I don't think constantinople will make that big of a difference.
Yes, it is a great development, but we are not in a market atmosphere where mere announcements or developments shoot off a bull run.
I expect some demand to raise the price, but only for a couple days.
When the 1 to 2 day hype is over, then eth will tank more.

But, eth is going in the right direction and is showing that it has what it takes to compete with the newer platforms.
ETH is still clearly the choice when it comes to smart contracts.

Right now is a great time to buy up more.
There is no way eth will go bankrupt, expect it to rise beyond $1000 in a year or so.
Buy at the prices today and that is still about 9x profit.

There is a very high chance that the entire 2019 will be a bad year.
Many people looked at the past two years and how the end of the year brought a bull run and expected one last month.
But they also failed to look at how last time btc had a huge bull run and crashed, it didn't recover for a full two years.
First, the price tanked in the year, then next it stayed under $1000 for another year.
Then, finally in 2017, it started to rise.

Thinking like that, we can expect 2019 to be mostly flat.
It really will be a good year to track developments and build up capital.
Buy up, hodl on to it, and get ready for the next bull run.

In a market like this, actually btc is your best bet.
But I have gone in and bought up a lot of two coins: Polymath and ICON.

I still think smart contract platforms are where the most potential is.
For ICON, it fits the already established crypto implementation in South Korea very well.
They have made significant progress since last year and are still moving right along.

For Polymath, I chose it because it is the only viable choice for securities out there.
It will basically become the eth for securities.
Once the floodgates for institutional investors arises, it will be securities where most of the profit is.
And polymath is the only one developed enough to meet that future demand.

Good for you, smart people have been buying up the last month.
Alts are especially incredibly cheap now.

But I wonder, why so many different coins?
It seems like you are spreading yourself too thin.
OR course, this reduces risk, but also makes it harder for your portfolio to make huge gains.

My suggestion would be to limit your smart contract coins to only two.
And then have two more beyond that: a total of 4.

Once you make a small gain, you can easily sell off some coins and move that into 4.
Of course, it is up to you, it is just my own opinion on how I would do it.

Nope, you lose your money.

This isn't like buying something at the store, and if you don't like it you can return it.
From the very beginning, investing in crypto has been very risky.
And inside the crypto world, ICOs are the riskiest of them all.
OR, at least didn't you do at least a little bit of research and find the 100s and 100s of articles talking about what makes it risky.

In the real world, 90% of startups fail within the first 2 to 3 years.
It's the same in crypto, the vast majority of icos fail.

In this market especially, the risk is even worse. Putting things in perspective, I would recommend just not doing ICOS.

I was one of those who thought there would be an end of the year bull run.
Instead, there was a pretty spectacular crash.
This week, we saw the market pump, and there were a bunch saying, "finally, the bull run is here!"
But I didn't think so, this time I finally saw the market for what it was.

I am ready for a prolonged slump throughout 2019 now.
Especially now that most other markets are falling like traditional stocks, things don't look good.
I have planned to buy back in if btc ever hits $2500, but beyond that I am just going to wait it out.
That way, I can keep my sanity.

I don't think these terrible coins are a good way to measure blockchain progress.
Instead I would look at the already established projects and see how they are coming along.
In that department there is a lot of good news.

The 2nd generation blockchains are pumping out impressive technology and functionality.
Specifically addressing scalability and cross chain/cross market transferability.

In the simple payments category, we already have great 3rd generation coins that are free, instant, and scalable.
There are also many significant companies starting to develop their own blockchain projects.

so I am not worried at all.
Game changing tech takes time to be implemented in our daily lives.

You have a lot of good advice.
A lot of it is focused on keeping contol of emotions and not trading based off of panic or fomo.
The thing is, us humans are pretty emotional creatures.
We often act according to how we feel instead of what we know is right.

But there are practical things you can do.
The most effective thing to do is to set up simple goals.
Start with the biggest of them all: how much do you want to make out of investing?
Then move to how long you would like to do it.
Break that down into quarterly goals and you have a pretty good guidance system to base your trades on.

I think people are looking long term when they say neo will surpass eth.
It certainly has done very well in the one year its been around.
From a technical standpoint, it is superior.
It has some good market system and pretty large amount of projects built on it.

I would say the only drawback is that it is a much more expensive platform to build on than eth.
But, in a way, that can also be a good thing.
This means that it can weed out terrible projects or copycat projects.
Something that waves and eth suffers from with all of their terrible icos.

Well, honestly that chart isn't that useful because it's obviously an advertisement for MOAC.
There are a lot of things to consider, honestly I think the technical aspects are secondary.
What markets have shown time and again is that the superior technology doesn't always become the most valuable.

With smart contract platforms, it is all about market penetration and adoption.
After all, the platforms are absolutely useless unless people build on it.
In that respect, of course, eth wins hands down.
Next would be NEO, the 2nd highest network.
A lot of the others are still in speculative stage, so you can speculate, or bet on the sure winners.

Not sure if you bought yet, but if you haven't I would wait a couple days or a week.
We are in a pump right now that will definitely price check.
Typically, this happens on the weekends.
You can expect a lot of the major coins to go down 10% or so in the next couple of days.

