The title says it all! We are making final touches this weekend on the book and given the volatility we have no doubt many people have many questions. All of the good questions will be added to the book. No crypto isn’t dead. Thanks!!!
QUESTIONS ARE CLOSED NOW
What percentage of investments funds do you have in various cryptos?
Sure will put in there broadly
How do you calculate a fair value for any coin, whether bitcoin or an alt?
How do you identify to avoid the Netscape navigators and Nortels, etc. of the crypto world?
How do you identify to invest into the Facebook and amazon, etc. of the crypto world?
Assuming you take an indexing approach to a portfolio of coins you see value in, at what frequencies, if at all, do you rebalance?
Folks like Buffett and Munger, those you can’t easily dismiss, have come out against bitcoin. How do we know we’re not investing into something that 10 years down the line we say, “it sounded like a good idea at the time” but ended up going the route of MySpace?
Buffet has been the worst tech investor of all time. That is an easy one.
Why would you trust a guy who can’t write a single line of code versus all the top tech people in the world who live breathe and sleep the edge of technology.
Makes sense. I guess the FUD adds to our risk premium, though the success or failure entirely depends on whether there is mass adoption of this or that coin.
Why is crypto going downhill? Will that continue?
What do you think of the coins based around the Internet of Things such as IOTA and Walton Chain?
Technologically, IOTA sucks. It achieves zero fees by conflating the concerns of making a transaction on the network and verifying transactions on the network. You’ll need to verify two existing transactions on the network in order to place your own. And you’re screwed if you accidentally a bad transaction since no future transactions will verify yours. It has no fundamentals. Don’t buy.
1. Is this winner-take-all or will there be many winners?
2. Where will the best salesman opportunities be in the crypto space?
3. What kind of events will have the biggest effects on the adoption rate? Central bank problems in India, pure greed, EU problems, Cypress adoption, etc.
1. If it matures as a market, many winners. Even right now it’s not a winner-take-all scenario. We need competition to drive innovation.
2.Marketing and community manager, aka shilling. The current coins with the highest growth are all produced by aggressive marketing.
3.IMO connectivity, convertibility, and anonymity. If the crypto space have networks perfectly resolving all 3 challenges, then we will reach mass adoption
thoughts on mcafee pumpss
What % do you actively trade vs hold?
Do you short sell?
What are you long-term bullish on and why? I like BTC, ETH, XMR, WTC, VEN
BTC = brand awareness
ETH = Strongest tech developers
XMR = Privacy
WTC = Massive partnerships
VEN = Already showing public use cases
Any concerns with these picks?
Took all my questions sir, hope they get answered!
Do you really think that fiat will eventually die as a result of crypto? How soon?
Definitely not. Adopting something like cryptocurrencies for a national currency is seriously bad policy. The main problem with using decentralized currency as a national currency is that it overexposes your money supply to foreign threats. The volatility the cryptos have would also be terrible for both consumers and business owners.
I’d wager in the future we will see things like better digital currencies issued by governments instead of cryptos as they exist today. Cryptos are only using a proof-of-work and a blockchain because that is the only way that trust can be decentralized. Gov issued digital currencies would dispense with mining and the blockchain and just use proof-of-authority from the central bank. Gov issued digital currencies can also have better accounting of transactions and can significantly change how taxation works.
For a sneak peak watch Estonia’s launch of estcoin to see what kind of changes to expect from them.
What’s the best way to hold bitcoins (and other crypto) if you don’t plan on spending/moving them for at least ten years (long-term)? Here’s my current strategy:
1. Buy bitcoins from somewhere, e.g., Coinbase
2. Generate a paper wallet on an offline computer
3. Send the bitcoins to the paper wallet
4. Put the paper wallet in a ziplock bag
5. Store the paper wallet in a safe somewhere
Easiest way is to use a hardware wallet like Trezor or Ledger since they can hold many cryptos at a time. Keep a back up and store the recovery phrase securely.
What are some of the areas that Crypto will have a huge effect in say 10 years? Kenyan rebel.
