I really do not understand how did you calculate this $2,000,000 as the value of bitcoin to be considered as a good long term store of value.

What is a good long term store of value? Do you understand the meaning? A good store of value is basically an asset that you can use to hedge against inflation..

So the long term inflation rate is about 3.22%, so any asset that can keep up with this inflation rate would qualify as a good storage of value.

That is why people tend to buy gold and properties to hedge against inflation and use as a "storage of value".

Pulling a figure of $2,000,000 is merely wishful thinking and has no economical basis.

What is the basis for $400? I think the demand for ETH to run all the DApps and smart contracts is more than sufficient to maintain it at this level. Unless there are some severe bad news, it will unlikely go below 500..

i foresee in the short term to go above $1000 though... esp with the forecasted POS coming up this year.

There is a risk in everything. And in this case, the risk is that the USD backing USDT does not exist and it is a large ponzi scheme.

While I chose to believe USDT being a 100% asset-backed cryptocurrency, I do not often hold USDT for long periods especially since I always find opportunities to buy for cheap. So i would rather buy one of the altcoin that has the potential to run up than to hold USDT for too long a period.

USDT will be here to stay for a long time.. that is my personal opinion.

One way of trading in this crypto market is to trade based on news.

You noticed that when bad news come up, the market tend to sell down for over a few days.

In this crypto market, news travel slightly slower than in the traditional financial markets cos we do not have a Reuters or financial news service dedicated to crypto.

So usually when you read coindesk or cointelegraph or just from google, you still have time to buy or sell.

This can make you good money if you are monitoring the news daily..

e.g. when I first read about IBM using Stellar, it was doing 0.022, then within the day it went up to 0.045.. and then over the few days it went up to 0.2. There is a lot of reaction time to buy or sell after you hear the news and you can still profit.

The Token generation event is conducted via 4 smart contract. The one that I see on my account is 0xc502c37f8b801e9144e785fcd7817b6a85529a95

so you can add up the inflow of ETH and multiple by 4 to get a sense of the total amount of contribution to date.

Or if you can get hold of all 4 smart contract address, then you can add up all the contributions 

Anyway I am quite sure Dragon will publish the total contribution at the end of the ICO so we should be able to know how much has been

invested.

Yes I do think that cryptocurrencies can exist alongside with state-back currencies (fiat or crypto) and that one day we will be able to use cryptocurrencies together with our own countries' cryptocurrencies (crypto-USD, crypto-Pound, crypto-Yen etc) but this can only happen if there is a means for govt to monitor and control the flow of these currencies.

If there is proper KYC and accounting of cryptocurrencies such that govt can know where you gotten your BTC or ETH, then I think they will allow these currencies to exist alongside their own currencies.

Else the foreseeable future of crypto is an asset class much like gold or commodity.

Yes Crypto is the future. This is correct.. I am glad that you did not just say that BTC is the future as BTC is just one crypto and will not support every aspect of our future.

Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain is changing our world and many businesses with smart contracts and the immutable recording of data on the blockchain.

We can make a lot of money from crypto if we invest correctly and hold on patiently. Lots of potential is available in this industry.

I am seeing lots of opportunities and just do not have enough time to do every one of them. Wish there are 72 hours per day!

Yes. Crypto exchanges exist to make money and they need to find coins that will have high trading interest and trading volume before they will list them.

Listing a coin requires backend work to ensure they can accept deposits of that coin and to be able to support the withdrawal. This is even more work if it is not an ERC20 token and that the coin have their own wallets.

So if there is no trading volume to make it profitable for Binance, they will not list it.

Do evaluate what's the likely returns of the ICO before investing. Perhaps it is likely that the ICO will provide a positive return but will it be better than if you were to just hold on to your BTC?

That is the question you should always ask before entering into any ICO.. will holding BTC or ETH be better than investing into the ICO.

I would also not enter into any ICO if there is nothing that catches my eye.

More and more ICO are launching on NEO nowadays especially for companies that want to be able to do their business in China. Chinese companies will want to do business with companies in China and NEO is recognized as a Chinese product.

I would say that NEO will eventually hit at least half of ETH value.. I would dare say $1000 for NEO would not be a problem.

Hold both ETH and NEO!

I think all Central banks will have some fear over cryptocurrencies as a decentralized currency will mean that the Central Banks will no long have control over the money supply or the exchange rate of their own state currency. Then the central bank will cease to exist as they will not be able to influence any monetary policy.

But commercial banks can see this crypto trend as a opportunity and provide more services to customers to buy/sell/invest/trade crypto and make tonnes of money doing this. Any commercial bank today that is willing to accept crypto as a deposit or to provide liquidity to crypto customers will see a huge influx of funds overnight. But I suspect they do not want to offend the Central bank or they are tied by regulations to provide this to crypto customers..

Soon we will see Central banks offering their own state-back cryptocurrencies.. one that they can control and one that they can use to continue to maintain control over us as citizens..

What we as citizens of the new world can do is to support decentralization of power and not be tied to any authority by promoting the use of decentralized currencies.. buy and use crypto!

