Bitcoin Forum

I wrote a post 2 weeks 'why i'm not selling my coins'.

At the time, it appeared that BU was gaining serious momentum, but
now we appear to be deadlocked again.  I'm not going to get too political
about this, but to make a long story short, stalement = blockstream/core
getting its way = little to zero on chain scaling in the forseeable future.

And what appears to be happening is that Bitcoin is being subverted,
not just by Blockstream but by outside actors who are employing a
sophisticated divide and conquer scheme.

Notice how neither segwit or BU can win the mining war... and that
is exactly what 'they' want.

I hope Bitcoin prevails but I am no longer comfortable keeping all my
eggs in one basket.

But I am afraid you may face your eggs broken in the new basket. The rally of leading altcoins seemed phased just before falling back. So close watching is highly suggested.

Today I read another group of people tried for bitcoin ETF and got the same consequences what Winklevokoss faced. I guess some people by "somewhat " will make bitcoin ETF into reality in very near future. I feel just holding bitcoin is more safer for me.

Honestly I feel the same way.

A lot of others are also hedging against a potential bitcoin collapse altogether by protecting their wealth and buying into altcoins such as Ethereum, Dash, and Ripple. Even though am I a strong believer of bitcoin, just like OP, i cannot help but try to be the safest with my funds.

I'll be diversifying probably 30% of all my bitcoins into altcoins.

I hope bitcoin can sort itself out this time round, and end this debate altogether. I don't care which side wins, honestly. As long as we have a working payment processor without the debates.

Good lord man, are you getting paid per thread or are you just a special snowflake who needs constant attention?

No one cares.

Good luck buying coffee with your altcoin BTW! Bahahahahahah....

The logic is fucking brilliant. Bitcoin blocks are too full and fees are too high to use it as a daily currency, so I'll sell my bitcoins for an altcoin that no one anywhere accepts (or will ever accept) as a currency.

Hahahahahah... oh lord.

Don't know what you invested in, but I definitely think altcoins are way more risky than bitcoin will ever be.  And I don't think that fits the definition of "hedging" either.  Diversification,  maybe.  Hedging I don't see.

At the same time the demand for bitcoin is increasing and real world applications are more numerous than ever.
This is arguably the worst time to decrease your position. Good chance you're sitting on a profit anyway, why not ride it out?

It is happening. The future will be decentralized. With or without you.

Yes, never put your eggs in one basket.

But if you want to hedge, i am not so sure about hedging bitcoin losses with altcoins because bitcoin sometimes can go against the general altcoin price trend, but in other times if there is an attack of a critic on cryptocurerncy in general then the altcoin prices can fall as well.

I think that buying some options or simply hedging using fiat is a good idea.

Or you could place bets against long positions, such as buying bitcoin and placing a bet on fairlay which predicts that bitcoin price will fall down to a certain level.

Where are you watching all of this play out? What's your source for the moves of this dance between BU, seg, and BTC?

And where are your hedges?!

Come on, give us the juicy details!

You should be happy about this :)

Now that I have some ether, I'll
likely not care as much about trying
to talk some sense into people
like you that think they're smarter than Satoshi (https://webonanza.com/2015/10/02/did-satoshi-predict-pooled-mining-big-farms-and-asics/).

Don't let the trolls get to you. How much did you get in at? Big buy position or building up slowly?

Alts ain't for hedging as far as I'm concerned. They're for gambling.

If you're looking to diversify your retirement fund you don't walk into a casino and throw everything down.

In this climate it seems a good move to diversify into alts but beware of pump n dumping shitcoins. Go for established ones. My favourite is Dash but I'd be cautious of that too after how much it has risen lately. Same goes for eth (which I don't like personally anyway) To me litecoin looks quite good at the moment, its very established, accepted on lots of exchanges, and price still depressed.

