Opinion: Which Coins to Hold and Which to Dump?
Are you an ardent holder of various coins for better or worse, or a timid trader prone to panic sells and FUD (fear uncertainty despair)? Regardless of answer it's always good to have an idea or two about how solid is the basis on which the price rests. I've chosen to present my thoughts on four cryptos I find quite interesting either in positive or negative way.
XRP Ripple
The way I see it Ripple is the coin that has some serious problems ahead. For one thing i always found problematic when XRP price grew propelled by the positive news about successful business undertakings of company of the same name. Ripple's business model targets banks in an attempt to convince them to implement its payment protocol for their money transfer methods. However, unlike most other coins Ripple (the coin) is not vital for the success of the company and its business model. As far as I understand only fees are supposed to be paid in XRP and I can't imagine banks would ever allow to be exposed to the volatility of speculative coin markets. So coin is basically little more than a demonstration of the protocol.
Also I believe that once Blockchain technology adoption picks up the pace banks and other financial institutions might prefer to actually develop their own proprietary protocols than risk using Ripple.
Last but not least there are almost 2500 times more coins in circulation than BTC (over 38 billion) and as this excellent piece explains some of those pre-distributed coins can be used to manipulate the price in a way that doesn't support a good night sleep for the hodl-ing folks.
GNO Gnosis
Hyped-up project of Gnosis prediction market developed on Ethereum platform paints an excellent example of greed and ICO madness running wild. In highly unfair auction-style ICO setup devs managed to pull through with selling only 4% in a process that gave advantage to whale-speculators willing to pay high ETH fees over investors interested in actual project.
On top of everything Gnosis has a solid competition in Augur team doing basically the same thing, but with less hype and greed.
I'm not saying GNO won't grow massively in the near future on top of more speculative greed, but my own gut feeling is just not right.
LTC Litecoin
On the other hand LTC once written off as shallow copy of bitcoin and old-generation coin with no hot development anywhere in sight has recently passed through a real renaissance. With the successful adoption of Segwit upgrade that is just too evasive for Bitcoin and soon to come implementation of Lightning-network technology designed for quick and anonymous micro-payments, LTC is bound to become what bitcoin never was - a super-fast and efficient method of payment. Also let's not underestimate the assets that Litecoin possesses over the next-generation coins - lasting continuity and recognition.
As cream on top of the cake comes the news that the creator of LTC, Charlie Lee recently left his position of engineer in Coinbase so he can focus entirely on further development of the coin.
ARDR Ardor
Extremely promising coin with bunch of captivating technological advances built on top of Next platform by adding secure and scalable child chains. It's innovative flexible architecture should allow users to create their own blockchains according to personal needs within the security of the global Ardor platform. Team of creators have already proven themselves in the previous NXT phase, by building one of the finest Proof-of-stake coins. Ardor is launching it's mainnet in Q3 period of 2017 which is just ahead of us so I'm feeling this would be the time to buy and hold.
That being said, keep in mind that the coin markets are rarely rational and you should never use other people's opinion as info to base your investment on. Please let me know what you think.