How do you decide which crypto currency to buy?

Go to Reddit and choose a crypto cult based on how annoying the various memes are.

Depends on how incriminating the video is

Depends which one the dealer wants to be paid in.

Depends on how incriminating the video is

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Dollar cost average into BTC and ETH. Maybe some XMR if you want to take a punt on something because you “believe in the tech”.

Yeah i'd appreciate some advice!

I decided to have a dabble recently. Bought some XRP, smallish amounts, and basically I couldn't even fart without making a 30% profit. So I very cleverly decided that this currency trading lark must be really easy, and launched a grand at it. Which is currently worth about £700 😆

So I've gone back to £20 at a time. I've got a few open positions in some smaller currencies, which are all gently in profit.

But every time I look at them, they just seem to be in a massive bubble. Everything seems to be on a massive tear, and although I've got massive FOMO there's just no way I want to be buying in as a novice to something that looks like this:

So I don't. And then it goes up by another 50% in a week...!

I've got a few alerts set up. I got one alert when ETH was trading at 1280. But by the time I noticed the alert, it was back up to like 1350 and I figured I'd missed that boat. It's now up near 1750....

<edit - image not working. But just imagine an exponential curve>

I think crypto is becoming more mainstream, so I wonder if the volatility will decrease as these currencies become more mature? I saw recent news that both PayPal and visa are doing more around crypto which points towards it being generally accepted. My teenage boys keep up to date with the meme's which helps! I'm up so far, but only gambled an amount I'm happy to lose.

Slight disclaimer. I've spent the last 27 years using FPGAs and the last 15 working for Intel that make them. These devices are often used for mining, so I'm hopeful this market will pick up! 👍

Slight disclaimer. I’ve spent the last 27 years using FPGAs and the last 15 working for Intel that make them. These devices are often used for mining

I can only assume then that you've invested heavily in AMD shares. (-:

There is bitcoin and then there is everything else (s***coins).

ETH is the only other one I would consider but even that, unlike Bitcoin, has a theoretically unlimited supply, so hard for me to buy into the concept.

Watch Crypto Diggy on YouTube.

Before Christmas he gave his top 10 coins to be invested in, including AAVE which was $32 at the time. Now ~$500. I didn't buy any, a mate did.

Also check out crypto mining companies, e.g. ARB, KR1 and Coinsillium.

Recently there was a bit of a pump and dump on XRP. I’d be careful if I were you.

As a technology, XRP has potential, but in all honesty, I can’t see it ever gaining mainstream adoption. More likely, the tech will be mimicked to make settlement faster for things that need it.

At the beginning, I just took a bunch of money I could afford to lose and just put it into a bunch of things that I liked the look of. These days, it may make more sense to just buy the 2-3 big players. It’s still just for fun though.

In my opinion, the ones that are just tokens are useless.

If anyone fancies having a bit of a play with the various currencies Coinbase do educational rewards for several - watch a video, get some of that currency.

In total you can make about £50 doing it at no cost so for messing around with its pretty good.

They're also doing 10% sign-up bonus on $100 bitcoin purchases with a referral code. If you want a code let me know and I can get the 10% as well!

With either you can easily cash out so worth looking at.

I’ve got massive FOMO there’s just no way I want to be buying in as a novice to something that looks like this:

FOMO is pretty much all you're looking at, strip that out and there's nothing left.

As for being a 'novice', everyone buying it is a novice, no one knows what will happen and when - it's just pure speculation / gambling.

I'm just a very low level beginner with this and in reality missed the boat with Bitcoin and Etherium without chucking big money in.

With my very basic research the only one I can see potential decent profits is XRP - it's cheap so you can buy a lot for not much cash - and in 5 years time it [i]may[/i] be worth 3 figures.

I'm just playing with £30/£40 a month at the minute. Money I can afford to lose.

Or it might completely bomb! 🤣🤣🤣

Ivandobski and Finbar are spot on.
Take a look at the interviews that Michael saylor has been putting out this week, this is
What may be helping the price increase today.

@Cougar.... Let's just say that it's good practice to diversify one's portfolio. 😉

I bought some Ripple because I was hungry and wanted some raspberry ripple ice cream.

I have now made enough profit to buy some ice cream so it worked for me.

Well from today's small-time piffling, I have just closed a couple of positions that netted me a tidy £3.64 in profit. All the self-satisfaction, none of the risk. Another day of this and I might have enough to buy the wife a pint.

There’s loads to choose from, most I suspect will be abject failures, the bebos and Myspaces to bitcoin’s facebook.

Shite analogy, both were hugely popular at the time until the next big thing came along. If its popular now you've already missed the boat.

Many many years ago I got sent 10p of bitcoin.

It's now become my retirement plan.

The power consumption of Bitcoin is about 75TWh/year. That's *dodgy back of the envelope maffs* equivalent of pointlessly turning on fifty billion electric fires and then running air conditioning to cool the room down again.

I don't want any involvement in it and urge everyone else to avoid it for the same reason.

