Now let’s see which cryptocurrency is the safest one to store wealth in, in my opinion. There are many cryptocurrencies, most of them are speculative, upcoming ones, but they all fluctuate, and their future might be unreliable.
When it comes to storing digital wealth, only safety and stability matters, alongside with a clear and positive expected future for that currency.
So we can already filter out anything which is not in the top 20. So go to coinmarketcap, and see which are the top 20 coins currently, only view the stand-alone crypto coins, not the tokens:
Actually you might want to sort them by TRADING VOLUME, since the market cap can be misleading. The most traded ones, obviously, are the most popular ones, and have the most users behind it. So it’s the stand-alone cryptocurrencies sorted by trade volume.
The list is that, and I’ll immediately remove Ripple from it since it’s not even a cryptocurrency, doesn’t deserve to be on the list:
ROUND 1
Then Ethereum Classic is just a fork of ETH will the premise that the original chain was somehow better, it’s a fallacy, since ETH has already demonstrated to work well with it’s new patch. This was probably the Bitcoin Core scaremongering against hardforks, which was demonstrated to be stupid, so ETH Classic can’t be better than ETH, neither in security, and certainly the ETH userbase is in the original ETH. Therefore I’ll remove it.
Also Bitcoin Gold had a very shady beginnings, allegedly the devs have premined a bunch of coins, and there were many other bad news about it, I’d not trust a single penny with that currency.
Zcash has a central point of failure due to it’s algorithm not being trustless, and several software or operating system bugs could have already compromized it. It has a huge cybersecurity Sword of Damocles hanging above it, and I don’t like that.
The Dash Masternode system also creates a lot of central points of failure, not just security holes but it opens up the possibility of censorship on the network, which is the antithesis of the crypto spirit in general. I would not hold a lot of money there. Not to mention the Dash Masternodes are allegedly “money transmitters” and further regulatory problems could arise, although I am not a lawyer so I can’t know for sure.
IOTA is also linked with this Internet of Things stuff, I don’t find that secure. Maybe it could be a good investment, I haven’t really looked into it, but I’d not consider this a store of value. The blockchain certainly looks very complicated, this means there are many potential security vulnerabilities. I think money has to be simple and secure, IOTA doesn’t quality. Though it could still be a good speculative instrument.
ION looks like a gaming currency, it doesn’t look serious, and again I am not judging the currency itself, it might be good, but I don’t think it qualifies for me. It’s just another cryptocurrency with it’s own niche, but I don’t think it’s money.
So we are left with these currencies:
ROUND 2
NEO is tied to Antshares, so that is a big central point of failure if something would ever happen to Antshares. It’s also a smart-contract platform, therefore it’s complex and potentially full of security holes.
Actually I am just going to remove all coins that have complex smart contracts built in it, because they all add security vulnerabilities, that may be later exploited by hackers, again this doesn’t mean that the coins themselves are not good, it just means that the coins are risky, and not suitable for wealth storage in my opinion: QTUM, ETH, NEM, LISK
VeChain looks like a token built specifically for China, thus at the bare minimum it’s politically centralized. It also looks like it’s aimed at corporate players not necessarily general usage, so that’s fine, but doesn’t qualify for this list.
Hshare/Hcash is tied to Binance exchange, it’s a prelaunch token redeemable for the Hcash coin which is also looking complex, IoT, Industrial stuff, doesn’t look like for general users. Plus I think Hcash is not even launched yet, so I’ll pass this.
ROUND 3
So we are left with the established coins, coins that have proven themselves through the test of time. I think any of these can qualify for wealth storage, but I am only going to choose 1.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin is certainly the oldest one, and by any metric the most secure. However the Segwit Address is still questionable, after some time core aspects of BTC are being changed, and there is not enough research on that to prove that Segwit is secure, it’s a new type of address after all.
But the main problem is that Bitcoin has enormous fees, so it’s almost unusable, driving many people away, so even if it’s good for wealth storage with high fees, it still has a sad future upcoming.
Stellar
Stellar has been tested through time as well, a pretty old coin from 2014, and it has many interesting features like a DEX. I don’t particularly like it, looks like it’s aiming to make a gateway between fiat and that could open up a lot of risks, it’s not my choice for this.
Cardano
Cardano aims to provide a provably secure POS scheme which is very interesting. I myself think that only POS schemes can be decentralized, while POW inevitable centralizes, so Cardano looks very hot, I am going to buy some myself.
