My top cryptocurrencies for 2018 are ...

Hello Friends,

So as a relative newcomer (summer 2017) to the crypto world one would think I should not spreed my totally uneducated opinions online regarding this highly complicated and volatile market ... but I just cant help myself form spreading a little FOMO.

My choices are based on the profit I made with these coins/tokens in the previous months and obviously on the research I made in order to speculate on the price change (which has nothing to do with technical analysis or other professional analysis).

Without further ado here are my top cryptocurrencies for 2018 in no particular order:

1. NEO

The artist formerly known as Antshares is now referred as “Chinese Ethereum” or “Ethereum’s killer“. NEO is the first decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency and blockchain platform launched in China. NEO tags itself as a “distributed network for the smart economy”, and NEO’s goal speaks volumes about their smart economy concept.

NEO has been the biggest earner in my portfolio since I bought in an average price of $43,96 and today stand at about $161,66.

Given China's appetite for crypto and all things Chinese, despite their governments constant FUD, I think NEO will be one of the success coins of this year.

I have to mention GAS here because its directly linked to NEO and you can get it for free. I get GAS free form my NEO app which I use with my nano ledger s ... pretty cool. As I am into NEO and speculating for fun and profit I bought some GAS on the 15 of January at an average price of $83,36. You would think I made a pretty bad call because form that price GAS dropped to about $33 at some point. But as I see it GAS its tied directly with NEO and can only go up (hopefully as today the price is $70,17).

2.Ethereum

Ethereum needs no introduction because is probably the most useful coin out there at the moment. Its an open software platform based on blockchain technology that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications.

Before the creation of Ethereum, blockchain applications were designed to do a very limited set of operations. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, for example, were developed exclusively to operate as peer-to-peer digital currencies.
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In a sens Ethereum is what Bitcoin could never be and is here to stay. The majority of new ICO’s today use the Ethereum blockchain and they fuel the market incredibly.

Ethereum is in my opinion one of the best success stories in the crypto world even if CryptoKitties manged to slow it down for a while.

I got in to Ethereum for the firs time when it was around $300 and now it stands at a tall $1141. For me Ethereum is one of the safest bets for 2018. As an honorable mention here I have to include Ethereum Classic which I use purely for speculative gains and so far has not let me down.

3.Stellar Lumens

Stellar Lumens advertises itself as an open-sourced, distributed payments infrastructure, built on the premise that the international community needs “a worldwide financial network open to anyone.” Stellar Lumens will fill this need, connecting individuals, institutions, and payment systems through its platform.

Now all of this sound so good and I like the ideas the promote (I just hate a little bit the loose connection wit Ripple via Jed McCaleb). Stellar Lumens is cooling off after an impressive bullish streak. I bought in at $0.179, so this makes XLM my second biggest earner in my portfolio since the price is now at $0.52.

In my opinion 2018 will be a good year for Stellar Lumens especially after all that FOMO for Ripple will die out. Now do not get me wrong i made some nice profits of XRP but I just find it impossible to see it go more that $2.5 for good and be stable.

4.EOS

EOS is a decentralized operating system, which greatly simplifies the process of designing blockchain applications, and also performs all of the communication between the application and the decentralized computer, i.e. the blockchain.

Based on the above EOS appears to be a direct competitor to Ethereum. But even if the idea shows promise its to soon to tell.

The most interesting thing about EOS is that its still in ICO. Basically 2,000,000 EOS ar distributed every day to purchasers with ETH. There are 127 days left in the distribution scheme.

I bought EOS through the ICO distribution scheme and found it to be cheaper than the price I would have bought on any exchange. Now this sounds perfect, but the price in the ICO can fluctuate depending on the number of contributors and ETH, so cheaper is not granted.

Anyhow, in my opinion EOS should have a bright future in 2018 if it manages to do something meaningful with the tech behind it, if not at least 127 days left form 2018 should be good, as you have a chance to make a quick profit form getting in on the ICO distribution scheme .

5.IOTA

IOTA is a revolutionary new, next generation public distributed ledger that utilizes a novel invention, called a “Tangle”, at its core.

