AAAgent's Crypto Journey

synergy1

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I looked at the total market cap of all the coins out there and was amazed - screaming over 250 Billion dollars. This price action is insane. I know I'll be the antagonist saying it, but I feel crypos are in a mania. Its not to say I don't think the technology is cool or has merit...but its not at a disruptive stage yet and a lot of folks are pushing prices up based on higher prices. Multiple surveys were taken as bitcoins prices has gone up, and as its price increases, more people feel the asset is undervalued. Soon professional investors will be able to take positions via options and futures once they are available, which may change the landscape drastically. Where as before being long the asset was just that, now market participants will be able to hedge as needed.

Again if you like doing this, and have done well thats great. The only purpose of my post is to warn people to be careful. From my own standpoint , I am not comfortable going long with any significant amount of money and will be shorting any ETFS and using options once they are available at my brokerage.

To those who buy/sell, best of luck!
 

AAAgent

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I looked at the total market cap of all the coins out there and was amazed - screaming over 250 Billion dollars. This price action is insane. I know I'll be the antagonist saying it, but I feel crypos are in a mania. Its not to say I don't think the technology is cool or has merit...but its not at a disruptive stage yet and a lot of folks are pushing prices up based on higher prices. Multiple surveys were taken as bitcoins prices has gone up, and as its price increases, more people feel the asset is undervalued. Soon professional investors will be able to take positions via options and futures once they are available, which may change the landscape drastically. Where as before being long the asset was just that, now market participants will be able to hedge as needed.

Again if you like doing this, and have done well thats great. The only purpose of my post is to warn people to be careful. From my own standpoint , I am not comfortable going long with any significant amount of money and will be shorting any ETFS and using options once they are available at my brokerage.

To those who buy/sell, best of luck!
Even a blind man can make money in the crypto market. You don't need to be smart to buy and hold. I've helped some 60 year olds get into the space. They just buy and hold for the time being. I don't know anyone that is net negative in this space. If you have a good head on your shoulders and some balls, paupers can become millionaires. I know many millionaires from the dotcom bubble and they are not the brightest people. Lady luck favors the bold and early adopters.

What people don't understand is this is new technology that will cause a paradigm shift from the way we conduct business. It will destroy the current financial system and revolutionize all other markets via blockchain and smart contracts. Anyone who thinks otherwise will just be laggards in the innovator curve. Shorting an asset that will be adopted by a majority of the population when it's currently held by less than 2% of society sounds like a very easy way to lose money. It takes about 3% of a population to cause a successful revolution. We will hit that number next year by Q1 of next year. Risk vs. reward. Too much risk for me to short bitcoin vs. reward.

Is Bitcoin in a bubble? Doubtful as not many own it. Are crypto's in a bubble? Potentially. There are so many cryptocurrencies out there that are completely useless. Literally there is a coin out there called "Useless Ethereum Token" meant to fund the creator/developer's luxury purchases such as TV's and furniture. Many of the startup/ICO's will fail, and only the cream of the crop will rise to survive and create a new economy where everything eventually adopts blockchain and smart contract technology.

I do think that we are a couple of years out from actual use case scenarios of crypto being realistic. It's currently a lot faster to use VISA/MasterCard credit cards than to use Litecoin or Dash as payment vehicles. Sure, they are fast but confirmation are not instant and no blockchain can handle the volume that Visa/MasterCard handle daily (Yet). I believe this next year will drastically change things. It will bring much need money, talent, and recognition to the crypto and blockchain space that is needed to grow and develop it to the tool its meant to be.
 

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@AAAgent I'm "new" to cryptocurrencies, I've been watching from the sidelines and have known about the blockchain technology for years though. Just this week I invested some amount into ethereum and a larger amount into bitcoin. I'm the type of person that ask myself a lot of questions so when I get into something I educate myself like crazy, but I got a lot more reading to do. You seem to hold good experience.

I came over this question on Reddit today https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7fnx32/an_economic_recession_ethereum_and_you/ and I'd like your opinion on it. What do you think would happen if 2008 repeated itself? Answers seem divided, not sure if that in itself could mean something.
 

AAAgent

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I'm not a fortune teller so take this for what it's worth from my few years of independent research in economics, politics, financial markets (working in the markets as well), history, and most recently, a year of diving head first into crypto.

