially means that developers can build applications on top of the NEO network and run application code directly on the NEO network.

Some of the basic features of NEO:

• Smart contracts
• Zero transaction fees to send/receive NEO
• NEO pays out a dividend to its holders in GAS coin, another related cryptocurrency

Unlike some other projects that only have a white-paper, or partially complete networks/feature-sets, NEO is a fully functional Cryptocoin network with a budding economy of distributed apps and spin-off tokens (similar to ERC20 tokens), and given its attractive base feature-set, can easily be considered undervalued at its current market value of approximately $22 per coin.

NEO pays out a dividend in GAS coin based on how much NEO you hold, which typically returns about 4% a year, which positively dwarfs the interest rate on traditional brick-and-mortar banking interest rates in the United States. As a bonus you can collect your GAS coin as it trickles in (provided you install your own desktop wallet and keep your NEO coins there), unlike banks you don't have to wait to receive an interest payout. To figure out how much GAS coin you would earn based on how much NEO you hold, check out this neat tool that will do the calculation for you: https://neotogas.com/

Given the fee-less transactions that NEO provides I am sincerely surprised that it doesn’t have a stronger market adoption in the crypto world -- most of us are pigeon-holed into buying Bitcoin or Litecoin or Ethereum, which are offered on many large crypto-fiat exchanges, in order to fund portfolios on pure-crypto exchanges like Binance.com, Coss.io or KuCoin.com, and in the process you incur transaction fees that are a percentage of the value you are sending across the network. (Which is the exact business model of Western Union if you stop and think about it...) NEO has no such limitation, which in theory makes it an ideal way to transfer value back and forth between exchanges or individuals; what you send is exactly what the recipient receives.

I have full faith that NEO will return to at or above its January/February valuation sometime in the next 1-2 years. These facts combined make for an interesting investment speculation. NEO hit its all-time high on the markets in January of 2018 at approximately $160 per coin. With the slump of Bitcoin in subsequent months since January of 2018 NEO has taken losses consistent with the rest of the alt-coin markets, today was a particularly rough day for alt-coins, losses across the board. But that means there is plenty of room for growth, and NEO has a solid, working, appealing feature set that will ultimately help it weather precisely these kinds of storms. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, "you must be willing to buy big when everybody else is afraid". To paraphrase another unknown (to you dear reader) investor I have spoken with "if you buy the dips and the mids you're going to make money, but avoid the peaks, the peaks get slaughtered."

If you don’t hodl NEO yet, or have never heard of NEO, I highly recommend you check out their website at: https://neo.org/. Or check out their charts at coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/

Happy investing my friends!