18th January

Portfolio: £231,798.66

I was very surprised to wake up to find that my portfolio was actually faring relatively well considering late yesterday afternoon it hit a low of £192k, almost a £100k drop. I’m not convinced this is a full on recovery as all the data, both contemporary and historical, suggests several spikes will occur on the way to all-time highs in a few weeks/months. But it should be steady progress, although I am concerned about the effect that China and Korea FUD can have and potential interference from the US government with the more exposure Bitcoin gets. All the more reason to get in, get what I want and get out.

On that subject I managed to beat off the masses using something called experience and get in on the OriginTrail ICO which was completely oversubscribed and resulted in people who didn’t know how to use MyEtherWallet not putting enough gas in and not getting their payment through on time. A little tip for ICO contribution using MEW – if you can get hold of the address ahead of the launch time, you can put in the address, amount, gas price and all that an click ‘generate’ ahead of time. This kind of registers your place in the blockchain, meaning all you have to do is click submit at the time the ICO opens which already puts you ahead of most people who haven’t filled out the details yet.

Inexplicably TRX is up 40%, but that’s probably just the fanboys getting back in the game and it won’t last. Otherwise the numbers are much more cautious – little 2% and 3%s poking their noses out at the post-apocalyptic wasteland and seeing if it’s safe. Of course the mainstream media are loving the crash, saying the bubble has burst etc. Will be interesting to see what they say when it goes to $20k – is that the bubble re-inflating or a whole new bubble? It’s hard to keep up with their fatuous portends of doom. I even read an article this morning in The Guardian saying how Bitcoin mining was a contributing factor to global warming! Alright, technically it is because it’s something that uses electricity, but when you’re whinging about Bitcoin mining while the beef industry is causing many, many times more damage you really need to look at your priorities. Plus they’ll all be mined in a few years anyway. It ended saying that it was ok because Bitcoin had fallen to under $10,000 anyway so was probably going to fail if it kept falling further. This shows complete ignorance of how Bitcoin works – it has dropped by MUCH more than half in its time and still bounced back, and if it drops under $10k for a few days then the miners aren’t exactly going to pack up and go home. It’s astonishing, it really is. Unless they have an agenda, which I’m starting to think they clearly do, then they really need someone more informed to write these articles.

Anyway, we’ll see what today brings. It seems we’re over the worst, but I can’t see a massive bull run so soon afterwards, except for a couple of randoms.