Everybody and his brother seems to have a cryptocurrency-focused newsletter these days, which I guess should come as no surprise — investors see the fortunes that have been made by the lucky early bets on Bitcoin or Ethereum or other cryptos, and they want a piece, which creates a huge demand for anything that might be perceived as wisdom in this space. And Andy Snyder at Manward Press didn’t want to be left out, it appears, because he’s using a tease of some favorite “altcoin” cryptocurrencies to get signups to his Manward Letter… that’s the ad we’ll look at today.
First, let me warn you up front: I have been dabbling in cryptocurrencies for years, having nibbled on Bitcoin starting in late 2013 and on Ethereum in 2016, so I’ve enjoyed getting lucky and harvesting some gains from those nibbles, and I do still hold a position in both, but I really have no idea what I’m doing in the cryptocurrency space. I’m willing to hold and gradually learn as the space matures, and as some protocols and cryptocurrencies actually begin to take their very first small steps toward meeting real world needs instead of just serving as story-driven gambling tokens, but my comfort level for a market like this that regularly provides both 500% gains and 90%+ drops in value for no fundamental reason is quite low, which is why I haven’t let my exposure become huge.
That’s where I’m coming from, and I don’t want to pretend that I’m an expert just because I’ve been tangentially involved in this space for a long time and understand the basic concepts and some of the appeal. My gains have come from a willingness to risk money on interesting ideas and, probably more importantly, from luck.
But I’m always curious to see what mainstream investing folks are saying about cryptos, especially when they talk up one of the newer cryptocurrencies — so the recent tease from Andy Snyder at Manward Press got my attention. The ad is dated August 2021, so it’s presumably been around for a few weeks now, and it begins by bathing in the “what if” regrets of returns you missed because you didn’t buy Bitcoin when it was at $25 (or 20 cents, or whatever):
“Think back to January 2013.
“The holidays had just ended. Maybe you were making some New Year’s resolutions.
“No doubt you were thinking about the new year and how you might improve your life.
“Now I want you to imagine walking over to your computer, sitting down and making a single purchase.
“Even back then, it would have taken only 10 minutes or so. Today, it’s even easier.
“Imagine that when that simple purchase is complete, your life is forever changed.
“Because you just bought Bitcoin at $25…
“Now… why am I having you imagine this scenario?
“After all, it’s not like you can go back and make it a reality, right?
“Well, what if I told you that there are three coins today, including one that trades for less than $2, that I expect will someday become MORE valuable than Bitcoin and its $600 billion market cap?”
Bitcoin’s back to about a $800 billion “market cap” these days, thanks to the recovery from the late July lows, but still, that’s enough to spark a few daydreams, right?
Fair warning: If you don’t have time for a little rant, then skip forward a dozen paragraphs or so.
That’s a powerful marketing strategy that financial newsletters use all the time, urging you to sit back and imagine the amazing returns you could have had from Buying Amazon or Netflix 15 or 20 years ago, or Bitcoin a decade ago, or whatever else that we know, with the benefit of hindsight, was the smartest investment ever. It both implies that these newsletters are brilliant, because it implies that they made those investments (even if often they did not), and it imbues investors with a lottery-seeking mentality.
Which is fine for some folks, but it also plays with your mind and makes rational investing hard. Much like pornography can ruin your emotional life and make it impossible to think rationally about the flawed and real human beings who are part of real life, this kind of financial pornography can make it impossible to think rationally about the risks and opportunities that exist in the “invest your money today” world.
Often those whose minds are overwhelmed with regret or envy about missing those past life-changing winners will either take too much risk chasing the stocks one might imagine rising by 10,000% (and human imagination for exponential returns is very much lacking, we can’t imagine real companies having that kind of return, so that typically means taking risks on dumb high-risk penny stocks or risk-everything options speculations), or will give up entirely because nothing seems to offer that kind of opportunity.
What’s the actual spiel? Snyder is selling his Manward Letter ($79), and if you subscribe he promises to tell you about his “three most important third generation cryptos” … so let’s dig into what he means by that.
The basic idea of “third generation” is really just a way of saying, “Bitcoin and Ethereum got us started, but newer cryptos are building on them and will be better.” He compares it to the commercial internet, with its first stage investments (Netscape) and second stage (Yahoo), both of which are almost forgotten to time now despite making some investment gains at various points, but he says the third generation, with the advent of Google (now Alphabet (GOOG)), was where the big gains were really made.
Of course, he doesn’t mention that there were hundreds of other “third generation” internet companies born after the dot-com crash in the early 2000s, too, Google was not the only one, and a lot of them failed and have been forgotten so they don’t play into the way we think about the historical odds of success for these companies at the time — something that the behavioral economists would call “survivorship bias”. Finding that winner is not necessarily easy until you’re looking back with hindsight.
