Hi

Hi STEEMit,

My crypto name is Aleksander Koreiko. It's not my real name, but it'll do in a pinch.

I've had several careers, lived a pretty interesting life and have some cool stories that I might share with the Internet someday, but this blog isn't about that. Instead, I want to use this space to jot down some crypto predictions, then check back every so often to see where I went wrong or right. To make this more structured and interesting, I'll try to post a few times a week. (<---- this is where things like this usually go wrong. checks back in three months)

To start off, here's my fundamental investment thesis:

We've been in a massive bubble since April. Originally, I thought it would blow up by the end of the year, possibly with the Segwit2x fork, but now that it's not happening and the bubble is still with us it's likely to avoid the implosion until next year. On the BTC side the bubble has been fueled by a mix of tax and currency avoidance, VC interest, and plain FOMO, but that bubble pales next to the size of the ICO bubble the Ethereum gods have graced us with. The returns on ICOs this year have been so staggering that even after the cooldown of the last two months, careful investment still guarantees triple digit monthly ROIs. This is not sustainable and will eventually murder itself from the inside out, but the sheer amount of money coming in from outside actors guarantees that it will take far too much time to go wrong. My guess is that the bubble will not fully deflate until one or more massive projects like TEZOS, EOS, and Polkadot pull the plug on themselves (trapping two thirds of their funds through self-induced stupidity comes close, but since they're still working it doesn't count).

Given all of this, the smart play earlier this year was to be staggeringly aggressive and go all in on flipping ICO after ICO regardless of merit (never staying in long enough to risk a bubble pop), reinvesting 100% of the flips from previous rounds.

Pictured: the author this summer

With the cooldown that phase is more or less over, but more calculated aggression - moving into good ICOs and alts at the first sign of market recovery and taking positions in advance of big news - should still work very well going forward.

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How do I define a 'good' alt?

• First and foremost, let's start with the assumption that every single coin is shit and destined to die.

This is, for some reason, a controversial opinion in crypto. I suspect that reason is because a bunch of people made a crazy amount of money being right a few times and think that will happen forever. This will change the minute the bubble pops and a bunch of people lose 90% of their net worth giving $50M each to companies that couldn't get the time of day to raise $100k in Silicon Valley.

More importantly, if I'm wrong and it never pops, everyone reading this will already own a different lambo for every day of the week, so who cares about any of this? Don't plan for massive success; plan for failure and be pleasantly surprised.

Counterpoint: using the exact same plans against the French twice seemed to work well for these guys...

IMO, if you assume that every coin is terrible and then look long and hard for reasons to prove that assumption right before even thinking about holding it, you're almost definitely on the right track.

• The coin/token should have a blockchain-specific use case. Broadly speaking, that means a business infrastructure/platform company, gambling (crypto is 99.9% 18-45 year old males; guess who bets on things online?), trading/exchanges, and related markets. I'll also throw in privacycoins as - let's face it - nobody's shutting down the darknet any time soon.

Other business plans are ok if, and only if, the blockchain component actually does something, the token has an inherent reason to use it, it won't immediately be crushed by off-blockchain competitors the minute it shows signs of amounting to anything, etc.

• The team leading the token should know what they're doing, have a pedigree, the money and time to get the project done, be mature adults with no tolerance for Twitter/blockchain drama and have at least shown a viable business model.

If a coin has an obvious use case, a good team, and I can make a case for its survival down the road, I look at any news it may have coming, take a position ahead of that news and then either sell into the rally or hold longer if there will be followups in the near future. Except for BTC/ETH, I will not hold a coin without medium term news (> 2-3 months) under any circumstances.

I wanted to end this with a case study, but the post has already dragged on too long. In my next post, though, I'll write up an in depth review of an alt/ICO I've previously looked at in detail. Feel free to vote for the in depth review, or I'll just pick one from this list. Not all are positive!

• FUN
• KNC
• EOS
• PAY
• 0x
• Cindicator