Given the average Joes need to be coddled, led, have an authority figure on serious matters, do you think there will ever be widespread pure P2P decentralization in payments? Given the ease of use, readily available network of Apple Pay, the safety of having banks depository insurance, it seems so far that mass market retail finance will be hard to crack for crypto. Your thoughts?
For B2B payments such as in international trade (payments of millions or billions of dollars), crypto should have an easy time. Friends in international trade are always fuming at SWIFT. It’s what sold me on a solid real world use case of crypto payments.
I personally don’t believe Crypto will ever fully replace Fiat. A middleman is a strong utility in some cases, but I see it working in conjunction.
It also helps keep banks in check – If they start playing games, well they got a serious competitor that can replace them at whim.
How do you determine which exchanges are best to use?Global ones if you’re going to list any please as some of us live outside the US
Could you add an investor psychology piece too? Id imagine it’s a good idea to prevent yourself from investing in crap that sounds like a good story at the time and your mind makes up stories to justify garbage investments. One of the best yet simple personal finance finance books I’ve read for the average joe is the behaviour gap. Just HODL-ing in the plain vanilla ETF for instance would have saved lots of people’s finances instead of trying to guess the next FANG.
Is it worth dollar-cost averaging or shoving as much in as early as possible given the meteoric rise?
Also, assume this will be in the book, but let’s say you save $2000/month, what percentage should you put in cryptos, dollar cost high-beta stocks, and real-estate (savings)?
hy is no one talking about Fastcoin?? Fastcoin actually has utility. It can handle 56000 transactions per second, deep blockchain, been in biz 4 years, and it’s cheap. All other crypto is a bubble about to be pricked. Fastcoin will survive and thrive in my opinion.
easy answer, 12 second time is cray cray
They have dozens of commits (out of a measly 107) on their github where they just add or remove a single blank line to show “activity”. Scam.
Do you think Charlie Lee selling off all his Litecoins because he did not want a conflict of interest to be a legit reason or is there something he isn’t letting on?
Where do you see Litecoin going from here?
Charlie Lee is a Satoshi wannabe, pretty princess, and a cuck. He shills for bitcoin and is managing people’s expectations for litecoin’s price on twitter. With his guidance litecoin is also going to be the lowly shadow of bitcoin.
Litecoin is only doing well for two reasons: people are using it to transfer their bitcoins between exchanges; and normies are buying it on Coinbase because they haven’t figured out you can buy portions of bitcoin.
Vitalik Buterin is a real through leader in this field and you’ll get way more value watching him instead.
How do I differentiate between values of different currencies?
For example, BTC is worth something, based on it’s utility and value in use.
But there’s better currencies available in terms of technology, such as Monero (According to this article atleast: http://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/monero/), but they are worth much less. Why?
How do I cut the risk of another better currency coming along that totally takes market share away from BTC (that I currently hold)?
Cannot tell if this is a troll. If this is really where people are at we may have to go even higher level for our product…
Network effects. Scaling.
Though I’m no expert myself, please do not go too high level, I’m sure I’ve asked my fair share of dumb questions throughout the years but really don’t want trolls like this to ruin the book for the rest of us.
No no no don’t dumb it down please. Those who are behind but are keen will figure out a way to understand what you’ve written.
Top 3 steps you take to make an informed decision about purchasing selling BTC/ALTS?
What are 5 businesses that did not exist before that will arise from the wholesale adoption of crypto?
In what way will the us government get involved in crypto? Seeing similar patterns to online gambling & affiliate marketing…
Top 3 crypto to HODL (outside of BTC & ETH) in a similar fashion to AMZN or BRKA?
How to accumulate more BTC during dips without shorting or buying w/FIAT?
Any forked BTC (cash, gold, diamond, super, etc) that poses a serious threat (oppty) to the original?
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) represents a pretty serious threat to BTC. It is getting merchant support while BTC is losing it and has the backing of Bitmain. Unless the Bitcoin developers can get the lightning network online and adopted quickly BCH is going to eat BTC’s lunch. The rest are scams and wannabes.
How do you go about forming an investment thesis? (if you could be specific)
I understand you probably look and research into the team, technology, marketing, and community.
I guess another question I have is What kind of fundamental analysis do you conduct?