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I happily own Google shares, it’s now my largest investment and it was a pretty obvious buy to me in 2005, but my portfolio was small and I didn’t buy that much, so even though that first buy is sitting in my portfolio with almost a 3,000% gain, and I’ve added through the years without ever selling, my total return on those shares only comes in at about 25% a year. It’s great, but it’s not life-changing — and that’s mostly because you don’t know in advance which investments will provide massive returns… and therefore you don’t risk life-changing amounts on those investments. You’re not crazy, after all.
Sure, maybe there will be more investments that return 200,000%, like you would have gotten by buying Bitcoin in the $20s. I wouldn’t tell you not to speculate on those, the same way you might speculate on a money-losing growth company that you love, even though it’s at a historically stupid valuation, or a few nights of betting in Las Vegas.
Here’s how I like to think about these kinds of speculative ideas: It has to be money you really don’t mind losing, and it has to seem like a pretty stupid idea to the vast majority of people, otherwise you are very unlikely to ever get anywhere close to 200,000% returns without a lot of luck and several decades of time. The only real life scenario I can call to mind for 200,000% returns in an investing lifetime is buying Microsoft sometime in 1986 or 1987 and never selling — but a lot of that is the value of time and compounding, that’s 35 years… even if you were wise and patient enough to hold for that long, resisting the urge to take profits or sell during bad years (and even a bad decade or so there in the middle), that only tallies up to a compound annual growth rate for the stock of about 23% a year. From maybe the best mainstream long-term investment in modern history (yes, I’m sure there have been others that don’t come to mind — if you have an example, feel free to share, I’ll throw it into future lectures). That’s only slightly better than twice the average return of the S&P 500 (which was about 10.5% for a similar timeframe).
Acting normally gets you normal returns, most of the time, and, if you give it time, that’s pretty good. If you put $1,000 into the S&P 500 in 1986, you’d end up with something close to $33,000 today. No, it’s not the $1.2 million you would have gotten from Microsoft during that time period, but it ain’t bad, and you didn’t have to know that Microsoft would be the biggest and best survivor in computing. That’s what we should do with most of our money — shoot for normal, it’s a big target and it’s easy to hit — you can do it with your eyes closed, one hand tied behind your back, and hopping on one foot.
But sure, if you want to go wild on small tech stocks, or $2 cryptos, or whatever the next exciting option might be with some of the rest of your money, I sympathize… I like to gamble and speculate too, and I try for above-normal returns because I like to spend a lot of time and energy analyzing investments. I like to dream of life changing returns, so I’ll stop the soapbox lecture at this point. I’ll even hold your beer, go ahead and give it a shot.
That’s about it for the ranting… welcome back!
OK… so, what Snyder is hinting at in his ad are three “altcoins” — with “altcoin” being a designation that means pretty much “everything except Bitcoin and Ethereum.” Which ones? We’ll sniff through the clues and get your answers, but first here’s a little bit of the ad to give you his context:
“…the three altcoins I’m going to talk about now have better technology than Bitcoin…
“They are also faster…
“And, best of all, they have the potential to totally disrupt and replace entire trillion-dollar industries.
“In short, these three altcoins are the wave of the future.
“And I believe investing in them now is as close as you’re going to get to a Bitcoin do-over.”
That’s right, the “Bitcoin do-over” — daydreaming about that Lamborghini yet? More from Snyder:
“Many of the same investors who bought Bitcoin in 2013 and Ethereum in 2017 are starting to buy into these three coins… and now is your chance to join them.
“The three coins I am recommending to you are not just digital money. They all are positioned to be “Giant Killers” of different trillion-dollar industries…
“This could be like getting into Amazon right as it completely upended the retail industry… or getting into Apple just as it dislodged the music industry with its iPod.”
OK, so what are they? He calls them “Killer Coins,” so let’s jump to the clues…
“Ethereum Killer Coin (EKCoin)
“This Ethereum-killing altcoin was actually developed by one of the original founders of Ethereum.
“He left Ethereum early on when he saw the flaws in its design.
“His name is Charles Hoskinson, and he is a brilliant mathematician and entrepreneur who started creating the EKCoin in 2017.
“His main focus was to solve the scalability and speed issues of Ethereum while maintaining the smart contracts and decentralized financial services it offers.
“And he’s succeeding!
“The result will be a fully scalable, fast network which operates for pennies on the dollar compared with the Ethereum network.”
Betamax was better than VHS, too, and look where that got them. Better doesn’t always win, and there are lots of “better” networks and platforms that have built on Ethereum… any other clues about which one this is, specifically?
Indeed…
“While people are minting and trading NFTs on the Ethereum network for hundreds of dollars, the first NFTs were recently minted on the EKCoin network for about $3.