In general I think a healthy market for alts is a good thing and much preferable to using sidechains and such nonsense on the bitcoin blockchain. This is the free market working to help resolve bitcoin scaling problems. I think bitcoin doesn't need to scale but needs to forget being currency for buying coffee, lets alts pick up that role. Bitcoin can be great as the reserve of crypto and a premium settlement layer and store of value for large transactions.
   

Exactly. Altcoins are pump and dump. A casino. You see the rises, +300 +500 +3000% and think wow, bitcoins is going down, civil war BU Core bad for price.
And think, I want in on that action.

You are too late,  you will be scammed.

All the rises that took place happened a few days ago. You missed it. Entering now is far, far more dangerous than it was last week.

The smart money at that casino has already taken their chips off the table.

That is profits in.. what? *Drumroll* --- BITCOIN.

And that is the only reason anyone trades alts. To (hopefully) increase the number of bitcoin they have.

If you want to do this, its a good idea to get in before the pump has started. Not when it is finished or nearly finished.
All that happens next is the price drops down on these coins. Especially the thinly traded ones.

Just a word of warning.

Each to their own, but for me trading alts has been a very good move. You do need to know what you are doing though.

edit: I'll qualify it a bit, its not so much trading in my case. Rather I'd describe it as researching first. Find some crypto(s) with fundamentals you believe in and are willing to hold long term. Make sure you are able to hold them securely off the exchange so you are protected in event of govt intervention, hack or whatever and also less tempted to trade badly. Wait for a good price point to start accumulating, ie don't buy when it is rising 100's of % instead wait until after a fall daily MACD looks to be turning back up. Wait patiently. When it starts looking overbought, take some profits (add to another coin, maybe bitcoin or another).

This is a very good call, just your timing is pretty bad.
Watch closely the market movement, some alts were pumped while there was the "fork uncertainty" and now a dump may happen. Make sure you don't buy right before a dump :)

I understand the timing is bad from a TA standpoint with the alts being expensive, but since BTC still $1000, makes sense for me.  If alts are dumped because certainty resumes with BTC, i'll only lose a little on the hedge but gain on BTC.

Very shitty idea. You can't trust altcoins. Nobody can. Most of them turned out to be scam, and it won't change in time. Investing in altcoins is no different than playing dice.

If you are going to hedge yourself, hedge in FIAT or Gold at least. The term "hedge" is being used for protection/precaution. Investing in altcoins is not a protection, it's a higher risk.

If you want to protect yourself from the risks of bitcoin, you hedge yourself by investing in safe assets. Not pump&dump scamcoins.

If you just wanted to make $$$ short term, the time to have bought in Altlandia was last year. When no one wanted it or cared.

If you are getting onboard now 'cause hype and "dur hur alts winning, Bitcoin failing dur hur", we'll I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

Short term perception <> long term reality.

I'll just leave this here:
http://altcoinobituaries.com/

Jonald_Fyookball has been warned many times, even after making walls of text how great BU is this noob finally realize that BU is a scam afterall.. :D

Jonald is an active r/btc memeber, all those noobs leaving there sinking ship for....ETH...LOL and they bought at the top  :o

sigh...no its blockstream that is the scam.  BU just wants to fix their mess.  believe whatever you want though

This site is just brutal. But 80% off all the altcoins will end up like this. Still a shame of litecoin. I liked the coin.

I'm paying to remove risk.   

Either Bitcoin overcomes the growing pains and goes to the moon,
in which case i'll be a happy camper... or it doesn't, in which case
another coin will take over and I'll be an early adopter on that one.

Either way I win.

Who panics first panics best. Would be a mess when SegWit wouldnt be activated, this destroys the roadmap and so bitcoin's future. This results in a Titanic scenario. I am just waiting to see how this all ends. Moon or 0.

Right now? Good luck with buying high and trying to sell higher.

