Crypto Currencies – The new mass hysteria, should you join or stay away from it?

Cryptocurrencies have taken the world by a storm, and there is no signs of it slowing down. Since I’m always following the latest trends, I jumped on too, though later than I should have. Are you still standing by and watching the train pass? Don’t do that 🙂

First of all, I DO NOT consider myself an expert on the subject, not yet at least, but working on that 🙂 So don’t take this article as some investment advice please, it’s more about throwing ideas around and giving you some food for thought.

The reason why I actually got involved with Crypto, is because I’m kinda used to look for opportunities on the internet and the Bitcoin craze was pretty hard to miss.

We all know that Bitcoin has been around for a few years, since 2009 actually … and we all know that it went through several stages already, many expected it to be dead by now, actually “several times” dead … check this site, they map the articles with Bitcoin deaths prophecies, it should have been dead 190 times already : https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ 🙂

But the fucker refuses to die, from one reason or another … and the will to survive alone, made me confident enough to start investing into crypto currencies at last. I wish I would of done that sooner, way sooner. I’m pretty sure you all noticed the massive growth of Bitcoin and a number of other coins, that happened in spring and especially summer of 2017.

Below is a graph of the Ethereum Coin, look at the green line which shows it’s value against USD. Basically any coin (or a big part of them) that you can check, will show a similar graph in the spring-summer part of the year… I’ve never seen such strong bullish trends in my entire life.

There are several websites where you can check the prices of many coins, for example coinmarketcap.com, cryptocompare.com, cryptowat.ch, cryptocurrencychart.com, cryptocoincharts.info … there is a ton of them, with more or less delayed data … my favorites are coinmarketcap and cryptocompare.

NOTE : There are more than 2000 Crypto Currencies already, and new ones are being created all the time. Some will die, some will survive … we’re still in an early stage of the whole thing, so there are many changes bound to happen yet. Here is a list of all currencies tracked by coinmarketcap : https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/ … This site lists even more : https://coinranking.com/, almost 2500. Not sure how many of them are still active though.

SO HOW TO GET INTO THE GAME?

Basically, you have two options : BUY them or MINE them 🙂

Mining was how it all started. At the beginning, you could mine Bitcoin with a simple computer, but as the mining process becomes more and more resource heavy, specialized hardware became needed in order to mine in a profitable way … Bitcoins are mined with Asic Antminers these days, they look like this :

But Bitcoin isn’t the only currency that you can mine, there are quite a few of them. The hardware needed depends on the algorithm they are based on. Bitcoing uses SHA-256 for example, the other popular ones are Ethash, Blake (2b or 14r), Cryptonight, Equihash … there are several popular ones.

I’m not gonna get into much details here, since it’s a topic for a separate article, but let me show you what a mining rig (that’s what the machines are called) for Ethereum (Ethash algo) looks like. This is one of mine, that I built. The mining power is measured in MH/s, this one reaches 180-185 MH/s.

To see how much you can actually make with this, check this website : https://whattomine.com/, enter the mining power (hashing power) for the algorithm you want to build machines for, and the site will calculate possible daily revenue for you, based on current exchange rates.

Thanks to the increased prices, mining of several currencies is profitable again … there are a few BUTs though. The rigs suck electricity like there is no tomorrow. Install a couple miners at home and you will burn the wires in your walls 🙂 They heat like crazy, you need a solid plan on how to cool them, leave it without ventilation and the temp will fly to 45 Celsius in no time. The prices of hardware are inflated right now, due to the massive popularity of mining. Don’t expect your investment to return sooner than in year …

Then there are the price fluctuations, uncertain future, new hardware can make the old one unprofitable … mining can work, but only at scale and you still need to treat it as a HIGH RISK investment. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

BUY IN – THAT’S THE EASIER METHOD.

I invested many thousands $$$ into my mining rigs and while they are making money slowly, if I invested it all in Bitcoin at the same time, I’d have WAY WAY bigger profit by now. While the rigs still didn’t pay for themselves, Bitcoin went up from about $3000 to $8200 … so instead of having to mess with my miners, I could have been enjoying a 270% ROI already.