“These advantages could eventually lead to the EKCoin replacing the Ethereum network outright….
“Remember Prakash Chand and his billion-dollar crypto fund, FD7? The guy who recently sold most of his Bitcoin to buy third-generation coins?
“The EKCoin is the one he put $380 million into in March.
“And while the EKCoin is moving up in value very quickly, it is still incredibly cheap.
“While Ethereum costs nearly $2,000, the EKCoin is still trading for less than $2.”
So this is another network that enables blockchain projects, like Ethereum, making it possible to do smart contracts or all kinds of other things. Anything else?
He does drop one final hint, which is that this is about to solve one of the specific Ethereum issues…
“Another weakness in the Ethereum network has been discovered in the coding of its smart contracts.
“The coding weakness has allowed hackers to get into those Ethereum smart contracts.
“Consequently, with the EKCoin, Hoskinson has developed some of the most secure, virtually unhackable smart contracts yet to be seen on any network.
“And they’re scheduled to go live within the next three months.
“So investing now means there could be a ‘good news bump’ built in on the horizon.”
That’s way more clues than we need, of course, he’s not being all that secretive here… but yes, the Thinkolator can confirm that this is Cardano, whose ADA token is now, according to CoinMarketCap.com, the third largest cryptocurrency by “market cap” (which is just a number borrowed from stock markets, the price of the token multiplied by the total number of tokens that have been created to date). Cardano has been around and in development for a long time, but the value of its cryptocurrency token, Ada, really took off in 2021, it was at ten cents a year ago and is now a bit over two dollars.
Here’s how Cardano describes itself:
“Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform: the first to be founded on peer-reviewed research and developed through evidence-based methods. It combines pioneering technologies to provide unparalleled security and sustainability to decentralized applications, systems, and societies.
“With a leading team of engineers, Cardano exists to redistribute power from unaccountable structures to the margins – to individuals – and be an enabling force for positive change and progress.”
So that’s the actual platform, and the token they use to run the network is Ada, which is what investors can actually buy if they wish. Here’s how they describe that:
“Ada is a digital currency. Any user, located anywhere in the world, can use ada as a secure exchange of value – without requiring a third party to mediate the exchange. Every transaction is permanently, securely, and transparently recorded on the Cardano blockchain.
“Every ada holder also holds a stake in the Cardano network. Ada stored in a wallet can be delegated to a stake pool to earn rewards – to participate in the successful running of the network – or pledged to a stake pool to increase the pool’s likelihood of receiving rewards. In time, ada will also be usable for a variety of applications and services on the Cardano platform.”
I own some ADA, right now it’s about 3-4% of my cryptocurrency portfolio. I have no idea whether it will shoot higher, but it has an ambitious scope and is fairly high profile and easily available on most of the “easy onramp” cryptocurrency exchanges (I use Coinbase and Voyager personally, mostly because I can’t be bothered with the hassle of trying out some of the other trading platforms and wallet services and don’t want to go overseas, but there are a bunch of others).
What’s next? Here are the clues for the second “altcoin” teased…
“Could This Next Gen Crypto Actually Replace the Internet As We Know It?
“We will call it the ‘Internet Killer Coin,’ or the ‘IKCoin’ ….
“A fully decentralized internet is the dream of many web developers.
“Enter Dominic Williams, famed crypto theoretician and internet expert.
“In October 2016, he began the project that would eventually become the IKCoin: a decentralized internet that runs on a blockchain instead of traditional service providers and traditional IP addresses.
“He and his massive team of experts spent years working on bringing web speeds and unlimited scalability to their blockchain network.”
Again, kind of a cool idea — replacing the basic directory functions of the internet with a blockchain-driven addressing protocol. More clues:
“The IKCoin network does away with IP addresses and replaces them with identifiable, yet anonymous, blockchain addresses. It allows unlimited addresses to be created in the future….
“The IKCoin network uses a system where people buy the IKCoin and use that coin to pay for their websites.
“And, of course, as developers begin using the IKCoin network, you will see demand for these coins go up….
“The more that internet developers move their websites from the old internet to the new IKCoin decentralized internet, the more important IKCoins become…”
And it’s fairly new to the cryptocurrency world…
“… the amazing thing is that the IKCoin just began selling a few months ago.
“I told folks about it nearly immediately.
“It’s already quickly moved into the top 24 cryptocurrencies by market cap, and I expect it will slowly move up to the top 10 to join the EKCoin I am also recommending to you.”
That’s Internet Computer (ICP), a creation of the DFINITY nonprofit which is trying to improve the public internet. I also have a very small bet on this one… mostly just because I thought it was a cool idea (they explain it pretty clearly here). And I like their little rainbow infinity logo.
