Well. I am off to go unload the couple bitcoin my buddy bought already of VRC already. He is fairly dissapointed. I thought telling a friend would be a good idea. Now its just stress on my back and losing him money! The past few days I tried to reassure him several times. But now I think maybe I am making up stories to myself to make me feel good about the investment here.
Really appreciate all the work everyone does. I am going to be a silent member of the community from now on, save my sanity.
Will leave my personal money in, because I don't see many better investments in all the shit crypto investments lately. But I am not going to keep relaying info to a buddy, daily when its been nothing but a stress so far. Nor will I continue to post in here.
I'll prob lose a few bitcoins with this investment but that's okay. I guess I am an idiot for believing in something that maybe wasn't meant to be.
VeriCoin has only been around for two months. If all you want are constant price increases, then you're going to be disappointed no matter which altcoin you choose. They all are going down right now.
I've only made three bets in the crypto world, Bitcoin (2012), Litecoin (2013) and Peercoin (2013). All three were big winners for me. I invested in Litecoin, because I liked the idea of decentralized mining and faster transaction times than Bitcoin. I liked Peercoin because of its implementation of Proof of Stake, which many people said would never work. I was one of the largest holders of Peercoin for almost a year before people finally started to invest in it. I was fortunate enough to ride the wave on all of these coins during the 2013/2014 price increase.
However, after a while, I eventually noticed a couple things that made me rethink my investments. One of them was that the development process seemed extremely slow with Litecoin/Peercoin in regards to getting it in the hands of casual users. In early 2014, it became apparent that more and more alts were arriving with new features and Bitcoin was attracting a lot of venture capital money to build an infrastructure around it. Being familiar with software lifecycles, I knew it would only be a matter of time before Litecoin/Peercoin would be replaced if they didn't innovate fast enough. As an example, it has been almost two years and I still don't think Peercoin (Sunny King) or the community has developed a mobile wallet yet. How can you attract people to your coin if it's not easy for them to access it?
The other major problem I recognized, which might sound silly to some people, is that the marketing for all of these altcoins was nonexistent. Most cryptocoins seem to be developed with the idea of catering to only the tiny cult-like crypto community, not the casual user. Any casual person with limited knowledge of technology is going to struggle greatly with any virtual currency and they don't really care about technical details. Bitcoin is closing this gap thanks to all of the venture capital money and apps being built on top of it, similar to when TCP/IP first came around. Most altcoins don't seem to have this luxury.
Between those fundamentals and the chart patterns I was watching (I'm a long time FX trader), I decided that it would be best to sell off both of my positions in early 2014 and hold on to cash. I didn't see a reason to hold any virtual currency outside of Bitcoin at that point, unless someone had a better way to market themselves to casual users. It ended up being a good decision, because most coins lost the vast majority of their value over the following months. I told myself that I would just make small investments in Bitcoin on dips and keep everything else in cash.
Fast forward almost six months later and VeriCoin arrives on the scene. I took one look at it and said, who cares, its just another altcoin. But, the more I read about the developers and their vision, the more convinced I was that this coin had the potential to succeed. A coin is only as good as its developers and they seemed to be the first ones that "got it". If you want your coin to be successful, you need to get it into the hands of the casual masses. How do you do that? By offering more services and using better marketing. The VeriCoin developers seem to understand the direction that Bitcoin is headed with it's third party services/feature infrastructure. Instead of doing everything that way, they've decided to incorporate as much as they can into one place, the wallet, which I believe is the right way to go. As long as the developers continue down this path, then it greatly increases the potential for adoption outside of the crypto community.
If you can find a service-based coin with long term potential and better developers than this one, please let me know, because I certainly haven't found one.