Ask HN: I'm late to the crypto currencies boom, what are my options?

The best strategy for small investors would be to purchase bitcoin monthly for a fixed amount of fiat (say 100 USD) and hold it. It'll come in handy when USD goes bust (come april 2018)

NEO is a new coin to keep your eye on.

My advice would be to stay away from ICOs entirely.

BTC and ETH are the "safest" bets right now. LTC has been really steady and is probably the most sensible investment, but will probably not take off like BTC did.

BCH (Bitcoin cash) is the newest fork of BTC and has been volatile but has a lot of people backing it. I would look it to it at least.

I've been keeping an eye on EOS and DASH but not really sold on them yet.

Biggest advice I can give is - don't let FOMO guide your decisions. Diversify your portfolio and don't micromanage it or keep an eye on the charts all day. You'll drive your self mad.

Also - don't expect to make ANY money of crypto. It's a gamble, like a scratch ticket. Only invest what you can absolutely afford to lose, because chances are you will.

If crypto-currencies really succeed, they're going to be worth a lot more than they are currently. They're still a really tiny market. For comparison, Bitcoin is ~60 billion USD and all the gold ever mined would be worth trillions.

Don't look at it like a get rich quick scheme. Think of it as an asset class you invest in. Set aside what you can each month and buy a basket of currencies.

Become educated about coins and get a sense of what real market innovation and real teams look like. There's a lot of scams out there. Most ICOs are scams in my opinion.

If you're looking for a coin to get into that's relatively new but has a lot of potential, my bet is Filecoin.

If all you want to do is earn money, they stay away and put your money in an index fund. Way safer, much better chances of making money. Crypto currencies are not a safe investment, you are not foolish by staying away, many people have lost a lot of money already.

If you are just curious and want to see what it's all about, then bob's your uncle!

Any comment on Tezos?

Wait for a dip. Market has been way up since Aug 1. Some controversy about Segwit2x could cause some dips in October/November.

r/Monero. See for yourself.

IOTA might be interesting to look at

I've been in the crypto space since 2011 and I've seen these bubbles come and go. When people like yourself come into the game though (and this is not an insult) I'm pretty sure the speculative game is just about to end. I don't know when - could bitcoin go to $4, $5, $6, $7k+ sure could happen in even a matter of days, but we're close to the end here IMO.

You can do small scale mining with GPUs and maintain a profit right now - zcash for example is profitable (but very small) so if that is interesting you could experiment there. 1 GPU maybe $400 or something minimal damage if the bubble pops, maybe worst case resell the card for $100 or something - that's a reasonable plan maybe I'd recommend. There are of course other more risky options.

As others have mentioned - please understand that ICOs are EXTREMELY risky and speculative. Even bitcoin and ethereum which many say are the safest - and I agree - the level of speculation in them is extreme and if you told me that ethereum will drop in value by 80% in the next 2 months, I would not bat an eye.

The level of speculation is extreme - you should realize it because even now you yourself are interested in investing - tons of people like you are doing the same irrespective of any actual intrinsic value. It is the hallmark of a bubble - and we're in the middle of it, but we can't describe with certainty until it is over.

Just don't mortgage the house man, and stay safe.

I actually think staying away was the smartest thing you've done!

I can't think of a worse reason to invest in an asset and market one doesn't understand than fear of missing out.

I'm not sure you're late. There is still at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude growth possible/likely for BTC/Cryptos in my opinion. It is really easy to make mistakes if you're trading. Buy and hold probably still works, but this whole area is high risk. The most likely scenario, for most, is to buy, at the top of a hype cycle, then get depressed and sell when it falls 60%, only to see it eventually triple again in 3 years. Don't put in more than you can afford to lose. Cryptos are a rollercoaster, and they eat shaky-hands alive.

Personally, I only hold stores of value or smart contract platforms. My reasoning is that successful platform(s) needs to be of a certain size as part of that success and their market cap would need to encompass value. That dictates growth ahead.

For tokens like filecoin, it is far less clear to me how to extrapolate their eventual end-state size, and therefore whether they will be worth anything in a few years. Instead of comparing coin market caps, a better comparison might be per-unit AWS storage costs vs. their storage rates * some risk-adjusted probability of network success. I feel like that's not the comparison people are looking at.

You're right about mining--in almost all cases, unless you have free power, or are an ASIC manufacturer, it is a losing game. If you're a believer, the better play is to buy the coin.

Just get funds you can comfortably afford into Ethereum and Bitcoin, rather than sitting on the sidelines effectively trying to time the market. You might not get 1000x returns but you will kick yourself if Eth goes to even just 1k, which it very well could in the short term (it could also retrace to $90, who knows)

In a gold rush, don't buy gold, sell shovels. Be a developer or buy stock in GPU companies. Don't buy cryptocurrencies.

Personally, I am a fan of Buffett's "Circle of Competence" theory. Until I have a firm grasp of concepts I am not buying anything because someone says so.

So when my relatives kept bugging me about this crypto-thing, I have been reading up and writing small layman blog entries for them. Something in the vein of ELIF.