The ICP token is also down about 90% in price from where it first started trading in early May, so that’s a good reminder that there’s no “right” price for these things, most of these ambitious functional tokens that represent a stake in a new platform or network are not really generating meaningful transaction flow or income or carrying any real-world value at the moment, they’re all a bet on what it might be like to own part of the value of a network that could be foundational in the future… as in, for Internet Computer, owning some stake in the actual internet instead of in a company that uses the internet. That’s wildly ambitious, and it probably won’t work, but it’s pretty cool. Which was enough to get me slightly involved, but not to risk a meaningful amount of money.
So the broad project is basically, “put the internet on the blockchain” and make it work better, more securely, and with a lot more autonomy for participants… here’s how they describe the token, which is what you can buy if you wish:
“The ICP utility token (formerly known as ‘DFN’) is the primary mechanism that allows the broader internet community to participate in the governance of the Internet Computer network. ICP can also be dissolved and converted into cycles, which are then used to run websites and applications as well as power computations on the Internet Computer via canisters.”
I love the idea of all of this stuff, it’s fascinating, but it also makes my brain hurt after just a few minutes. I’m a dilettante in this area, not a developer, but it’s fun to see the scale of ambition that cryptocurrency projects can enable. I expect they won’t get as far as they hope, forcing change is hard, but maybe they will attract enough developers who want to build on the platform to begin to build something impressive… they certainly have a lot of folks working on DFINITY and the Internet Computer right now, it’s just too early for me to have any idea what any of it might mean in an economic sense. The ICP token is also available on Coinbase, should you be interested in checking it out.
And one more…
“Crypto Just Solved a Major Problem for Savers
“I call this final coin the ‘Income Coin’ or the ‘ICoin.’
“With all the various cryptocurrencies in a major growth pattern right now, liquidity is very important as they expand and advance the technologies of their blockchains.
“Rather than turn to traditional banks, these altcoins have come up with a unique solution.
“In short, they are offering to pay yields to those who use their coins so that circulation expands.”
OK, so one of the Decentralized Finance altcoins that provides ways to earn a meaningful yield of some kind on your crypto holdings. Which one? Here are the clues…
“… there are roughly half a dozen networks currently making this possible.
“But by far the BEST is the one behind my ICoin…
“Because its unique platform gives users the chance to supplement their retirement income by collecting the highest yields available.
“Unlike its competitors, it automatically moves a user’s investment to whoever is paying the highest yield. (Imagine a traditional bank doing that!)
“If another group starts to pay a higher yield, the ICoin network immediately transfers the user’s money to that new group… so they ALWAYS get the highest possible yields at all times.”
He says there are possibilities for yields as high as 12-20%, so what is he pitching?
There are a ton of these DeFi platforms who focus on providing the potential for income yields, including Compound, Aave, UniSwap, Balancer, Synthetix, Curve, and Ren… but given the focus on automation providing the highest yields I expect he’s teasing yearn.finance (YFI is usually the abbreviation)
Here’s how yearn.finance describes their core income product, which they call Vaults…
“Capital pools that automatically generate yield based on opportunities present in the market. Vaults benefit users by socializing gas costs, automating the yield generation and rebalancing process, and automatically shifting capital as opportunities arise. End users also do not need to have a proficient knowledge of the underlying protocols involved or DeFi, thus the Vaults represent a passive-investing strategy.”
This all blows my mind to some degree, I have no idea how to think about a crypto vault protocol that’s effectively like a quantitative “black box” investing strategy for maximizing income from transaction volume (and “gas” fees) and lending of cryptocurrencies. It’s probably not fair, but it makes my mind drift to Bernie Madoff’s secret computer that he kept in a closet, and which tracked his (fictional) steady 10-12% returns.
Like I said, it’s probably not a fair comparison — but these kinds of projects, often called “yield farming,” are so new and so inscrutable to me at this point that I’ve not gotten involved. Maybe you’ll understand them better and be willing to risk your money (and put in the time to really “get” what’s being done with your money), but as for me, well, I keep coming back to the idea that it’s OK to miss out on some things.
So yearn.finance goes in the “too hard” pile for me. There are lots of projects that are trying to build the next generation of decentralized finance (DeFi), including several that run networks to enable those who stake their cryptos to earn money… I even have some small positions in a few of those from some small-time dabbling I’ve done in the easily accessible cryptos (ie, those that are on Coinbase or Voyager), but this is an area where we should not make any assumptions about future returns.
And that’s about all I can tell you, without further illustrating my lack of expertise in cryptocurrencies. My allocation to crypto in general is very small (it’s at about 3% of my portfolio now, similar to my physical gold and silver holdings), and that allocation is about half Ethereum, 25% Bitcoin, and the rest split among a lot of much more speculative little projects that caught my eye at one time or another, including, of the ones mentioned here, Cardano, Internet Computer, Compound, and Aave, along with a dozen or so small stakes in other speculative ones that I’ve put some money into over the past few years, including Polkadot, Chainlink and Cosmos. I don’t write about them much because I don’t want to send anyone astray with my mistakes in this area, I have very little conviction and I’m really just playing around… but if you’ve got thoughts on which ones might have the most potential, whether among Manward’s teased cryptos or not, please do feel free to share your ideas with a comment below. Thanks for reading!
