Researching Altcoins 101

in #altcoins7 years ago (edited)

In the world of cryptos there are just too many coins to choose from.
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Finding a Coin

  • Cryptonaire.com is a site that suggests coins to purchase from their verified coins list.
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    The site gives suggestions for the Day, Week, Month, and Long-Term. It also has a community section but these are mostly just hyped coins being shilled. The site can give insightful times to enter a certain coin and helps cut out a lot of the uncertainties of if a coin is reputable.

  • Bitcointalk is a forum with vast amounts of discussion on Bitcoin and various other altcoins. First navigate to the Alternate cryptocurrencies section.
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    The best sections to find discussion on coins is in the Altcoin Discussion and Speculation (Altcoins) subsections. If you want to learn about newly released coins or read a coin's Bitcointalk announcement thread then the Announcements (Altcoins) section is where to go.

  • Reddit is another social forum with a huge community around cryptocurrencies. The subreddits r/CryptoCurrency and r/CryptoMarkets are my go to.
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    On the right hand side of both subreddits are flair filters where you can sort the discussion in your direction (i.e. New Coins, Strategies, etc.).

  • Coinmarketcap.com is a good site to use to find various coins and their standings.
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    Looking through the list of 100s of cryptos can be intimidating but sorting by market cap or daily use can be a good indicator of the coins value.

Researching Your Coin

For this example I will be looking at Waves as it is pretty popular at the moment.

  1. Navigate to Coingecko.com and type in your coin
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    Here we can see a few key stats that give us some insight into the coin: Market Cap, 24 Trade Volume, Liquidity, Developer Score, Community, as well as a short description of the coin. The site compiles all of these factors into their algorithm and creates a score for each coin (Waves ranks at 20) and gives you a sense of where the coin is right now. You can explore around the site and learn some more information about the coin's social presence or the cost over a certain time period.

  2. The coin's website gives a lot of information about the team, development, professionalism, and other key factors to look at when investing into a coin.
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    From here we can navigate to the coins How It Works, Team, or Projects section. Towards the bottom left of the webpage we can find the coin's Whitepaper, which brings me to number 3.

  3. Read your coin's Whitepaper and Roadmap to understand what the key issues your coin is trying to solve and how they are planning to do it. On the Whitepaper you will read about where the need comes from, how the coin works, why it is valuable, how it will scale, and other important details. The Roadmap lays down how the coin's development will work and around the times certain things will be done (i.e. wallet, phone integration, etc.).

Investing and Choosing Your Coin

When you are ready to put your money in you will need to use an exchange such as Poloniex or Bittrex. Remember to try and not buy in the highs but in the dips and diversify your holdings as these markets are volatile.

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