The Coins I have and Why I have Them
At the moment we are living in Bitcoin hype times, and as I have started talking and owning Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies years ago…
At the moment we are living in Bitcoin hype times, and as I have started talking and owning Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies years ago, people sometimes ask me what I own and why. This post is my shortcut, as I can just point them here.
And please remember that I am well diversified beyond cryptocurrencies and have put only a very small amount of my liquidity into them. Do not invest more than 2–5% of your assets into high risk things like this. If they go up in value and become 20–40% or more of your net worth, take money off the table at the latest. Remember this is still high high risk stuff.
Additionally, there are A LOT of scams out there and A LOT of coins that should never have existed. In case you have no IT background, do not really understand what those coins are about, keep your fingers from it. Now for the list.
Bitcoin
I started buying Bitcoin in 2013, when everyone still thought about it as a currency. These days, most people really think about it like a new world Gold. This is really already the first notion that I think is important to understand. The cryptocurrency space is no longer a one size fits all thing, but rather a lot of different things that are tokens or coins on blockchains or even only slightly related mathematical things. The idea to put them all in one basket to understand them does not work.
Why did Bitcoin rise so sharply in recent times, other than simply because more people bought it for higher prices, is a question that was often asked and I have a possibly slightly different answers.
Remember, Bitcoin does not belong to anyone, it is a really distributed system and there are different factions pulling it in different directions. That always made people uneasy in terms of what might happen when one of those factions manages to _change_ Bitcoin into something else. With the latest upgrades, one of those actually failed and this was a good thing, as it showed that Bitcoin is really, if anything, set in its ways. It is what it is.. Of course you can argue this is bad, but an alternative view is that this is making Bitcoin more predictable.
Bitcoin has become a relatively safe bet in the long term in my mind, within the real of high risk assets mind you.
Ethereum
The idea of making a blockchain touring complete, and to allow applications to run on that blockchain is simply amazing. There is a lot of opportunity in that general idea. Of course Ethereum has its own scalability problems but those will all be dealt with in due time. The team is amazing. Ethereum is the blockchain of choice for the ICO market for now and first really interesting things are starting to appear. 2018 will arguably need to be the year of signs of real usage.
Ripple
Ripple is trying to replace (parts of) SWIFT, the interbank monetary exchange. I actually got the first ones ages ago as part of the gift from Ripple Inc, and then after one of our developers was going all wild about Ripple, I added Ripple to my list and bought some more. It has a totally different set of problems, like being too centralised around Ripple Inc, but Ripple the company (with Billions of USD of its own Cryptocurrency on his own books now!!!) behind a cryptocurrency actually makes it easier for big banks to work with them, and that again makes it more likely for Ripple to build up an alternative to SWIFT. At this time all those customers are using a Ripple product that does not need the XRP Coin by Ripple, but there is another alternative product that does use XRP and is more efficient and cheaper to use. In either case, this is promising and will turn out to be one of the best Startup Investments ever for the VCs. At this time, the value of XRP reflects the general idea that all of the customers of Ripple will eventually fully use XRP. I expect this thing to drop hard some time 2018 when reality sets in.
Btw, I also have some Stellar, which was co-founded by Jed McCaleb, who was also Co-founder of Ripple and actually has still a few billion ripples under tight sale controls under his belt. Let’s call it the open and egalitarian Ripple that has gotten some traction recently too, though nowhere near Ripple. But Jed can fund Stellar for some time to come if need be. The B2C play of Stellar makes the upside bigger and the likelyhood smaller than the B2B Ripple.
Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold
I simply got those as part of the Bitcoin Split in recent times and I am holding on to them for at least a year, partly simply due to German tax laws around cryptocurrencies being treated like money. Bitcoin Cash seems to possibly become a real rival to Bitcoin though, which I heard by some very powerful people in the space, so we will see what happens there.
EOS
Often not the first mover wins, but somebody later to the game and the group that is behind EOS is really interesting. I also had some chats already with Brock Pierce and I wouldn’t count him out to say the least. If EOS manages to really launch something secure and scalable, with thousands of transactions a second, interconnecting decentralised chains, coupled with them having hundreds of millions of USDs to give to startups to use EOS as their base, this will turn out very well. Let’s call it a startup investment, but check their latest development update.
Tezos
[Tezos has gone up in flames](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/tezos-a-cryptocurrency-that-raised-232-million-in-july-is-in-crisis/) but still has a small chance of seeing the light of day. In short, the code belongs to the founders, who setup a Foundation in switzerland to take over that code after the ICO and now they are fighting and are in the deadlock. The Foundation has close to a Billion USD of crypto worth from the ICO, and the founders and their company have the code. Totally stupid to say the least. At least the money is still there, as Bitcoin Swiss AG posted.