Why not employ a bunch of haitians and buy a hotdog stand instead? That's a real diversification.

based on my experience anybody who stays in altcoins for too long is a fool, no offense but history has proven that altcoins aren't really something to think of as long term investment.

and on top of that all the facts about them points toward it being a bad idea. facts such as all the bugs and problems, small and fundamental, they have. facts like the manipulations, the scam ICOs and the premines and massive premines. you can't just close your eyes on all of them and make wish to have a successful investment!

that would be childish and the dog eat dog trading market is no place for such behavior.

Some alts like Doge and Litecoin stayed absolutely steady in dollar terms, even as the bitcoin pump happened from November onwards. Which meant that if you used bitcoin to buy either doge or ltc in Jan, you would have locked in bitcoin's dollar value at that point.

That's what usdt is for. Anyone buying doge with the expectation of preserving their dollar value is a freaking maniac.

Diversification is very important when it comes to investments and I am happy that you have decided to go for it. It will prove to be a wise decision in future.I myself have diversified my bitcoins into 30 to 40 altcoins (both established and new altcoins included). I am still holding 25% of my total crypto portfolio in bitcoin.

@jonald_fyookball getting out of bitcoin is a good move, i personally wouldn't risk at all (unless it would be a very small amount). But many investors didn't look past bitcoin and they became maximalists, so they'll end up with #diedHolding meme on their tombstone.
Out of curiosity, where did you diversify your money ?

I bought ether, dash, and litecoin.  yes, none of them is perfect, they all have their issues.

would have bought some monero too but too much of a pain with the way their wallet structure currently is.

Ok, dash and ltc seem like a good hedge if you don't wanna lose money. But then you could just buy UDST with it. I do recommend you to read about ethereum's short term development. With privacy, scaling and smart contracts it will become an all in one project.

Interestingly, you never see any of the long term holders posting these hopeless threads. Why not? Because they've seen a thousand altcoins die.

If the Bitcoin experiment fails, these altcoins are going to fail as well. There is a reason every altcoin trade against Bitcoin. And why not? Why not use the most available global currency for trustless global payments we have?

Altcoins are for daytraders.

No, you seem like a bitcoin maximalist. Eth has its own market, and about half, depending on day, is traded in fiat.

So instead of spending time in the Eth forum, you're spending it here instead. You seem desperate to get Bitcoin users to buy Eth.

Wonder why the desperation?

By "here" you mean what ? Even though the name of the forum is bitcointalk, it's not just about bitcoin but crypto and blockchain generally. And it's a public topic.
So, as i suspected, you indeed are a bitcoin maximalist.

On this exact date:

ETH = ~$52
BTC = ~$1035

Let's pull this post up at the end of the year (12/30/2017), and see which one did better.  Shall we?

^{(oh that's right, you'll be long gone by then)}

Even if we talk about the future performance, eth is the one most likely to outperform, as in % increase. But it's not just about that, my opinion is that there's like 25% chance for bitcoin to spiral to death, assuming you don't manage to get out in time. That's the biggest problem.

Buying low will give you enough time to get out if needed. BUT btc wont die. It can only die when it doesnt get enough air when its landed on the moon.

I think most of the big traders use to do the same thing, i have also done and had good profit. I sold my Bitcoin @ 1150 to 1200 range and that time i had bought ETH, ICN and then i sold ETH and bought back btc @ 1000 range and that way only you can make more profit.

if bitcointalk had an activity bar chart for days in months like the one it has showing hours in the stats in the profile, we could see which weeks mining1 is most active.
hint: it was not when ETH was dumping to $9

Looking good so far  8)

dammmmn litecoin just popped.

Doge is holding up splendidly in dollar terms...!

It's unlikely to in the long term though.  Doge has had a slight recovery since its huge dump, partially because of the general rise of altcoins, but it won't last.  Doge is dead anyway.

Did you buy LTC?

What are peoples experience with USDt? Do you believe it to be safe?

If Satoshi wanted everything to be done on-chain forever he wouldn't invent gradual block subsidy decline/mining reward halving.
We are having cheap transaction fees because there is block reward still being distributed, namely transactions are subsidized by the block rewards.

