Crypto-trading — week 7: skin in the game

I’ve got some good news! This will be a short post, unlike the first six weeks.

My activities for this week have been a lot of reading to decide on which exchange to use for my very first cryptocurrency purchase. (I’ve decided on Independent Reserve, an Australian operation.)

I’m pretty damn proud of myself for sussing out the crypto scene for 7 whole weeks before jumping in. I’ve also been sensible and resisted the urge to look at the price charts and ponder which day or hour or minute was the right time to enter. I plan to keep this coin for many years and I’m averaging in on a weekly basis, so attempting to fine tune the entry point doesn’t interest me.

I’ve decided on $500 each week, and I think I’ll alternate between ‘established’ and risky assets (for my Turtle Fund and Hare Fund).

So, each week I’ll do a bunch of research into one cryptoasset; if it’s good, I’ll buy it, if it’s crap, I’ll research the next one.

Maybe these articles will become ‘crypto of the week’ with me writing up a summary of all I’ve learned.

Learning materials

I have a new favourite podcast: Unchained, with the formidable but friendly Laura Shin. There’s several years worth of interviews with all sorts of people speaking all things blockchain. Favourites are the one on BitPesa from way back in 2016 (I learned that Bitcoin was being quite widely used all those years ago) and the one on Ripple from this week (I learned that Ripple exhibits some classic behaviours of an entity that is up to something sneaky).

Then there’s The Bitcoin Podcast which is like being at a party where you’re the only sober one and most people left 4 hours ago and the music’s turned off but there’s some people hanging around playing car games on the PlayStation, talking about Bitcoin and what sort of movies and food they have watched and eaten recently.

There’s some great nuggets of wisdom in here (maybe two nuggets in the 30 minutes I could endure), but they’re interspersed with so much rambling and sniffing and what sounds like someone flicking a playing card up against a microphone. 10/10 would not listen to again.

Next week

For my next cryptoasset to research I was going to start with Oyster (market cap rank #211), because I hate ads on the internet. Except it’s based on IOTA and I don’t know what an IOTA is. So maybe I’ll read up on IOTA first and buy some of that.

I’ll also work on a way to try and spot up-and-comers. I made a chart (naturally) showing who’s moving around in the top 40 over the last year, but it’s a bit hard to read (and probably impossible for you to read, because it does nothing when you hover).

Reminds me of wool around nails on a wooden board.

If you want to see which line is which coin, you’ll have to guess.

Rather than manually cobble together data to make a non-interactive chart, I should probably just go looking for a site that does nice, relevant charts.

Or make my own site.

A short one as promised. Thanks for reading!

Crypto-trading — week 7: skin in the game was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.