What is the best cryptocurrency to invest in right now?

Disclaimer :: None of this is intended as advice, these are merely my thoughts!

Ethereum: Had 40x growth rate over the last two years. Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

Antshares (ANS) Smart assets & application platform based in China. C#, DPOS Ethereum, a partnership with Alibaba and KYC compliant, connected to major exchanges.

Factom: A blockchain-based system that’s optimized to store millions of realtime records with a single hash. Factom allows companies to create immutable database.

Factom store information in their own blockchain and then create a hash of that data and stores it into the Bitcoin blockchain. They are also working on adding that hash into ethereum and other big blockchain to add protection.

Siacoin: Distributed data storage. An alternative to Box, Google Drive. The big corporations would not have any access to your data in this point.

Augur: It is coined as a “prediction market” but basically, this means gambling. And gambling is big big business. Throw in the fact that the supply is limited at 11 000 000 tokens now and always and you can see the potential.

Stratis: Stratis is essentially doing something very similar to what Ethereum is doing - smart contracts. The primary difference being that the programming language for smart contracts will be C# and .net platform integration. Besides for that a java and javascript API will also become available Q4 this year. Stratis is also PoS and segwit ready.

Maidsafe has been around for quite a while now. 10 years exactly and they finally launch their Alpha MVP this week. Maidsafe is a decentralized database.

Instead of storing data on your computer, with maidsafe you can encrypt and upload it on the decentralised server. That way no one person can access your data without your permission. It is 100% secure and it doesnt use any space.

STEEM: A decentralized platform which allows to reward content creators easily.

Golem: Built on top of the Ethereum blockchain Golem is on track to becoming the world’s most powerful decentralised supercomputer, processing anything from scientific research in academia through to rendering the latest block buster movies.

NEM (XEM) NEM is the first private/public blockchain combination. It's one of the most popular Japanese based blockchains.

Waves (WAVES): Crypto-platform for asset/custom token issuance, transfer and trading on blockchain.

TAKE NOTE: Never take financial advice from random people on the internet

OK, NOW ABOUT CRYPTO INVESTING (some prefer the word SPECULATION).

I am not going to tell you what you should do, I am going to tell you what I do, merely for entertainment purposes, not as investment advice.

My approach to cryptocurrencies is similar to seed investing in startups. I create portfolios of 10 - 20 cryptos. Not all of them will make it, in fact possibly most of them won't. But hopefully one or two will become the next big thing, and make it all worthwhile. Also, I am investing only money I am 100% ready to lose, in fact, I regard all my money in cryptos as lost already. Any better outcome is just pleasant surprise.

Steps

A. First I have to strongly believe that whole industry (cryptocurrencies) is disruptive and is here to stay and take over. And that belief must come from understanding, not blind wishes. For that, some studying is necessary - I read BTC whitepaper and Whitepaper of every cryptocurrency from TOP 10 by market cap to develop a strong base knowledge of the industry.

I ask questions on reddit, etc. I stay clear from spam Facebook groups full of hyped up people talking about random price fluctuations.

B. Then I start researching cryptocurrency by cryptocurrency. I quickly skim through the webpage. If I do not understand the key value proposition of the cryptocurrency, I write it off. I like to understand what I am buying.

C. If I understand and like the value proposition of a coin or token, I am going to see under which blockchain it is built. Most of them are build under Ethereum. So I ask myself - does it make sense to invest in this coin? Isn’t it better to invest directly into Ethereum? How are they correlated?

D. If I see the coin is priced pretty low (comparing market cap), I might go directly for the coin. If it already went up a couple of hundreds or thousands of %, I might as well invest directly into ETH.

E. When I decide the price is right, I am going to dig deeper - reading whitepaper, Reddit boards (sometimes you find pearls like this ). I ask some hard questions -Is it inflationary and how much? Is it valuable for this project to use blockchain? Most of the services could just as well use SQL database and it wouldn’t matter. I beware of same old business disguising itself as disruptive blockchain tech. There are plenty of them.

F. I pay special attention to the team - who are these guys? How experienced are they? Are they fully committed or is this just a sidekick project? Especially - who are the developers and how many of them are there? If I see 7 founders, and only 1–2 are devs (the rest usually being “marketing, community management, finance, sales, visionary…”) I run away.

G. If the coin passes all these filters, I am going to close my eyes and buy for a couple of bucks. I always only buy for as much as I can lose. I am not going to day trade, stare into charts or panic sell. I am going to let it lie for 1–5 years, occasionally watching and reading the news about the project. I also set up some sell limit order for 1/3 - 1/2 of the investment for 300% - 600% to secure a profit and freeroll if it spikes suddenly (which happens a lot here), depends on the coin and my faith in it.

Warning! I do not recommend anything to anyone, this purely me saying what I like. If I said I like jumping into volcano, you surely wouldn’t jump there.

This article originally appeared on: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-cryptocurrency-to-invest-in-right-now?redirected_qid=12216786

I hope you enjoyed the article. Please Upvote, Comment and Resteem