P.S. Shameless referral plug here: I use both Coinbase and Voyager as my favorite easy platforms for buying and trading cryptocurrencies, and generating some income from them in some cases. If you are just beginning to explore this world, you can sign up for a Coinbase account here and deposit $100 and get $10 in free Bitcoin, or use this link to try Voyager and get $25 in free Bitcoin (with code AF72CA). I’ll get a similar reward if you do so. Thanks!
How do you purchase cryptocurrency?
Read the last paragraph.
The main way is by opening an account with a cyrto exchange, like Binance, Coinbase, etc.
There are also some wallets, like Atomic Wallet, that allow you to buy through them.
You have to remember that every crypto transaction has a cost involved with it. So you will pay to buy and sell. Pretty much like stocks used to be.
I would also mention there are tax consequences with Crypto. You really need to keep records. Otherwise you can end up in trouble with the IRS later. For example some Crypto you can stake, like ADA, and earn free Crypto. But you are required to pay taxes on any free crypto you earn, much like claiming interest payments from a bank. And when you sell it you have to claim it and pay taxes on it, just like you would with stock.
Good point. I expect that lots of relatively new traders in both crypto and stocks are getting their first big tax shock either this year or next… even small dollar amounts of trading that generate fairly minor gains can add up quickly to surprising tax bills if you have a lot of transactions… the big platforms do a better job of providing that tax liability data for tax reporting than they used to, but in my experience they aren’t as good as regular banks and brokerages. Yet, at least.
There are many exchanges, but the easiest way is to set up an account at Coinbase.com
Agreed — Coinbase is the easiest way to get started, and I still use it as my primary “fiat” (i.e. US Dollar) “on-ramp.”
Pro-tip: Trading fees are much lower on Coinbase Pro than regular Coinbase! The UX isn’t as friendly, but you can move USD and crypto funds between the two instantly for free.
Coinbase is “the easiest way” if you live in the US. If not, I suggest you google “Buying bitcoin in ….”
I use Bitstamp and recommend it
Schwab has several cryptocoin funds that look interesting from a tax/accounting point of view.
Are these Schwab branded funds or like GBTC?
I recently opened an account with Etoro in Europe. Works very well for many cryptos as well. You buy and sell them just like you buy regulare stocks. They also have an interesting feature called copytrading. You can choose another member of the EtoroClub and more or less copy his portfolio with the amount of money you choose. It is an interesting concept that could work for a lot of people who do not have or do not want to spend much time following the market or doing their own research. I am not sure if they are already operating in the U.S., but they are on the move to the U.S. as far as I know.
According to the comments on YouTube, we should be calling some lady named Mrs Bella or something like that, via WhatsApp to invest. LOL
you can also purchase thru SoFi app rather easily. No limit orders, all market orders so make your purchase timely
I own some Crypto too. But I would be very cautious about how much you invest in it. There are so many Cryptos with no utility at all and some of them are doing quite well right now, but basically they are useless. Also Elon Musk farts and Crypto crashes. It is crazy.
I opened a Coinbase account last March and quickly moved to Coinbase Pro. I funded it with $10,000.
By July the account was up to about $13,000. That’s when I got a message from Coinbase Pro that they had frozen my account due to suspicious activity. It took me almost 4 weeks to get back into my account, and when I did I found that thieves had stolen all but $35 worth of Bitcoin.
Good luck talking to a human at Coinbase. All I ever get are form letters, probably AI generated, that they are “investigating”. I so wish I had transferred my Coinbase holdings into an external wallet, like the ones from Ledger. How the thieves got my password and by-passed the verification code that supposedly used my phone I have no idea.
Recently I was talking to an E*trade rep and mentioned my Coinbase experience. He chimed in that his Coinbase account had also been hacked. He’d lost about $6,000 and was very
unhappy with Coinbase. I’d love to know how many
Coinbase accounts have been looted.
Oof, sounds terrible! There are plenty of hacking horror stories in the crypto world, for sure — as well as horror stories of people who pulled their coins offline or into a secure wallet and lost them just by forgetting or losing their key.
I got looted. Hundred bucks I think. I chalked it up to me forgetting my password.
never had a problem w CB/Pro for yrs now !
any idea how/why it happened ?
I caught the crypto bug pretty bad in 2017, and have been shoveling money into it ever since — my crypto portfolio is now 4x as big as my stock portfolio, and I spend way too much time on “Crypto Twitter” every day. So I’m pretty immersed in this stuff.
