Bitcoin (BTC)
I bought my first bitcoin on February 5th, 2013. I spent $50.10 and netted 2.44114706 bitcoin at $20.40 each. At today's rate, that's worth about $2,657.16. I kept buying through all of March and April that year and though I lost quite a bit on a bitcoin miner I melted, I also paid off my house this year.
Steemit (STEEM)
Fast forward to 2016 and along comes Steemit. @sean-king and @billbutler (both I know IRL... "In Real Life..." remember when that was a thing back in the days of AOL chat?) told me to get onboard the Steemit train. I dropped some bitcoin in, and it's been a wild ride ever since. I bought at $0.28 per STEEM ($310.48 worth) and $1.00 per STEEM ($5,843.52 worth). I later sold some STEEM on bitrex, but nowhere near the top. I was powered up by then and all-in on the Steemit dream.
It was sad to watch the price drop from $4 down to $0.07, but I was also loving the community and the blogging rewards. I've written more in these last 9 months than any other time period in my adult life. I was also around during the inflation days, so my Steem Power was increasing all the time. I began to realize how awesome some non-bitcoin cyrptocurrencies can be.
In the past, I played around with a couple coins. Made some money on Quark when Max Keiser pumped it on his show, but also lost out on some other now dead coins. With that experience, I figured trading isn't for me, and I'll stick with bitcoin. But Steemit changed all that.
Well, this weekend, with all the drama around Bitcoin lately (Will it fork? How will they solve the increasing fees and blocksize issue?), I decided to branch out a bit. Things were going crazy with Ethereum, Dash, Monero, and many others I had been thinking about purchasing for some time. So I had to start somewhere.
Private Instant Verified Transaction (PIVX)
I started with PIVX because of a post I saw here on Steemit. On March 17th, I bought 1,000 at 0.00009930 each ($109.86 worth). As I learned more, I bought another 5,000 that same day at 0.00010450 each ($578.05 worth).
Here's what that looks like right now:
That's $2,501.76 in potential profit from a $687.90 investment.
Crazy.
Here's the crazier thing: I haven't sold anything yet to realize that profit. Logically, I should. I should get my initial investment out, at least, and ride with the rest, right? If I had done that with STEEM, I could have made a nice profit.
I should... but I've also heard too many stories of those who proudly made insane profits selling bitcoin for a couple dollars. They made the "right" move also, but they surely regret it now. If this Private Instant Verified Transaction (PIVX) coin is moving towards more privacy while improving on things DASH got right, that sounds like a really good thing.
I also really like the Manifesto:
PRIVACY is non-negotiable, it’s a basic human right.FREEDOM is everything.
TECHNOLOGY is advancing, GOVERNANCE must also.
Privacy ALLOWS the freedom to share what you wish with EVERYONE, but also the freedom to RESTRICT who sees your information.
We believe this is each person’s CHOICE. GOVERNANCE is used to further objectives and FUND development.
The DAOS are untouchable.
Join us WHEN you like, WHY you like, and, for AS LONG as you like.
Lets explore ALL the options TOGETHER. You are IMPORTANT to US, It’s TIME we harnessed your FULL potential.
Another thing I really like about PIVX is the Proof of Stake reward system. Unlike most systems which only rewarwd the major players/miners for their efforts (i.e. masternodes in this case), PIVX rewards anyone who runs a full-node wallet and stakes their holdings. Based on the amount you stake, you have the chance of earning some newly minted coin. I got lucky last night and scored two rewards within six hours:
It took me a day or two of tinkering around with it over the weekend before I got the wallet set up and properly staking. After that, I thought things weren't set up correctly because I had a couple conflicted rewards come through (meaning my wallet thought I had minted some new coin, but in reality I was in a conflicted state with the blockchain). The QT wallet with their custom skin looks quite nice:
Here's the thing: I won't tell you to invest in PIVX. I shouted from the rooftops to my friends to invest in bitcoin and many, unfortunately, only took me seriously once it peaked out above $1,000 at the end of 2013. They bought in and watched it go all the way back down to $250 or so. Many, I fear, sold at a loss instead of waiting for it to recover this year. When I suggested they get into Steemit, they had no interest. With the price drop that followed, they may have made a good choice, from a certain perspective. As I said above, I did alright because I kept blogging and powering up my rewards.
PIVX may be no different. This surge may come crashing down and this coin may be ignored from here on out. I've seen it before. So don't take my advice, but please do know there are some amazing cryptocurrencies out there beyond just bitcoin.
BitShares (BTS)
Which brings me to BitShares, Dan Larimer's creation prior to Steemit. Today I bought 300,000. Two days ago I bought over 130,000. This is another one of those coins which I think may have a great future. It's possible many don't understand how useful it can be to businesses and to those who need pegged assets with smart contracts. I'm just getting into it myself, and there's so much more to learn.