Same power consumption as Chile.

But same argument as gold. Spent all this energy digging it out of the ground, transporting and keeping it safe. We use it as a store of value - same as what bitcoin is turning out to be And apart from dentistry, gold doesn't do much else all day long.

Could also argue bitcoin is a network and settlement layer. It electricity used also performs the transactions. So if comparing apples with apples we should also include the energy to run the all the international banking/swift servers.

It's a tricky argument thought. A lot of power goes into the bitcoin network. I would love all the computation to go to something like astro/seti/Cern or even cloud commerce type thing. Probably can't happen technically for some reason?????

And apart from dentistry, gold doesn’t do much else all day long.

It's a bit like forex trading I guess, as it's essentially a currency.

Just for fun and cos I can’t lose much I’m looking at DOGE,
Currently around 6 cents, and realistically overvalued even at that cost
BUT... and it’s a big but ... if the wsb apes get lucky and by some miracle it does hit $1 ( highly unlikely ) it should then take off as a result of the FOMO factor

When I say looking at I have to admit it will only be very small punt (£25 ish )

No-one 'decides' which bitcoin to buy, you discover which bitcoin you bought, the morning afterwards

Did not know gold was used in electronics. Ok this is productive. If that was a world chart - then is that saying 37% of all the gold mined per year goes into electronics?

What wedge does gold bars go under?

Official coin and jewelry - store of value.

Other - whiskey with gold flakes is for w**kers

Did not know gold was used in electronics. Ok this is productive. If that was a world chart – then is that saying 37% of all the gold mined per year goes into electronics?

No, it excludes bullion - ie gold used as money. Pretty much every electronic device will have a tiny amount of gold used to plate all the contacts as it doesn't corrode and is an excellent conductor of electricity.

I don’t want any involvement in it and urge everyone else to avoid it for the same reason.

If that's your only concern then stick to currencies that use Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work.

Etherium should go completely over to Proof of Stake in the next year or two but there are plenty other currencies that already use it.

https://cryptoslate.com/cryptos/proof-of-stake/

Put it this way - we're 31 posts into a crypto thread on a bike forum and nobody (but me) has used the word "Tulips" yet.

Penny is dropping. Crypto's here to stay. It's still cheap.

It’s a bit like forex trading I guess, as it’s essentially a currency.

Except that most forex is not hugely volatile, and you can link many of the fluctuations in value to political or economic things in the world. So you can take a view on whether Biden is going to help or hinder the dollar, whether Brexit has bottomed out the value of the pound, and more niche details like whether a single case of covid escaping from quarantine in Australia will hit the economy, or how a new technology that relies heavily on a particular raw material might boost individual countries etc. Of course there’s hype and market effects too, but with crypto it’s all hype and market dynamics.

Thanks all. That's basically what I was asking Poly, other markets have things you can look at to inform your decisions, those you mentioned in the case of currencies, I gave the example of shares, for say the market in grain futures you could look at forecast demand, crop yields, weather patterns, rules around GMOs, all other markets have things you can look at to inform yourself and you to make predictions.
People obviously disagree on the conclusions to draw, hence some buy and some sell, but they all look at information to make their decisions.
What can we look at with crypto currencies besides market sentiment, what other drivers are there that we can examine and try to learn from?

The big institutions are now looking and investing clients money into crypto, and in the US the SEC this is what will push up the prices.

@andrewh - you need to look at the project.

What does it offer? What function does it serve? What potential does it have? Is it inherently secure? What are it's weaknesses? What are the barriers to it's uptake? Can it be transformative in an apparently crowded space?

I've been thinking about dipping a toe into the water, is anyone using Binance? I don't mind the complexity of it but there are a lot of bad reviews about withdrawals going missing.

I'd be buying more Bitcoin - https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/08/tesla-buys-1-5b-in-bitcoin-may-accept-the-cryptocurrency-as-payment-in-the-future/

What can we look at with crypto currencies besides market sentiment, what other drivers are there that we can examine and try to learn from?

Nothing.

There is nothing unless you can measure a combination of human greed / FOMO and then work out how much of those Crypto will attract before people loose interest or find something else.

I’d be buying more Bitcoin

Doesn't really mean anything. If Tesla set their prices in Bitcoin and then converted to other currencies, that would mean something.

As all their costs are in $, their car prices will be determined in $. BC etc are far too volatile to be useful as a currency.

It's just a gimmick.

Nothing.

There is nothing unless you can measure a combination of human greed / FOMO and then work out how much of those Crypto will attract before people loose interest or find something else.

It would be interesting to know what you're basing that on. Is it after extensive research?

I've been studying crypto currencies for a while and I'm still getting my head around the technology. How long did it take you?

Personally I believe that there is a crisis of confidence approaching when it comes to fiat currencies and people are not going to put their faith in gold this time around. Gold is too difficult to secure and any government can decide you're not allowed to own it any time they want.

Even China wasn't able to stop it's population owning crypto and if the Chinese government can't ban it what chance do western governments have?

