It is not uncommon to log in to a cryptocurrency site and find the values have changed by 20 percent since yesterday.
There are 1,037 different types of cryptocurrencies, including 626 that have listed market caps of at least $100,000, according to the website CoinMarketCap .
Don’t bet any money in cryptocurrency that you would not be willing to risk at a casino — that’s just one piece of insight from one of the Quora contributors listed below:
“Your odds of being a huge winner are probably as unlikely as winning the lottery. But you have a reasonable chance of walking out ahead if you research your “bet”, and then have the will power not to jump ship too soon.”
Still in? Then here’s some insight from Quora on just one of the 1,000-plus cryptocurrencies you may never have heard of:
“NEM – the technology behind this is a beast. Most coins here are variants of bitcoin but NEM is 100 percent new code with a layered design that makes it ultra fast while still able to scale and do most of what Ethereum can do. The development team has not done a good job of explaining what it’s good for, so it’s baffling to many and it’s somewhat under the radar. I like this one for a long term hold.”
Ten years ago the cryptocurrency market did not exist. No one had ever heard of blockchain technology except perhaps Bitcoin’s unknown inventor. Ethereum’s founder had just turned 13.
The crypto market cap is worth approximately $164.3 billion today, security analyst Gaurav S. Iyer wrote in a guest column for Coin Telegraph. That was on Friday, Sept. 1, 2017.
After the weekend that followed, there was a $20 billion cryptocurrency price correction, Business Insider reported. China announced a ban on initial coin offerings or ICOs, the digital coin issuing craze that helped fuel the market’s rapid rise in 2017.
“It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the fastest explosions of wealth in human history,” said Iyer, who describes himself as an advocate for commonsense, buy-and-hold investing.
Millionaires have been created through crypto crowd sales, turning Litecoin, Bitcoin, and Ether into investment vehicles that everyone wants a piece of. But with 1,037 different types of cryptocurrencies, what’s the right one to invest in?
“Now we’re entering a new stage of the crypto market, where commercial use-cases verge on mass adoption, use-case specific coins pop up almost daily, and government regulators complete rules on how cryptocurrencies will be governed,” Iyer wrote.
“With that being said, the crypto market cap may exceed $200 billion by year’s end.”
These questions, “Besides Ethereum and Bitcoin, in which other cryptocurrencies should we invest? What are the most promising ones?” originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answers by Charles Marino, Joe Roberts, Abhijit Kumar, Bill C. Riemers, TM Lee, and Jack Dunn.
Answered July 10
I’ll give popular coins a 1–5 star rating and follow up with a brief description. I’m going to still rate Bitcoin and Ethereum, so it can be used as a comparison.
Bitcoin, $42 billion market cap: 5 Stars
A $43 billion market cap makes this makes it the biggest crypto. It’s known as the Father of Cryptocurrencies. It’s considered a store of value and also known as digital gold because there is a finite amount of coins. There’s also a lot of infrastructure built around it, some examples include: paying with bitcoin at cafes, paying on online websites, using a bitcoin debit card, and depositing and withdrawing at ATMs. The leading payment processing development kits, Braintree and Stripe, include bitcoin payments which make it easy for developers to implement bitcoin into their app.
Ethereum, $25 billion market cap: 5 Stars
It allows developers to code smart contracts on top of transactions. Ethereum has been the go-to crypto for developers to launch ICOs. Also, I’ve seen more job boards listing positions for Ethereum developers. Corporate support for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is growing after 86 firms including JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, CME Group, BNY Mellon joined the collective that is seeking to use blockchain technology to run smart contracts.
Ripple, $10 billion market cap: 2.5 Stars
Ripple has had partnerships with over 70 banks. They are smaller than the ones backing ethereum. Examples are BBVA in Spain, MUFG in Japan, Akbank in Turkey, and SEB in Sweden. An interesting fact about Ripple is that all of their coins were pre-mined by the company and they still currently own over 50 percent of it. This makes Ripple a less traditional type of cryptocurrency and makes it feel more like an unregulated, overpriced security.
Litecoin, $2.6 billion market cap: 4 Stars
Litecoin was first introduced by Charles Lee, a former employee of Google and former director at Coinbase. A few weeks ago, he stated on his Twitter that he will be leaving Coinbase to work on Litecoin full time. As a cryptocurrency, it’s stable and always a few steps ahead of bitcoin. It hopes to be your checkings account, making bitcoin your savings account. Litecoin’s trading volume has been significantly growing due to a lot of volume in China. Something to keep in mind is that Litecoin is no stranger to pump and dumps: In 2014, The price went from $50 to $3 where it was quite stable for around 3 years.
Next, we move to smaller market cap cryptocurrencies.
