Bitconnect: post lending platform - part 1

What's the point of this post? Mainly I am writing it for myself to document the experiences of how various things have gone in the cryptocurrency space. Bitconnect is not the only thing I've tried, but at least from the previous 4 months, it certainly was the one I focused on the most.

My very first activity in crypto was to buy some meager Etherum mining hashpower from Genesis Mining (10.10.2017). ETH was trading around $200 and I ended up getting about 30 MH/s which at the time was maybe paying about $1 a day (think it is around $2.50 a day now with the price increase in ETH). I have some BTC contracts (~60 TH/s) that will start at the end of Feb. 2018, so hopefully, the price of BTC will stay where it is at or go higher.

Back to Bitconnect: I did invest money that I could afford to lose into the lending platform starting with $130 on 10.20.2017 and ramped up to an active investment of a little over $75k. And just to be clear, the way the platform was closed certainly sucks but could have been worse (e.g. Hexabot or Pandex). I'd estimate I am out of pocket a little north of $35k actual cash. The accounting gets hard once you start mixing coins in from other sources like mining. As of this moment, I have about 245 BCC sitting in the Qt wallet (some of those coins I bought recently on HitBTC - more about that later). Maybe they will stake, maybe they won't--we'll see.

I remember describing my decision to try Bitconnect to some friends as "going into a burning house and hoping to get out before it collapsed in on you." I even offered a couple of those same friends $100 startup BCC to open an account and they turned me down--guess they were smarter than me. So ultimately I had zero referrals and was never on any of the affiliate "teams." My plan was to get a few 10k loans in, wait through the 120-day capital release and then cash out all of my original money. I missed the original release date by about 40 days.

So while Bitconnect was still in the mode of making daily payouts, I was slowly starting to pull out BTC for some other "projects" like Hashflare and also funding a Gunbot running on Bittrex. Currently, on Hashflare I have a little over 16 TH/s of SHA-256 and my Gunbot has approximately 0.212 BTC that it is slowly buying and selling with. Not sure if I'll ever really make a meaningful profit with Gunbot, but it is sure fun to tinker with. I've been debating about whether to try Profit Trailer as it seems a little more polished and the "Profit Feeder" add-on seems very interesting. Having a bunch of bots all do trading using almost the same sets of rules on coins that are not necessarily tied to anything in the real world seems like a fairly strange concept, but again it is sure fun to play around with.

OK, so the current plan as far as BCC is to HODL and buy small numbers of coins on HitBTC as they have the inevitable dips. In many ways, I just don't see the difference in playing the "buy low/sell high" game with BCC than with almost any of the other coins. One thing that does seem to be an advantage for BCC is that if there is any good news the coin will probably take off for a short run (like the run up to $90 on HitBTC over some speculation about the price normalizing at $150 due to the ability of converting to BCCX at $150 per coin). I cannot participate in that ICO, so that is not an option. As an aside, I haven't done anything with ICO's as that really feels like pure speculation to me -- pretty much that same as buying penny stocks and hoping for a tiny price blip.

And while waiting to see what happens with BCC, I will continue with Hashflare: re-invest for a few weeks, then sell for a few weeks -- still trying to figure out a good pattern for that. I have been thinking a lot about building my own mining rig. I'll save that part of the story for some future post.