UU that sound awesome, and so different from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Dash etc., because it’s designed for the Internet of Things. Its developers see a future where machines trade resources (electricity, storage, bandwidth, data, etc.) and services with each other using IOTA as payment.

In theory every user is both submitting and verifying transactions. So every user contributes both to verification, and security. Transactions are verified multiple times by different users, as it keeps getting approvals, the degree of confidence for that transaction increases.

In Practice in order for IOTA to work as a decentralized cryptocurrency it still has to solve a lot of challenges and technical difficulties that still are yet to be demonstrated will work, like: Conflict Resolution Vulnerabilities, Malicious Attackers, The Coordinator, Parasitic Chains, Cryptography Best Practices and Ternary Processor concerns (Obviously for clarification on these issues you should study the technical details)

The general idea for IOTA is that it promises a lot and could have a great future and for me mabye a great 2018, seeing as I got into it at $0.77 and held when it was $5.

6.Power Ledger

Power Ledger is a distributed, inter operable energy trading platform that supports an extensive suite of energy-focused applications. It features a live and deployed platform that possesses the ability for others to develop applications for use on it.

For me the idea of Power Ledger sounds very appealing. The electricity market will always grow and just based on that POWR should have success if they implement their proposed strategies more aggressively. How does not like peer to peer trading in buildings of energy assets while using micro grids.

POWR is currently facing a healthy correction from a market surge that brought it to almost $2.

Again like IOTA I got in low ant held when the price was high. I’m still in profit, but my opinion is 2018 will be a very good year for Power Ledger.

As an honorable mention I have to say something about WePower which will start with a ICO form the first of February. Basically is a blockchain-based green energy trading platform based in Europe. In my opinion it will be an almost shure profit maker in 2018.

7.STEEM

It would be total awkward to post a description about STEEM on steemit, but a cryptocurrency used to power an incentivized blockchain social media platform sound like the next big thing.

There is no point in going on about it, so yes I believe STEEM will cross in the summer of 2018 the $10 barrier.

8.Siacoin

Sia is one of the players in the decentralized storage space. The cloud storage industry is massive and companies like Sia are hoping to put a dent in the dominance of other popular storage platforms such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, and Google Drive. But what sets Sia apart is that it is a decentralized, encrypted, peer to peer cloud storage platform.

Unlike most new coins, the Sia team chose not to hold an ICO. Instead, Sia began life when its genesis block was mined.

Anyone who has extra space on their PC can rent it out to the Sia decentralized network and get paid in Siacoin. Similarly, anyone who wants to use Sia storage needs to pay Siacoins to a host.

Everything sounds good to me except one fact: the supply mechanism of Sia is somewhat unique, because there will be an infinite number of Siacoins.

Even with the infinite number of Siacoins the idea behind Sia is pretty good and in my opinion 2018 will be a good year.

9.ARK

ARK is a fast, decentralized, scalable, collaborative system that allows for bridging between blockchains. Transactions on the network average around 8 seconds.

ARK pays up to 10% dividends on coins when you stake them and vote for one of the 51 delegates. These dividends are paid out every few days (or sometimes daily) so you’re getting instant growth in your tokens.

Like so many others on my list I got ARK at a good price and held when the coin had its maximum price of about $10. I like the ARK democracy system and think it has a future.

10.ICON

The ICON team is building a massive platform that will allow various blockchains to interact with each other via smart contracts. (great in theory but if you are more skeptical than go with @roosterred article for details).

My personal opinion is that ICON is going to have a very good year even if in its home country the regulatory trend is goring fast.

That is all folks

... but i cant end without mentioning the other coins that i have and believe will make me some profit this year: Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Nem, Lisk, Digibyte, VeChain, Cardano, Kyber Network, EthLend, Envion, WePower and Medicalchain.

So, in the end a word of caution: never invest more money into cryptocurrencies than you can afford to lose. They are extremely volatile — value goes up and down a lot — making them less stable than standard currencies like dollars and euros.

Have a good year and sorry for any spelling errors.