It’s common for people to ask me about the best cryptocurrency to invest in, and I always want to say “I don’t invest in cryptocurrencies.”
Cryptocurrencies are not a good investment because you can’t tell whether they will be worth anything in the future. Maybe they will be worth a lot. Maybe they won’t grow at all. (Some of them have already grown out of their boots.) Maybe they will disappear altogether.
All you can do is try and find some of them that might grow. That is hard enough, but it’s actually even harder if you are looking for something that has nothing to do with buying or selling goods and services.
For instance: if you buy a cryptocurrency because you think it will become an efficient way to make a secure Internet connection, then why not simply buy an existing and proven technology like BitTorrent? Or Bitcoin itself? Or e-cash? Why put your money into something that isn’t even a thing yet?
In this blog post I will review a number of parameters that are important in determining if a cryptocurrency is a good investment.
I will start by giving a list of some of the most common questions that investors ask me:
1. Is the information we are given on the internet reliable?
2. Is the cryptocurrency’s market cap large enough to be an interesting investment?
3. How is the cryptocurrency distributed?
4. How is its distribution determined?
5. What is the purpose of the cryptocurrency?
6. Who is behind it?
One way to think about potential investments is that they can be divided into two categories: things that will probably be useful in the future, and things where there is a big question whether they will ever amount to anything. The first group includes things like Internet standards (see below), computer operating systems, and early versions of programming languages, which were very likely to become useful. The second includes cryptocurrencies.
If you’re asking yourself whether it’s a good idea to invest in cryptocurrencies, it means you don’t know what you are talking about. It’s not a good idea, or at least not a very good one.
Cryptocurrencies have never been used outside of being traded as commodities (for example, as an investment), and they always have some kind of monetary or speculative value. We don’t know how much they will be worth in the future, but we can make some guesses based on their history so far.
Bitcoin got started when an anonymous person using the name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed an alternative digital currency that was based on mathematics rather than trust-based systems like banks. That might seem like a good thing, but it’s actually bad news for Bitcoin: it would seem that only someone with deep knowledge of cryptography would have come up with such a system. And
You can’t buy a good cryptocurrency just because it’s a good investment. But you can tell by looking at the price whether it’s likely to keep getting better, or to crash and disappear.
In the early days of the internet, people got rich on the difference between buying early and selling late. The two most obvious investments in cryptocurrencies are bitcoin and litecoin. So let’s look at bitcoin first:
Bitcoin is not just a currency; it is also a payment system. It wasn’t until 2009 that Visa and MasterCard opened up their systems to support what we now know as credit cards. Until then you could use any old credit card to pay for stuff online. When they did, Bitcoin was born as an alternative payment system that didn’t depend on financial institutions like banks or credit card companies.
But before bitcoin had its own payment system, it operated like a currency, only with higher limits. So if you wanted to buy something for $1,000 but had only $100 in your account, you could pay for it with bitcoin by transferring $900 from your ATM-like wallet (which you could use to store bitcoins) to the seller’s address (which would appear on their website).
So once upon a time there were two currencies: bitcoins
It’s a tricky topic, but the most important thing to figure out is whether you are buying a cryptocurrency as an investment or if you are buying it because you believe in it.
If you are buying it as an investment, there is no point in worrying about whether you should buy Bitcoin or Ethereum. The value of each will go up and down until they are no longer worth anything. As long as you keep your money in crypto on Binance or Coinbase rather than keeping it on an exchange, you’ll still be making money. You’re investing in the technology and the community, not the price.
If, however, you’re buying it because you believe in it, then every penny of a loss feels like a punch to the stomach. All that’s left for your investment is to stay invested.
Before you invest in any cryptocurrency, here are some things to keep in mind:
1) Does it solve a problem that many people think is important? If so, then other investors may be willing to pay a premium for your token.
2) How big is the market for your token? The bigger, the better. If you’re launching a new cryptocurrency that has a small market size, then after you’ve built up some initial demand you will need to spend a lot of money on advertising, and you’ll have little left over for developing your project. As soon as the price of your token starts to go down, you’ll be at serious risk of being forced to sell out at a loss.
3) What does it cost? Does your token need much electricity or hardware to run? Is the cost rising rapidly? These questions are either easy or hard to answer: if they’re easy, then someone else has already answered them and you can look at their answer; if they’re hard, then you’ll have to conduct some research and figure out how much money it’s going to take to build something like what you’re trying to build.
4) How long will it take between when someone first encounters your token and when they can use it comfortably on a
Cryptocurrencies are harder to understand than traditional investments. You can buy shares in a company or you can buy bonds in a country or you can take out a mortgage, but those things have well-defined legal rights and no one has tried to claim they are willing to litigate over the terms.
Cryptocurrencies do have legal rights, but they’re harder to define because they’re not states. The kind of currency that is going to be useful is the kind of currency that has value by being scarce and difficult to create, like gold or diamonds. If you think Bitcoin is valuable, because it is scarce and difficult to make, then you might consider buying it.* But if you think Bitcoin is valuable because people think it’s valuable, then you should probably not buy it.