But it’s fairly new, so it hasn’t been well tested, but the aspects of it look very interesting. It’s still not the best one.
Litecoin
LTC is just like BTC, whatever issues BTC has LTC has them worse, since LTC is barely used, most merchants in 2014 used to have BTC & LTC signs, the LTC signs quickly dissapeared (and now they quit BTC too due to high fees). LTC simply doesn’t have the economic backbone and it’s very obsolete technology.
Steem
Steem is a very good choice for currency, I mean there are no fees. Very easy to use, very comfortable.
However it’s not inherently secure, I don’t know about Steem wallet, but using it through Steemit opens up all kinds of risks by anyone who can hack this website, inject javascript malware, and so on.
It simply doesn’t have the cold-storage feature, not that I know of. And I don’t even think there is a Linux wallet out there. So at best you can store it in an exchange, like I do now, or on your Steemit account. Therefore it’s inherently insecure until a lightweight wallet like Electrum doesn’t appear for it.
ROUND 4
The 2 coins that are left are Bitcoin Cash and Monero. Both are secure, decentralized, permissionless coins. And I like both of them. They both qualify to be called money. Monero in Esperanto means Money anyway. Bitcoin Cash is like a true digital cash.
I’ll do another article comparing the two, stay tuned!
Disclaimer: The information provided on this page or blog post might be incorrect, inaccurate or incomplete. I am not responsible if you lose money or other valuables using the information on this page or blog post! This page or blog post is not an investment advice, just my opinion and analysis for educational or entertainment purposes.
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With the lighting network coming it has to be btc.
LN is overrated, it has tons of flaws and it doesn't provide quality scaling.
I wish you all the best with your choices even I don't understand why are you excluding coins because of security issues that You even don/t know and just guessing? Like Steem, did you know if you held your Steempower in the wallet that even when you get hacked it is not available to withdraw for the next 7 days. You have plenty of time to react to a hack and there is also a official Account Recovery Service from Steemit. I'm just saying if you exclude coins from your list without even knowing the details of security issues you probably come to wrong conclusion and will miss out on great opportunities.
7 days is quite problematic, some people only check their stuff once a month. I only do accounting once a month so what if it gets stolen between that time?
Also what if the recovery system gets hacked? It's pretty centralized from that aspect in my opinion.
I won't miss out on opportunities as I am already holding Steem, I am just saying that it has vulnerabilities since the only way to access it is from a Javascript based website that for some reason loads Google and Facebook scripts on it's login page, instead of a cold-storage wallet system that can be held on a cold storage computer or hardware wallet.
interesting ideas. I am with you on many coins, but Cardano and QTUM are overrated imho... don't know, but get a bad feeling about these...
Cardanos MC is too high for the current state of the project
QTUM will be obsolete, soon ...
Cardano sounds cool, I think POS is superior to POW so it's interesting to see where that goes.
If you look at a chart of BTC/BTC you will notice that 1 bitcoin has equalled 1 bitcoin since the inception of bitcoin making it extremely stable!
I noticed a coin that looks interesting at the bottom of your list.
STEEM. I need to look into and get me some of this coin!
That is funny but that is not how value works, it has to be compared to something other than itself
Steem is a great coin, very good for commerce, heck I hold quite a lot of it, but it's not my favorite currency.
Until a lightweight Linux wallet doesn't come out for Steem, I find it risky. I went to steem.io and there were no wallets there.
I don't know how the witness system works then, what software do they use?
Witnesses are basically miners. Ned computed the number of nodes needed to make sure that the data stayed solid, and that is how many witnesses are paid.
You can write a wallet if you want to. There is all kinds of libraries for accessing the graphene block chain. However, it would be almost exactly like the wallet page on steemit.com. No more and no less secure.
Your master key is the only security in the entire system.
Yes but I could not find any software on the steem.io website.
I think there is a Github repo, have to look at it.
Although I am sure there isn't a specific LInux wallet out there , as lightweight SPV wallet like Electrum/EC, so the only way to access money is from Steemit or Busy i think.
There is a Desktop Wallet developed by @jesta named Vessel. With that, you can manage your account keys and keep them offline but even if you don't trust the online or desktop wallet there is still the possibility for a paper wallet.
https://steemit.com/vessel/@jesta/vessel-0-2-0-interact-with-steem-securely-from-any-website