Thoughts on this list here? Most of these coins are a lot cheaper than before.
Well, I'm personally more attached to Shift than is good for me, so I'd tell you to get it while telling you at the same time not to listen to me. But it's a legit project with a long history and a dev team that is willing to make it work. Started off as an Ethereum Fork, then changed to Lisk-style DPoS due to network attacks. Still an underdog, but promising. Wouldn't put too much into it, though. This is a high risk/reward play (btw. to be clear here, "high reward" isn't like 100x anymore, we are playing a different game now. High reward is more like 4-5x in my book).
Waves is solid. Not a fan, but nothing wrong with it. I can see it going back to its previous high, when alts moon again.
Iota is shit. That doesn't mean you can't use it as a speculative tool, but I stay away from it, because it is run by a condescending bunch of dickheads which seem to be stuck in their puberty or whatever. No. 1 popcorn deliverer on Cryptotwitter, though. But seriously, way overpriced.
I can't really comment on the rest.
Here's the thing, though:
I have a strong feeling that the alt game is changing. I'm not too sure how exactly, but this means that a lot of conceptions, truisms and past experience becomes invalid. There are a couple of things to consider.
In the past, alts tended to move as a somewhat homogenous asset against BTC and this started with relatively small diversification. I had around ten alts and I still felt I was basically trading them as a single asset vs. BTC. If alts start to decouple, this becomes less predictable.
We have way more assets in the market than a year ago and a lot of them are priced pretty high. This means that there is less headroom. This is mostly why I don't really believe in 100x pumps anymore. It's not like they won't happen, but they will become way more sporadic. In the past, when BTC lost like 10% market dominance, this went into small alts and there were less of them, meaning, those small alts pumped hard. Now, this 10% will be spread over a bigger number of alts and those are already pretty high, so the pumps will be smaller.
There are more players in the game. In the beginning of 2016, crypto had a marketcap of like 20 billion $. It was basically a bunch of nerd trading virtual pokemon cards. You could make 5x moves with absolutely no experience on totally bonkers bullshit news. Like a fucking rebrand. DogecoinDark becoming Verge with no technical improvement whatsoever was a solid 10x move and it was absolutely predictable. The first ICOs were a sure thing, there was no question whether you would make profit, the only question was how much. These times are past and one of the reasons is that this isn't the kiddie league anymore. More players means more smart players. And those people know damn sure how to play you and me.
Past altcoin pumps were not based on viability of a project. Whether it was a good idea or not was insubstantial. The value of a coin/token was (and still is) not based on its utility, but on speculation. I am really not sure whether we will see another pump like winter 2017/18 based purely on speculation, or whether the next big movement will be triggered by mass adoption. In that case, you can be damn sure that it's going to be a rude awakening for at least 95%, if not all of the current projects. Because here's the thing:
Let's say, you have a utility token that projects something like a potential future number of users of 100 million. That's what current speculation is based on: the assumption, that in the future, this token will serve 100 million users. But even if this is correct, you will have two big, BIG problems with this:
1.: Additionally to your token, there are a number of other tokens out there which serve the same purpose and base their speculative value on the same number of users. So, when those 100 mil users come, they will either choose just a few tokens (likely), which means that a lot of tokens will become useless, or spread over a number of tokens, diluting the 100 mil users per token calculation by a lot.
2.: The transition between speculative and actual value won't be smooth. Here's the thing: let's say, you actually have a potential of 100 million users. These people won't be there all at the same time the next day. You start with 10,000 users, then 100,000, then a million and so on. Which means, the projected utility and therefore value isn't true for at least some time. For you as a speculator, this might mean that you investment will drop considerably in price and that "announcing mainnet", "we are now open for business" or "we have now partnered with pornhub" are actually sell indicators.
Last point: we haven't really seen an altcoin mass extinction yet. There have been coins lost in the depths of the crypto ocean, but what we are witnessing right now, with all those coins popping up right, left and center is not sustainable. I'm not saying the extinction is coming, but I would consider it a definite possibility.
Sorry for my rambling, I was in the mood. What I am trying to say is this: this game is considerably harder than it was before. Don't let past performance fool you. There is a good chance that blockchain and cryptocurencies will have a bright future and that the 17/18 pump wasn't the last one we've seen, but I wouldn't bet on it being just as easy to maneuver through than the last one was. I would say that none of your choices is really low risk/reward. Maybe that's because you are hodling stuff like ETH anyway, but if you don't, if you're planning to put money into crypto, I'd hodl most of it in "boring" but established projects (Bitcoin obviously, others like ETH, I also really like XMR).
If you are planning to go in, average in. My gut feeling is that most alts will lose considerably more, but my gut has been wrong before. Maybe buy a small position now, gut expect a drop. In that case, buy some more. Try to find the levels you are comfortable with. Like Shift as an example, I wouldn't be surprised to see it lose like 50% from here. What would you do then? Panic because you bought before? Buy more?
After all this, only one last thing: I believe that privacy coins, such as XMR, ZEC and their copies will have their day in the sun at some point. Plus, they are an excellent hedge against a lot of fuck-ups that might happen. But that's just my personal gut feeling.
That's it. Sorry for the long post again.