Snyder’s 3 picks are not terrible, but they seem almost arbitrary.
The only one of his three picks I own myself is Cardano ($ADA), which IS supposed to be a “better Ethereum,” does have some serious academic bona fides, and has seen significant price increases lately in anticipation of the “Alonzo hard fork” on Sept 12, which brought Smart Contract functionality to the network. But despite the technical ‘prowess’ of Cardano’s network, there’s almost no real world adoption — and Ethereum has had Smart Contracts for YEARS now. I’ll hold my “bag” of Cardano, which I’ve had for a long time — but because I bought it with Bitcoin, which has also increased in value, I’m technically slightly underwater on this position (unless I convert to USD).
$ICP, or Internet Computer Protocol, is a token I know almost nothing about — I remember there was some buzz on Twitter a while back, but it wasn’t enough to convince me to dig deeper. I never hear about it now, and have no plans to buy any.
$YFI is an interesting pick — I use Yearn Finance to “yield farm” with my highest-conviction crypto holding, $LINK (Chainlink) — but I don’t have any $YFI position. This might be because the $YFI token is like the Berkshire Hathaway of crypto — 1.0 YFI currently trades for ~$30k, and has traded as high as $82k (higher than Bitcoin’s all-time high!) in the past. Of course, I know that I can buy tiny fractions of a crypto, but I just feel like I missed the boat on $YFI.
So there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Snyder’s picks — but they just seem very arbitrary to me. There are dozens of other cryptos with equally compelling theses!
BTW, Palm Beach’s Teeka Tiwari (arguably the newsletter editor with the most solid crypto credentials) did a teaser event recently called “Catch-Up Coins” (or somesuch BS) — FYI his free pick was Polygon ($MATIC).
I’m also heavy in $LINK (Chainlink) as it has practical use applications. I’ve been buying in at $100/mo since February 2018. I’m excited to see the ups and downs..
Tony, it would be interesting of having your comments on the 6 picks, which are $up to buy:
ZRX $3
REN $2
CRV $5
MATIC $2.50
CELO/CGLD $12
LDO $12
Travis,
You are absolutely the best in this business. You are my go to for all these newsletter pundits. You have saved me countless dollars that, in the past would have been wasted on promo traders.
Billyrob
I would like to hear if anyone has any knowledge of a crypto called, Manero. My son who is into cybersecurity says it apparently has advantages over all others. I am not into crypto so would welcome anyone’s opinion.
One of the big draws in Monero is the ability to mine it via a standard GPU (rather than the commercial rigs of mining companies) and also the privacy aspect. It sets itself apart by being “untraceable.” Unlike BTC which you can follow the on chain transactions and all accounts on exchanges contain identifying information. So basically it can be traced back to you by the government or malicious actors.
One that I will throw out there with Monero is Ravencoin. Both are proof of work coins and interesting use cases and can be mined by the common man. The big promise of future gains with these coins is that once the miners leave Ethereum (when it’s switches to proof of stake), the everyday miner will need something to mine and that will drive prove upwards.
I bought some Monero in 2017 and it’s up 277%. This is not bad, but it’s far behind other cryptos such as ETH, BNB, LINK, NEO, ADA, SOL, DOT, etc. , all of which have gone up more than 10x in the same period. For example, BNB has gone up 19,708% since Nov. 2017.
Thanks for the article, loved it, please continue with more advice about crypto, I am long ADA ,ALGO, and IOTX, would love to read more about the other two coins I own. Thanks again Doc
Can someone help me understand how cryptos like Cardano, that have a circulating supply of over 32 BILLION coins can ever realize a massive gain in value? XRP is another that has a circulating supply of over 46 BILLION. These coins are constantly touted for their huge potential, but it seems it would require all the money on the planet to increase them to so-called life changing numbers. I will appreciate any help or thoughts ion this. Thanks
I am NOT an expert, I am a total newb, I literally started buying crypto last week (and stocks the week before. It would be almost impossible to find someone newer at this than me). But I think I might have an answer for this, because I just read an article about Shiba Inu (which I hold 1.1 million of) dealing with a similar situation: the fact that there are so many of them out there that it’s difficult to impossible for them to rise much in value.
What the Shiba people did was start “burning” coins. They transfer an amount (I believe the article confirmed they started with 25k) of coins to a hidden or “dead” wallet, and basically erase them. Which means there are now 25k fewer Shiba coins out there to be bought or traded, which means the coins out there are now worth a tiny bit more.
I’d link to the article but I don’t know if that’s allowed, so I’d say Google “Shiba Inu burn strategy,” and you’ll find it.
Again, I am SO NEW and this is just (what I believe is) an assumption based on logic. So please don’t take my info to the bank (so to speak). But if one coin is solving the same problem in this way, I think it’s at least reasonable to assume others are or will, too.