Here are my full holdings so far:
I plan to continue learning about BitShares and diversifying into other cryptocurrencies as well. This is not only the future of money, but of business, governance, and maybe even some day, law without violence, just protocols.
Thank you, Steemit, for showing me there's more to cryptocurrency than just bitcoin.
I'm excited about the future.
What altcoins are you excited about and why?
EDIT: To be clear, this is not investment advice. It's also not a promotional piece. This is my own personal story. If you are investing, do so based on your own research and, please, only invest what you are willing to lose.
Dang it, you were the reason BTS was spiking today when I was online looking with my minnow life hoping to invest in some Dan-Tech affordably lol
Hah! Nah, my purchases were tiny compared to what was going on over at Poloniex. I didn't check the volume for BTS before moving my bitcoin to Bittrex. I should have used my Poloniex account instead.
The solution to minnow life is providing real value to others, even if it takes 10 years to build a company. :)
I am trying man!
I am on here every day trying to add value! Have a nice week Luke
I meant more about building a real business (or working for someone else who has). I'm not a fan of writing on steemit as a business. Doesn't seem like a solid plan to me. I hope you also have a great week.
Oh yes.
Thanks Luke. I still get a kick out of how you used your crypto wizardry to move your family ahead, I think of it every once in awhile. Real practical crypto lessons.
#Stewardship.
It was more so building a business for ten years serving thousands of customers every day. The crypto part helped, for sure, but the real rewards come from putting in consistent daily effort to meet needs others are willing to pay to have solved. Thanks Barry.
Awesome post, thanks for sharing. I like Pivx more than Dash but its up to the market to decide that.
Indeed. What goes up can go down even quicker.
Will be following you. I enjoy your content. Thanks.
Thank you! I always appreciate a new follow. :)
I think you will be right. BitShares might be the one that blooms late. PIVX is on a run right now and if all of these development concepts manifest....again another winner. Got to be in it to win in it and at the prices that these two coins are at currently..... I feel it is worth it. :)
I hope so. I do think BitShares will be a late bloomer, but I also wonder if Ethereum will get more attention from businesses and be used instead. I also wonder how governments will react to unregulated systems like bitshares.
I don't think the Government will have the resources to implement measures fast enough. The crypto world as a whole will take years to regulate and I don't feel many coins and investors are going to care too much what the government says. Governments as we know them have their days numbered. Cryptos are part of the change. Regardless....lets hope BitShares and PIVX go to $50++ in the next 12 months. :)
Hear hear, buy this one a beer!
Very well said.
I've been hearing more about PIVX appreciate your post, providing more information for me to start researching this one. Great info to get me motivated to look closer at it. Thanks
Glad to hear it! I've been enjoying the community in their Slack channel as well. There are some other Steemians there as well including @bitcoiner who has been super helpful.
Thank you. Will check it out
I just ended up with a bit of this because of dumb luck. I mined it back when it was dnet and it auto converted on bittrex one day. I was like how did that get in my account then I went to the forum and the rest is history.
Nice! I remember it back when it was DNET also and thought, "Man, that might be really valuable some day."
Too bad that was prior to Steemit and I was still pretty much a bitcoin maximalist. :)
I just bought some steem, maybe I need to get some BTS as well!
Only invest what you can afford to lose. Cryptocurrencies can be amazing and awesome... and they can be brutal.
Thanks for the tip about PIVX. I will definitely look into it more. I am always eager to learn about more great alt coins to invest in. Here are a few that I am in and like: DMD (Diamond), XEM (also known as NEM), and DNotes. Methinks I need to diversify some more :D
NEM seems to be approaching it's all time high. Nice. The others aren't in the top 100? I think I remember hearing about Diamond. Yeah, I remember hearing about that one. $181 of daily volume is tiny and it seems only bittrex is carrying it. Do you think it will ever be more mainstream than that?
I think DMD has a decent chance of getting mainstream, but what's really attractive about it right now is that it mints at 25% annual rate. I bought a bunch of DMD and now regularly sell off the minted ones which now funds my other investments. Of course, I'm a small player compared to you, so DMD works well for me. I was fortunate to be an early adopter of NEM. Although I did sell some at way low prices compared to now I have held onto the vast majority and also keep buying. DNotes is undervalued imo.
Early days of bitcoin was really scary i remember those days.
I also wish i had been around from early steemit might have made a killing and been much further along then i currently am.
Anyways good post once again. Upvoted.
Thanks! Yeah, when they start posting links to suicide hotlines on reddit, you know it's bad. I remember that happening all to often in the early bitcoin days.
