Great point. I used ETH pairing when I bought mine so I keep track of that and am up based on that. I currently use a couple apps. Delta & Blockfolio which let's you enter in all your holdings and actually put in your pairings as well as what exchange you got them in since pricing is different in all exchanges. This way I keep an accurate idea if my profit loss. I'm starting to like Delta more than Blockfolio. Lot faster and cleaner looking.
I’ve been going back and forth on several apps trying to find one I like. Have used both above, solid apps. Currently using coin ticker as it allows me to setup more than one portfolio to track. Think that’s the only thing missing from the two above.
This depends on what your goal is - making BTC or making USD. You could lose net total BTC but still make USD in an alt-coin trade. Would you have been better off keeping BTC? Sure, but you didn't actually lose money in USD terms; you made less, butyou still have profits. And you diversified your portfolio in the process. Really, you should never look at alt-btc value when cashing out of your alt-coin. You should look at your investment thesis of why you're in your alt-coin, and why you think it will rise (either absolutely, or relatively to BTC). If you have a compelling one, stay in. If you don't, you probably shouldn't be in it. What's done is done - when looking to get out, you should be looking exclusively to the future (and to any tax consequences/benefits). That's true of all investments.
I'm skeptical of the use cases for any of these altcoins, but perhaps I'm biased The main use case for bitcoin is sound money and final settlement, not micro-transactions or smart contracts.
No, you're not. Most of the top coins gain their value from popularity, not a practical sense. This is a very dangerous way to invest. The mico-transactions and smart contracts are not the issue. Its more about how the project will bring in revenue and disperse it. Todays hot coin will be tomorrows memory. If you're one of those HODL people on your fav alt going, you risk a good chance to lose a lot of money. BTC/LTC and others are meant to be nothing but currency. There are a handful of projects out there that have a means to generate revenue beyond mining.
The Alt-BTC sentiment is of course when looking at trades, what you're talking about is long-term investing. I'm strictly talking about people who think they made money and forgot that they actually lost satoshi in the meantime, so their entire reason for altcoin trading was wrong. Trading alts is always done to multiply your btc, I'm not talking about the holding aspect.
BTC is mostly seen as a storage of value actually, the currency is just a part of it at this point and not yet viable.
You're right, 99.9% of alts will die out. If you follow the BTC development and sidechains, Bitcoin can actually integrate all those things like anonymity, smart contracts, lighting-fast transactions when properly integrating sidechains, so there'd be zero need for almost any alt out there.
point is, you don't need to record your purchase of a cup of coffee on an immutable ledger, Bitcoin is not practical for that but as sound money that can't be inflated, and guaranteed final settlement that can't be reversed, that's a huge thing
yeah, and that was Satoshi's original vision, but I've changed my thinking on that, and the emergence of off-chain tools like lightning network is proving that out
If you’re not a Bitcoin millionaire now, then none of us really have room to criticize another’s thoughts on Bitcoin from three years ago.
I think it's great if he or others invested in a thesis several years ago and made a bunch of money. My questions then, and now, have always been tied into the investment thesis - the question of *why* bitcoin has value and what's going to drive it forward. The questions I had then about it's use-cases still apply today in large part. It's refreshing to hear when people have changed their mind on why they think it's useful and what might drive it's value going forward. Back then, people did think it was about replacing currency and people using it to buy their coffee/etc, which has turned out less than practical. If people today still think as they did in 2014, that would be a huge red flag - but everyone should look at what they thought about it when they started investing and if it's matched their expectations or what changed. That's true of stocks too, and a key part of being a good investor.
perhaps Satoshi was soft-selling the sound money aspect because he didn't want to come off like a Ron Paul gold bug type, or perhaps he didn't see it as the biggest benefit, but we could be seeing the beginnings of the Bitcoin Standard (vs a Gold Standard) Something that holds/increases its value so well and is super secure and reliable is going to be too appealing not to use as a standard for final settlement.
I'm on the boat that believe Bitcoing will end up being more of a stored value commodity while a few of the alts that have placed their tech right and made partnerships will end up being more of a transactional style product. Bitcoin right now is so slow right now and the fees are high. That's why I have been buying ETH to transfer and buy alts becuase the timing is much better than waiting for BTC to come through these days. Of course this could all be alleviated but I do think there is some room for a few of these Alts to bring a great product to market.
As Major hammered on earlier on the thread, centralization is not a bad thing. Some things you want reversal, some things you dont. Where a cryptocurrency will do well is acting as a global backbone where centralized services can tap into the network and buy/sell/trade across the world. Also, people are going to want privacy. Not everyone is going to want the ability for anyone in the world to track their transactions on the global chain.
ETH is only functional right now because of not being used widely though, it isn't by any means a technology ready to handle world-wide transactions on a wide scale. BTC was also fast and nearly without fees in the beginning, if you follow ETH you'll see that there are severe issues with no answer for atm. Agree that some alts will survive even if btc adopts smart contracts, lighting network, anonymity etc, but 99.9% will inevitabily die out.
Just to visualize the ETH scaling problem: 15% of the entire ETH network is atm used by this r****ded CryptoKitties game where people buy and breed virtual cats: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/03/p...ying-virtual-cats-on-the-ethereum-blockchain/ This is already immensely slowing the ETH platform down and has lead to issues. Remember, those are just a bunch of idiots playing a kitty game, now imagine what happens when ETH tries to go for world-wide adoption for businesses and normal contracts or transactions. Absolute clusterf*** with no solution right now, this project hasn't advanced in years and besides those scaling issues also has severe security issues and other problems to worry about.
I agree with you on ETH. The only reason I buy it right now is because it's fast enough for me to pick it up transfer to Binance and get my alts without waiting a long time like with BTC.
