I think the question here is why people are holding coins despite that everything points to decline in price (no matter what kind of intentions creator of the currency has) and miss oportunities for profit. Personally I had lost thousands of BTC on bad decisions (not bought when I had to, sold too early, bagholding). I think there is nothing wrong holding a coin, but lately that concept is not working very good.
Just asking.. is it 1000+ btc's or $1000+ . If its thousand btc's, you should very rich guy for you to gamble in altcoins
BTC. I can give few examples. I can't exactly remember how I did with Moon and EAC for example, but I do remember that I sold 10s of millions coins while they were dirty cheap. I do remember TIPS though.
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Back in those days I was mining with 6 x R9 270x with 2.7 - 3 MH in total. I was able to mine 130-160M TIPS/day with this hashrate. I was happy enough to sell them at 1-2 litoshi, because profit was bigger than to mine LTC directly. Probably many people remember that TIPS didn't exactly explode at first and difficulty was pretty low. It took probably 2 months until Cryptsy listed it and guess what happened?
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While you was able to buy/sell it at 4-5 litoshi on ConedUp, the price went up to 170 litoshi. I think I was holding 400M coins and participated in the "fight" for BTC pair with 227 LTC. The outcome was bad. My buy wall was eaten in under 1-2 minutes. At the end I sold my TIPS @ ~30-40 litoshi weeks later. Frankly speaking I believed that TIPS can make you very good profit, but the problem is that I am working with investor and I wanted fast results. That is why I didn't always mined TIPS directly, but I think that I've managed to accumulate about 3B coins. This is about 5327 LTC x ~$30 = $159,810.
Another example is BC. I was very active on CoinEx (nickname bulgar1an) and Smurf01 (or something like it...), which is a dutch guy who I was familiar with told me to buy when the price was 500 satoshi on Poloniex. I didn't listened to him, but then decided to buy at higher price (probably ~1000-1200 satoshi) and I bought about 250k coins. Probably a week later (don't exactly remember) sold them with x4-x5 profit and I was pretty happy. I wasn't very happy when it hit $0.58/coin 2 weeks later though. So 250k coins x $0.58 = $145,000.
So far my loses on
bad decisions (I am talking about bad decisions (impatience for example).. not that I didn't make any profit) are $304,810 at only 2 coins.
Now assume that I am mining with 420MH scrypt since May 2014 and I was able to mine $800-1100/day worth of alts. If I tell you how much LTC I have and what is my loss on bad decision (not to sell them) your mouth will stay open for hours.
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I had several bad decisions again.
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While I consider myself as a good trader, I did failed numerous of times by holding coins.
I think this will answer your question.