Hi Bounty Manager,

This is my update on the signature campaign for Week 3 (20.1 - 26.1)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1118743;sa=showPosts

For this week, I have done 17 quality posts, of which 2 quality posts were on the ANN thread.

Please see my posts. I have ensured each post is carefully crafted and above 50 words. Actually most are above 100 words and properly

researched before I post.

Please assist in updating my stakes for week 2 and week 3.

Thanks for the hardwork counting stakes!

jaredl

There are several ways for cashing out but why would you in the first place if you really believe in crypto and believe that crypto will become as usable as fiat in a few years.

But if you are thinking of cashing out some fiat to spend today, you can either go through OTC means like localbitcoins or sell your coins on local forums or classifieds. This is the best means for cashing out to fiat today. You can often get a premium above the price of the crypto.

I can illustrate why it carries a premium with an example like EOS or NEO.. these are just examples but it applies for any altcoins not sold on coinbase.

For any investors that want to buy into altcoins, they have to first buy BTC or ETH on coinbase or their own fiat-to-crypto exchanges. Then after holding BTC or ETH, they have to go to specific crypto exchange like Binance or kucoin to buy the coins. This is the friction of the crypto world now. But if you offering to sell your crypto like EOS or NEO (or whatever is popular in your country), you can command a slight premium cos you are offering a service of fiat to altcoins without having to first buy BTC or ETH.

If you are selling out on those fiat-crypto-fiat exchanges, you will tend to get less for your coins and there are a lot of transactions costs.
Hence it depends on what matters to you, convenience? go to a exchange to cash out. Or you want a better payout, go sell it OTC.

Of course there are now crypto credit cards which will allow you to use crypto as a means of payment in the real world. That is another method for using your crypto.

I intend to hold much much longer and not sell out to fiat. At least not in the short term. Maybe I will sell to finance my next property though

I am involved in several industries. Some in crypto and some in the traditional markets.

For Crypto,

I like projects that are building smart contract platforms especially those that are able to meet the needs of dev teams. This can be seen by how many ICO are being launched on their platform. ETH and NEO are my fav. Been holding them for a while now. ArcBlock is my latest favourite and I intend to hold ArcBlock for a while, once I get their tokens.

I also like projects that are using the blockchain to disrupt current day industries and able to meet current day need. There are plenty in the crypto world. Cross-border value transfer, gambling, renewable energy trading etc.

And I particularly like privacy coins as these coins will be highly sort after by investors or wealthy individuals who prefer to keep their wealth private. Privacy coins will gain in demand in 2018 as more and more countries tax and regulate the crypto world. Many of the old big BTC holders who have gain a lot holding BTC will move to privacy coins as they want to hide and protect their wealth. Right or wrong.. I do not want to comment on them but I do recognized their need for privacy; hence I am hodling XSpec.

For traditional industries,

I am holding stocks in several markets. I like JD.com and have been holding their stocks for a while. They are very innovative and will be giving alibaba a run for their money. The company is also investing heavily into their logistics infrastructure so in the future, they will be able to deliver to anywhere in China while alibaba cant as they do not have their own logistic infra.

I am also keen in the EV market so I have bought stocks in the lithium mining industry. This has been a good area and i have already gained 1x and waiting for more. 1x in the crypto world is boring haha but in the traditional markets, 1x is huge especially when you are putting in a sizable investments.

I have also been holding stocks in data storage for a while now. Been giving me good returns and I expect it to go higher and higher as the world's consumption of data grows day by day.

There are also many areas I am exploring.

If you are keen to invest for the long term, just observe the world and see where it is going.. then find the industries that will benefit the most from the long term trend. Buy into them.. you wont go wrong if you are convicted of your reasons for buying.

Demand and Supply. Thats the simplest answer.

But if you are looking for reasons why some ICO has a higher demand and why some ICO has a lower demand, then you got to look deeper.
Some of the factors I have realized after so many ICOs are..


