Topic: Alts are so cheap, are you buying or selling? (Read 2789 times)

MYR looks like a good one to get into.
I think POS coins would be the future because of their low energy consumption.
Exciting times ahead.

I'm selling all scrypt coins, buying 100% PoS and mining alternative algos (X11, groestl, q2c).

Unthinkingbit was the DeVCoin designer, he wanted merged mining because he wanted a secure blockchain and because he did not want all the coins to go to miners, the entire point was to create coins that someone else other than miners can get. Specifically, developers of free open source software, hardware, art and so on.

One thing I have been trying to provide that end users should like is actual "backing" for the coin: ever-growing heaps of buy-orders ensuring that anyone who wants to dump is able to dump, and hopefully at an ever growing price-floor.

-MarkM-

Just holding DOGE, LTC, PPC.
You, too?

Okay, I stand corrected.


Are you responsible for putting in (or insisting upon) Devcoin's merged-mining capability? What does Devcoin have going for it, end-user-wise?

This was a difficult decision, I feel or look at the market, when our choices are not necessarily correct, but can reduce the loss of their own.

not cheap enough.all those shitcoins and copycats worth nothing.

Buying AirCoin, because I already dumped too much on it and only way to lower the point at which I can cashout without losses is to invest more at current (hopefully) floor price.

It went to 27 satoshis again like the previous low period didn't it?

Usually though it seems best to place at least some buy and sell orders far beyond the lowest or highest you expect to ever see, so that if there is a big surprise in either direction it will be a pleasant one.

-MarkM-

Devcoin is/was good for trading. It went lower than I expected the last month or so.

Hopefully none. BTC has the SHA-256 realm and just let it remain that way; other coins can be made to be merged-mined as it should be for something with strong infrastructure.

Anyhow, yes you did. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even the merged-mined coins like NMC/DEV just doesn't seem worth getting at the moment since BTC is still "struggling." I'd still rather get more BTC while it is in its dip, rather than divesting what I have in BTC to get alts. Don't get me wrong, I think that the merge-mined coins will go up (and in fact will likely gain significantly more value than coins in the scrypt realm), but I'd rather see the correlative TA first before taking that risk. I guess I'm just a smidge risk-adverse at the moment.

Heh, I guess in response to the thread question, I'm holding; but if I had to choose between sell or buy, I'd buy.

Well I do actually have a bias, I trade coins that I want to try to ensure go up, and failing that want to raise the floor of over time.

Coins I hold lots of in my off the exchanges wallets and thus have a vested interest in trying to prevent from becoming value-less or of less value.

So my bias it toward filling the buy side of the order book, piling up more and more and more buys trying to eventualy have so many buy orders in place that if all the coins of that type that I do not own were sold to my buy orders I'd own them all, and maybe then some.

The and then some is that even if I manage to have enough offers to buy them all at one satoshi per coin, I would keep going, heading toward being able to buy some of them at more than one satoshi and still be able to buy the rest at one satoshi; and eventaully to be able to buy some at 50, more at 49, even more at 48 and so on all the way down and still buy them all before hitting one satoshi. Then onwards to being able to buy them all before hitting two satoshis, and so on onwards and upwards slowly raising the lowest price that coin can reach if sold to me.

I like DeVCoin for this not only because I helped develop DeVCoin but also because its price has tended to be a small enough number of satoshis that I can put an offer at each and every satoshi of price despite having to type in the offers manually due to the API not allowing me to have thousands upon thousands of offers (across all the coins I trade).

I don't like leaving gaps between offers because bots tend to fight over individual satoshi changes of price so simply flooding all possible prices leaves them less space to fiddle around with, to sneak in between my offers etc.

-MarkM-

i bought btc, then swapped to gpucoin and am now sitting on them till they mature.

Thanks for your take. You're obviously experienced with a different trading strategy entirely: market-making, or the kind of trading that pros licensed to trade on the commodity exchanges do. Floor trading. That's an entirely different animal, as the name of the game is to keep neutral about the long-term value about the vehicle in question. Bull-biased and bear-biased traders get cleaned out of Chicago Board of Trade so often, "be neutral" is Newble Lesson #1.

Psychologically, I'm a different kind of animal. As you may have guessed, I'm the type who gets a kick out of buying a vehicle that's out-of-favour but with good long-term prospects. Switching over to floor-trading mode would involve a real psychological retooling for me. That said, you do have my respect for knowing thyself and sticking to what works for you. That's hard to come by, even in the conventional investment arena. It took me a while before I could figure myself out enough to see what style I should stick to.

