Investing safely

[cmacwiz]

With all the advice to not trust third parties with my bitcoins, how do I invest in companies I believe in? Investing in companies that promote/use bitcoin (like NeoBee) is important, how can I safely do so? Havelock Investments seems well trusted in this community, but can I bypass a third party all together?

[mysidia]

With all the advice to not trust third parties with my bitcoins, how do I invest in companies I believe in?

Most companies are not going to take investments directly; they will have some service provider, so the answer is usually no.      But there are some organizations that may do a private placement -----  if you have a large enough amount of capital to invest,  and  you have  met the management, etc.

To invest  is to endow, and to entrust.    So there is simply no way around trusting third parties to some extent;    the more capital you have,   the more ability you have to bargain for extra "strings" or controls.   Therefore...  it is not safe to do this willy-nilly;  caution is warranted, or that which is invested will be lost.

Which, by the way:  can happen,  even if there is no breach of trust.

So before investing....    You need to answer the question is it reasonable to trust them,  and the third parties I have to deal with to invest?

The process of selecting good investments includes  looking into the parties you will be dealing with,  to ensure their trustworthiness the best you can.

Trustworthiness is best found through positive references,   lack of  negative references,    reasonableness  of  the company's  claims about what they can provide investors.

Management's ability to verify certain claims, and to provide certain details of their company and/or  independently-audited financials   and attestations from trusted third parties such as certified public accountants and public well-known  trusted individuals to vouch for them, depending on the stage of their company.


After you've filtered out any potential investments based on trustworthiness criteria, AND many potential  investments fail there....    without even having to worry about the viability of the business.

Then after you are Okay with trustworthiness of management  you can then begin to look at the prospects of the company,  and.....   whether the investment is likely to pay off.

[Coins4life]

The safest investment is to purchase some BTC and then keep them in cold storage until you want to sell your profits.

[mysidia]

The safest investment is to purchase some BTC and then keep them in cold storage until you want to sell your profits.

No... the safest investment is the pre-purchasing of anything which you can store securely
for long enough that will definitely help you meet a guaranteed future need.
Such as  water, food, shelter,  medicine, ....
These items don't lose value,  because you will definitely consume them  (not sell them).

Purchasing and socking away BTC is comparable to stuffing US dollars in a safety deposit box.
which, by the way,  is essentially guaranteed to lose money, at whatever the rate of inflation.

It's not fair to say BTC is safest possible investment, since it's not even that "safe" in volatility
terms,   there is a significantly high chance BTC could lose 99% of its value in a short time;
(it's value could then go up 1000x, a few years later after most investors sold it at the bottom).

Dollars have a longer history and larger number of users,  and therefore these stable currencies
are much less likely to experience comparable levels of volatility  in the foreseeable future.

No  investment is really safe, though,  they all just have a different risk profile.
To optimize risk/reward,   most people  will want to have  numerous investments  of various sizes,
and avoid having direct correlation  between assets  meant to be diverse.

It does no good to have equity in 100 companies that will all fail,  if  there is a shortage of type Xyz widgets.

[rogi696]

What about this link: https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=21194.0

Fund backed with real land?
"To achieve a higher level of safety in this offer, we would like to use our property to back up our shares. We view it as a fair way of proving our worth. Additionally to using land, we would like the shares to retain a minimum value (by performing a buyback at a set minimum price if requested). We view this as an additional method of bringing more safety for the investors. As we are investors ourselves, we would surely appreciate a company doing a similar thing, this is our reasoning for doing so.

The goals are:

-generate a profit of 5 to 10% per month trading Forex
-allow Litecoin investors to participate in gains achieved by our trading methods
-prove our trading methods to the general public"
fb: https://www.facebook.com/pages/TheSolution-Land-Fund/687807614647270

[ferman]

i think you can choose coin which one has 1 or 2 BTC daily volume. and you keep your %60 of your total investment.