For sure eth is one of the less risky investments imho, with both less upside reward but also less downside risk.

If you want to go for riskier investments, you could opt for some of the newer platform-like altcoins, e.g. Cardano and NEO or one that builds on top of Ethereum like Loom.

If you want to go for less risk, then BTC, BNB or a good stablecoin are the only possibilities I can think of...

Random alts pumping give the false impression that we are in Dec 17 again. But the hard truth is we lost more than a 100 billion in mkt cap over the past month.

This is just partial recovery, not even half of what we lost. Kinda apprehensive to buy now. If short term traders bought in to ride the pump to 50% rise, they would sell at the first sign of red candles.

The last time Bitcoin was around this price in November, the volume was about half and that was in the middle of the biggest bullrun of history.
Even in December, Bitcoin volume wasn't this high, ETH volume was half of what it is now, Tether with its hundreds of pairs is 5x the volume.
15b+ isn't low - The only time it went above this was the biggest, most unrealistic run in history.
Also, people have to remember that there are SO MANY different markets that aren't included in CMC rankings Here they are - Another 4-5b in stuff that isn't counted. Same with ETH - 1.5b uncounted.

Except that it's competing with numerous other platforms, and ETH and NEO are actually up and running with viable projects on them and both have very impressive roadmaps ahead.

ADA looks solid but nobody knows if smart contract based tokenized blockchains are even the future. It shouldn't be a top 10 coin with as little to show for it as they have, I think it's overpriced atm.

Cryptocurrency is revolutionary technology where cryptocurrency such as bitcoin confirm transactions on average in under 15 minutes unlike today with conventional credit and debit cards which can take up to 3 days to confirm transactions. Also not to mention cryptocurrency is much affordable way to send decentralized wealth around the world instantly. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is definitely the future of global currency because it provides a decentralized global open ledger of trust and instantaneus transfer of wealth to one another with little to no fees.

I have been following/investing in NEO for a long time, back to Antshares days, it's a great project. They have the Chinese backing, as we all know China loves to support their own projects/companies (Ex: Alibaba over Amazon).

A major benefit over Ethereum is that developers can code within NEO using various pre-existing coding languages. Whereas, with ETH you need to learn solidity. NEO strives to build a "smart economy", which I do envision as something that will exist in the future.

If you are interested in NEO, and the overall vision of a "smart economy", I recommend you look into Elastos (ELA), which is the most important peice to the overall grande vision "Smart Economy" that both NEO and Elastos are striving to achieve. Elastos also has a smaller market cap compared to NEO, and if you do your research you will soon learn that the upside is extremely large, assuming Elastos can achieve it's goals. As much as I love NEO, I am that much more in love with ELA.

NEO has copped some slack lately for being too centralised and some minor network bugs. Aside from that it's one of the most legit projects.

They have enough funding for 5 years at this time. That's a huge sell for me considering many alts may die during or as a result of this bear market.

Also their CEO is one of the main blockchain advisors in Europe and China.

Every ALT is tied to BTC for the most part. Unless there are people fleeing from "ALT" to BTC, then the price will go up as Sat value stays the same, but BTC price goes up. Only when people exit their ALTS will BTC be the only green figure. Today just shows that money is going into BTC, and everything else is being inflated because of its trading pair. Hence why the market cap really isn't an ideal indicator of the market, but rather BTC dominance is.

The same way the market thought that the bull trend will never end. They believe the Bear trend will never end. Prices are still very high compared to a few years ago when these coins just started out. Once we see 3 months of consolidation and a floor being set we will be ready to enter a new bull run. Where and when that happens we dont know.

I'm not making a prediction here, but we've seen these bounces a lot in this market. It bleeds like hell for days on end, then we have a day or a few days of pump, then it dumps again.

I can't help but feel like we're being set up to get rekt. I'm just going to continue to hodl through this thing and hope for the best. Be careful FOMOing into this thing. There is NO ONE that can predict this market. It's as irrational as it gets.

I realize BTC is down 70% from its ATH and some alts are down 95%+. This is definitely frustrating and we're clearly in an extended bear market.

BUT, in my view, the year-over-year price (at least for BTC) is what we should be paying attention to. If by January 2019 we are still significantly below Jan 2018 prices, that would be the first time since 2015 where BTC has been lower than its price from a year ago, and would signal a possible multi-year bear market. This is how professional financial analysis is often done when evaluating a stock or a company (they compare current period to prior year year period). Recent trend is important but year-over-year is critical.

Id wait another week and then put 50% of what you’re willing to spend into the market. After that, wait until the Bitcoin ETF news of September 30; if the ETF gets approved put the rest in and ride the wave up and if it doesn’t get approved, save your money and watch rock bottom happen.

If the market dipped this much because of a delay, wait until the official decision.

I think XLM is going to do great long term, but it may not pump as fast as some other lower cap alts if this market turns around. This market does not look like its ready to turn around though, and XLM is the only one that seems to be gaining some ground.
I turned all of alts into XLM 3 weeks ago except for ETH... I turned all of my ETH into XLM 5 days ago. All turned out to be really solid moves...might have done even better turning them into TUSD, but I always feel like I shoot myself in the foot when I try that.

If you think it's going to go even lower, you should sell now and ride it out. You can choose to buy back in later if you still believe in the space, increasing your stacks in the process.

If you sell today, it drops 1%, and you choose to buy back in tomorrow, you're still up 1% relative to where you would have been by doing nothing.

I'm not buying the dip. I have figured out a crypto secret that if you just wait a little while it will dip again and then again. But don't buy just yet, you have to wait a little longer and then it will dip again and then again.

But if you think it's time to buy the dip, just wait a little longer and then it will dip again and again. Once your target coin is down 99.9% from ATH, then you can buy a little bit. But save a little bit of funds though because it will probably dip right after you buy it, and you'll want to have enough left to buy that dip too.

The price of bitcoin rose from $2000 to $20 000 in about 8 months last year. That's an insane surge and this is simple the market swinging in the other direction.

Crypto rises hard and falls hard, this is an extremely volatile market. This is why people warn you to only invest what you can afford to lose and only if you are a risk taker.

The people who didn’t buy before the last bull run and cried that they missed the train are going to be the same ones crying this time. This is your chance and you are in the fetal position feeling sorry for yourself that the market is crashing.

Either buy into some decent projects or go invest in some other market. Quit trying to make yourself feel better by bitching here, the whales don’t care.

I'm still buying because my investment thesis isn't based upon TA conjecture or the day-to-day or month-to-month price movements.

Crypto is too nascent and lacks maturity so you will have to base your investment strategy upon other benchmarks like taking a deep-dive into the tech and trying to, as best you can, understand how it works, how it compares to current/legacy alternatives as well as other competitors working in the same space.

If this isn’t the time to buy, it is close enough. If people were this careful they wouldn’t have bought in over $10k btc but people are...you know.

You win at trading by trading at the knees and shoulders, but everyone goes for the feet and head and just gets rekt because those are the hardest to call.

My main question around XRP is - why do we think banks even want to do transfers faster or cheaper? Financial Services is notoriously risk averse so they're not going to just install brand new infrastructure that will have significant (potentially adverse impacts) to its regulatory compliance efforts without a significant return on investment. Think about the cost to install, administrative cost (this is an entirely new technology they'll need to retrain or hire competent admins), cost of complexity - now all your key controls for financial reporting need to be updated or re-written entirely to be tested (this is exponentially costly depending on the size of the bank). Currently, they pass the existing costs onto consumers and they will continue to do that until the end of time.