I get requests all the time as to what are my core holdings for the long term investor. So what better way to start out the year then to go over my top "Non Bitcoin" picks for 2018 after adjusting my portfolio. So without delay.
#T1 DASH' - To me Dash is way undervalued compared to the rest of the Blue Chip currencies. I love their philosophy, and it is only going to take a listing on Coinbase to send it to the next level!
#T1 ETH' - Tied for #1 with Dash is Ethereum. Yes there may be other smart contract coins out there but Ethereum has first to market advantage, and many of the top tokens are based on this coin. I also consider it a hybrid where it is both a SOW' and a platform for other tokens, A conglomerate for sure and ETH' could challenge BTC' for #1 in market cap!
#3 XLM' - Stellar Lumens is the libertarian's Ripple. I love this space. The only reason it is ranked higher than XRP' is because it is 25% of the value, so there is room to run, and room for both in this multi Quadrillion dollar space!
#4 XMR' - Monero I know I dumped it and bought it back, as I want to own winners. Monero is the leader in privacy coins. Are there others? Yes, but Monero has the Lion's share of the market and is marketing hard!
#5 BCH' - Bitcoin Cash was my #1 pick two months ago at $300. Since then it has outperformed the market. It only dropped to #5 because its exploded 1000% in a few months but I feel it will continue to dominate in 2018 as a top 5 coin.
#6 XRP' - Ripple is run like a Wall Street company and from and investment (not philosophical) standpoint I like their leadership. I also like how they are empowering smaller banks to compete with a handful of banks that control international money transfers. (The CB' Disruptor for sure)
#7 MTL' - Metal is the 1st of the lesser known coins. Brian Kelly has it in his portfolio which was enough for me to look into it. Great team, investment capital, and though a bit speculative I like this better than TenX or Monaco to compete with Credit Cards.
#8 Waves' - Talk about an undervalued coin IMO'. They compete with NEM' but their partnership with Deloitte and their market cap bumps them ahead of NEM' in the smart asset system space.
#9 NEM' - New Economy Movement. I do not like the name but I like the coin and moreover the space "Smart Asset Systems". Real Estate, Inventory control, asset management, the possibilities are endless. (China Play)
#10 NEO' - The Ethereum of China, I want exposure to China and China will be a leader in cryptos no doubt!
Almost Made it!
#11 NXT' - This surely could be a top 10 coin, but the website does not provide enough info on team members. With that said I love the features of the coin and the market cap can grow. #12 OMG' - OmiseGo Again speculative but a good group and has venture capital backing #13 DCR' - Decred This is one that my buddy loves and he is the founder of Mars coin and a true genius. I do not argue with geniuses I take their advice. #14 QTUM' - Qtum could be a top 10 coin, but it is a little pricey at these levels. (China Play) #15 LTC' - Litecoin would have made the top 10 BUT I have issues with the direction of the team. They need to be have a professional presentation starting with their website, getting rid of childish avatars and doing more marketing. #16 ADA' - Much competition in this space but they could challenge for market share. High market cap but who says you can not go higher.
My top 5 speculative picks for 2018. #1 Dragon Chain - Disney's OS platform and Love the target market. I'm in! #2 IOTA' - Forget the MIT paper, BK' owns it, I love the space #3 EOS' - Speculative but well backed #4 Powr' - Power Ledger 1 tweet by Elon please #5 TRX - China play, and this is a huge market
Disclosure: I own all the coins above, You should do your homework before investing as many are very speculative and its your money! Not enough room to go into full over view of each coin. CONSTRUCTIVE input is always appreciated!
Comment
⋅
Please keep in mind there are 1300 coins at this point, and it is not possible for me to review them all. If you have reviewed a coin and think it should be up there, (and from the numerous messages asking to look at several) Please write a short description of why you like it and what market space it is targeting, so we can all work together to make money in 2018. Keep in mind it will be US vs Wall Street soon, so the better we work together the better off all of us will be!
I like Neo because the upside on china ICOs recovering is amazing but the downside if it doesn't is still amazing:
a. NEO is better than most of the crypto platforms (more common programming language, less electricity wasteful, faster, plugs into government and regulatory requirements, good community..) and will address the biggest concern (centralised nodes) in Q1 this year
b. NEO doesn't depend on ICOs returning to China (though it would benefit NEO if they did). NEO is good for ICOs which it can do outside of China . But also NEO is particularly suited to digitisation of assets which can be moved with know your customer (KYC) in china and NEO is well placed to be a platform of choice for this. It doesn't require them to do ICOs to believe in this.
c. Imagine we are all wrong footed and crypto goes into an 18 month bear market. NEO is almost certain in my mind to pick up market share relative to Ethereum as its currently just 5% of the market cap. And meanwhile it even pays a dividend (gas). Suppose bitcoin and ethereum collapse 65%, but NEO rises to 40% of ethereum's value once all its good news for 2018 is out, then overall NEO will more than double the price it is at today. A while ago I checked the ratio of alibaba to amazon and it was about 60% so I can't see why the long term price ratio of NEO to ethereum couldn't also be 60% - not very scientific but its a quick top down way of doing a sanity check on what it might be worth
I also like Skycoin It is remarkable to me that this has gone under the radar for so long. It has been 4 year in development and is launching as we speak. It is seeking to reinvent the internet. This is:
(i) a platform (as ethereum is) on which ICOs can be offered. ICOs play to launch on skycoin though unless they use the sky wire infrastructure operationally skycoin token holders won't get further benefit. On the other hand when they launch their version of crypto kitties (coming soon) and more serious initiatives the iCOs get their own version of the blockchain so that congestion of traffic on one ICO doesn't impact another. It already has 4-5 serious ICOs just launched or just about to including a solar system one and some others.