You could say I didn’t make the best investment, but I couldn’t possibly know that Bitcoin will rise that much and at the same time, I invested pretty much the same amount into various coins too, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything 🙂 I love to have all options covered.

Many people are doing this right now : buying coins, then holding them and hoping for the prices to go up. This strategy is called HODLing in the crypto world and it can yield amazing results in a bullish market. This is also the easiest to do, just make sure that you buy coins that have solid projects behind them.

I see several coins being part of HODL portfolios over and over again : Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, Monero, NEO, Verge, Zcash, Ethereum Classic, OMG, Waves … There is no shortage of recommendations to be found all over the various crypto websites now. But I can’t stress one thing enough : ALWAYS DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. Check the projects behind the coins, make sure to only enter those that have some potential and backing from a solid community. Minimize your risks.

In order to buy some coins, you need an account at some exchange that will let you trade your hard earned $$$ for the coins of your choice. There is a lot of them, let me list some of the most popular ones for you : Bitfinex.com, Bithumb, Bittrex, Kraken, Binance, Poloniex, HitBTC … there are many of them available.

NOTE: Not all coins are traded on all exchanges, the major ones are everywhere, but the smaller ones are not. Pick your exchange based on what coins you want to trade. There is also a big difference when it comes to the overall volume of executed trades. Check this link for a list based on 24h volume, broken down by the major coins : https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

HOW ABOUT THOSE ICOs I KEEP HEARING ABOUT?

There is one very popular term in the crypto world: ICO. So what is it actually? To put it really simple, it stands for Initial Coin Offering … the easiest way to explain it, in my opinion, is to compare it to IPOs of standard companies … so Initial Public Offerings. When a company needs to raise some money, to fund their investments or they simply decide to sell part of their company, they can do so buy selling shares on the stock market.

And the first emission of these shares is called the IPO. So instead of selling SHARES, companies are now selling COINS. During an ICO, you can buy coins before they become available on the public exchanges. Once listed on a public exchange, it’s price can fly to the moon, due to the increased interest … but it can also go down a lot, which has been the case lately with several new ICOs … so proceed very carefully here.

ICOs also created a lot of negative publicity for the whole crypto market, cause as you could guess, it was an amazing opportunity for scam artists of all shapes and sized. Several ICOs turned out to be scams and left the investors with bunch of worthless coins or tokens at their hands.

I’M INTERESTED, WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?

Well, educate yourself 🙂 As I said at the beginning, I’m still far from being an expert, but I’m slowly getting the whole thing. I mine some coins, I HODL some coins, I trade some coins … and I’m already seeing some success. BUT I WANT MORE 🙂

I’ve spent my entire life in Affiliate Marketing and I know how important the proper connections can be and looks like it’s even more true in the Crypto space. Insider information, properly timed actions and the right contacts with people WHO KNOW … this is something I need to focus on.

The first step I’m gonna take in this context, will be to attend an Amazing (I hope) event that takes place right before the Affiliate World Asia in Bangkok on December the 4th. Since I’m going to AWA anyways, it would be a sin to ignore this Blockchain event 🙂

The official name of the event is : Blockchain World Conference, they also have a website here : https://blockchainworldconferences.com/, where you can also buy tickets. BTW : it’s co-organized by the same people who are behind AWC, so you can count on the high level of organization, speeches and general value provided.

List of 20+ speakers is available on their website, there are some VERY interesting names in the list. I’m really looking forward to this one, should be a day packed with excellent information. Based on the chats I had with several Affiliates, looks like half of the Affiliate World visitors will also visit the Blockchain Conference … so should be pretty crowded 🙂

It’s not to late to get into Crypto, I think we’re still at the very beginning of a new era. It reminds me of the when the “internet” started, many years back. People couldn’t get how I could be making money from some virtual network, many thought it was some bubble that’s abut to burst soon … and see, I’m still making money from it, along with a ton of you.

Will this be the next big thing? I can’t say for sure, but I will be in, should that be the case … how about you? 🙂

Thanks for reading,
Matej.

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