Pre-Sale Bonuses

If the project provides huge discounts for presales to investor groups who come in together to bargain for a deeper discounts, then expect huge selling when the coin is listed. Cos these presale investors are just looking for a flip.. their pre-sale discounts can be as good as 50% or even 100%  i.e. buy 1 get 1 free. These guys are vultures and will sell the moment they see profits at listing.

Pre-Sales discounts for insitutional investors are ok. Cos they buy in bulk and they tend to hold for longer periods.

Circulating Supply

If the project is launching a large circulating supply, expect a boring price during listing as there may not have sufficient demand to buy up the coins.

Backing by strong advisors and influencers

This is something that I do not agree with but it is a fact that investors gravitate towards influencers. When they see a strong advisor who have been on previous successful ICO, there will be large buying activity at listing and the people who bought during ICO tend to hold longer. Look at Ian Balina, each time he recommends an ICO, everyone just jump on and buy. His google sheet on ICO ratings was so popular, it was unaccessible when he shared it. Imagine google drive could not support his list of ICOs...

There are many other factors and they are all very obvious factors which you just need to observe a few ICO to learn.

The investing or trading community for crypto is still very immature and unlike traditional markets, as the number of institutional investors is still small. These makes it easier to read as the mindset of retail investors are much more herdish.. they follow hype easily. So if you are on the lookout for hypes, you can easily find coins that jump in price at listing.

Good luck hunting.

Yes this is why I like ArcBlock. While they are creating a very advanced platform that will not only help to incentivize and resolve many of the

existing blockchain issues, they also have a clear aim of making blockchain simple for the average user.

This is what is admirable about this project and I think the incentivization model of ArcBlock will help to bring more developers and resources onto

this platform and evolve ArcBlock to one of the most commonly used platform and protocol.

Being able to create blocklets and api to connect to different blockchain will mean that DApps developers will be able to increase their speed to

market as they can now use ArcBlock to deploy their DApps on various blockchain without having to rewrite their codes. They simply have to use

the Open Chain Access Protocol provided by ArcBlock.

This project is really getting a lot of attention and popularity and their KYC applications is now through the roof. They had over 100,000 KYC

applications which will translate to a huge sell-out TGE.

I foresee this to be one of 2018 top ICO.

The crypto market is a market whereby you are not able to do leverage trading and have to buy it with real currency and not be able to lend and buy. That has been the reason why there is relative stability in the market despite the volatility.

Once people starts to leverage their assets by mortgage and loans, this is where the trouble starts. The moment when market turns and you are not able to get your returns, you will panic sell and bring down the entire market like how it happened to the sub-prime market.

Over leverage with too little money. The investors during sub-prime were overly leveraged and when the sell down came, they sold down really hard as everyone panic sell. And many investors were forced to sell to finance their mortgage.

Borrowing for investing or trading is one of the worst idea ever in any financial endeavour. Always invest with what you have and always trade with what you can afford to lose.

Anyone suggesting to sell their house to buy crypto is not only harming themselves, they are harming us as a community as they will contribute to the tipping point when the bubble burst.

If you really are looking to become an instant millionaire, buy a lottery ticket. Do not bet your house on it. And do not borrow money to trade.

ArcBlock will be an amazing success. I think we can all see from the overwhelming KYC applications as well as the number of telegram participants.

The thing about ArcBlock is that what they are building is something revolutionary and yet the idea behind it is simple.

The team wants to make blockchain achieve mainstream adoption and remove the challenges blocking this.

If you do read the whitepaper carefully ( i read it 3 times to really understand it) and listen to what the team is talking about in telegram,

you will understand that the technology they want to build is about a platform that will make it easier for users (with or without blockchain

knowledge) to be able to use applications (DApps) powered by blockchain without even knowing they are using DApps.

This is because users will interact with DApps from browsers as well as downloading DApps from app store or play store.

This is a great idea in Change Management for the traditional space to crypto space.

People will begin to use DApps but yet do not know that the blockchain is behind it.

This is how amazing ArcBlock will be.

And hence the success of the ICO is certain.

ArcBlock will be a success. That is without a doubt.

