Purchase and hold some alt coins with play money

[uki]

i think it's better to just focus on bitcoin instead of altcoins.
there are so many altcoins that have lost 99% of their value.
if you still decide to invest in altcoins make sure you avoid the bad coins.

I think it is not possible to avoid 'bad coins', as you called them. The only thing you can do, once you decide the altcoin arena, is to diversify your investment so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

[ajareselde]

i think it's better to just focus on bitcoin instead of altcoins.
there are so many altcoins that have lost 99% of their value.
if you still decide to invest in altcoins make sure you avoid the bad coins.

I think it is not possible to avoid 'bad coins', as you called them. The only thing you can do, once you decide the altcoin arena, is to diversify your investment so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

They're all bad coins imho, 99% are scams from start, abused from devs, and will be abandoned after the dev team cashes out, which he will do as soon he feeds his greed.
There are some exceptions, but the chance you will hit the right one is like playing lottery, so better to just play with bitcoin in the end, since it also has volatility, and unlike altcoins it has much more volume for cashout.

cheers

[virtapayseller666]

i would recommended to you focus on bitcoin because 90% of alt coins are scam and rest will lost the value when bitcoin price rise up or down. its better advice to you keep away from altcoins .90% altcoins are scam from the start , from website look.

[tss]

having personally a good deal of experience in the "alt" trading world , my best advice is that most of the "alts" (anything that's not btc) live fast and die hard in terms of price.

most are created with the express intent of pumping and dumping these coins on willing participant exchanges - you can sign up for one such market (cryptsy) in my signature - there you can find literally hundreds of "alts" to convert your btc into.

other "trusted" options for alt exchanges include poloniex and bittrex.

if you plan on buying and holding , do not hold the coins on any of these exchanges that allow you to trade alts - they could disappear tomorrow.

also - if you're looking at obscure coins , try to at least find ones which are traded on more than 1 of these exchanges - coins on these exchanges are delisted and the exchanges themselves have been known to shutdown so it's a good thing if you can re-sell your alt-coins on more than 1 exchange.

litecoin and darkcoin are considered relatively decent frontrunners of the alt-coin world.

other relative oldies include namecoin and peercoin.

some of the alts cost only hundreds of satoshis (the smallest denomination of btc 0.00000001) - some can actually be obtained in the single digit satoshi land - these are almost universally considered junk , but as with all of the alt-coins , the possibility of using btc to pump the price up and then sell for profit exists.

if you're not doing the pumping of the price , or getting in on a coin the day it's listed , it will be near impossible to make anything on your purchases.

it is fun owning 1,000,000 of something when it costs you 50cents , even if it is total crap.

also each and every one of the alts has their own announcement thread if you look for it , and you may be able to gather some information regarding the current level of ongoing development / commitment to said alt , which is a good way to attempt to sort the shit from the crap.

goodluck

my advice is to stay away from alts, full of scum and scammers.  but if you must then the above advice from 12345mm is pretty solid

[afbitcoins]

Only alt that interests me much is Darkcoin.

[chriswen]

Clams seems to be a decent value buy right now.  One thing that offers clams value is that you can invest them at just-dice.com to get stake rewards and also invest in the bankroll for the gambling site.  There's quite some decent profits from that.

[m3110w]

i think it's better to just focus on bitcoin instead of altcoins.
there are so many altcoins that have lost 99% of their value.
if you still decide to invest in altcoins make sure you avoid the bad coins.

I think it is not possible to avoid 'bad coins', as you called them. The only thing you can do, once you decide the altcoin arena, is to diversify your investment so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

Yes, that is what I'm doing. Just getting small amounts of a small number of altcoins that have high market cap. Once again, I'm only using play money. And it will be a "invest and forget" investment.

I think we all agree that its *very* early in the evolution of crypto currencies and I guarantee we'll see some Black Swans that will totally surprise everyone.

Perhaps the next Chaiman of the Fed Reserve will be a big fan of Shiba Inus and dogecoin will shoot to the stars!     I'll be ready...

Thanks to everyone who has replied. Its very helpful for a newbie like me! I'm slowly getting the lay of the land.

[JaredStein]

Clams seems to be a decent value buy right now.  One thing that offers clams value is that you can invest them at just-dice.com to get stake rewards and also invest in the bankroll for the gambling site.  There's quite some decent profits from that.

You actually don't need to put them into Just-Dice to stack, as they do that on their own. CLAM's are good imo, I have a few of them stashed away.

[avatar_kiyoshi]

There will be a surge of people telling you which new alt is the best and it will rise 10 times or more next  month. What they will not tell you is they are in it for the pump and dump. The only crypto worth holding is only bitcoin.

Agree with you.
Bitcoin is not too risky for holding some assets, but if you want to take a risk for alt coin, I prefer to ripple or nxt.

[RodeoX]

Be wary of alt-coins. 99.999999999% are actually script kitty cut and paste bitcoin code. Often they are the brilliance of bitcoin as envisioned by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.