I think the end game for most governments is to have some form of digital currency but one that they control rather than one that is decentralised. How they deal with the current crypto currencies is the question.

We're in for a turbulent few years in my opinion but writing off crypto because it's difficult to understand would be a mistake, I reckon.

I’ve been studying crypto currencies for a while and I’m still getting my head around the technology. How long did it take you?

You're confusing two things: blockchain and crypto currencies.

Blockchain technology, might have some uses, a lot of the initial hysteria seems to be dying out as they're they don't appear do anything particularly new or useful. There was a time a few years ago when any company who mentioned Blockchain on their website got a 30% share price boost overnight. Thankfully, that madness has passed.

Crypto currencies' populatity has nothing to do with the blockchain technology, it's just a FOMO / get rich bubble pumped by 100s of celebs, which seems to have generated it's own momentum. Their volatility and lack of liquidity make them totally innapropriate as a currency and most people now see their only future as a speculative asset (not dissimilar to a certian Tulip mania).

Personally I believe that there is a crisis of confidence approaching when it comes to fiat currencies and people are not going to put their faith in gold this time around.

Well that's a hypothesis, however the trade in Gold hasn't diminished, so not much in the way of evidence to support it.

In fact, the price is rising, which suggests more buyers than sellers...

Gold is too difficult to secure and any government can decide you’re not allowed to own it any time they want.

True, they could, but why would they want to?
And what makes Crypto any different?

If they wanted to outlaw it they could just block access to all the exchanges, would making trading it very hard (but not impossible).

I think the end game for most governments is to have some form of digital currency but one that they control rather than one that is decentralised. How they deal with the current crypto currencies is the question.

You're sort of missing the point of fiat currencies, the fact they are regulated, controlled and stabilised means they are stable and low risk. You can sell a house and have 1/2 million sat in an account, not worrying it could delvalue by a factor of 2 overnight. Certainly not the case with crypto currencies.

If cyrpto currencies were useful as a currency ie stable, like fiat currencies, they wouldn't go up in values and probably depreciate slightly with inflation, which would kill off 99.9999% of interest in them.

They're just a speculative asset at the moment and unlikely to be anything else.

For me it's simple - there's nothing else that gives the [i]tiniest possibility[/i] of turning my £200 spent now into 2k, 20k or even 200k in 5 years time. Perhaps a bet on Derby County winning the Premier League, Champions League and FA cup within 5 years would offer similar odds! 🙂

It's just playing and a bit of a punt for me and I'd never pull my savings out the bank and chuck it at crypto - but £200 is a night out at a gig.

What would make the average person choose to use crypto over the currency in their country? And if you removed the only potential lure of getting rich quick? I can only see that it creates problems, not solves them. But I agree with footflaps, no matter how much I read about it, I remain utterly unconvinced. Well done to those that have made money on it. But I won't be one of the suckers who makes them profit. Based on the GameStop saga there is no shortage of suckers out there.

If cyrpto currencies were useful as a currency ie stable, like fiat currencies, they wouldn’t go up in values and probably depreciate slightly with inflation, which would kill off 99.9999% of interest in them.

You aren't even slightly concerned at the sheer volume of dollars printed in the last year, not to mention the M2 money supply?

I can't say for sure what is going to happen but one thing I'm 90% certain of is that we are on the cusp of a major shake up of the financial world. If you think things are going to go back to normal then that's wishful thinking on the same scale as the most enthusiastic crypto evangelists.

What would make the average person choose to use crypto over the currency in their country?

Hyperinflation.

Hyperinflation would be a good answer if crypto currencies were stable. But they are hugely volatile.

Hyperinflation.

Have you looked at the BC price graph recently?

You aren’t even slightly concerned at the sheer volume of dollars printed in the last year, not to mention the M2 money supply?

Well, so far, the $ is orders of magnitude more stable than crypto.

Of course, that's what happens when no one is quite certain in the value of something. There are massive fluctuations while the market tries to figure it out.

The only thing we can be certain of when it comes to the value of crypto currencies is that the value lies somewhere between $0 and $5 trillion.

When you look at it on that scale it's been remarkably stable so far 🙂

For me it’s simple – there’s nothing else that gives the tiniest possibility of turning my £200 spent now into 2k, 20k or even 200k in 5 years time. Perhaps a bet on Derby County winning the Premier League, Champions League and FA cup within 5 years would offer similar odds!

And this is Crypto is a nutshell. Probably accounts for 99.99% of invetors. The other 0.01% being blockchain evangelists who believe it will cure cancer etc.

Nothing wrong with it as long as people realise it's just a completely blind bet.

What I don't agree with is celebs / influencers pumping it as something it's not to inflate their own holding as people will end up loosing money they can't afford to. Same with Gamestop, lots of people jumped on for FOMO but far too late and just lost a load of money they couldn't afford to.

I may have missed it, but what's a good app for having a dabble? I'm thinking the occasional night out on the beer rather than sessions on the Champers.