Monero, $730 million market cap: 4 Stars
The go-to cryptocurrency used for anonymous transactions. Monero is used on online darknet markets. They are a lot more low-key but have a strong developer community. Dash, another popular cryptocurrency, used to be known for its anonymity but experts began to criticize its cryptography and infrastructure. Dash decided to pivot and focus on its GUI and ease-of-use rather than privacy. Many say Monero is the only true fungible and anonymous coin.
Waves, $434 million market cap: 3.5 Stars
Waves is a platform where you could create custom tokens, similar to ethereum. A notable ICO built on waves was PrimalBase, shared workspaces through cryptocurrencies. Waves is also approaching a solution for a decentralized exchange. This has more potential as a use-case since ethereum’s current network makes it a tough competitor. However, they’ve recently established a partnership with Deloitte which may get more of their customers building out ICOs on Waves.
AntShares, $392 million market cap: 3.5 Stars
China’s ethereum. The idea is that for the Chinese to use an ethereum-style blockchain, there would need to be a Chinese ethereum. There may be some truth to this, since Facebook and Amazon were never able to become successful in China. And for this reason, I can see Chinese partnerships and development happening on AntShares over Ethereum.
Answered Jun 1
In my view, the best cryptocurrencies to invest in at this point are those tied to decentralized services that do more than just provide a store of value. Bitcoin is still king, but Ethereum is more than just a currency. It is the fuel for the entire network of decentralized organizations and smart contracts. In short, you have to have ether to participate in those things and make them run.
Two current projects that I am invested in and see taking off are Storj (decentralized, encrypted cloud storage) and Golem (decentralized leasing of unused processing power of your own computer). Both look poised to be able to disrupt the storage and supercomputer industries in the years to come, and it is still quite affordable to get in on the ground floor of both as of this writing.
Answered Jun 10
1. Siacoin (Network token for Sia Network. The cloud blockchain network.)
Why Sia? Because we want best in class tech in lower price. Sia is just like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Then how is it different? By technology obviously and more importantly price. Check out their website.
Sia Networks would be releasing their v1.0 network on 28 June, 2017.
2. Golem Project (The network token for Supercomputing Blockchain Project.)
Golem is unique. With Golem you can build and create anything you like at lower price. AI, Cloud Computing, Rendering Graphics and everything normal computers can.
Currently no technology exists on the internet to compete with it. Recently they released beta version of their Brass project which aims at CPU rendering (Blender etc.) graphics.
Check out more about them at Golem.
3. Factom (Network Token of the record keeping Blockchain Project)
Factom is one of the projects with tons of real time uses. It is meant to record and secure any document related to governments, NGOs and industries. Think it as a record keeping storage.
“Honesty, trust and immutability” — that is the tagline of Factom. Honest because you can’t forge documents. Trust, because no one can access your data unless you want it. Immutable (because) no document can be hacked by any means.
And there are more of this list, like NEM (XEM) , Lisk Foundation (LSK), Stratis(STRAT), BitShares (BTS) and NXT(Next) as well.
Learn to have patience as well as trust your investments. The place where you are investing is not like the stock market where there is no real life significance except money. But you would also have power to trade the technology token you hold anywhere.
Answered July 10
Ripple and Golem are two good ones that I can think of.
Ripple is distributed protocol to move money around the world, but the concept is very good and the tech behind it is already proven on a large scale.
Buying Ripple can be beneficial as their value would increase with more bank tie-ups and when customers start using them, so it might be a good investment.
Golem Project holds a lot of potential value for the future, as it would effectively create a truly global, open sourced and decentralized web.
Combining the power of computers all over the world would provide all of the necessary hardware resources, and Ethereum-based payments will clear transactions.
Disclaimer: I have invested in Golem and Ripple. This is just my personal opinion on the project.
Answered Jun 19
If you are thinking of it as an investment, you are only going to lose your shirt.
It is not all uncommon to log in to a cryptocurrency site and find the values have changed by 20 percent since yesterday. Sometimes in your favor, sometimes not… The first thing a smart “investor” (does) after their research indicates they should make such an investment, is to put in a stop loss order. So you can always walk away with some of your original investment.
However, cryptocurrencies are not traded like stocks. The feedback is real time, the large exchanges take place instantly on the click of a button. Even a simple mistype like accidentally erasing your decimal in your bid price means suddenly you could be doing a very large trade for the maximum volume you can afford. Newbies will see the sudden change and start buying, or sudden drop and start selling. If you follow the ETH exchanges you’ll see at least once a month the value drops by more than 50 percent suddenly. Your stop loss orders are instantly activated, and you add to the fuel of the trading panic. So now you’ve sold out at the worst possible loss you thought you could accept. By the time get back into the website, the price has restored. You lost big, and you are going to have to double down if you want to play again.
