To Hodl or not to hodl

| roger nunn

The crypto world is full of opportunity, opportunities to strike it rich and opportunities to lose a lot of money. The problem is to know what to do.

The control of money rules human activity, so there are huge numbers of people wanting to jump onto the bandwagon of easy money through crypto. The easy money idea is great but it is never guaranteed, it mostly comes with the luck of owning the right crypto at the right time and then selling at the right time.

The easy money idea is thwarted by our own greed and emotional involvement. We FOMO in as soon as free money seems to be on the horizon, like Dogecoin, where many people bought huge amounts after it had gone up. The extra buyers put further upward pressure on the price, increasing the FOMO induced purchasing even further.

It’s easy to find people online explaining how they got rich through buying Doge but not many are willing to admit how much they lost by buying at the top and watching its value drop. They perhaps had not realised that the price rise is fueled by new fiat money coming in, so when others sell their Doge and remove the money, prices drop.

I watch the daily fluctuations in the coins at the top of the market capitalisation tables. The prices have being going up and down like a yoyo recently but I have found that you have to monitor them constantly to make a profit over and above the costs of trading.

My decision for the moment is to HODL what I have and only sell when a coin gains more than 100%. Life is less stressful and it seems to me that having some crypto is important to be able to gain in the longer run.

So I HODL a selection of different coins and try hard not to suffer from FOMO.

What comes as well as crypto?

| roger nunn

I am happy that I got involved with crypto and spend some time every day listening to youtubers, checking prices and then trading.

It’s working but I don’t feel that I want to do only crypto trading. I have spent a lot of time looking for the new ways that technology will change our lives and how I can get involved with it.

I have looked at electric cars, AI, etc but don’t have the resources to get involved in a meaningful way.

I am involved now with remote analysis of local data, using a new technology called Mioty. It allows free long range and low power data transfer even when other tech fails due to excess users.

The Company is called Enduralink, getting onto a new tech as an early adopter.

https://www.investmentnetwork.sg/business-proposals/iot-industry-40-b2b-15-1178001

Crypto growing pains

| roger nunn

When I was a child my parents used to talk about “growing pains” in relation to real or imagined difficulties experienced by myself or my siblings.

I never found out if there was such a thing as a growing pain but I feel that the idea suits crypto currencies very well.

Crypto is no longer new but it has not yet matured at all. It is leaving infancy and is unlikely to die, especially given that its market cap (total value) exceeds 2 trillion and it keeps finding new use cases (areas where it adds value to the current way of doing things).

I see crypto as a teenager, suffering from growing pains as it starts to mature, still unsure of what the future hodls and full of excitement about its place in the world.

Once crypto grows up there will probably be less uncertainty but also less excitement linked to its current unpredictability.

Therefore now is a good time to learn and get involved, even making money in the process.

Now…..should I buy or sell some crypto?

| roger nunn

We have had a few weeks of dropping prices (in US$) of most of the crypto space. At the time of writing, a recovery seems to be in the air but,…..

There seem to be equal numbers of doomsayers predicting a collapse as predicting a huge rise in Bitcoin ( with some others being touted as the replacement of bitcoin).

So what should I do?

Right now I am trading coins and tokens against one another, buying those that have dropped in value with those that have risen. This system works, slowly and with a lot of manual intervention. I have looked, and am still looking for an AI based robot that will do the tedious buying and selling for me, making money as long as there is fluctuation.

If there is a good auto-trading bot that works I am unlikely to hear about it, the owner will simply build his portfolio while saying nothing.

I still don’t know whether to sell my holdings or to buy more, one of which is likely to be a money making step.

I will probably play it safe, buy a little and hope that the whales manipulate the market in my favour.

What’s next in crypto?

| roger nunn

No one knows the future, unless they control it. In crypto there are a number of parties battling for control of the technology and the wealth attached to it. A number of writers have compared the adoption of the blockchain to the adoption of the internet, with the fortunes that were lost and made.

As things are at the moment it seems that the use of the blockchain is increasing exponentially, with more and more uses appearing daily. The positive side of the development is the very high returns on investment for those who choose to invest in the winners.

Unfortunately, non-wealthy people like me cannot influence the market, nor can we easily guess what is going to succeed and what will fail. Right now we have had a huge drop (50%) in the value of Bitcoin with a corresponding drop in the value of the altcoins.

So what is the best strategy to follow. I prefer caution, which means minimising risks. So I continue to sell my coins when they have made a profit, and buy low. It’s difficult to decide, given that had I sold my hodlings a month ago I would have made more profit.

Could have! , Would have!, both ideas that rely on hindsight. So in keeping with the idea of caution, I have sold most of my holdings, taking profits on them.