Agree. I've never sold any of my btc, however I put a few hundred into a handful of alts when they were disliked. XMR in July 2015, ETH in Jan 2016, LTC when it was hovering around $3 - $3.5. Also a couple others.

Only the coins I can see sticking around for a while and that have a *possible* future use.

My main reasoning is that if the cryptoeconomy expands, so will the caps & price of these coins.

Lets see in 5 years.

Who said everything needs to be done on-chain forever?

I'm sick and tired of these bullshit all-or-nothing arguments.

No, we don't need to be on-chain forever... and we don't need to plan a century in advance either. 

I guest all of you geniuses that have divested into every shitcoin imaginable have never cared about things like merchant adoption, global acceptance, and all that, you know, really important cryptocurrency stuff.

Only ONE coin is talked about most in the worldwide news.

Only ONE coin has the MOST merchant adoption (hell, 99.99999% of alts have ZERO).

Only ONE coin has anyone even TRYING to get it considered for an ETF.

Only ONE coin has been around for 8 years, still going strong, the price higher than it has every been in its history.

Only ONE coin has wealthy people buying millions of $$$ worth as a long term investment :
https://gemini.com/auction-data/

Only ONE coin is being traded around the world on EVERY exchange.

Only ONE coin is being bought vigorously off-exchange around the world:
https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

And that coin is Bitcoin.

Everything else is a wannabe for troll trading fodder.  History will prove this out.

Mostly agree, but Bitcoin is not invincible. 

Right now it is on the decline in terms of marketshare and utility,
and major companies like Dell and Fiverr stopped accepting it,
so we're possibly going backwards in terms of adoption.

Does this not concern you?

Concern me enough to think that a shitcoin up-and-comer could do better?  Or even get to where Bitcoin is now?  And do it soooo effortlessly, without all the trials and tribulations that Bitcoin has already gone through?

Nah, I'm a lot brighter than that.

This is what n00bs will end up doing if they keep jumping off one train (Bitcoin) for another supposedly "better" altcoin, because they don't think that things are moving fast enough in Bitcoin land. And they will continuously lose money and fail each time they do it.

https://i.imgur.com/LBXFSGe.gif

Remember, a new form of worldwide money, if is to be successful, will need to be around for decades.

DECADES. Not just a year or two.  DECADES.

Might as well gets trashed by mods.

If I were you though, I wouldn't use the word hedge in an altcoin unless you buy altcoins that rarely moves up and down in price like doge. It was a nice call though but I think it was too late for you to invest on ethereum right now that it has been pumped real hard to 0.05+ BTC. Because of the big pumped that happened to eth the risk of it falling down in price this week or another was greater than any of those altcoins around now.

In either scenario it is never a good idea to keep all of your eggs in one basket even in your most ideal situation.

But if you hurl your eggs at 50 baskets made of steel they're not going to last very long.  There aren't actually a lot of stable altcoins and even the stable ones are bad to invest in right now as they're in the middle of big pumps and are unlikely to go much higher.

woooah whats with all these altcoin blings that started appearing?  good april fools joke theymos

It's funny how Dash and Etherium were hot a few days ago and now it's Ripple. I wonder how high Ripple could go and will it drop back at some point.

Ripple isn't a real crypto imo.

without realizing it yourself you have actually answered yourself!
the same way Dash and Etheerum has been hot a few days, Ripple will be hot a few days then XYZ coin will be hot a few days and so on.
just take a look at the history of all these altcoins and you can see their future from the charts!

and the funny thing is that they always get replaced by a duplicate coin very similar to them and again the same story of pumps and people saying this time it will last will continue.