I would not keep any money in gold. While it is a good storage of money (for now), it has little chance of capital appreciation when compared to bitcoin or equities.

I keep 1/3 my money in crypto and 1/3 my money in equities and 1/3 in property investments.

property investments served as a hedge against inflation while the other 2 are for capital appreciation.

This has served me well over the years.

It depends on what coins you want to keep for the long term.

These coins which form your long term investments must be kept in your own wallet and in a hardware wallet if supported.

For those coins that you are trading, then keep on the exchanges.

It is important to evaluate what are the coins you are really thinking of keeping for the long term.. if you are having a problem keeping track, then it probably means you have too many on your portfolio.

Any exchange can also close down.. so pls be careful when storing coins on the exchanges.

We are witnessing lots of market manipulation in the crypto markets.

When a public figure belonging to a financial institution speak badly about crypto, you can be sure he has shorted the market or he is buying the market when it drops.

When fake news get sent out, like the fake Vitalik death last year, it was to manipulate the market.

And for the smaller markets, the daily trading volumes of many alt coins are below 10million. It does not take much for a single trader to sell the market in order to buy it cheap later on.

Plus there are so many pump and dump groups, what they are doing is price manipulation as they are coordinating buys or sells at the same time to move the markets.

This is happening all the time in crypto markets as the regulations are not as strong yet.

P.S. this does not mean that manipulation is not happening in traditional markets... you just dun hear about it publicly as regulators are on the lookout for manipulators in those markets.

Yes you will be right some day when the crisis comes.. but in the mean time, you will be missing out a lot of gains if you are just worrying about the next recession.

The world economy is still chugging along well and if you look at all the indicators, a lot of economies are doing very well and companies are generating profits.

Ultimately it will be either sudden surge in inflation or another financial scam that will bring down the markets, so what we can do is to protect ourselves by diversifying and also keeping a close tab on the markets. Be nimble in this market but staying vested so that we dun lose potential gains. I rather enjoy 100% gains and experienced a 20% drop in the markets (technical definition of bear market) cos i will still be positive in my portfolio.

I know too many people who have been "predicting" this crisis for 3 years now.. but the market has been ignoring them. I been staying vested with the stock market and crypto market 

Lets all stay vigilant in this market and we will be rewarded.

There are 2 ways of looking at things.

Pre-sale seems to be the best time to get into any ICO as it offers very good discounts but sometimes this can be a double edge sword.
If there is no lock-in for the pre-sale tokens, then the big whales who have bought in during pre-sales may dump their tokens once it is listed. Many big whales are not looking to make 10x on their millions.. they want to get in and out with a decent 20-30% gains and not be tied to a single token for long.

So the other perspective is that when you see ICO with deep pre-sale discounts, you must understand whether the investors are lock-in. If they are not, then the best time to buy would be once the tokens are listed.. as the dumps will usually drop the price of the tokens below ICO price.
I have noticed many times when I could have gotten double the tokens if I were to buy at listing versus ICO.

Moreover with the rising ETH prices, sometimes we do not want to be lock in for too long.. as the lost in ETH gains (after we invest into an ICO) can actually afford us more tokens if we are to buy at ICO.

just my view.

BTC has greater ambition than as a national currency. It wants to be the currency of the people and a currency that transcend borders.

For bitcoin to be officially recognized as one nation's currency would be for the govt to admit that they are not able to maintain credibility
of their own currency and have to adopt BTC as their national currency.. which nation do you think will do that?

anyway there is no need for BTC to be recognized as a nation's currency. What is needed is for cryptocurrencies to be accepted as one
of the medium of exchanges or as a type of financial asset that can be freely traded. This would be the win we want.

This is good news isnt it? The crypto market is recovering and prices are increasing.

However I would approach this cautiously as it may not be a real bull run as the market is still weak.

I would not be surprised to see BTC and the cryptos trading within a range for a while more as traders are likely to sell

when BTC hits 12000 and buy when it hits 9000 again. Just be careful if anyone is buying at this price.

The idea of a decentralized currency like bitcoin and cryptos... is that banks are not needed.

But we all know this is the real world and banks will want a cut of the pie. They will collude with govt to create regulations such that financial transactions will still need to go thru the banks. State-backed cryptos will never be truly decentralized and real crypto-currencies like bitcoin and litecoin will only become closer to financial asset at best.

japan is probably the only country who will make crypto legal-tender. The rest of the countries will at best categorize bitcoin and crypto as assets. And this will mean that banks will continue to be required to handle your money. So bitcoin will become one of the products that banks can help you to manage as well; with a fee of course.

NEO will reach $1000 by 2018. This is the most likely scenario as more and more ICO gets launch on NEO, we will see a higher demand for NEO.
ETH will still be the leading smart contract blockchain but NEO will be climbing up closer to ETH by 2018.

NEO is doing what ETH was doing in 2017. Even the founder of NEO Da Hong Fei is doing advisory to ICO now, as per what Vitalik was doing in 2017 (Vitalik stop after ICOs went viral).. so I suspect NEO will follow exactly ETH's 2017 footsteps and then reach 1000 this year.