I hope that we are in a bear market and intend to buy more in the Autumn, depending on whether or not there has been further drops. At least I am in profit now, even if the markets shoot up.

I have kept small amounts of some coins anyway, so even if there is a big rise in prices, I will still make profits.

Having said all that, it’s easier to make profits in a rising market, and I like it when all the charts are green.

Is crypto finished?

| roger nunn

Whenever Bitcoin changes value the rest of the crypto market reacts, usually mimicking Bitcoin’s moves. There are many opportunities to make money buy strategically buying and selling other coins, provided that you time their changes against the value of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s value dropped by half in the last couple of weeks, which brought out the doomsayers, with endless reports about the end of Bitcoin.

In reality it is a bit more complicated. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and because of its inherent limitations in terms of speed, has morphed into a store of value rather than a useful tool.

The rest of the crypto world is developing quickly with new coins and tokens coming online all the time, most of which have specific use cases. The development of the crypto world is very competitive with their relative values changing constantly, as was the case for web based businesses in the early days of the internet.

So I believe that as the crypto market matures, there will be many opportunities to make money. However there will be many opportunities to lose money as well, which is why I have only invested money that I can afford to risk.

Now each Bitcoin is worth close to US$ 40k, taken by many to be a disaster. Many panicked and sold their holdings at a loss, a stupid thing to do and one that only exacerbated the situation.

At $40k, each bitcoin is worth about 4 times what it was a year ago, so profit is still the order of the day.

Anyway, I don’t like the current sideways movement of Bitcoin’s value as big fluctuations provide a better opportunity for me to buy and sell at a profit.

What’s in a hardware wallet?

| roger nunn

When I started looking at crypto there were lots of comments online of what a disaster Mt Gox was for Bitcoin owners. Mt Gox was an exchange that was hacked and many people lost Bitcoin.

So it is clear that if exchanges can be hacked you can lose your crypto.

The answer is to to keep some of your crypto on exchanges for trading purposes and to store the rest “somewhere safe”, in a hardware wallet. Given that all crypto movements are stored online, in a publicly readable format, it is hard to see what you can store in a “hardware wallet”. I find the name slightly misleading as I feel that my Bitcoins should be in the wallet, perhaps in a form that I can get out.

In fact, the hardware wallet is just a password protected memory stick that stores your private keys, each private key being just a string of numbers and letters. Now I can imagine that, a wallet that has keys in it, keys that serve to open up access to value stored on the blockchain.

So far, no one has managed to take a Bitcoin address (public key) and find the private key through running computer programs. This means that without the private key, no one (not even you) can recover the money from the blockchain.

Interestingly, when I first started with crypto, there we no hardware wallets and I just printed out the private key and hid it away where no one would find it.

So, after looking and looking, all I found in the hardware wallet was a series of numbers and letters.

I have simplified it but feel that this covers the essential points, or “Not your numbers, not your crypto”.

Crypto in a falling market

| roger nunn

For the past couple of weeks the crypto market has fallen quite a lot. Actually, Bitcoin took a huge dive and the rest of the market followed.

I look at it like a set of planets hanging on elastic with the market capitalisation of each being equivalent to the gravity of each. This means that as one crypto is affected by an outside event all the others are affected too, one way or another.

The analogy isn’t very good but it gives me a way of watching the value of coins relative to others that I hold, rather than just watching the price in $.

For me there are far too many coins and tokens to monitor so I have selected about 25 that I watch. I add or remove them as news changes my focus.

When one of my trading coins goes up relative to another I trade, regardless of the hype, and so increase my overall holdings. It is slow but it steadily builds a portfolio.

I get my share of FOMO when I see a coin going to the moon but I don’t buy after it’s gone up. I only buy the red ones. Green means sell.

Btw, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I buy and it goes on dropping. Then I wait.

Crypto prices, finding a new normal?

| roger nunn

In the last couple of weeks Bitcoin has gone from an all time high (ATH) of over $ 60 k to around 40 now.

There have been stories in the news of what a failure bitcoin is and its lack of stability, etc.

It’s only a couple of months since people were questioning whether Bitcoin could get to 40 k and being delighted when it happened.

I consider this to be ridiculous, as we react happily to an upward movement in prices and dream of being rich and then despair because of a correction, partially caused by people taking out some of those riches.

Now the prices seem to have settled and started going green again, heading upwards.

I get around the problem by making a strategy and putting in buy and sell orders that generate a profit without me having to sit and watch all day.

I don’t make 100 X gains but as they are few and far between I can manage without them.

Remove emotion from trading and hodling.