Needless to say, my psyche makes me hapless at momentum trading. Some people can pull it off, but I ain't one of them.

No wonder you're obsessed with what makes for a secure blockchain. It's just plain impossible to floor trade an investment that's on its way to the graveyard - especially in an environment like this where it's effectively impossible to short sell.

Anyways: glad to make your acquaintance, sir. Congrats on finding your niche.

Try then instead to do the buy low sell high only with your profits.

Obtain your initial profits to work with by, instead, buying on the buy side and selling on the sell side, of the order-book, growing a pile/range of orders each side of the gap in between the two sides of the order book, back and forth like a bot at low profit, and gradually growing the range over which your orders on both sides deviate from the gap in the middle.

Basically that is to start off by feeding on variance / volatility but over time building such a range of orders on both sides of the book that you have orders all the way up to above previous highs and all the way down to below previous lows.

At that point you will not only be buying low and selling high but also be buying all the way down and selling all the way up, moving the proceeds to the other side of the order book each time someone takes you up on one of your offers, at a slight margin each time of course.

This of course works best when there is some volatility initially. Eventually it should lead to less and less volatility as you grow - all using profits of course, having long ago gotten back out your initial capital plus more and more profit over time - into a more and more significant "market maker" aka "liquidity provider" in that pair.

-MarkM-

What new crapcoins do you imagine SHA256 ASICs are going to move on to?

I already mentioned that I won't consider the merged mined family of scrypt coins worth risking until I see litecoin and DOGE being merged mined together or one of them becoming so insignificant it no longer seems a serious fragmentation of the scrypt space, didn't I?

-MarKM-

That's fair, it just that this time, around I don't have confidence that any of these alts are necessarily going to go up again. Maybe MEC and DGC could go up again as an example, but there has been so much negative press around a lot of these older altcoins too. I just don't have enough confidence to even say with serious miners that a coin will go up again. A lot of people in this scene have turned to a fickle type of panic mode so I think a lot of serious miners will start switching either to newer coins or to LTC. And if that is the case, it makes it very difficult to instill confidence in me that any of those alts will go up in price.

I would rather wait to see signs of life in the BTC market as a prompt to check for signs of life in those older altcoins and use some sort of correlative TA to determine what to get. Sure the profits won't be as much, but for me, the risk would be much more acceptable.

Part of me wants to say with the advent of new hardware, a lot of that hashrate will go the way of LTC or newer coins where is it "easier" to make a profit. Anyhow, before I ramble on too much, I just don't have any confidence that any of these coins will necessarily trend upward again. That's why I'm personally going to take the correlative method so that I protect myself from a lot of that risk.

As I have a small rig, I am mining the more profitable altcoins and sell them.
While I keep Bitcoin, PPC and NXT for a long term investment.

Yes, that's exactly why. Thanks to the way we're wired up, "Buy low, sell high" is the stock-market-maxim output of a hash function. The maxim itself is easy to understand and remember. But to apply it, you need to "de-hash" it...which is damned difficult and takes a lot of time.

Fact is, we're wired up to assume that the past, present and future are linked together in a more-or-less linear way - which works so well in everyday life, we more-or-less take it for granted. Moreover, we fall into the habit of assuming that heeding the consensus is a reliable shortcut to finding truth, which works as long as the consensus' members are more-or-less honest  . The price of an altcoin, or of any investment, is a kind of consensus estimate of its future prospects. One that's, naturally, reinforced by people voicing their opinions directly.

To "buy low, sell high" entails bucking those two habits explicitly, which is a tough habit to learn.

Moreover, there's a special psychic risk that comes with buying low and selling high: the risk of buying a dog and feeling like an idiot when it tanks. As we know, it's a lot easier to act like a jackass when everyone else is (or wishes they could.) Acting like a jackass alone, in  a way that doesn't tap into the crowd's secret desires (and buying unpopular investments never does), is a time-tested way to get yourself singled out and even picked on by the group.

Let's face it: there's a special kind of sting that comes with buying a dog that the consensus thinks is crap, finding out that it is crap and seeing that the consensus was right. That's when the "I told you so"s really get to a fella.

And that's the psychic risk you shoulder when you buy low, sell high. Add to that the fact that post-bubble investments take a long time to recover, so the fear that you're the village idiot for buying in hangs over your head for a long time.

Who was buying a house in 2010?   

Not just devs, miners. Unless you want centralisation, in which it is the devs that decide which transactions happen or did not happen rather than the miners?

-MarkM-