Outside of the jobs numbers being manipulated/fake, unemployment manipulated/fake, housing prices being artificially inflated by foreign demand and easy monetary policy forcing money into real estate and financial markets which all coupled together is creating this fake semblance of a great economy, I think our economy is pretty crappy. Not the worst but definitely not good. Obama was spouting the same stuff Trump is now spouting, even though Trump was calling out all the bs when he was running for office. I guess he's actually looked under the hood and realized it's easier said than done to fix and thinks continuing spouting bs like his predecessor was doing is the best path.

https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate-3306198

Almost every country out there has the same problems we are having. At least all of the major countries do. So if sh1t hits the fan in the USA, you can bet it's hitting the fan in Japan, Europe, China, and pretty much everywhere else. The financial world is even more intertwined now than it was back in 08.

I used to think that this Mad Max scenario would happen when I was a precious metals investor but not anymore. Now that I've learned about Bitcoin, blockchain, smart contracts, the crypto economy, and how it can and will displace the traditional financial economy and other markets, I think we have a good chance of not having a major catastrophic collapse. Yes there will still be bankruptcies and banks going under, but as this happens slowly and the more people and money that moves into crypto, it has a kind of equalizing effect to balance things out. Money will be lost on one end by the banks who cheated us of our money and that money will just be added into the crypto economy. The shift is already happening now and will only continue to grow.

I think the crash will happen gradually as opposed to a condensed crash like 07-08. Governments will do anything and everything to keep our fake bubble economy afloat. Can you imagine what would happen if the stock markets crashed tomorow? Governments have forced the majority of the population in stocks, bonds, and real estate. If the markets crashed, all the sheep that they forced/led into the financial markets would lose everything. Like what happened during the dot com bubble except this time it will be everyone everywhere. There would be blood on the streets and there wouldn't be an easy fix this time. They dropped interest rates 7% last time to 0% before raising it slowly to 1% over the course of 2 years. You can't drop it from 1% where it's at now to 0% hoping for a dramatic effect.

So assuming that we don't have a financial collapse with a crypto collapse, I think we'll be fine. Any major market dip is an opportunity to accumulate more. I'm on the train that Bitcoin will be in the $100k+ range in a few years. It's already about to breach $10k as we speak. Wouldn't make sense for people to cash out of crypto into fiat dollars, euro's, yen or yuan when those currencies can be printed into oblivion. If financial markets are stable, I'd rather stay in a currency that can't be printed to an infinite amount of supply. If it's the scenario where markets are imploding then I'm expecting a Mad Max scenario where holding large sums of dollars, gold or bitcoin will all be worthless. The cascading crash of global markets would literally create an apocalypse.

--

TL;DR - Buy crypto as I don't see 2008 happening in the near future. Our markets cannot be allowed to crash as we are too globally intertwined.
 

Serenity

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I'm not a fortune teller so take this for what it's worth from my few years of independent research in economics, politics, financial markets (working in the markets as well), history, and most recently, a year of diving head first into crypto.
I get the disclaimer, but I'll just tell you that I won't hold you responsible for my decisions even if based on your statements. I know the future can't be predicted, but nonetheless it's interesting to hear people's speculations and reasonings. Gives me something to think about.

I also think bitcoin still has a lot to grow, in a global perspective it's still tiny. I wasn't thinking of a Mad Max scenario, in that case we'd have a lot more pressing concerns than currencies. I was just thinking if the economy as a whole starts going really bad.
 

AAAgent

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I just don't see our economy going bad without everyone else's economy going bad at this point. They are more interconnected now, than ever before. Not in a good way. So if our economy does go bad, quickly. I believe it will create a mad max scenario. I don't think it will happen anymore with this new booming tech and sector.
 

AAAgent

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Been eyeing pivx masternode for a few weeks doing research. Was considering buying around $2.4 but didn't. I like that it's very similar to dash but doesn't have the pre mine scandal dash is involved in. It popped over $3 last week and was still considering it but then it had an unlimited supply for a long time frame. On top of the it's POS not POW type of protocol. The staking coins and the masternodes would seesaw (alternate depending on weight) for staking rewards which I did not like. I was expecting masternodes to be rewarded a bit better but I guess in the long run this would work itself out because there would be more stakers than masternodes. Rewards were looking to be around $6 or 1.7 PIVX a few days ago. Rewards are now $10 a day for a masternode.

