RE: Here's Why You Should Power Up As Soon As Possible!
@thecryptofiend Ahh the magic keywords, "there are no guarantees because this is crypto". If only more people kept this in mind. I have a feeling while some may be very familiar with crypto on Steemit, a majority of people are more familiar with blogging and social media.
Crypto incentivized social media is a brand new concept. This project really could go either way but as of yet there's really no precedent to compare it to.
Your statement about no guarantees and the depth of your above post would seem to imply you are quite familiar with Cryptocurrencies, exchanges, and the market as a whole. To the best of my knowledge most altcoins gain traction fast while they're easy to mine (in the case of POW's) , pump fast, and dump just as quickly. Very few if any have a life expectancy that even comes close to everyone's favorite crypto gold standard, the Bitcoin. BTC seems to be the metric by which most crypto currencies are compared but none have even come close in price or popularity to Bitcoin.
More often than not an Altcoin created this late in the game has a relatively short life expectancy compared to some of the early SHA256 and Scrypt coins from back in the days. Only time will tell if the social media aspect of Steem and it's lottery like comparisons will be enough to keep it afloat.
As of now the SBD which was supposed to be pegged as close as possible at a 1:1 ratio with the USD is already trading at 83 cents on the dollar and that's only 10 days after its initial appearance on Poloinex. Granted it's holding pretty stead over the past few days. The trade volume is so low it's hard to get a large enough sampling to make more than a mildly educated speculation on what it future holds for SBD.
In any case, this 7 day graph speaks volumes about the price trend post hype, and it's only been on the market for 10 days... As always with crypto my friends, Caveat Emptor. Most especially with a crypto that is still in it's infancy and self proclaimed beta stages. Only time will tell if the unique structuring, multi currency split social platform will be enough to mitigate the risks involved with such a bold project.
As I stated above, we have no other similar project to compare too, but as always do not put in what you can not afford to lose. Crypto can seem like a god send but there's just as many horror stories as there are ones of success.
The best way to protect yourself is do your homework, read the white paper, and stay informed of changes to the platform as they come about. The last hard fork made some major changes. At this point no one but you can decide your own personal risk/reward factors because everyone's situation is different. A good rule of thumb in investing is to diversify your holdings and hedge your bets because few stories of success have come from the "all eggs in one basket" method of investing.
Stay Safe! Stay Educated, and always remember @thecryptofiend 's golden words of wisdom, "there are no guarantees because this is crypto!"
Thanks @alifton for that outstanding post. Yes I'm not new to this - I've been in and out of crypto since late 2013 and I'm still learning and making mistakes. Mostly mistakes but I think that is how you learn best.
Any time you think something is a dead certainty in this field it has a habit of pulling the rug out from under you.
Your advice (diversification etc.) is very apt but I suspect people will only follow it after they lose enough to make them realise how important it is!
@thecryptofiend We've all made mistakes. What more important, is did we learn from them along the way. God knows I've had more than my fair share in my life.
Maybe we should start a thread or tag for intro to crypto so we can help others get caught up to speed if they're new. Hopefully in-turn we can all learn from each other and the collective years people have spent feeling out the world of crypto along the way.
From the early days of GPU mining SHA256 (when it was still possible) to game changing ASIC's and even further down the road into ASIC resistant algo's like Etherium and Cryptonote.
They all have pros and cons and Steemit being crypto based social media might not be a bad place to discuss it in an open forum format. ;-)
PS: I forgot to put that I added you to my followed users list after checking out some of you more interesting posts about the DOA hack, it's timing and in theory could it have been considered a well timed white hat attempt to stop a much larger problem from occurring down the road. The post was insightful and something I've actually debated elsewhere with people as to its implications and timing.
Was it Black, White, or Grey would be a matter of opinion because no one will ever know for sure the motive behind the breech. In any case no matter how you label it, the hard fork bailout would have been much harder to pull off had the DOA pressed on only to be hacked later down the road.