When it does, yes, buy in with as much as you can.
We probably won't see a full on bull run for a long time.
But you can play the short term game and sell off for profits.
Then, you buy back in when it crashes.

If you want to do the long term hodl, then it is still a good price for that too.

Not just whales, but anyone who has experience as an investor has been accumulating their coins the past month.

Once the market crashed and btc went below $6000, that was the signal to buy up.
For eth, when it went below $100, that was the signal to buy too.
With ICOs desperate to sell their eth to stay afloat, there was also volume to continuosly buy at the price you wanted.

Eth will rise above $1000 again.
Even buying eth now, that is an insane 1000% gain.
People don't realize how much opportunity there is right now and instead are focusing on how the ICO market is shot.
If one form of trading becomes not profitable, move on to another.
Because in the end, you really just gotta buy low and sell high.

Sounds like a very hippie approach to trading, which seems unreliable to me.
But I suppose you are suggesting we be more conscious of our decisions?
Yes, that would help.
But basing trading choices on hard data is way more reliable.

The only reason why people have been yelling "hodl!" this whole time is because the early adopters were yelling that.
Those are the ones that were hodling back when btc was under $1000.
Obviously, the market is very different now and much more complex.

But one thing to remember, is that you will never actually lose or gain money unless you sell.
So even if your coin has gone up a lot, it doesn't mean anything unless you sell.

Yes, ethereum has definitely affected the market negatively.
But it is not the only reason.

I would say, the main reason is right in front of everyone's eyes: last bull run was too high too fast and totally unstable.
In simple laws of economics, supply shot way past demand and the entire year has been collapse.

Another thing that contributed to our current state, is the stock market crashing about a month ago.
We like to think that crypto is seperate from traditional markets, but that just isn't the case.
In fact, crypto is very much integrated into traditional portfolios, especially with btc futures.

erh does affect the market but not as much as btc does.

I'm not so sure it will immediately raise the price.
The market conditions just don't support it.
If anything, if the price doesn't rise then it could crash more as people lose hope.

But, the fork itself is a great step for Eth.
It will set the stage for many of the important developments that need to happen for it to be competitive with the newer smart contract platforms.
I see this as another strong sign that eth is here to stay and is still the industry leader.
this makes me very hopeful for eth future.
Combined with the years of experience and market penetration it has, eth will eventually reclaim its position.

Well, we've got two weeks left in 2018 and btc made a 5% and is now $3400!
Wow!

...putting joking aside, we should prepare for another bearish and crashing market in 2019.
Last time the crypto market crashed this big, it took a full two years for things to start growing.
On top of that, we are heading towards a big global economic depression.
There are some predicting that it will be like the 2008 crash.
At the very least, the American and Chinese stock markets are totally shot right now.

This means that the hope for new money to come in and breathe life into crypto is very slim.
And with everybody now just hodling, things don't look good.

Well, you can't really say "prediction is not totally allowed" people can do what they want.
But I get what youa re trying to say.

The thing is, the market is so volatile because people predict and speculate so much.
The vast majority of cryptos worth has always been on what people think its worth.
Most of it is just fluff and air.

Since people are very quick to change their minds and act on impule, prices rise and fall dramatically.
But with the case of ripple and eth, you could actually see it coming.
XRP has often artificially pumped their own coin while eth has been on a steady decline all year long.
If you look at the numbers and patterns, it wasn't that surprising at all.

Actually, yes, it is bad.
The success rate of startups using the traditional funding model is a dismal 10%.
The fact is, normal funding methods are rife with predatory VCs and "investors".
They mostly prey on young, inexperienced companies and cut deals that let them walk away with a lot of hteir assets when all is said and done.

The whole entire basis of blockchain was to avoid the entire insititutional investment world all together.
Creating technology that didn't require trust and was mathmatically unbreakable allowed anyone to circumvent the middle man or opportuntist higher ups.

So ICOS resorting to VCs and angel investors has brought the whole thing right back into their hands.
Yes, this might sound hipster and anti establishment, but have you even read Satoshi's whitepaper?
It's a sad thing to see it being swallowed up by traditional institutions

Crypto isn't really that much different than traditional investment.
I guess the big difference is that it is a young market and so there is a lot of volatility.
But the same rules of economics and supply and demand apply.

There is another reason why diversifying your portfolio is beneficial.
It not only lowers your risk it gives you opportunities to take advantage of certain niche markets.
For example, in the crypto world, there have been times when certain types of coins have done exceptionally well.
During last bull run, privacy coins performed amazing.
And for most of the year, smart contract platforms have done well.
Now, we are saying stable coins doing well (tether).

I managed to sell off enough to make back what I initially invested in, so I don't have much regrets.

But, on the other hand, I really regret not selling all of it and cashing out.
I would have made around $12000 extra on top of making back what I invested.
I then would have pocketed 2k and set aside the remaining 10k to reinvest in the future.
Of course, this is all easy to say when we look back at the year and see what has happened.
Who would have had the patience to do that?
Hodl on to 10k until btc reaches under $4000.

But, I can make plans for the future based off of experience and knowledge.
When the next bull run comes, I won't be buying, I will be selling.