I think that the concepts and technology that ArcBlock is bringing to the world is amazing cos they are focus on the

user experience and performance first.


Most importantly, they will make decentralized applications accessible from users' browsers and even from app stores.

While the idea is simple, this is the most groundbreaking thing of all. We are all so used to playing games, interacting with

applications from our chrome or firefox browsers or downloading applications from app store or play store.

If they are bring the blockchain to the same browsers or app stores that we are using today, the mainstream adoption

will be tremendous. There will be avalanche of users who will be using apps that are powered by blockchains.

This will be the greatest value of ArcBlock.

Simple but world changing.

I am also waiting on the sidelines for the crypto to blow up but it has yet to cross the 1 trillion mark.

It has been hitting new highs but each time the crypt market is marred by bad news and it comes down.

The good thing is that each time the crypto market sells down, it sells down to a low which is higher than

the previous low.

This shows that the crypto market is moving generally higher over time.

At the same time, each selldown will take out the weak hands who are not able to hold on to their crypto

or perhaps they do not have the conviction to hold when they see the market sell down.

This leaves only the strong hands or hodlers who really believe in the crypto market and wants to hold on

for much bigger gains.

If you really believe in the crypto market, you should just wait out 2018 as this year we will definitely see

a lot more new highs but also with a lot of sell downs.

And at the end of 2018, I am certain that the entire crypto market will make ATH.

The world is moving towards crypto..are you with us or are you not?  

I think the question should be BTC and ETH or Alts.

Fiats are out. If you are moving between crypto and fiats, first of all there is a lag and there are also associated fees. Unless u are moving into USDT to weather the storm.

In this market now, BTC and ETH is stablizing around 10,000 and 1000 respectively. It is worthwhile to think about which alts to get into as many have been oversold to very cheap levels.

The Korean situation is now clear. The govt just want to ban anonymous trading and prevent money laundering and at the same time, collect taxes. The latter being the most important.

A taxation on crypto implies that S.Korea is recognizing the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies as an asset class. This is very good news and once all the players in the crypto market realizes this, the market will continue to recover.

With the recovery, will u be buying BTC & ETH or will u be in alts? fiats is out of the question as it is inflationary and u lose money holding it.

If u want just stable growth and want to be able to close your eyes for 2018 and see the returns by end of the year, ETH is the bet.

But if you heart can withstand the ups and downs... alts offers the best bang for returns.

i personally bet small on alts while holding big on ETH and NEO.

NEO is one of my fav coin after ETH.

But you do not need to stick to the coins that are in the top 10. if you have research enough, you can take a look at the cryptocurrencies

in the lower half of the top 100.... or even those that are having below 100mil in market cap.

These coins are still undiscovered by the masses but when they are discovered, they will moon.

The key is to identify what are the driving forces in this crypto space and identify the coins that

will benefit when these driving forces take place and the trend comes.

Privacy is a driving force as more and more regulations get put into the crypto space.. so what is a undervalued privacy coin?

Perhaps Xspec?

smart contract blockchains? which are those that have demonstrated an ability to scale up their transactions?

these are the type of trends and driving forces that will move the prices of these crypto assets.

With 5k as a investment fund, you wont be able to buy significant amounts of coins so I think there is a need to split your portfolio into 2 parts.
The first part should be a top 10 token like NEO or ETH. While the second part can be a variety of ICO or altcoins that has a small cap.

For example, you can consider looking at XSpec which is a privacy coin that has better stealth tech than all the privacy coins out there. It is still very cheap and you can buy it at cryptopia

For ICO, you can look at ICOs that are working on smart contracts blockchain like ArcBlock.

Split your ICO funds into 3 parts and invest into 3 good ICOs. Do your research before investing.

cheers

jaredl

If you mean as a legal tender form of currencies, i do not think cryptocurrencies will overtake regular currencies.

But if you mean as a total market cap, for cryptocurrencies to overtake fiat currencies, it is only a matter of time.

Even at this point, BTC marketcap is already higher than some State backed currencies.

