Totally agree, I've been holding this for nearly a year (since it was $0.07) and have never sold, despite all the dips. This project is definitely still one of those hidden gems out there, and the team has developed an actual platform for real world use cases. It's a good time to accumulate more Shift before marketing is in full flight and many people finally know about Shift.

Yeah and also Bittrex doesn't accept new signups so it's hard for new users to buy Shift right now... we definitely need another exchange and marketing before the price can really fly.

I have a feeling some new exchange might be coming soon. Had the same feeling for my other holdings like Lunyr (which was stuck in $5-15 range), and then suddenly Binance added it.

Definitely Shift. I have been invested in Shift since $0.10, the team is definitely legit though they are under the radar because they haven't done much marketing compared to Substratum. But Shift already released their prototype decentralized website (the shiftnrg.org site), so now they just need some marketing (and possibly another exchange, like Binance of KuCoin), and the coin will easily fly.

I don't think there are specific news, but personally I think it's because it's been undervalued for a long time. Also, it might be following Ripple's recent rally (as it has in the past), since Stellar is technically similar.

Congrats to the Shift team on the new website!

It was added to Binance a couple of days ago, which gave it good volume and price increase. There's also the anticipation for the open beta launch at the end of Jan 2018.

Yeah there are lots of heavy buys just today. Whales entering again or someone knows something...maybe it will be added to another major exchange soon?

When did you get the SHIFT? If it was before the switch from Ethereum codebase to Lisk codebase (I believe this happened end of 2016 or early 2017), then unfortunately you are probably out of luck...

If it was after, and you have your passphrase you can just enter it at https://wallet.shiftnrg.org/ to access your coins.

Most of the picks are decent. Here are some thoughts:

I guess the Binance coin will probably continue to do well, but I am just wary now that its price is already quite high and its performance is so coupled with the success of the Binance exchange, since BNB is used to pay trading fees (imagine what would happen if it gets hacked and goes bankrupt, like a number of other exchanges have in the past).

For payments/remittances: I think Stellar Lumens is very low and will probably spike soon to $0.40-0.50 due to the recent Ripple rally. Request Network, OmiseGO are also pretty strong - OmiseGO in particular since it's backed by a real company that already existed for several years. Request Network is lower cap and riskier, but potentially way more profitable.

For privacy: I think Zencash is quite undervalued, but you can stick with Monero for a safer choice.

Others: I think the next big thing are coins that enhance/facilitate crypto-trading and/or a multi-blockchain/tokenized economy + allow users to control their coins: for example 0x, ARK (and its upcoming ICO partner, Blockport.io), Blocknet, Komodo. Perhaps Enigma/Santiment as well since those are focused on facilitating crypto-trading. As crypto goes mainstream, it is going to be important to easily allow the average person to be able to trade cryptocurrencies without having to learn about all these exchanges and/or worry about being hacked.


 

1. Yeah, but I guess in general, some exchanges might be afraid of Blocknet because it might take away market share from trading volume (I think many suspect this is why Poloniex delisted Blocknet?).

2. I noticed this too, I think whales might just be moving or consolidating coins in their nodes.

3. Yeah, you can't use cold wallet unless you import the private key into a connected desktop wallet (which then defeats the purpose of it being cold storage). But I believe it is theoretically possible to use a hardware wallet e.g you just need to physically confirm the trades, just as you would when sending coins.

I think it should be at least Lisk level (so $25+ or 3x the current price). This is coming from someone who was in since almost the beginning or $0.05. Right now ARK is still so undervalued despite it having so many good things going for it for 2017 and beyond: Blockport.io partnership (and others), rearchitecture of the ARK core, ARKVM (smart contracts, like Ethereum), a very user-friendly mobile wallet, etc.

It is clear the team is very smart and taking the project very seriously, and making major improvements so it is no longer simply a Lisk fork. As others have said, yes ARK just needs a bit of a marketing push to bring it up there.

We're just hit a high of $38, need some dips so I can accumulate more I'm fairly confident we'll hit $100+ in the next months.

Well my observation is that alts are becoming decoupled from Bitcoin compared with years ago. Soon I think alts might perform mostly independently of Bitcoin price.

My suggestion is to not buy into niche ICOs but those coins that support decentralized token exchange and/or crosschain tech. This is because a multi-blockchain / tokenized world is becoming more apparent.

