nah, the crypto world can't be compared to the current financial infrastrucure. We are several trillion away from affecting anything

sure thing, Europe is actually one of the safest places right now and most crypto-friendly continent where you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Hope Draghi will keep it that way

it's a fun activity, you learn a lot and you see how the markets react to a new technology. Most interesting aspect is seeing the psychology in my opinion of the crowds and how they react to various news. Would be even more interesting if the entire thing bursts and we'll see some bears making serious dough.

nice, I've been following Raiden for a while but I'm not really happy how things have turned out. Initially, Raiden was a proposal to help out Ethereum to create this side chain that will process transactions (off-chain) in order to increase the total transaction output of Ethereum and to stabilize the network. The proposal came out after the Status and Bancor ICO's which cracked down the network (you were not able to make any transactions for quite some time) and hence the reason why it gained so much popularity. The Raiden team wanted to implement their solution to the network, by issuing their own token (which they now have). Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum didn't like the proposal and the fact that Ethereum would be split in two coins, so he disregarded the team's effort and is now focused on developing his own scaling solutions. Would be nice to see if Raiden will manage to gain more popularity in the coming months.

Hello! My stake for the last update ("Week 5" column) has for some reason been reduced from 2 to 1.75, can you please have a look and correct it?

User: Nascor

sure most of the altcoins are a scam, that's because people are seeing how much money is being raised and everyone wants a piece of it, whether its legit what they are doing is another quesitons. We've basically opened a pandora box by issuing relatively easy coins for fiat curreny, which is something that has not been possible until now, and that's a good thing. What is missing from the market is some sort of regulation, not regulation that will limit the potential of blockchain, but regulation that will ensure the smooth transition to mainstream adoption. At the moment it's the wild west, everyone just does whatever the heck he wants without consiquences and people are wondering after why they are getting scammed, or why the project is not delivering on their promises.

Forks are in my opinion just exploring the popularity of the main coin in order to profit themselves. The team behind BTC Cash for example new that people would be attracted to the benefits they offer, and instead of making a similar network or blockchain themselves they simply decided to fork BTC, which is bad in itself but harms the entire system if you ask me. As it seems with the latest fork they have profited massively, BCH cash is trading at about twenty billion right now which simply means that other people will see that, and will want to do something similar, so don't wonder if within the next year we'll be seeing five or even ten potential forks or forked versions of Bitcoin, it's just the profit that these projects are after imo.

It might reach hundred thousand as you mention, but the reason won't be because you blockchained beans.. there will probably be other services around that will do that. Bitcoin since the very start is functioning exclusively as a transfer of value and that is what made it so popular, don't forget the first whitepaper released and its title, that will explain a lot. From the other side, you should keep your expectations a bit more conservative considering that we still have to see how many people will start adopting Bitcoin. There is definitely a lot of potential but at the same time you have everyone investing in things they don't understand, so you start wondering whether everything will simply crash one day and whether you'll be crashed along.

If you're a trader and managed the fork fluctuations right, then you could have made a big profit from the cancelation, BCH appreciated by a lot, at some point becoming the second most valued crypto coin (about thirty billion), but after that it went straight down, shorting that would have made you as much money as it made you when you went long on the position. I'm not a big fan of bitcoin cash and wouldn't buy it at the first place, but if you did buy it and are looking for a place to put back those funds, then get back to BTC or some other altcoins. Considering that forks are incoming, I think ultimately the value of Bitcoin cash will go down again and expectations should therefore be balanced.

Tezos is a good pick but you shouldn't have the mentality of "I need to invest in three more projects, so I'll invest in three projects", what if there aren't any three good projects out there? What if there is only one good projects and the rest are bad projects, will you still invest in three projects? What if there are six good projects out there, will you still invest in only three? The point is that you should invest in something once you found something good, if you have set in your head that you'll invest in three projects, then you'll find three that might not necessarily be good one's. It would be prefered to invest a lot of money in one good project than invest in three mediocre one's.

SOMN is interesting, they basically want to create a supercomputer by having several nodes connected to one another, this will help people "lease" computing power and do all sort of things (graphic designing, rendering, difficult calculations that require a lot of processing power, statistical models etc.) it's a great sector to be involved in but there is so much competition from other coins that are offering something similar, SOMN has in my opinion come a bit late to the party and it might find it difficult to gain some of that market share. It is however backed by a capable team and they do seem like they know what they are doing/talking about, I'm overal optimistic about the project but would closely monitor the competition if I was holding a significant stack.