Just curious your take on the various alt coins and if BTC could end up being the “MySpace” of the crytpo era and if so what are predictions for the Facebook if it.
What things do you evaluate to form an investment thesis? (if you could be specific)
I assume you look at the team, marketing, the community, the technology, etc.
I guess another question is what kind of fundamental analysis do you conduct?
What do you think about IOTA?
Technologically, IOTA sucks. It achieves zero fees by conflating the concerns of making a transaction on the network and verifying transactions on the network. You’ll need to verify two existing transactions on the network in order to place your own. And you’re screwed if you accidentally verify a bad transaction since no future transactions will verify yours. It has no fundamentals. Don’t buy.
-technical analysis & indicators for crypto specifically (if any unique ones)
-your quick and dirty formula for fundamental analysis on crypto and getting to an opinion quickly.
-thoughts on selling gains and putting into asset classes with less volitility. I.e.: RE, etc. or staying overweighted in crypto and becoming an expert in one space.
-thoughts on ponzis like bitconnect that are extremely profitable.
What is your price target for bitcoin? other cryptocurrencies? and how do you get to your price targets?
What are the strongest bear arguments for bitcoin / other crypto?
What is your preferred way to get exposure to different up and coming currencies? Surely direct exposure is most profitable, like having BTC for the last years, but there are new currencies launched every day.
Follow folks on Twitter. Miners. TA folks. Masternode people.. coders…pnd folks.. They’re all out there and the info is pretty much real time.
Reddit another great resource as well as bitcointalk
Are true ‘hodlers’ holding on 30% dips?
BTC was <1000 usd 1 yr ago…. So…..
True hodl’ers have seen way worse than just 30% dips. The Winklevoss twins hodl’ed through a 93% dip after sinking millions into it. We can see where that got them today.
For someone at ground zero should they learn sales or crypto 😉
Why not both? They’re not mutually exclusive.
What do you guys think of Ada and Zcash?
How soon do you think we will see an ETF for BTC? Seems this would help mainstream crypto to the masses.
Fiat currency, the value is controlled by inflation and interest rates.
Drug prices are controlled by supply and demand or drug cartels.
What is controlling bitcoin valuation/prices? Peoples hopes/faith/trust in its potential?
What will be the key factor or event that determines the coins that stick around and the coins that will go away? Any idea as to when that may be?
I heard that around February 3rd there will be a major catalyst. What are your thoughts about that?
Is it best to buy and hold BTC and ETH since they’re most often the coins that people use to trade their fiat into, or use those funds to convert to other coins?
Also, is it best to buy and hold, or use profits to buy into the lower valued coins that are expected to gain?
Thoughts on getting a safety deposit box for coins in cold storage?
What are some effective security applications and methods? LastPass, VPN, etc.
Which coins do you anticipate will be added to Coinbase that will further increase in value as a result?
Any suggestions for the most secure alt-coin online wallets?
What are your criteria for determining which coins to buy into?
Thanks for this open ended Q&A. Gonna be a lot of maintenance on your part, but your advice will be greatly appreciated by all.
What’s the damn deal with exchanges blocking people from joining? How do we circumvent these issues? Is it wise to fork over SSN Info?
Maybe not for the book, but the trends in price movements seem weird. If bitcoin goes down, most alts go down.
However, if bitcoin goes up, alts do not necessarily go up. Alts seem to move up when bitcoin is trading sideways.
I realize that trends in a high-growth situation can be very different from trends when crypto is more mainstream, but seeing as crypto will in growth mode the next few years it may be worth trying to analyze this.
When evaluating an alt coin, how much do you weight feasibility vs execution vs team?
For example XVG talks a big game but the premise is predicated on both parties enacting the I2P and TOR (silly) and their team is primarily composed of Marketers and front end people. I remove McAfee from my outlook. You need some serious backend guys and network specialists to hit what they suggest.
What type of liquidity does GS creating a trading desk mean? Will it be a prop desk?
Which exchange do you suggest as an alternative to CONbase?
I have friends who think it’s a bubble because of stories like this – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-craze-sees-long-island-iced-tea-rename-as-long-blockchain. Any thoughts?
Do you think technical analysis/ day trading is worth it?
How often do you shuffle your crypto holdings?
