The Dilemma: Sell or Hold

Cryptocurrency can be really unpredictable. The price of coins or tokens can rise or drop at the blink of an eye. The market is open 24-hours a day and trading never stops. If you have ever traded in cryptocurrency you probably have often wrestled with the question: Sell or Hold?

The case

A while ago I broke one of my own rules and that is to never to blindly buy a coin especially when tipped by a friend of colleague. However in this case I just couldn't resist. A colleague tipped me of about a new coin that was having a pre sale, the Dentacoin. What got me hooked was that the pre sale price would be much lower than the price for the intial ICO pricing. It meant that I would be able to sell the coins for 2,5 times more than what I payed in the presale.
Easy money, right? Although I was rather skeptic about the certainty that the price would be higher at ICO.

I gambled on it anyway and bought €100 dollar's worth of Dentacoin, resulting in me owning 3.2 million tokens. Some of my colleagues also bought the coin and we were eagerly waiting for the trading to start.

The waiting game

So now the waiting started, The pre sale came and went. The Etherdelta exchange was only showing sell orders and besides that nothing exciting was really happening. No other exchanges were supporting the coin so I figured that the only thing to do was wait for the ICO and see what would happen. My plan was to sell immediately if the coin indeed turned out to have a higher price, take my profit and invest it into Steemit. I regularly checked the exchange but nothing changed, no trading, only sell orders.

Finally

Then it finally happend Cryptopia started trading the coin on the Bitcoin market and low and behold the coin took off.
When I bought the coin (Ethereum based) I used ether and Etherdelta also is an Ethereum exchange, so it took some calculating to figure out what the new rates were in Bitcoin. But the results of my calculations were promising. Selling the 3.2 million Dentacoins would fetch me almost €500, exceeding expectations.
But then it happened.....

The Dilemma

It's like some nagging voice whispering in your left ear, "but what if price keeps on going up?, 500 could become 1000, you have 3.2 million coins, what if the price reaches 0.1 cents or even 1 euro? You don't want to be that guy right? Remember the Bitcoin Pizza guy......."

And there is that other voice whispering in your right ear, "Sell and take the money now!, You have no way of knowing if the price will go up, at least you made some profit now, sell now and secure your profit, if you wait too long the price might drop and you will have missed your window of opportunity"

To make things even worse, there are also the people I work with who also bought the coin, what if it turns out that I was the schmuck who sold 3.2 million of what later would turn out to be the "new" Bitcoin?

Hold or Sell?

Normally I make a decision and don't look back or wonder too much about what might have been. Rather a bad decision than no decision at all is a motto I live by. But this time I had a hard time deciding on selling or holding. Truth it is that I did not do much research about this coin and was only in it for the quick win. So selling off the coins and taking the money seemed to be the best way to go.
But with the ICO planned for October 1, things might even get better over time, on the other hand, nothing is certain in the world of cryptocurrency.
So I decided to sleep on it a night.

After a good night's rest

I woke up to find that the coin's price had tripled overnight which only made it harder for me to decide what to do. I contacted a good friend of mine and presented my dilemma.

His advice was simple, Sell a third of your coins, this will cover your costs and give you a small profit. You will still have an amount of 2 million coins and will be able to hold these for the long term.

I realized that I had so been consumed with my dilemma and the possible profits of these coins that I had not been able to think things through clearly. Surely if I had been more rational, I would have been able to come up with a similar solution.

In the end

I sold 1 million of my Dentacoins for almost €500 and used it to power up on Steemit. I have 2.2 million tokens in my wallet and waiting patiently for the ICO. But when the ICO comes around I have no doubt that the question will resurface... Sell or Hold?

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