I hope that helps, and of course I’d be very interested to hear the thoughts of someone with more knowledge and experience than myself (which is almost anyone at this point, heh).
I’m personally hoping Shiba hits even a half a penny each–I’m not counting on it by any stretch, but I’ll be mighty happy if it does.
I think it’s a little late for Cardano. Buy the news sell the rumor already happened and the $72 Billion marketcap is a bit rich. GM, ABB, Capital One, and Duke Energy have such market caps. They employ thousands of people, have assets and sell stuff with healthy margins. Cardano doesn’t have much to show for that valuation. Crypto is a casino. You need to find the small tokens (shit coins) that you think will pop and place bets on them with predetermined goals for exit. When the coins finally get regulated, they will be stocks more or less and held to the same standards: financial reports, taxes, insider disclosures etc.
I placed my “bets” on Axie Infinity, Polkadot, Matic, and Avalance because that’s what the YouTube people are hyping. I call them bets and not investments. We know Duke Energy and GM will be around in the future, but we have no idea which coins will be.
You are definitely a serruptitious cryptocurrency hodler! Along with the other 200m people currently in this space including some of the very large financial institutions I speculate you believe this is the future of money.
Hi,
Any thoughts on PayPal’s entry into the bitcoin wallet market? I received an email today (UK based) saying that I can now buy, sell and hold (but not send) crypto (BTC, Ethereum, Litecoin, BTC cash) in my PayPal account. Without looking into the details I’m guessing fees will be much higher than other wallets but I’m interested in thoughts from the good people here.
I’ve been following the crypto story for years but have never taken a position, having always felt like I couldn’t understand the mechanisms well enough. In the early days I opened a Blockchain wallet for some miniscule amount of btc generated in online mining games that I briefly played with. About 12 cents worth that is now worth approx $150 ha ha.
I didn’t have money to take risks with back then but now I’m looking to get involved more seriously.
Cheers.
ADA is the most popular and probably best long term bet of this group. ICP, my understanding is a startup from some Harvard or Stanford grads (sorry – don’t remember) and could be a classic case of pump and dump. The interesting thing about YFI is it is only owned by 35 wallets. That is why you see such volatility from 30K to 90K because whales are controlling the market. It follows Bitcoin but tends to go down more when Bitcoin is decreasing. The 90K was what the crypto world could call an “outlier.” – meaning not a typical price for this coin and it did not last long. DYOR before investing in any of these.
I have no fear of missing out on the Crypto craze. It’s unregulated, the “exchanges” could implode at anytime as a result of that, hacked accounts are on a totally different level than any real exchange and none of your investment is FDIC insured. My biggest issue with crypto is that it will implode eventually with no government protection to bail anyone out. If you made your early profits be happy and take it, but don’t base your retirement on it. It likely won’t be there unless you moved your profits into real investments on the way. It’s rise is literally based on FOMO and the pump and dump nature that social media investing crazy has brought about. I sleep better at night watching this one from the sidelines.
Excellent info as always, Travis
Lots to unpack here – as hopalong mentioned: a “cold’, or offline wallet such as Ledger or Trezor are the way to go. I prefer the Ledger. The Ledger Nano S only supports 5 or 6 crypto applications at a time max, while the Nano X has more wiggle room. Because your private keys and hence access to your money are stored offline, it cannot be accessed by anonymous hacekers. A word of caution, there are reports of one being physically broken into so I wouldn’t leave it laying around at the library. Not shilling anything, just what works for me.
I agree with Tony that LINK has the most promising practical use-case of the dozen or so coins I own. I haven’t staked any of them yet, however, precisely because of reporting concerns. Came across yearn a few months ago and passed on it but perhaps next year following the outcome of the OCC nomination.
If Biden’s nomination of Saule Omarova as Comptroller of Currency isn’t shot down by the banks there will be acutely increased regulation in the crypto sector, and we all know more regulation and oversight is not good for any business. There is going to be more oversight regardless, however this is a woman who believes all consumer financial transactions should be handled by a central government bank instead of private institutions. Complete oversight and autonomy. While most aren’t using crypto for illicit purposes, it will have an impact on valuations either way.
Unlike Paypal, Robinhood is launching their soon-to-come wallet with the ability to send between exchanges. Of course there will be fees.
So many of these alt coins get hyped by the twitterati and reddit apes (i.e. satoshi street bets), the most valuable tool in my crypto kit currently is a fairly new media aggregation site, lunarcrush.com which helps me winnow out the pump and dumps. I get a myriad of crypto and investment newsletters each week and this site tracks the social attention coins are garnering along with historical price data, information regarding purpose, etc. It is interesting to watch the impact of such newsletters and to see exactly who is pushing what.