Well, I will have to re-evaluate everything as it spiked over $4.5 this morning and hit as high as $7.

Another aggressive member in the group who's opinion I highly value was looking substratum. eyeing substratum @ $0.14. Well now it's $0.37.

Walton officially released it's Guardian masternode info, which spiked walton up.
Pivx listed by UPBIT which spiked the price.
Populous is still crushing it.
PayPie is now officially double.

Caught the btc spike up to 9200 and swapped into LTC at $82. So far so good on that swing trade. LTC hit new all time highs and looks like it should break $100 soon.
 

AAAgent

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Updates -

There's been a lot of speculation on the BTC price movement from institutional buying, tether scandal of unbacked printed tethers being used to drive up the price of BTC (Bitfinex which controls tether will not provide any proof that it's tethers are indeed back by USD), and also post thanksgiving wave. The post Thanksgiving buying actually makes sense from a timeline perspective as many who were discussing crypto during thanksgiving with family and friends that signed up to coinbase as a gateway into crypto usually need a few weeks to get approved and up their limits for buying. We also recently had the Big Bang Theory Bitcoin episode last Thursday. Japan announced preparation for Bitcoin futures while South Korea is banning Bitcoin futures trading.

Charlie Lee and LTC foundation have officially announced marketing for Litecoin. This should be a positive for LTC. LTC is very undervalued compared to BTC. It's code and purpose is literally meant as a smaller, faster, and cheaper Bitcoin. At 4x the supply of bitcoin, mathematically it should be 1/4 the price, but that isn't exactly how it's being valued by the market. I've gotten burnt by LTC many times now. Hopping out of it right before it doubles in price and hopping into it more recently while it stagnated/dropped in BTC value. I still believe LTC has a lot more room for growth and should make some sizeable gains comparatively to BTC, especially with this marketing push just starting.

Populous is exploding. It hit a high of $19 and is hovering around $17. Beta platform should released soon and platform launch is looking closer to early spring. If you're looking for Populous type gains on a similar platform and good team, check out PayPie. Very similar concept of invoice factoring but also business credit rating based off their internal accounting platform. Ethereum co-founder is on the board as well. PPP is hovering around the $0.70 mark.

Iota announced a partnership with Microsoft. Back in September I was looking into IOTA under $0.40 but they had a major scandal with a flaw in their code. MIT notified them of the flaw in their code and how it allowed funds to be stolen for any wallet. MIT worked with the IOTA team for a month under wraps to help them fix the error before IOTA announced publicly in september of the error and that it was patched. MIT was pretty angry that IOTA tried to playoff the patch which resulted in a hard fork of IOTA as a mere code update. Updates happen often to correct errors, but usually they aren't errors regarding a flaw that allowed the exploitation of all IOTA wallets. On top of that, the exploitation was around for a few months, and no one knows if and how many times it was exploited. This was never really addressed by the IOTA team which annoyed me a bit. I understand not drawing attention to negative press, but having made such a large mistake and not addressing it properly left a sour taste in my mouth. Iota on a positive note resulting from the partnership has exploded to over $4 in price.

NEO + Microsoft announced a dev competition together. There was leak of some type of news in NEO to be released late November. Most people were hoping it to be around Chinese officialdom to announce some type of pro crypto news but it turned out to be a small dev competition jointly held with Microsoft. NEO pumped from $26 up to $48. It dropped back down to $35 and is now hovering around $37.

Veritaseum is making a strong push back up. Not sure why as it's pretty much been clockwork with the CEO, Reggie Middleton. He's been nonstop traveling working on striking up institutional and government partnerships. There's been rumours for a few months of a partnership with Germany's DAX (Nasdaq equiv stock exchange).

NiceHash, where I sell my GPU power for BTC has been down for an excessive amount of time due to maintenance. I'm speculating they were just hacked.

In a bull market, it's really hard to find deals or even trade. Lost some BTC trying to trade some alts. Everything is up in USD value but the point is to accumulate more BTC. I also spoke with upper management of CoinDesk and visited them at their offices. They pretty much sold out of their last event Consensus: Invest. They're crushing it right now in terms of advertising/events revenue which should be noted as the digital ad space is getting destroyed.

