my gratitude to you guys for the thoughtful responses. this thread has given me alot of homework to do.
I'm definitely going to pick up, and do my best to hang onto a little bit of nxt. For the moment though I'm scared because of how quickly the price just rose. I worry that one of the big early investors is sitting there right this very moment going "well... I guess this is as high as its going to get for the time being, time to dump and buy back low."
I've decided I'm going to eyeball it for a week or two first, then buy in, just in case the price falls.
I think nxt is a really sexy looking technology, but I worry about it being closed source. I realize that's less of a concern since Java code is apparently easily decompiled, but I still can't help but wonder why not just share the code? I also worry about Java as a platform. I'm not personally knowledgeable enough about programming to know for sure either way, but I have read concerns that Java code might be more exploitable than C++. The recent price spike has alleviated these concerns to some extent though, I figure if 50 million dollars worth of people did there homework and decided to buy in, then it must be okay.
Many of the coins being pointed out are very new to me, after having taking a short hiatus from crypto-land. I am in the process now of researching credits, syscoin, crypti, and the cryptonote (nite?) coins. I really do appreciate being pointed towards those things.
My suggestions:
1. Buy some NXT.
2. Take a look at NEM stakes being sold on the NXT DEX. Consider buying a partial stake.
3. Buy some MaidSafeCoin. This is still priced near or below the IPO price depending on the day.
4. Buy some XCP. It's only about about 4x the IPO price.
5. Look at crowd-sales and tokens coming through the pipe on the Counterparty DEX e.g. Swarm, Vennd.
Full disclosure: I own NEM stake, EXO stake, NXT, XCP, and MAID.
There's plenty of stuff going on, and no need to feel like you've missed out. "It's still early days".
I'll add my two cents on the Cryptonote coins. They won't fly for a very simple reason: the addresses are way, way too long. My mom isn't going to use those, ever. Too scary for her.
The NXT team was pretty smart to truncate the 256 bit public key to 64 bits (+ auto correcting RS code). If you want to place a bet on anonymity, better to go with a competent, non-anonymous developer. There are scant few of those...
I really want to get in on some NEM, but can't. Even at .1 NEMstakes the price is out of my league. We're talking poverty here
otherwise I'd probably just buy a little bit of everything and hold forever. that's why I want to get in early on an IPO and actually get something of a foothold in crypto.
Maidsafe intrigues the living crap out of me. I've been reading about it, but something still isn't clear to me. How are the coins and the decentralized internet thing connected? I'm about to take another crack at learning more about this one.
Counterparty also piqued my interest quite some time ago, but I didn't buy for the same reason I didn't buy into mastercoin, because it's a layer on top of bitcoin right? I had trouble figuring out how both things worked. Obviously, I'm not the smartest turd in this punchbowl, but I'm not the dumbest guy on earth either, and my logic is if I have to struggle to figure out how to use these technologies, then there's zero chance of them becoming more popular. However, it could just be that the infrastructure around them isn't quite developed enough yet. If that's the case then I really need to take another crack at looking into those. Which this post has inspired me to do.
Can anyone recommend some good ELI5 guides for Counterparty?
You've all given me alot to think about.
