If you have that much money, then I would withdraw some as it can make a real difference in your life - unless you already have a lot of money of course
Also I would be careful sharing details of how much you have - certainly in a public place.

Nice portfolio though!

I'm glad you've got some bitcoin, that is always a good idea.
As for the alts, I think you have way too many high risk low cap coins in there. I would recommend having a decent amount of higher caps alts, definitely ETH, probably also some XRP and a few more from top 10-20.
Also you have too many alts in general - it will be impossible to keep up with developments for that many coins, which will impact your decisions on when to buy and sell.

Nothing is 100% safe. It's all a question of managing risk. Even having everything offline is a risk in case you lose your private key.
Some exchanges reimburse users who lose money due to an exchange hack, and responsible ones keep the vast majority in cold storage with a minimum in hot wallets.
Coinbase I think is quite good in general, and obviously has a reputation to maintain.

Where you tend not to get reimbursed is if it's a small/disreputable exchange, or anywhere where the mistake is yours - e.g. giving your private key away, software vulnerabilities on your own pc, etc.

Generally just take sensible precautions, be careful with your keys, and don't key everything on a single exchange. A mixture of good exchanges plus some offline storage as well probably mitigates the risk sufficiently.

Now is probably a good time to buy alts as they have all fallen again with the recent BTC drop. We had been waiting a long time for the bull run to start, and since it did we have been waiting a long time for alts to take over. I do think it will happen once BTC stabilises, so yes, now is probably as good a time as any to pick  up some cheap alts - at least for the stronger and more established coins; weak and low-performing alts still represent a huge gamble.

Alts are still struggling against BTC. I don't think we'll see alts increasing against BTC until BTC has stabilised. People are still quite uncertain of what the price should be following the bullish movement since early this year. I would expect BTC to level out at some point, after which attention could well switch to alts.

I agree completely. If someone develops a quantum computer that can break existing encryption with ease, then there are much bigger targets than bitcoin. As mentioned by PrimeNumber7 above, if it becomes public knowledge that someone has hacked bitcoin and stolen say $1 million of coins, then crypto will take a nosedive and that $1 million will fall in value very very rapidly. If they steal $1 billion, then I'd be very surprised if they could cash it out to fiat before it lost most of its value.

We all know how volatile crypto prices can be, with even the merest suggestion of a rumour of bad news often enough to cause the whole market to tank. Something like a quantum hack would have a huge impact. If this hypothetical malicious actor with a quantum computer wants to make a huge amount of money, they could go after banks instead - that would be much more lucrative and probably easier. And if it's a government doing the hacking, then again it would be much more advantageous for them to hack a rival government (US vs China for example). They could wreak havoc, with infrastructure a likely target, but in theory any state secrets or corporate data would be vulnerable.

Finally we must also remember that one of the best things about crypto is that good coins are under continuous development, and defences against quantum attack will likely be in place long before it becomes a real risk. These coins are developed by some very smart and very tech-savvy people. If quantum computing becomes a threat, it won't take these people by surprise.

As I've mentioned before, I think that whilst a lot of work has gone into building quantum-resistant systems using classical computers, one of the best avenues of investigation is defence using quantum computers. There has been plenty of research into various methods of Quantum Key Distribution, and this research continues with approaches such as Kak’s three-stage protocol. Perhaps this will be quantum-attack-proof, or perhaps not. But the key here is that defence is actually moving faster than attack.

It's good to hold whilst the IEO fever continues, but I suspect this will fade and the coin will fade as well. That's just a guess for the future, however. For the moment, yes, it's a good coin and will probably continue to rise for a while yet.

I much prefer ETH, but I do think ADA is good as well. Fortunately this isn't an either/or situation, I would say if you like both, then have both. ADA has a lower price, so potentially higher reward but obviously higher risk too. ADA does have good tech in theory, but this is still mostly theory as it has a long way to go to catch ETH.

Yes, that's the whole point of them as far as I can see. They are forks of bitcoin, which is why they use the bitcoin name. But I can't see that any of them have any point or use beyond speculation based on that name.