Just sit back and enjoy the ride guys and if you're not in, time to buy some tickets.
 

TheGambino

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Recently started to invest in cryptocurrencies. Ill be watching this thread!
 

TheGambino

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Yes. I mine ethereum everyday. I get about 1 ETH per month from mining currently.
How do you mine? I found out about Genesis, I dont have the assests to invest in that though.
 
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TheGambino

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I am thinking about selling 20% of my BC and investing it on an exchange in IOTA's. Is this a smart decision? @AAAgent
 

AAAgent

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How do you mine? I found out about Genesis, I dont have the assests to invest in that though.
Yeah you can do cloud mining through companies like Genesis Mining and hashing 24 but at this stage it really isn't worth it IMO. You're better off buying and holding BTC instead of cloud mining it.

Now you can buy miners directly from Bitmain, they make the most efficient miners out there for LTC, BTC, and Dash. They are a bit pricey. Usually 1.5k-3k for 1 miner but it should pay itself off quickly at the rates BTC, LTC, and Dash are rising.
https://www.bitmain.com/

You can GPU with graphics cards. That's the cheapest way depending on what type of Asic miner you compare it to. If you have a good gaming computer with a good graphics card, download mining software or join a pool and use their client software and just run the program when you're not gaming. Or you can build a rig which I did as well and have 5 graphics cards connected to a mother board, process, memory, SSD, power supply, and I setup the computer to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse one time to actually start the mining program and I haven't really touched it since. It runs 24/7 depending on how many GPU's (graphics cards/processing units) you have can cost anywhere from 1k setup to 5k+ if you have 10+ GPU's. It's nowhere as profitable as Asic's but then again not everyone wants to support Bitmain, which almost has a monopoly on the mining industry.

I cloud mine, GPU mine, and own a couple of Asics. Cloud mining is the cheapest, but they take the highest fees and their contracts are sometimes limited to 2 years.
 

AAAgent

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I am thinking about selling 20% of my BC and investing it on an exchange in IOTA's. Is this a smart decision? @AAAgent
This is up to you. I think IOTA does have a good future for it although not a fan of their team and how they handled the hard fork announcement.
 

BeTheChange

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Been eyeing pivx masternode for a few weeks doing research. Was considering buying around $2.4 but didn't. I like that it's very similar to dash but doesn't have the pre mine scandal dash is involved in. It popped over $3 last week and was still considering it but then it had an unlimited supply for a long time frame. On top of the it's POS not POW type of protocol. The staking coins and the masternodes would seesaw (alternate depending on weight) for staking rewards which I did not like. I was expecting masternodes to be rewarded a bit better but I guess in the long run this would work itself out because there would be more stakers than masternodes. Rewards were looking to be around $6 or 1.7 PIVX a few days ago. Rewards are now $10 a day for a masternode.

Well, I will have to re-evaluate everything as it spiked over $4.5 this morning and hit as high as $7.

Another aggressive member in the group who's opinion I highly value was looking substratum. eyeing substratum @ $0.14. Well now it's $0.37.

Walton officially released it's Guardian masternode info, which spiked walton up.
Pivx listed by UPBIT which spiked the price.
Populous is still crushing it.
PayPie is now officially double.

Caught the btc spike up to 9200 and swapped into LTC at $82. So far so good on that swing trade. LTC hit new all time highs and looks like it should break $100 soon.
Any other masternodes you are eying?

Missed the boat on WTC.
 

AAAgent

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Any other masternodes you are eying?

Missed the boat on WTC.
Just PIVX for privacy purposes.

Always nice to have privacy tokens in your back pocket if and when government/courts do digging in the future. This is a long way out as they would need to educate a large group of new age employees on how to read blockchain which they barely understand at the moment. Governments are so big and move at such slow paces that this probably won't even be possible for atleast another 3+ years. I was talking about with my friends that if a divorce happens, will courts even be able to enforce the dispersing of assets if all of your crypto is in privacy tokens that they don't have the private keys to. How will your ex wife prove you have this much crypto?

You can't see the amounts and you can't see transaction sizes, how will they "prove" you have those assets. They could have been donated, spent, etc. Virtually impossible to force you to give up your crypto outside of torture or threat.
 