Some suggestions:

Ark, Waves, Blocknet, 0x.

Also with high transaction fees of first gen blockchains (Bitcoin especially) projects like Stellar or Ripple will shine when we need to pay for blockchain services. Personally would recommend Stellar as they have major partnerships and it is still quite undervalued.

Sweet, I'm so stoked for January. This is a substantive update. It looks like the price is already reacting positively.

Yep, definitely going to trend up until then. I say we will see $4-5 by end of the year. Doesn’t best the all time high in BTC, but still pretty good. The good thing is volume is also constantly increasing. Only a matter of time until it’s widely recognized.

I think Shift for a few reasons:

1. Niche product that might be actually be more useful than you think. Yes, right now there are decentralized apps interacting with cryptocurrency networks (ex: Edgeless on Ethereum), but the website itself is not decentralized. A decentralized web platform will allow developers to easily decentralize entire stack (web server, webapp logic, etc.).
2. It is kind of a first mover. Its closest competitor, Substratum, doesn't have a product out yet is trading at ~3x the market cap of Shift ($75 MM vs. $27MM). Shift has much more progress thoughI think the cause of this imbalance can be attributed to Shift's lack of marketing, low communication, and a semi-anonymous/mysterious team. But it looks like they are ramping up marketing plans in the next months, and will actually launch Shift's Phantom dApp in production in the next months as well (and the new site will be running on Shift). If marketing/launch plans are successful, I fully expect Shift to go to at least $100MM market cap just on this alone.
3. I think the DPOS consensus algorithm (delegated proof-of-stake) will dominate in the future, due to problems of hashpower centralization and energy use during mining. It has seen great use, since currencies like ARK, Lisk, EOS, Rise have all adopted it from the original implementation of DPOS in Bitshares (and all of these DPOS coins have done well this year). Also, Shift is the cheapest in terms of market cap (Shift - $27MM, ARK - $380MM, Lisk - $900MM, EOS - $2B, Rise - $37MM). Yes, I know there are other, lower market cap DPOS coins. But I have looked into them and didn't really find any compelling one, that's also traded on a major exchange (Shift is on Bittrex, at least).

This is my personal analysis - please do your own DD before investing. If you want to be less risky, I suggest investing into bigger cap coins (my other recommendation, if you're looking for a different DPOS coin, is ARK).

Yeah, I think you are right - exchange fees should get distributed to nodes. But for the time being, normal staking is more profitable, unless there is some mechanism to balance it out.

It just stuck out as not ideal because I was under the impression that nodes should always have at par or higher ROI over stakers (but not too much higher) since they have to lock up 5000 BLOCK (~$110k now, which is not a small amount). Perhaps the Blocknet team can address this issue?

According to the ROI spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y8uRsftL_uUcDPPiRvDDxJwI2ftLZq1iPavKaGfrF_c/edit#gid=0 it seems the network is currently oversaturated with service nodes, being only 79% profitable (!) compared to just staking 5000 coins. Theoretically, market efficiency means that people will start staking more instead of setting up new nodes and/or switchover nodes to staking, so that nodes become as or more profitable as staking. But I guess it takes some time to happen.

Is there a plan for implementing some automatic mechanism to help rebalance this or guarantee nodes to get a higher profitability than normal staking?

Ah I see, I must have missed that. Glad it is working now 

Yeah, as he said, you need more BLOCK in order to get rewards more frequently. This is because each staked block is a static 0.3 BLOCK reward to stakers, unlike some other proof-of-stake coins. So unless you have a lot of coins, it will take a while to get your first reward.

Example:

Right now according to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y8uRsftL_uUcDPPiRvDDxJwI2ftLZq1iPavKaGfrF_c/edit#gid=0, the staking ROI per year is ~14%.

If you have 100 BLOCK, you should get 100 * 0.14 = 14 BLOCK in stake rewards per year.

(365 days / 14 BLOCK) * (0.3 BLOCK / Stake Reward) = 7.8 days / Stake Reward on average.

Note that this 7.8 days is not constant; it is just on average. You may get lucky and find two blocks within minutes of each other or get unlucky and not find any block for a while.

@EnViRoNmEnT: you mentioned you waited 2 days and didn't get anything. According to the above calculation, you need to be staking at least 400 BLOCK to get your first 0.3 BLOCK stake reward after about 2 days.