For example, it shows that the official Dfinity account is primarily responsible for social posts regarding ICP so I think I will pass on that one until I see it is garnering more external attention. It’s quite thorough and saves me from logging into various applications to check up on things. Again, not shilling anything – just the easiest way I have found to keep track of this madness.
As always, due diligence is required – don’t believe the hype, check the charts, premise, and histrionics for the coins you are interested in.
Financial Pornography. That is EXACTLY it !!!
In the “for what it’s worth” category, ”
“Thinkolator can confirm that this is Cardano, whose ADA token is now, according to CoinMarketCap.com, the third largest cryptocurrency by “market cap” (which is just a number borrowed from stock markets, the price of the token multiplied by the total number of tokens that have been created to date).”
Interestingly, nomics.com, an unbiased crypto statistic site (coinmarketcap.com is owned by Binance a well-known large crypto exchange that has obvious financial interests in front lining coins that best serve its bottom line), carries Cardano as the fourth largest market cap ($72B) behind HEX with a market cap in excess of $200 billion. I understand that coinmarketcap.com is being sued for damages resulting from carrying HEX at #201 ranking in market cap.
Full disclosure: I have holdings in both Cardano and HEX
Apparently I’m going to have to learn something new every day — thanks!
What is the difference between cryptocurrency and the banks printing their own money in the 1800’s ? I have been confused with this correlation.
I think the fundamental difference was that banks in those days backed up their bank notes with silver and gold that was on deposit and silver and gold were universally accepted, you could buy anything with silver and gold, that’s what really made it a ‘currency’ that had usefulness as a currency. A crypto token/coin means somebody solved a math equation and earned virtual ‘coin’ for their trouble/effort. The industry that pumps Cypto currency would like you to believe that these virtual coins are precious items like Gold and Silver because somewhere in a line of computer code there is a line that reads something like this: MaxCoins = 21,000,000. As we get closer and closer to the max number of virtual coins generated this drives up the ‘value’ of this virtual coin. Here is the issue. Crypto isn’t regulated at all and believe me, when that max coin number is hit, the backbone of the crypto pumping apparatus will update that MaxCoin to a larger number to keep the machine pumping. And why will this positively happen ? Because this need to solve a complex math problem to create a ‘bitcoin’ has created a MASSIVE uptick in Graphic Card demand and custom ASIC chips that specialize in math. So a whole billion+ industry has been created by the craze. Nvidia and AMD alone have made 100’s of millions over the last 5+ years of the crypto crazy, as well as many other companies in the background.
Fast forward to today. Currencies like the U.S dollar are relatively stable. Sure it fluctuates but you don’t see multiple percentage point changes on a daily basis, never mind multiple 10+ % swings in a single year, and todays banking has your money federally insured so if the bank fails you money is guaranteed(of course only up to a point but that point is pretty big for the average American middle class). Crypto coins will never be a universally accepted currency. They are backed by nothing and they fluctuate so wildly it is useless as a currency.
Buy hey, in the end there is plenty of money to be made in this cyrpto/bitcoin madness until the scheme hits its end.
Now, the technology “blockchain” that tracks bitcoin creation and ownership , well that has value and can be implemented into a useful business workflows.
There are now over 6,700 cryptocurrencies in circulation. The better known ones of course are Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, XRP, Tether and Litecoin. They are unregulated and no one is required to except them as currency. With that, they have a liquidity risk. Also, there is no unifying single pricing mechanism to reflect digital currency value. So they have a pricing risk. Worse, will be when governments at some point seek to regulate or restrict cryptocurrencies by issuing a digital version of their own. That event alone, would suddenly have an adverse affect to the whole cryptocurrency scheme, leaving many, if not all, left out to dry.
So, with that possibility and with governments now looking toward a future cashless society, I’ve started to nimble in the blockchain aspect which will be the driving force in a cashless digital world.
Mr. Stock gumshoe thank you so much this is why I’m into my 2nd year of subscribing to your channel. So I’ve been following you for a couple years now and I see that you don’t post that much about cryptos and I just got involved with them about 7 months ago. What I like about you is that you always bring me back down-to-earth and I really appreciate your no nonsense approach and being so honest about how you see things.
ETHE is Cathie Wood’s crypto fund if you want to get your feet wet without wetting yourself
coins about to pop – XTZ, REN, DOT, ALGO, ATOM, HBAR….ADA may resurge but speculation
Until China proves it can stop people from mining crypto the market is wide
With the uttermost certainty that congress will not agree on budget come the end of the month, knowing they can extend deadline to next year session, stocks will surely dip in a week. This means fast money will move to crypto….trickle down theory. I’d move from tangibles now even if only for a couple months.
Anytime you say “uttermost certainty” to yourself, you’re setting yourself up to take more risk than you think… tread cautiously.