Yes, he held his coins (or said he was going to - I hope he didn't sell):


It does go to show that it can be worth holding in crypto, even when the markets are very low, if you have solid coins there is a good chance that prices will eventually rebound upwards.

This is a question I have in general, and not just for the rise that started this thread - for a high cap coin, XRP does seem to have really sudden price movements that are not related to news about the project, it's behaviour that is normally associated with much smaller coins. I'm not sure how it happens with XRP, as it should really take huge volumes to cause such significant sudden movement.

I'm not sure that discussing all small coins in one thread will have a good effect. It will be very tempting for bagholders of low cap alts to recommend the coin they hold. I have a few myself that I want to offload as soon as the price rises a bit!

There are often threads recommending or asking for recommendations for coins that cost under $x. It doesn't make much sense though, because in crypto you can buy fractions of a coin. If you have $1000, that doesn't mean you can't buy bitcoin, it just means you can only buy 0.1 bitcoins.

Coin price is only relevant when it is considered along with the supply of coins. This is why people look at the market cap rather than the $ price.

Scenario A: a coin costs $10 and there are 1 million coins.
Scenario B: a coins costs $1 million and there are 10 coins.

A and B are exactly the same. If you have $10 to spend, you can either buy one of coin A or ten millionths of coin B, it is exactly the same. In both cases you have $10 in the coin, which is one milionth of the $10 million market cap.

XRP does look very low in price considering all of the good news that keeps appearing about this coin. I know there is always the question of distinguishing between Ripple the company and XRP the coin, and Ripple does have many non-XRP offerings, but still, XRP should be a lot higher in price than it is now. I think it was mid-2017 when it was first at this price, and it deserves a much higher price now.

I think it will always be that way with anything that can give people an advantage in business or over other people. It doesn't have to be computers, it happens everywhere. There will always be those who look to exploit a thing in order to gain personal or commercial advantage.

We've mentioned a few times how quickly this field is advancing... yesterday a team at the University of New South Wales announced they have achieved a
200x speed improvement on a 2 qubit gate!

It depends on how much risk you're willing to take. Top 10 coins are more likely to rise than top 100 are - but there will be some in top 100 that rise faster than all of top 10. Similarly top 100 are more likely to rise than smaller cap coins, but some of these smaller ones will have the highest % rises.

Yes, I think it's only a matter of time before ETH goes back above $300. This is still the best smart contract platform we have, and it should be reflected in price. Everything has been hit in the recent correction, but ETH should rebound strongly.

A lot of the discussion around post-quantum cryptography and how to protect against attacks from quantum computers is more 'how can we use conventional computers to protect against quantum attack', rather than 'how can we use quantum computers to protect against quantum attack.'

In this thread we have covered how quantum computers are superior to conventional computers only in certain ways and for certain types of problem, where they can use their quantum nature to effectively take calculation shortcuts. It has also been discussed how quantum computers might be bolted onto conventional computers in a manner similar to GPUs. But this can be done as defence as well as attack.

I am a long way from being an expert, but from my limited understanding of the basics of quantum mechanics I think that one possibly fruitful avenue to pursue is using quantum properties as a pre-emptive defence mechanism. There has already been a lot of work in this area, particularly in Quantum Key Distribution, which uses quantum indeterminacy to ensure that any act of measurement (eavesdropping) is always detected. As with any other 'arms race' type situation where you have two opposing sides competing against one another, there have been many attempts to circumvent and hack quantum cryptographic processes. Whilst these have sometimes been successful, this success is often down to exploiting vulnerabilities in the set-up rather than in the quantum processes themselves. I do wonder as the technology to both defend and attack improves, whether it will reach a point where there is a final barrier in that the laws of quantum mechanics, whether the uncertainty principle or quantum entanglement or some other facet, creates a system that is fundamentally impossible to hack.

No I don't think it is or will become a monopoly, but you've raised a valid concern.
Binance has been really ambitious since it started, and has performed hugely well. I do expect it to probably increase its dominance, but I don't think it will ever reach that sort of monopoly stage. There is a limit to how far it can go. People will be too wary of one exchange ruling everything. If it ever reaches the stage of being that dominant, I would image that people will start to make comparisons to MtGox for one, and start to get very wary.