Crypto shuffling, gripes and power up!
With the crypto market in free fall (well, at least at the time I am writing this, I am currently 6 hours disconnected from the world on a ferry across the the English Channel), it is potentially a good time to inject a bit more fiat into my crypto holdings. Of course, it could turn out that it was a moment of throwing good money after bad, only time will tell if this was a good idea or not. That said, it is money that I can afford to lose, the only downside would be that it could have been put to better use if the entire crypto market tanks completely down to zero in the coming years!
The Preparation
This is the slightly slow part of the equation, the moving of fiat money from your bank account to the exchange (for this part of the process I use the exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase and Coinjar. Usually it will take a business day or two to complete, however in my case it was a bit complicated by the fact that I made the transfer at the beginning of the weekend, which meant that the funds didn't clear until the Monday (which was almost three complete days from initial transfer to the receipt of funds). As anyone who has done any trading on the crypto market knows, a day is a long time in the crypto world... three days is an eternity!
Luckily for me (maybe not for others), the market steadily decreased in value over the weekend. After a concert last night, I got a message after driving and arriving home at around 1 in the morning that my funds had arrived at the exchange. I was tempted to hop online and start investing, but I figured that it was a bad idea to be making financial decisions when you are dead tired. Things could wait until the morning, when I would have a bit of time to think things through. Even if the prices picked up a bit, they would still be down a fair bit from the week beforehand (although, that is a dangerous thing to say about crypto, it can jump up and down faster than a kangaroo on speed).
Well, waking up in the morning, it did prove to be a wise choice in hindsight. Ethereum (ETH) had dropped around 20%, Bitcoin (BTC) was nearly double digits in the red, and the was a complete swathe of red across the board. There were some hints of green (the one that I noticed was Stellar Lumens (XLM), although these were more like keeping a tiny sliver above zero rather than any real growth.
So, I picked up a bit of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) on the fire sale, hoping that it wouldn't plummet too much further. I figured I would just buy at market value today, I didn't have so much time that I could play around with the trading markets. In addition, the price was severely down at any rate, any further down and I would be in serious doubts of the entire system rather than being happy about picking up a discount. It wasn't worth risking the missing out on the low prices by being a bit too greedy for a tiny saving.
Bouncing out
With some of the principal crypto in tow, I had to bounce some out to a hardware wallet to avoid any temptation to spend or sell too easily (also, you only really own the crypto if you own the private keys, exchanges are only IOU's). Also, I had to move some BTC onwards towards exchanges that hold higher volumes of altcoins that I was interested in. The exchanges that I personally use for the higher altcoin volumes are: Binance, Kucoin, Poloniex and Cryptopia.
At this stage I was reminded how slow the Bitcoin (BTC) network is at the moment. This is really a big problem for the adoption of Bitcoin (BTC). I have been spoilt by using relatively fast networks recently, STEEM is an example of a faster network with transactions being almost instantaneous, or at the very most taking only a few seconds. In contrast, I set a Bitcoin transaction going, then went out to an embassy and applied for a visa and then drop home, and it had only just processed. It was a time of network busyness, but this sort of transaction time is completely unacceptable for anything that wants to be widely adopted.
There is a lot riding on the Lightning second layer (off chain) solution for Bitcoin (BTC). It really needs to work, or Bitcoin (BTC) is really going to fade into obscurity as an idea ahead of it's time that wasn't able to deliver on its promises due to technical constraints that were not scalable and politically not solveable within its governence structure.
Time to go Shopping!
Well, this bit I guess I will be holding close to my chest. There were some altcoins that I wanted to increase my holdings for, and a few others that I wanted to make long bets on, on the off chance that one of them might turn out to be a unicorn.
However, there was an interesting crypto called STEEM. I bought up some, and due to the currentlly rock-bottom pricing of STEEM was able to come away with much more than I had expected... much much more!
So, I've powered up, and I'm ready to delegate some STEEM POWER to worthy causes that are helping grow communities and cohesion against the perverse structures that currently incentivise against long term sustainability of the Steemit social network. And of course, I have also delegated a little bit to more selfish ventures that will help my account to grow over time, after all, sometimes I need to help myself as well....
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Lol, this as definitely a free fall.
I've got some coins I need to get rid off, because they are losing value at warp speed. I was going to buy some extra Steem with them, but now I'm not sure anymore...
I have some dead altcoins as well, but I figure they aren't worth any thing if I sell them, so I just let them hang around as a reminder to not be too careless!
I'm surprised that more people don't trade in Litecoin. It's much faster than Bitcoin and maybe this is a personal thing, but the wallet I have for Litecoin is SO much easier and cheaper to use than myetherwallet. I only know of one exchange where I can directly purchase LTC with Sterling though, so maybe that's the drawback.
I'm trying to do this just now, and someone recommended Binance. However I can't work out how to actually buy crypto with Sterling, so I'll probably try Coinbase now.
Also, the market seems to be rapidly turning round - I might have missed the bottom!
Take a look at Bitstamp, they take IBAN deposits, but the down side is that it can take a few days to clear. There are faster ways (mostly credit card based), but you incur either fees or a bad fiat-crypto rate.
LTC is definitely faster, but it isn't a trading pair with most of the other crypto unlike BTC and ETH. It just doesn't have the same volume to be a viable alternative at the moment, I guess.
I use a mix of hot wallets and hardware wallets. I rarely use Mew unless it is for checking balances of tokens on the go or signing stuff (via a ledger hardware wallet).
Great info, thanks. I haven't traded much crypto over the past year or two - only Steem, and LTC works with Blocktrades. I will definitely have a look at Bitstamp. I think now is a good time to get back into crypto!
Well done on buying more STEEM. Im trying but am having some wrangles with Coinbase right now. All is good if it works, but if it doesn't, their support team are abysmal.
Good luck with them, their support was mixed with me. .. I ended giving up on them and moving to Bitstamp. I still keep Coinbase around but I have serious problems with their fiat on and off ramp which they don't seem too willing to solve...
Its still in the red, I am sorely tempted to put a little bit more fiat into crypto today I feel or hope it will start bouncing back up soon
I see green today! Time will tell if this is just a dead cat bounce...
@bengy Yeah lets see how it goes
We can't do that with our holdings it would just cause us too much stress trying to guess the market we pretty much bought and held, and held set a time frame to check again and try not to fry when we peak.
Agreed, it is stressful. Most of what I do is just HODL, but at a time like this when I add in a bit more fiat, I need to check out what is there to take some long shots or otherwise....
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@bengy, you are interesting to read!
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