I've been hanging out a bit in the pivx chat and there are some really excited people in there (understandably). I worry when this hype settles, there may be some bag holders. Always is, I guess. At the same time, who would have thought Dash would go as high as it did as fast as it did? I'm thinking maybe some Dash winners will diversify into similar coins like PIVX. We'll see though.
then again dashes community has been pushing it pretty hard.
It's funny because I literally was going to do something like this the other day. I still am!
Do it up!
Hi, great article & good coins investment, i remember a guy commented in Youtube channel called The Cryptoverse said that PIVX has a great potentiel and should be considered an good investment plus seeing your article made me really confident!
Please don't make investment decisions based on anything anyone else says. What goes up can also go down. Only invest what you're willing to lose.
Very good advice im a newbie on trading so i'll keep that on my mind thanks a lot
Thanks for the informative article, and welcome to BitShares!
I'm still learning, but I'm getting there. Thanks for the links in your other comment reply.
You should have some ETH. Highest potential to get mass adoption as many big companies will use it on the back end. I am lucky enough to have accumulated a good position since the DAO hack last year until the bottom back in December. I am bullish on Steem too but Ethereum is where most of my eggs lay.
Yeah, I bought some ETH when it had a scare recently about a big holder getting hacked and it dropped below $7. It went up to $10 and I felt like a hero... then it started to slowly come back down again. Since I had been burned on other coins and had recently watched STEEM just go down, I ended up getting out just above what I bought in for. Of course, it has gone way up since then. I'll get some ETH soon, I think, but I'm also hoping for the current bull market to cool off a bit and buy on a dip as I did before. It's possible that just won't happen though. We'll see.
Yeah, the Crypto market may dip back down a bit then go back up as it recently added 4-5 Billion in value over the last two weeks. Oh, that was REP founder that got some of his coins hacked. REP is a DAPP that runs on ETH. Buying when there's blood in the streets seems to almost always work best for me but there again I am a hodler not trying to time the market.
You probably bought your PIVX off of me. I sold a bunch and put it back in BTC. I doubled up but wow I would have 4Xed!!
Oh, man! Nicely done with the double up. Yeah, I'm watching this coin moon, and it's blowing my mind. It's not even on Poloniex yet. I'm really curious to see what happens here. I wonder if DASH whales will diversify into it a bit.
Oh, nice. I just got a 6.07498960 PIV Stake Reward while typing this out. Feels like Christmas. :)
Wow, I gave up Staking because my wallet kept crashing. I would not have sold if it worked. This sell is looking worse every day.
There are worse things than a double up. :)
But yeah, the staking is super fun. I may have sold also if I hadn't gotten it working. Took me a day or two to figure it out, but the wallet hasn't crashed on me at all. Seems pretty solid on the mac.
Really appreciate the info my man, as well as giving the attention to my article on pivx Lots of good buzz going around about some of these newer coins. I still see widespread adoption as a problem until we get some easy to access marketplaces to use these coins on. Whichever one does that first will be amazingly huge seeing as only a fraction of the world's population are currently using crypto currencies, and most of them are probably only aware of bitcoin. Very exciting times!
The world needs crypto, but still seems in hibernation. So many recognize the problems. We just need more people implementing solutions like being their own bank.
I agree, its hard to explain to people what crypto actually is in relateble terms. Ive broken it down to explaining how a bank is a human run ledger, comes with human problems. Crypto is a transparent ledger ran by computer networks . Essentially being a secure and transparent personal bank account.
True
Quark was the first coin I caught a ride on. In a lot of ways crypto has beat me up pretty bad because I couldn't really hold my positions a lot of the times. Awesome write up Luke.
Thanks Brian! Yeah, when Max pumped it, man... it went crazy one Saturday morning.
I definitely identify with your story. It's difficult to get people to invest, and when they do the volatility scares them into panic sells, or away even. Most are willing to listen, but do not want to do their own research, or at bare minimum even follow the multitude of free advice from friends, or paid advice from an advisor or consultant.
I have had trouble persuading most into investing in digital currency, so I thought Steemit would be an easier sell since there is no investment with the exception of time to create and curate. Even Steemit seems to be a difficult sell with most of my friends, family, and business associates.
Nonetheless, I had not heard of PIVX, as I got out of Dash quite a long time ago. But I noticed the huge spike in the Bittrex charts so I've bought in.
Now this could be risky if the drop comes, but long term this looks strong comparable to Dash, and the 24 hour volume is at $6.2 million. That's very strong and I think even if there's a drop, that type of volume shows there's huge interest.
Time to buy :)
Thanks for sharing!
Good luck!