Not bad at all as long as you divide into some parts instead of keeping all of yours in altcoin.
We know some alts has genuine idea and bigger potential to grow and rise than others as time goes on.
However, bitcoin still doing so good all this time. Look at the charts of bitcoin (price or unconfirmed transaction), it's getting better even though the debate about development shows no sign that would be ending soon.

ok now lets see how all your eggs have been doing so far:
start from 2017-03-29 (topic creation time) up to today 2017-4-12
Bitcoin $1023 ---> $1230 ---> +20%

Ether 0.059BTC --> 0.035BTC --> -40%
Dash 0.084BTC --> 0.049BTC --> -41%
Litecoin 0.004BTC --> 0.0077BTC --> +92% lol, should check back in a month since LTC pumped after all the others


https://i.imgur.com/LBXFSGe.gif
thank you @Torque for this GIF :D

If he invested big time on litecoin im sure he is enjoying his profits now and if he sold ether and dash when it was at high he might be happy with it but if not im sure he's not that sad because he still got profit on litecoin recovering his loss on the other two unless he invested bigger money on ether and dash. Its nice to see though that bitcoin is on the green right now I really do hope it won't dump soon.

right now litecoin has the hype for the SegWit going on for itself so it is an ongoing rise. and with the new pools starting to signal SegWit on litecoin it seems like we are closing in on the threshold of activation (only 1% more remaining last time i checked). and this alone will keep the price up and rising.

but in the long run it is still in a bubble and will come down. last time a nice rise happened, Chinese went crazy and dumped a massive load on the market that crashed the price down to previous levels in a couple of hours.

I took profits on litecoin.  I think all this hype for segwit will burst.

Segwit isn't all that special and won't make litecoin special.

Riiight, sure ya did.  ;)  You divested in those other shitcoins along with the rest of the n00bs.

(And btw, I agree with ya about litecoin. If it wasn't anything special then, it surely won't be with SW either.)

For the world to adopt cryptocurrency at all as a truly-integrated payment system, it's Bitcoin or bust, man.

...not sure what u mean

For short time SegWit for Litecoin was blocked the same way it is or Bitcoin. Chinese LTC mining pools increased hash power just to block SegWit.
What is interesting right now it appears that there is 78% support for SegWit: http://litecoinblockhalf.com/segwit.php (http://litecoinblockhalf.com/segwit.php)

Activation will follow and we shall see if that upgrade will be that completely insignificant as some speculators say.

i don't exactly know what you mean by the bold part!
litecoin price went up, many brought out their old equipments to mine it, many switched their hashpower from other altcoins to litecoin (as miners always do with price changes). so hashpower (hashrate?) went up. there is nothing new here, hashpower changes like this all the time, with pumps it goes up and with dumps as miners switch to a more profitable coin it goes back down.

here is a summary of what has been happening with LTC:

• Litecoin gets pumped after ETH and Dash and couple of other small coins get dumped. > price up
• F2pool startes signalling SegWit.
• support for SegWit on LTC went to 69-70%. > then price went higher.
• then F2Pool said we may reconsider SegWit. > price tanked.
• then F2Pool said we are happy about SegWit. > price went up again. (LOL).
• pump power is diminishing > price coming down slowly
• meanwhile BW.Com said we never got the memo about SegWit so Charlie Lee sent them the open letter from a long time ago. in a couple of days BW.com also started signalling SegWit and percentage went up to 78% (66% for activation period). > price went up again
• future: up and down until it activates, possibly a big dump then another pump and eventually (like all the other altcoins) back to normal low price levels!

I would say keep around 75% of your coins in bitocin and then 25% in altcoins.

The 25% of the altcoins should be diversified as well, it shouldn't be just Ethereum, Ripple, or Litecoin.

The problem with having only bitcoin is that you have put all your investments in one basket. You can't count on bitcoin to always perform like it did a month ago. You're still taking risks, and you can reduce your risks of losing by hedging against bitcoin with altcoins.

But the majority of the portfolio should still be bitcoin.

having your eggs in a basket that doesn't break your eggs is better than putting a couple of them on hot air balloons that are going to burst at any moment.
you say 25% i say either don't or if you do, remember to enter only at the bottom and dump the altcoins as soon as they rise. the dumps are as real as the pumps.