Taas is indeed a nice project, about five months ago they announced they would create the first tokenized closed-end fund, and they pretty much delivered. I like their business model as well, basically with the money they raised back on May, they invested portions of it on various cryptocurrencies and used their "fund" status afterwards to create partnerships with upcoming projects and join their presale process. Not sure what discount they were getting, if any, when investing in ICO's but it's nice to see that they are not only focusing on main coins, and diversify some of their portfolio to ICO's (which can eventually lead to higher returns). Basically every three months the company would calculate their bottom line (how much profit/loss they made) and distribute 50% of the earnings to Taas token holders, which works out great until now. The firs two distributions were successful and they have an average return of about 400% by now

listening to some random guys on a forum is not the best financial advice I can give you. There are many who own tokens just because they were recommended by someone else, and that someone else has them because they were recommended to him too. You have to do your own thinking and research about the coin and idea before investing to it, it's better to do some research and come back to this forum asking specific questions about it, rather than going "tell me the best coin to buy", that will never work out for you. Spend some time on a coin that triggers your interest and investigate (by reading the papers, getting into the community Slack, reading blogs and check what competitors are in the market) and then you'll have a more clear idea on whether you should invest in it or not.

I like that your portfolio is well diversified, you have many tokens and that's great. Only wondering why you would put about 40% of your entire portfolio on Waves, it's quite a big bet in my opinion. Waves has competition as well, such as ETH, which is kinda ahead and will appreciate a lot in 2018 (if the promised protocol upgrades are implemented). Besides that you look quite good me, maybe some of that 40% should go to some "main" coins, don't see you having any BTC/ETH/XRP - looks like you have appetite for risk, if you'd like to hedge a bit your portfolio, buy some BTC it will keep you above water in case the market goes to the south.

one year is kinda short-term, most of the ICO's currently which look very promising are undergoing initial funding, which means that after they've ended this (couple of months) they're gonna have capital available for development. The development part can take anywhere from six months to two years, which means until the service or product is developed and released to the public, the coin's potential value (price) won't be reached. Considering that you're better off investing that money into something more stable, like one of the top ten coins by market cap. You can make short-term profits as well, by joining ICO's and flipping after that, but that's risky and I wouldn't recommend you to do.

would be nice if you could give some more input that just saying "it's a house of cards", like the reason for example or why you believe it's not sustainable, it would help us to understand your position. From my side, I'll tell you why ETH is not what you're saying. It's survived for about two years now (quite a feat in the crypto world), it has a market capitalization of about thirty billion (which mean people trust it enough to put their money into it), it has a fantastic ecosystem of thousands of projects building on it (have a look at ICO's), the founder is both young and very skilled, the protocol is being enhanced very often and soon many new upgrades will make it even more attractive, such as PoS or the upcoming privacy features.

you basically have to find an exchange that is offering FIAT payouts. Depending on where you live, it might be easier ot more difficult to do so. Some countries have very stirct rules on cryptocurrencies and in others its a breeze. China for example it's getting quite tricky to get any FIAT into crypto's, because the government doesn't want its Chinese Renminbi to leave the country, in the US and Europe from the other hand regulators have not taken any serious actions yet against FIAT deposit/withdrawls. What I recommend is that you do a google search, like "Sell BTC/ETH in [INSERT COUNTRY]" - you'll probably get a few exchanges listed that will serve your location. You'll have to submit some documentation for the KYC process (they need to know who you are) and after that you can easily buy or sell cryptos and convert them to FIAT or vice versa.

Even though ETH is already quite popular and has already substantial market exposure, I still think it's the best long-term investment. The concept just encompasses anything that can be encompassed, it's a programable Bitcoin essentially. The fact that is already has such a wide adoption (and so quickly) means that it's well received by developers and there are already many projects building on it. It's like Microsoft in the old days, they made Windows accessible to everyone and everyone still uses it up this day (the majority at least). The same is with Ethereum, developers are building on the ERC20 standard, and applications (which will be accessed by consumers) will be used by them, that's quite big and I think people have not realized the future implications of this.

If you want to find specific news about a specific topic e.g. "upcoming BTC fork" the best way to find a related article is using Google News. It's constantly updated and you can easily browse through anything related to what you searched. If you want to keep a general overview of the market and it's development, the most visited crypto sites are coindesk.com and cointelegraph.com. Both of them have quite good content, but you should always be aware that editors have the choice over what you read. So they can influence your opinion, and might publish information that will benefit them personally - that's the reason why you usually can read a disclaimer at the end of these articles, were the holdings of the author are indicated (to make sure the readers knows that they are sort of "biased").

It's really hard to argue against Bitcoin with whatever currency.. escpecially Dogecoin. The fact is that BTC has been the first in the market, and has the first mover advantage, which is very important. Microsoft had the first mover advantage as well when they lauched the PC (personal computer) and now decades later people are still using Windows (a microsoft product) and it become very difficult to change the Windows operating system, with, let's say Apple OS, which might be the best operating system, but since microsoft was first and introduced Windows, people got used to it, and people don't like change so they stick to Windows even if there are better operating systems out there. Same goes for Bitcoin.