(ii) the primary function is asset backed - the asset is bandwidth. The proportion to the user is "free internet access (bandwidth) for life". This "free bandwidth" message may be very slightly over hyped as you probably have to offer up a node to relay someone's bandwidth to someone else, or as a pure user, pay skycoin for bandwidth but what you pay will be much, much cheaper than paying your ISP. Not just that but it gets round the lifting of net neutrality in the US (over sky wire everything has equal access), can't be traffic sniffed or stopped (they've developed a whole parallel IP layer stack), and has an anonymous team that therefore authorities can't put pressure on
(iii) it has a sensible roll out plan: initially nodes are rolled out to provide bandwidth access and private VPN (like Tor but better) in exchange for "mining" skycoin. Then when Skycoin has 1BN market cap the coins held back by the company will be enough to start buying backhaul. I was growing their telegram channel the other day when someone said "I'm from a top 5 internet backhaul company and want to reach one of the founders about this project" so it may be that bandwidth comes to them before they are even ready to go out to strike a deal. They are also developing applications to sit on top of skycoin (like the Tor like VPN network)
(iv) the first 300 sky wire miners have already been shipped so should be up and running soon. (They'r not miners in the traditional sense because this is a new private and very very fast consensus mechanism and there is no mining. But it is analogous to mining in that the nodes get paid skycoin for relaying bandwidth to other people
(v) the team are knowledgable. The interviews with the founder synth have not been targeted well at investors but if you can actually listen to the 1.5 hours worth it is clear how knowledgeable and prescient he is about the market. Reading the early telegram messages and asking questions, the team also claims that many of the early contributors to this project were cryptographic experts from security agencies in US and israel who contributed anonymously as they weren't allowed to in their capacity of working for the agency but wanted a new internet to evolve. Synth himself says in one of his audio interviews that he was one of the people sent in to look at the early bitcoin code since "white Satoshi got it 90% right, there were lots of problems and bugs that had to be fixed. While looking at it all in this depth a few of us realised we could create something much better".
(vi) and like NEO gives gas dividend, so skycoin gives skycoin hours as dividend though we don't know how much this is worth so I'm assuming it might not be more than 1-2% and then we might be pleasantly surprised and find out it is more like the 7% value one gets from gas on NEO
It beats me how a project like Skycoin that is this far developed, with such a grounded use case, has gone under the radar for so long. Perhaps it is because today it is only available on a couple of small exchanges like Cryptopia (or over the counter)? Probably more likely it is because their website is terrible and getting a story clear in my mind has required me to hang out in the telegram channel and ask a lot of questions. I'd never have got that far if I hadn't been tipped off about it back in May but then the more I dug the more impressed I was with the substance of what is actually being created. So here I am now encouraging you to take a look at it (and share your thoughts with us here)
Obviously I'm not a financial advisor and this is not advice and I should also mention that they have asked me (because of all my questions to them and the fact I'm a technology strategy consultant by profession) to consider getting involved with them in some way but we haven't discussed what that would be and I haven't accepted. I'm just rather excited about this project. Regarding price/valuation, it has gone up from $2.50 when I bought in May to $50 the other day (now back at just under $40) and Synth says on the telegram channel that based on the exponential growth there he's expecting $300 before it even hits a main exchange which he anticipates by end of April. That would give it a market cap of 2bn. When you think ADA hit the top 5 with nothing much in place , if people think skycoin's claims are real this sort of valuation seems entirely plausible. Long term it would be many times this if it got to 5-10% of the marketcaps of all the global ISPs.
I'd like to see a better competitor analysis from them against: Maidsafe (though that isn't strictly speaking bandwidth), Substratum (though Synth says that they are more like hosting whereas Skycoin is more about bandwidth) and one or two others. But what I expect to see if and when such an analysis is done is that skycoin has something close to the man years of development maidsafe has (as opposed to substratum that has an easier over the top application sitting on ethereum). This means the barrier to entry for people trying to emulate skycoin is much higher. For the time being, based on what I have been able to find, i see way more substance in this initiative than in most others I've looked at.
Goldbug1 (and anyone else that looks into them): I'd very much like your thoughts on this one - as you say: better we pool our thoughts together
@goldbug1 bro what about XVG I think it has great potential. Any thoughts on it?
Palasht
⋅
I like coins with a vision to provide existing services in cheaper and efficient way and plan to get some market shares from Giant companies e.g. Google, Amazon. That's being said, I like and own below coins and all have active communities, good team, and lots of room to grow:
@goldbug1 Could you be so kind to update this idea :)?
Wondering if you have some new thoughts on some of your coins
smuggler322
⋅
Could you share where you buy your crypto's? Thanks.
ottobloom1
⋅
@smuggler322, that’s a good point :-) I am not in the USA so don’t deal with USA exchanges but my exchange doesn’t provide all those top 10. Maybe I should get a USA account as well.