Every Coin Carries An Overhead

Originally I only owned Bitcoin, then I thought I would get bold and bought some Ethereum, which at the time felt wild and speculative. Now of course, those are the blue chip cryptos!

Well, I eventually became more comfortable with the crypto world and started spreading out my investments into more cryptocurrencies. I learned about each one, figured out its purpose, its wallet, the exchanges it was on, its price, and I bought quite a few, eventually around twenty.

Fast forward several months later to today, and I find my investments spread out across a score of cryptos, all of which I believe in, but quite frankly it is too much for me to really keep track of.

I have the Daedalus desktop app to store Cardano (Ada).
I have the Stellar Lumens desktop app to store lumens.
I had the iota wallet and stored the tangle (a little joke), had being the operative word as I sold all my iota, more on that later.
I have the Stratis desktop wallet and was trying to run it 24/7 to stake stratis.

You get the idea. This is not even to speak of my ERC-20 tokens that I store across multiple ethereum addresses, including hardware wallet.

For every one of these, I have to write down private keys, passwords, seed phrases, make duplicate copies, then physically go and store these copies in different geographical locations.

I try to keep up on the subreddit(s) for each of these cryptos as well, keep track of the price to see if any big moves are happening, and stay updated with things I need to do for them (e.g. Loopring announced to claim their upcoming Loopring-Neo combo token LRN you have to do a series of smart contract steps).

After a while, I examined my portfolio, saw how spread thin I was, and wondered whether it was worth doing all this overhead for a few hundred dollar investment.

While I believe in all these cryptos, I had to start saying No to them. So I have begun selling off some of them and combining them into ones I really think are going to do well over the long term.

Note on iota: in my laziness early on, I wanted to buy iota, so I used that one website to generate my iota seed. Months later I find out that site was hacked or was a scammer waiting for critical mass of seeds to be generated, and $4 million USD had been stolen from people who used the site. Frantically, I launched my iota wallet and saw that my iota was still in there. Fortunately, while lazy, I did do the trick where I randomly changed the seed given to me in several character locations, which may have saved my funds. In any case, I was annoyed by iota not having an easy way to generate a seed, as well as the bugs in transferring iota around the tangle, so I sold it all off.

It's hard to sell off even a little bit of some of these cryptos, but I am forcing myself to do it so I can say yes to ones I want to double-down on. And when I consider getting into a crypto, I think much harder about whether it is really worth the overhead or not.

Last note, for humility's sake, I bought some Verge (XVG) months ago, sent it to a paper wallet and left it there ever since. Well, as I've learned more about Verge, it's lack of speedy development (seems to be one guy mainly), its DogeCoin dark clone origins, and the fact that I don't see it ever beating, tech wise or marketing wise, a crypto like Monero, I decided to sell off, at a loss, my Verge.

That required ten minutes of googling how to sweep a Verge paper wallet, downloading the Coinomi mobile app for Android, finding my paper wallet key, etc. etc. then transferring to an exchange and selling it for Bitcoin. All told an hour of work that I caused myself by buying this crypto in the first place, ignoring the time spent keeping up to date with it.