You need to think of alternate currencies as gambling. You can win big, but also lose big. Your odds of being a huge winner are probably as unlikely as winning the lottery. But you have a reasonable chance of walking out ahead if you research your “bet”, and then have the will power not to jump ship too soon.
But it is a gamble. Don’t “bet” any money in cryptocurrency you would not be willing to risk at a casino.
Answered Jun 13
The general rule of thumb is to do your research and acquire as much information as possible regarding the cryptocurrencies. From that, understand you will have an edge in identifying potential coins and know when to exit the market.
Typically a strong coin would have strong developer backing. Imagine a coin where there is no future development for new features or bug fixes. The coin would not have a long term potential. This is the very reason why Ethereum is a good cryptocurrency.
Next, a popular cryptocurrency is crucial, it indicates a good ecosystem, strong community and the desire for the coin to improve over time.
Lastly, market capitalization is a good smoke test as this is how the market generally perceives the value of the coin. Beware the total supply trap.
We track a list of coins based on the metrics described above on https://coingecko.com
They are for informational purposes and the final decision is yours to make depending on your goal.
Answered Jul 5
Here are my opinions on the top 9 coins by market cap.
Bitcoin – The first and original, will be in high demand for the foreseeable future, but market cap is so big that there’s less potential upside than the smaller coins. The brand is super strong, but in terms of practical usage the network is backed up and the mining community has huge political fighting about how to solve its problems. So it’s not practical to shop with until they solve the scaling problem.
Ethereum – Probably still underpriced despite the recent gains and all the hype. Huge amounts of business projects are falling into its gravity well and many big companies have signed on to the Ethereum Alliance. Still has big scalability problems that are a long way from being resolved so could still have some tech disadvantages compared to up and comers despite its powerful momentum. I like it long term.
Ripple – A protocol for bank settlements. Not really a cryptocurrency, and not even a blockchain, but so many big banks are backing it that it went to incredible heights. One of the fastest transaction speeds on Earth and the ability to change between any currency, but centrally controlled, unlike all the other top cryptos. Many millionaires would disagree with me but I’m not interested in investing in this at all.
NEM – The technology behind this is a beast. Most coins here are variants of bitcoin but NEM is 100 percent new code with a layered design that makes it ultra fast while still able to scale and do most of what Ethereum can do. The development team has not done a good job of explaining what it’s good for, so it’s baffling to many and it’s somewhat under the radar. I like this one for a long term hold.
Litecoin – A clone of Bitcoin with many fixes to Bitcoin’s problems. Faster, better in many ways, with a thriving development community. Still, it’s an advanced first generation crypto and I would not expect it to compete all that well with the 2nd and 3rd generation blockchains that have world-changing abilities like decentralized applications (Ethereum and NEM.) Litecoin will probably be around in the future but I don’t expect it to be at the top. I like it for the short term.
Dash – Slick, fast, anonymous, targeted at being a practical currency for shopping for everyday use. Has a really low number of coins so it’s easy for the price to get high. They have done the best job at marketing and have been spending 6 figures a month on promotions and PR. They have gotten some traction and I like the fact that they have picked one function and attempted to own it. They were doing really well a couple of months ago but seem to have lost momentum. I am neutral on this one.
Ethereum Classic – Well, when Ethereum was young it went through a rough time and actually split into two blockchain projects. This is the evil twin and is really a different product now. Their main selling point is that they will never break the rules (its big brother did) and you can trust them 100% to do what they say because obviously they were willing to have one tenth the success in exchange for sticking to their guns. I’m not sure why a business would use this instead of the other Ethereum, which pretty much seems to do everything better.
Monero – Monero is the best coin for anonymity. For this reason it’s the favorite of Dark Web users who don’t want their transactions known. Pretty clearly there will always be demand for this, so most people think Monero will be around a long time. The development team and fan base seem solid, but it’s sinking into a niche role as the bigger coins start to attract the attention of banks and Winkelvoss types. Monero is a bit tainted by a seedy reputation so it will never get invited to the country club. I’m mildly bullish for a long hold.
Stellar – Stellar is a blockchain that’s actually doing what Ripple is pretending to do. It’s a protocol that’s able to do fast international settlements between currencies, but it has a bit more use for individuals too. It’s not as well-vetted and hasn’t attracted as much attention from big institutions, but it’s an exciting enough prospect that it came from way behind to the top 10 in a very short time. This will probably creep higher in the top 10.
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These questions, “Besides Ethereum and Bitcoin, in which other cryptocurrencies should we invest? What are the most promising ones?” originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