I heard about Tezos in several podcasts and over Twitter from the right people. The idea I like most about it is that they have a voting mechanism to be able to upgrade things more easily in case of problems. I think DApps and DAOs are important but in their purest sense, aka code is law, they are going to far due to our missing experience. We still need to learn and play with this stuff as it is too new and for that, a more easily usable upgrade path in case of problems, putting people above code programmatically, is the right way to go. My mind. Let’s see how this turns out. I still wish them luck and actually … get your act together and stop playing he-said-she-said.
Litecoin
This is actually all about the founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee leaving Coinbase and focussing on Litecoin again. If something like this happens you listen and it was worth the shot. Also, Litecoin is kind of the Bitcoin playground and gets a good amount of attention. Them being listed in Coinbase is also not bad. All in all there is nothing OH MY GOD about this but a list of small things. Admittedly, that Charlie sold all his Litecoin recently to avoid conflict of interest is an emm… interesting move. Caution.
Side Note: I am still investigating lightning networks (billions of transactions a second) for another post and that might also be interesting in that in the future there might be transactions across litecoin and bitcoin through “Cross-chain atomic swaps”, as long as they can support the same cryptographic hash function. Mind blown. Need to read more.
HumanIQ
[HumanIQ](https://humaniq.com/) was one of the first app coins I bought. It resides on the Ethereum Blockchain and the idea behind HumanIQ is to give the unbanked in Africa both an ID and a Payment Mechanism and I would love for this to work. I feel best when this goes up among all of the coins I have. :)
BTW., the team feels rather un-technical but this is a good thing in this case I think.
Monero and ZCash
I will group Monero and ZCash into the general anonymity play group of cryptocurrencies. There are others, but these are the two I like, first one being the underground-gang-lords-use-it one, and second the crypto-coder-driven. You might agree with the idea of an anonymous cryptocurrency or not, but always remember that cash is very anonymous too and this has real value. Some things you want to do not under the eyes of the state or your employer or others and cryptocurrencies are really an open book. This provides a way out and an important one.
IOTA
[IOTA](https://iota.org/) is one I am fighting with myself, and I came late to the party as IoT is totally not my use case and this is exactly where IOTA has it’s adoption. While the coin itself might not be needed and I highly doubt that IOTA will every become something you use to pay other people, it might be used in their machine to machine infrastructure and that infrastructure is getting some real usage and is being praised by friends. Usage is important, sooner or later. Books will be written about this one, especially because you either love or hate it.
Something Different: Neufund
I actually committed Ether to Neufund, a fund investment they call ICBM (Initial Capital Building Mechanism), which means I can invest that money into startups and earn Neumark as a side effect, which again gives me credits in the revenues of the entire fund. It’s a really interesting concept, read the paper, and committing those ether for a year actually cost me nothing, other then them being locked up for 18 months. If I don’t invest, everything is back where it was. No risk, all fun and a really new use case. Actually, just to make the hype market clear again, my Neumark are now worth almost double my committed Ether, so I could sell my Neumark, pay 50% taxes and have my Ether sitting there for free to invest in Startups. Makes no sense.
Some other app tokens
While we are still in the time of the tools making the money, think Netscape, Exodus, Level3, Cisco, … and the applications on this network/system, like Amazon, Facebook, Google, will come later but will be way bigger still. So it might be a bit early to invest in those, but there are some that I like that might be worth the shot.
One of them is Monaco, who are building a credit card bridging the crypto and real currency gap. How much fun would that be, and a 2% cash back is good too. Let’s see if it works.
[Augur](https://augur.net/) is a decentralised prediction market where you can put your money where your mouth is, nice concept.
[Aragon](https://aragon.one/) is about creating a platform to be used to build your own company on the blockchain, with shares, and voting and so on. Very cool indeed as I love the space in general. They are also making some huge progress at the moment. Check their latest update on Medium.
[Golem](https://golem.network/) is the first network of idle compute resources… on the blockchain, as the concept has existed for a long time, just remember the Seti@Home Project that was running on my machines when I was still living in a student home.
[Aventus](https://aventus.io/) is using blockchain methodologies and smart contracts in the ticket space, trying to build a totally new model about secondary sales and the like.
The Rest
If you have stuff in your own wallet (I have all of mine secured via the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, you get some tokens given to you. In my case this includes some Xenon, INS Promo, Cobinhood, GCS, EMO, Bitclave-ConsumerActivityToken, SSS, VIU, DataCoin, AMM and OmiseGo. I am not really sure what to think of those though. I just add them here for the fun of it, maybe you have a view on them :)