If you have to ask don’t do it.
Most effective way to DCA?
Feel like Gemini –> Binance –> Ledger eats away fees, especially with the lower priced Alts
Say BTC and an altcoin ALT both go down 30% in a day. This ALT is not on gdax and you have to buy with Eth/BTC.
To take advantage of the BTC dip I’d just buy with fiat on Coinbase/Gdax. But how would I buy the dip for ALT if my stored BTC has gone down a similar amount?
I guess I could use fiat to buy Eth/BTC then buy the ALT, but you have to wait too long to receive + transfer. Sorry if this is a noob question
To mitigate long tx times, buy litecoin with fiat on gdax, transfer to binance, convert ltc -> btc/eth, then buy alts.
Sure! Looking forward to your book.
If you have the technological skills (coding, etc.), how would you leverage it to maximize your earnings? Would you work as a developer for an alt coins? Or would you create a business out of it?
If you’ve studied math: do you see CRC becoming the numeraire for valuing assets? It already is in the alt, but in the real world. If it truly was the numeraire, we wouldn’t hear folks saying oh bitcoin going up in value, rather than usd crashing in value.
^*do you see bitcoin…
Sorry about the typo.
I read some of the other questions and answers before posting mine (for everyone’s benefit)
Here goes:
-How do you pick coins that will win till 2020 and beyond? I no longer want to touch anything which I won’t keep for years (long term thinking like Naval)
-How do you evaluate whether a coin and its team can deliver?
-In what order do you see *utility* adoption popping up overtime? So far I think projects that deal with privacy, interconnectedness of different blockchains/ DEXs , and eventually e-residency/e-identity. ( in that order)
-What are the most efficient ways to educate myself on a given coin? Asking to evaluate the winner between something like Verge and Monero.
Also I noticed you guys said something like, “we may have to go even higher level for our product”. Please go in depth as you’d like – will help some of us. Also some pointers about taxes would be much appreciated.
I read some of the other questions and answers before posting mine (for everyone’s benefit)
Here goes:
-How do you pick coins that will win till 2020 and beyond? I no longer want to touch anything which I won’t keep for years (long term thinking like Naval)
-How do you evaluate whether a coin and its team can deliver?
-In what order do you see *utility* adoption popping up overtime? So far I think projects that deal with privacy, interconnectedness of different blockchains , and eventually e-residency/e-identity. ( in that order)
-What are the most efficient ways to educate myself on a given coin? Asking to evaluate the winner between something like Verge and Monero.
*Also I noticed you guys said something like, “we may have to go even higher level for our product”. Please go in depth as you’d like. Also some pointers about taxes would be much appreciated.
You preach “doing the opposite”.
Right now crypto has become “famous” and everyone is buying coins.
Should we really be buying coins??
—
Or maybe I got it wrong.
Right now, doing the opposite would be “buying and stashing for at least 5 years”.
Am I right?
Most hilarious comment
Oh, I was being serious! Damn, I look like a fool.
I should think more before asking questions haha! Sorry, sleep deprived! =D
How about affiliate marketing in the crypto space (ICOs, miners, currencies, vendors, etc) – either white hat or black hat?
Zcash differentiator is anonymity but it isn’t truly anonymous.
Monero wins this battle hands down. Issue is infrastructure isn’t really there yet for monero.
Do not know about ada
Hi guys — Been lurking here for about a year now and knew you guys would have the awareness to enter the space. I’m a 24 year old working in management consulting. Struck it big early 2016 with Ethereum early on and then Antshares/NEO. My current portfolio is valued at around half a million dollars. My assets right now are in OMG, ARK, ETH, XMR. Thoughts on this allocation? I’m planning to just hodl through 2018.
All the best,
RA16
Moreover, and this is for everyone who is reading the comments section. Just smile and say
‘yes, it’s a bubble’ (which it is for the 99% of shitcoins out there) when people outright condemn all cryptocurrencies. Do your research, talk to engineers, and understand the nature of money. Finally, read ‘The Sovereign Individual’.
Do you see advantages in the blockchain technology like the usage of smart contracts applied to insurance cases, bank transfers, on-chain storage, power grid distributions, etc?