etherium

The ever expanding world of crypto

| roger nunn

I find that I only really understand something when I do it myself. This applies to all new things in life but at the moment I’m still trying to get my head around the constant development of crypto.

I have been trading cryptocurrencies, trying to get the feel of buying low and selling on the way up. Everything is converted to equivalent values in US $, making it easy to see when the value has risen. However, this ignores the problem of fluctuating value of the $, so it would be best to find something else to use as a baseline.

There is nothing that doesn’t fluctuate in value, so I just stick to the $, this is best until bitcoin stabilises, probably sometime in 2023.

My newest experiment is in looking at NFTs. Non Fungible Token. As I see it, the difference between an NFT and a Bitcoin is that each NFT is numbered and unique while bitcoin is seen as more generic. You can own (control) a bitcoin, but no one really cares which one it is.

To try to get my head around NFTs I decided to create a work of art and put it up for sale as an NFT. NFTs are built on the etherium blockchain so I had to work from an etherium wallet. I used Metamask.

I had to save the artwork (a sketch of a new type of car) onto the blockchain and put it up for sale on an online market place. It sounds easy and is fairly straightforward. However, nothing on the public blocckchain is free, so you have to pay (in gas, the payment system in etherium) for it. It is worth choosing the time of day as the price in gas depends on how busy the blockchain is at any moment.

Thats’s my first experience of NFTs, I will now experiment with making more and maybe selling some,

What is an altcoin?

| roger nunn

History shapes language. First there was Bitcoin (there had been previous attempts at electronic money but no real success). Just ask most people about cryptocurrency and you will get comments on Bitcoin being a criminal’s money. Most people are not even aware that there are other forms of crypto.

The development of Bitcoin spawned a lot of interest in developing alternatives, supposedly able to address its short-comings. Disagreements in the mining communities resulted in copies (hard forks) of existing coins and developments of new ones. Extra ideas, such as programmable inputs were also brought in.

Now there is Bitcoin, Etherium and lots of alt-coins. Lots and lots, measured in thousands of new coins and tokens. I have separated Eth from the altcoins because of its huge market capital and because it is used a base for the creation of many other forms of crypto.

Bitcoin has increased hugely in value over the past 10 years (large fluctuations make it more exciting), so it is now considered a store of value, rather than a currency. However, its increases are dwarfed by some of the increases (and price drops) in many of the altcoins.

The problem is knowing how to choose an altcoin to buy and then when to sell it. Even when you find one that is increasing quickly, it is exciting enough that your inclination is to go on riding it up to the top. Where is the top? Nobody knows?

So what to do? Build and apply a strategy (logic not emotion) systematically. Usually this means researching a coin, buying it and then selling when it reaches a pre-determined price. Not very exciting, but it can be profitable.

Apparently it is now an alt season. Try to figure out what that means.