Tip #7: Understand there's more besides BitcoinThis forum got started back when Bitcoin was pretty much the only game in town when it came to cryptocurrencies. To this day its focus is on Bitcoin. However, we are now almost done with 2017, Bitcoin has been around for eight years, and it has inspired lots of new coins and other cryptocurrency related projects.
You may be feeling overwhelmed by all the information you are encountering about Bitcoin. I remember feeling that way too. I kept seeing these ads for writing to earn a different coin, also known as an altcoin, and I ignored them for several months because I thought I should just focus on Bitcoin until I'd mastered it.
If you ignore the other coins you are going to miss out on a good 99 percent of what the cryptocurrency world has to offer, including a lot of ways to earn.
There are currently over seven hundred actively traded coins, and several thousand more defunct coins. It is very important to understand that there are more dead altcoins than live ones.
So at this stage, I am only going to advise that you get to know about some of the other altcoins. I am going to show you how to most easily get the information and your "homework" will be to get to know two or three altcoins. Just get to know them, but don't buy any yet. I will provide future tips on what to look for in an altcoin, but today I'm going to focus on how you can find the information you'll need to make an informed judgment about an altcoin before you buy it.
Coin Market Cap will be your go to site to connect with all the active altcoins. You can also use it to look up inactive coins as long as you know the exact name or ticker symbol of the coin. Go ahead and bookmark coinmarketcap dot com.
The home page is a list of the top one hundred coins in terms of market cap. Market cap is the total value in Dollars represented by all the coins currently in circulation multiplied by the current market price of the coin. Right now, the price of one Bitcoin is $9607.11 and there are 16,705,012 BTC in circulation. So the market cap for Bitcoin is $9607.11 x 16,705,012 = $160,486,887,835. It's a very simple math problem and a good way to rank coins. It is an inflated number for a couple reasons. First, this amount would be realized only if every single Bitcoin were to be sold at its current market price all at once. However, if everyone who owned Bitcoins tried to sell them, the price would drop and drop until the last person to unload would get next to nothing. Second, it doesn't account for any coins that are lost. We know from various anecdotes that a few people who mined Bitcoin early on wiped their hard drives or in some other way lost access to those coins and so they are not actually in circulation.
The rank of coins has nothing to do with the coin's quality, only its market cap. You can have a coin that is high quality but still has a low market cap.
Diamond, for example, has a current circulating supply of 2,531,992 and a price of $9.66, so its market cap is $24,447,193. Because the supply is so low compared to Bitcoin, even if Diamond were priced at $10,000 each, its total coin market cap would still be lower than Bitcoin's. As for the coin's actual value, well, you need to know right now that a lot of very poor quality coins go through periods of rapid price rise due to hype, pump and dump schemes or random weird market forces, so you can't just consider the price or the market cap in making your investment decisions.
If you click on the name of a coin from the Coin Market Cap home page, it will take you to a page that is just for that coin. For example, click on
Ethereum to get to its page. You will see a repeat of the information for Ethereum that you saw on the home page. On the left hand side, under the name "Ethereum," you will see a short list of hyperlinked words like "Website," "Announcement," "Explorer," and more. The
Website hyperlink takes you straight to Ethereum's website. The
Announcement hyperlink takes you straight to Ethereum's announcement thread on this forum. the
Explorer hyperlinks (in the case of Ethereum there are several) take you to block explorers for Ethereum. Other hyperlinks take to you other sources of information about Ethereum, such as Ethereum's own forum or message board, Ethereum's chat channel and even Ethereum's source code. If you were interested in investing in Ethereum, you would first want to spend time looking over those different sites.
We're still on Ethereum's page. Scroll down a bit to where the charts are. That shows a graph of the overall price (in BTC and USD) and market cap trends over time. You can click on
Markets to learn where Ethereum is traded,
Social to get updated feeds of various social media sites where Ethereum has a presence, and
Historical Data to find out the daily high, low, open and close price for Ethereum as far back as you want to go (default is 30 days).
I used Ethereum as an example, but the pages are laid out the same for each coin. Some coins may have slightly less information than Ethereum, but it will all be there.
So, for your "homework," spend some time on
Coin Market Cap. Get familiar with the home page and the pages of a few individual coins. When selecting coins to learn more about, don't limit yourself to the top 100 ranked coins. You can easily ask to see the next 100 to get lower ranked coins. Once you've picked a few, then start digging into the hyperlinked information found on each of their pages. Feel free to post any summary information of what you've learned here.