PIVX had a pretty big drop today, though it has recovered some. I'm tempted to take some profits out "like I should" but I also agree there seems to be a lot of interest here, and I've been impressed with the team I've seen in the slack channel. If the price does tank hard, that will be the true test of that team and where they go from there.
I feel like branching out a bit to invest in coins which seem to have a long future. It's kind of fun getting out of just being in the bitcoin world, though I too have made mistakes with crap coins and will probably make many more.
Yeah, I think most people are struggling just to get by with the things they can understand and don't have enough room (or at least, they think they don't) to learn anything new. Crypto is complicated and most us are nerds so we're okay with complicated.
We're onto something amazing with this coin I tell ya! Steemit community will go hand in hand with what PIVX is building... resteemed, upvoted & tweeted!
I'm trying to get into this but it is tough in my situation. I've been following along.
Thanks! I've certainly been impressed with the helpfulness of the team there so far. They seem to be pumping out a lot of great marketing material and support documentation and the vision for the coin seems pretty good to me.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
I mean no implication whatsoever, I'm just curious: is this paid promotion? It comes across as such. If it's not, my apologies.
If it is, good pitch, but you should probably disclose.
No, certainly not paid at all. I've never been paid to post anything on Steemit (other than by the rewards pool, of course). If I was paid, I would certainly disclose it.
Right before going to bed, I got tipped 11 PIVX after sharing it in the PIVX slack chat. While I slept someone tipped me another 5. I did not write this with the intention of getting paid in PIVX but because it's a fantastic altcoin story (so far) which would not have been possible without Steemit.
We need to get you writing for us, then. You're a natural pitchman. :)
Hah! Thanks. I try to write with passion, that's for sure. My older brother sometimes tells me to stop preaching though. The things I really get excited about pitching is voluntaryism, improving epistemology, and morality. I think cryptocurrency can help in all three areas.
Nice one Luke! Congrats on jumping on the PIVX train!
With the bts thing, you missed last year's peerplays drop from last year. Would have been a nice addon to owning BTS.
Yeah, I have a friend who gained 15x on that. Sure would have been nice.
oh yeah. I mus really learn to read the signs better. I missed Dash, I missed PIVX...
Just think when DASH was $4, people were saying they missed it ..... maybe blockchain will lead us to actual time travel where we can go back and tell our 2016 self to buy a shit load of DASH at $4 lol
I don't think you missed PIVX yet, I have been reading about it for the last couple of months, and then jumped in the other day when it was 40 cents, it shot up to 98 cents, and I got nervous (god damn emotions) that it was gonna shoot up even more, so I bought another $20 worth, then of course it went down, I think I have a couple hundred now, I am holding, I really like their plan, their technology, and honestly I am pretty new to being so engaged in crypto, but I've been intensely researching the last 2-3 months, and this seems like a legit opportunity. The hard part is not selling when you double your money or something, then you have to decide if you're in it for the long haul, or if you want to take your profit and go elsewhere, I think that's where the research part comes in. If you have faith or confidence in the crypto, as I am sure many have had in bitcoin and dash, people saying cash out now, nervousness, emotions, etc. My point is, I certainly don't think its too late for you to jump into PIVX, it's a hard fork of dash, which seems promising. Anything can happen, but IDK the amount of attention it's getting, my research I've done, posts like this, increase my confidence. Just my personal opinion.
I just started starting last week. Tho I have only a small amount of money. It's also growing pretty fast. Soon I'm gonna take out the amount I put in, and just play with the
rest. Thanks for the post.
still holding PIVX?
No, I haven't held PIVX for quite some time. Someone I know had some really funky stuff happen to his wallet a while back and he lost some masternode rewards. I tried to help him over a video call, but it seemed like something had gone wrong with the wallet and had him on a fork without letting him know. Later, it turns out that's what happened, and I wasn't too impressed with how the team handled it. I ended up moving on. It's been a long time since I've checked in with them, so I'm not sure how things are going now.
Okay, so which altcoins are you in now?
A lot.
I'm not financial advisor, sorry. :)
I was just curious to know which coins you are optimistic about or some projects you are involved in, because you seemed to be a cool dude and you shared your altcoin story, so it seemed a relevant topic to converse.
It was not my intentions to ask for financial advice from you and make gains/losses on my investments.
Apologies for making a comment!
No need to apologize and no offense taken.
My hope is people will do their own research instead of just asking others. The reason I think that, I explained in detail here. If we just go off what others have experienced, we'll not get a full education, and we won't benefit as much.
One of my recent posts talks about not getting a job and I cover a number of different altcoins and projects I'm involved in. You may find that interesting.
Sure, I will check it out. Thanks! Have a good day.