Once I have a firm grasp of concepts then I might decide whether to buy or not.

1: Buy Bitcoin, 2: Figure out the next alt-coin (I like ZCash but presently own none of it.), 3: Learn to program Blockchain stuff and become a consultant... 4: Become an alt-coin day trader 5) Mine some alt-coins 6) Be creative the space is still young

> investment

Invest your time into learning to have common sense.

Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, unsafe speculation objects.

There will be a lot of people who will lose a lot of money in that space soon. I would advice staying away.

I second the buy a fixed USD per two weeks / month. I kick myself for a lot of btc miscalculation (love my 20ish btc t-shirt) but that one has at least left me with a sizable (but less than 10x) return on average if I liquidated right now, rather than nothing if I just stayed away. I also figured the price would improve after the halving day last year since the supply of new bitcoin would go down, it did, so since I think bitcoin can last at least until 2020 (next halving) as the biggest cryptocurrency I figure buying more now is fine too. What other easy-to-buy asset offers the same chance at 2x+ over 3 years? I still put most spare income into an index fund with the conservative 5%/yr target that lets you retire when 4% meets cost of living, but if bitcoin keeps growing I'll soon have more in that...

I agree with xsynonym - stay away from ICOs.

If wishes were horses... I wish I'd been born 10 years earlier and bought shares in Microsoft and Apple!

There's no way of telling what will work and what won't (and also no way of telling what will continue to work - hence the gamble in any sort of investment).

Any investment should be done with as much emotional-detachment as possible - you have to see the investment money as something that won't impact your personal life in the slightest, whether it rises or sinks.

In this case, Bitcoin is a relatively safe buy, with Ethereum as slightly less so. Monero i bleeding edge, but has great potential.

I would read up on as many of the services being offered by the cryptocurrencies (or services) you're interested in as you can, and base your investment on what you perceive to have the biggest impact to their relative industries in the future.

It's the same approach to buying penny stocks, effectively...

Start at the beginning. Read about how Bitcoin works. Learn about the security model and how it differs from traditional banking. Try buying a small amount of coin, putting it into cold storage (paper wallet), then selling it back for USD.

Then when you're comfortable with that basic knowledge, start following the history of Bitcoin and current events. Get a basic understanding of the events of this year. Learn about other cryptos, too. You might not have an opinion about any of it, or you might.

Earlier this year I was trying to explain Bitcoin to a friend of mine and he expressed the common sentiment, "I wish I had gotten in sooner." That was when Bitcoin was $1,200. Now it's trading at over $3,400. In the 1930s, people were saying the same thing about Coca-Cola stocks: I should have bought them in 1918. Nobody can predict the future. Investing is nothing but learning and applying what you learn. If you understand and like something, invest what you can afford. If not, don't.

How people lose their shirts in any market:

- Trying to time the market

- Trying to get rich quick

- Believing that past results indicate future performance

- Making decisions based on emotions (regret, fear of missing out, greed, wishful thinking, etc)

Your comments make it seem as though you're doing at least half of the above, so be very careful.

Also...

> In retrospect, it was foolish of me not to get some BTC since they were $1 per coin (!!) last time I checked.

Everything is obvious in retrospect. Were you also foolish to not buy TSLA in 2011 when it was $30? No, because you didn't know then what you know now: That TSLA reached $350 and BTC reached $3,000. In the same vein, you are not not foolish (uuh..) for not (uuuh...) buying any other cheap investments that did not (oh lord...) grow insanely fast. In other words, you should judge past decisions by the information you had at the time, not by the information you have now.

Small scale mining is not so much dead as on the edge of profitability.

I have two graphics cards, I started mining ether about two weeks ago. I have about 0.2Eth now. This is not a huge amount, but over a few more weeks I intend to get a few more cards and build up to holding a few ETH and a few ZEC. I may mine other currencies if they become profitable, but will likely sell any gains for ETH immediately.

It's not exactly a time of bonanza AFAICT, but if you just want to get and hold a few things you can still do it.

I too regret not sinking £50 into BTC when it last plummeted into the $0.5 USD range, just to speculate, which I was considering... But them's the breaks.

--edit-- I'm not claiming this is a profitable way to operate! It's just what I'm doing to get my hands on some smallish quantities of the currencies.

It's still early. Had you bought at $1 or even $0.01, would you have really held until $3500? At $40 you would have had decided whether to sell or not, then again at $200, and at $600, and at $400, and then at $1000, etc. I think people like to gloss over all those difficult compounding decisions about whether sell or hodl.

On another note, seeing these as assets that merely store value for speculation may be a shallow view. However, it may be the case today. Long-term, the industry is betting that there are far deeper drivers of utility that will be unearthed in the next couple of years. This is where the real value can be captured and where fortunes may be made. Thinking about "what currency should I make a quick buck off of" misses a lot of the potential.

Here's a reading list: https://medium.com/@dwr/digital-currency-reading-list-6219f1...

Does anyone else care about the environmental waste of churning banks of GPUs to "mine" an imaginary asset or is that just me