At the end of the day, do we really need btc or any crypto currencies to take over the role of fiat currencies?

I see both currencies serving different purposes and should survive side by side. Fiat currencies (maybe in the form of crypto)

must exist for a country to manage the economy. Without a national currency, a government will not be able to manage the

economy.

I think there could be some cryptocurrencies that will be accepted as legal tender and be used for payments, but largely I think most cryptocurrencies will be viewed as Assets. Except Japan of course as it already sees BTC as legal tender.

If cryptocurrencies are viewed as storage of value and as an asset like Gold is right now, then it will not compete with fiat currencies as

a legal tender currency. Thereby allow crypto to survive as govt will feel less threat.

hi Bounty Manager,

Signature Campaign

Username: jaredl
Row on Spreadsheet: 578

Week 2 (13.01 - 19.01)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1118743;sa=showPosts

I have done 17 quality posts, of which 2 quality posts were on the ANN thread.

For your attention.

thank you very much

cheers

jaredl

week 14.01 - 20.01

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it is unlikely bitcoin can be stopped by anyone but if it does comes to that point, it is likely highly that another coin has taken its place in the number 1 coin in the world.

BTC could be retired if all the BTC miners migrate their mining power to other variants of the BTC but I would think this scenario would not happen in the near future.

BTC miners are very resilient. Even with the China's mining ban, they are moving to all over the world to start their mining operations.

So if bitcoin stops, it will be a non event as it is highly likely that another coin has taken over BTC as the leader and BTC is being retired and we wont see a sudden BTC death.

To prepare for such a situation and to be able to profit from it, we should constantly be on the lookout for the next big thing.

I am currently looking at arcblock, achain, NEO etc. Achain and NEO are already on the market while Arcblock is in the development stage and doing their ICO now. I would look at it if you are looking for the next thing after btc death.

Are you considering a portion of your portfolio in ICO?

In this crypto space, buying the top 10 coins is a good bet.

After that, some portion of your portfolio can be devoted to ICO to take part in those that can deliver 10x or more ROI.

This is cos the majority of the profits that older investors made are from the original ICO of the top 10 coins.

So I would recommend a small 10% speculative portfolio for mature investors.

look at arcblock ICO if u are keen

The two countries that are closest to a cashless society are India and China.

I travel a lot for work and in this 2 countries, you can definitely survive by digital payments.

Even tips can be paid by cashless means..most developed nations have become entrenched in

our traditional payment forms like cash, cheques, credit cards but for China and India, they have

skip everyone and jump straight to cashless digital payments for all.

This trend is very good for crypto as crypto has no physical form as well.

We will likely see countries launching their own crypto currencies this year and in a few more years,

cashless will be the norm.

btw with cashless, governments will be able to track every cent you earn and spend - great for collecting taxes.

This is the real motivation for governments to move to cashless..

I believe that by 2022, most developed countries will have their own state-owned cryptocurrencies and in their respective currencies, coins that are not stated-backed will not be legal tender.

But all cryptocurrencies that are not state-backed such as BTC or ETH etc, will become an asset class.

We will still be able to buy BTC and ETH and the rest but this will be an asset and not currencies for usage.

This is the vision I have for crypto. And I think becoming an asset class is the only way for crypto to survive.

If any crypto wants to compete with state-back currencies, the only way is to go to countries with a weak or corrupt government where mistrust by the people is a huge factor.

Else in the developed world, I see the likely scenario for crypto to end up as an asset class.

This is actually a good path for crypto as it will reduce the need for govt to worry about losing to crypto and prevent them from banning crypto coins that are not state-backed.

As expected, BTC and ETH won hands down.

Every investors should have both or either one of these as a core part of their portfolio. If you believe in crypto, you must hold at least one of these. As these 2 are the most reputable blockchain on the market, when the value of the crypto space goes up, both of these will go up at the same time.

I am holding ETH as a major part of my portfolio and a number of altcoins as my speculative part of my portfolio.

NEO is fast becoming a major part of my portfolio as well. I was surprised that NEO is not part of this poll.