AAAgent

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I've officially hit my goal for crypto. Everything else is just gravy but i'm a hustler so i'll keep hustling.

There's been so much FUD in the crypto space, tokens being released daily that now hovers above 3K+ cryptocurrencies. It's nearly impossible to stay on top of all the news. Coin releases, coin listing on exchanges, partnerships, FUD, alpha, beta, platform launch, etc. Covering all that information on 1 or 2 companies is already cumbersome. Imagine trying to cover all that information on 20-40 companies. Researching new companies becomes nearly impossible.

I've probably done research on over 50+ cryptocurrencies, blockchain, proof of work, proof of stake, mining, building your own miners, etc. If it's crypto related, I've probably looked into it. It's really hard to stay on top of all the news. The crypto group i'm building is now 15+ people, and it's starting to come together well. I've educated most people beyond beginner level. Everyone has their own wallets and knows how to send coins. 3 people have broke 6 figures and one has broken 7 figures. We all know each other in real life and or are 1 person removed from being connected. I've started to split up researching coins within the group for people to stay up to date. This way it isn't overwhelming for any one person to be researching an infinite amount of coins and no one does repetitive work in having 5 people researching the same coin when we only really need 1 person. It's a divide and conquer type of strategy that allows us to identify good opportunites and scale our portfolios.
 

BeTheChange

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Just PIVX for privacy purposes.

Always nice to have privacy tokens in your back pocket if and when government/courts do digging in the future. This is a long way out as they would need to educate a large group of new age employees on how to read blockchain which they barely understand at the moment. Governments are so big and move at such slow paces that this probably won't even be possible for atleast another 3+ years. I was talking about with my friends that if a divorce happens, will courts even be able to enforce the dispersing of assets if all of your crypto is in privacy tokens that they don't have the private keys to. How will your ex wife prove you have this much crypto?

You can't see the amounts and you can't see transaction sizes, how will they "prove" you have those assets. They could have been donated, spent, etc. Virtually impossible to force you to give up your crypto outside of torture or threat.
Why pivx as opposed to Monero or Xvg?

And I feel your pain. So hard to keep up with this space. I still have a full time job so I'm spend 2 hours in the morning on crypto and 2 hours at night and atleast one day on the weekend.

Considering hiring a part time personal assistant. Missed out on some good trades and icos because I just didn't have enough time to do research.
 
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AAAgent

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@AAAgent

I understand your frustrated at people. Appreciate your work. If you can offer no help can you atleast give us greener guys a few places that are reliable to research coins and our possible investments.
I've educated a lot of people on this space and that is the most important part of the crypto economy. The space will not be successful if everyone getting into the space is getting in to make money and not in it for the right reasons and it's real benefits to society. It's why I focus on educating people properly when I get them into the space. I normally do it for free, but I've learned that people don't take this stuff seriously unless they pay for it. It also wastes a lot of your time and removes the serious from the greedy. This is just my journal with some back and forth Q&A so I don't find answering questions here.

Here are some tips.

Twitter is the main place for crypto news. You will get new here faster than anywhere else. Follow all the major crypto guys on twitter.

Twitter people to follow: Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, Andreas Antonopolous, Charlie Lee, Erik Voorhees, Vinny Lingham, Crypto Cobain, Whale Panda, Wolf of Poloniex, and many more. Pretty much every ICO CEO and company should be followed that you are interested in. Follow every exchange to be updated on coin releases and issues. Follow CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph, and Youtubers. There's so many I can't even name them all but Twitter first and foremost.

Outside of Twitter, the next go to spot is Youtube. There are many independent Youtubers that provide great Youtube content if you can't live and breathe twitter.

StoneCrypto - Great for beginner crypto tutorials and explanations
Crypt0 - aka Omar Bham does the best daily crypto space summaries.
Boxmining - aka Michael does good daily crypto space summaries and interviews
Ivan On Tech - does more technical summaries and also explain blockchain tech from a programmers point of view.
Clif High/JSnip4 - for crypto space general perspective and trends 3-18 months from now.
Tone Vays - For great Bitcoin charting. He pretty much moves the market or used too.
World Crypto Network - blockchain interviews, daily updates, price and chart updates, and technology updates
Node Investor - great for charting many crypto coins
 
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