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I think I'm right in saying we own 25% of Pluto Digital Assets.
Looking at our overall exposure to the three main types of crypto coins (ignoring tokens for the time being), we obviously have Proof of Work coins covered with Bitcoin and Zcash mining.
With Pluto we have some coverage of Proof of Stake via investments in DOT and ETH (once Ethereum transitions from PoW to PoS that is).
But do we have any exposure to the newer coins using Directed Acyclic Graph / block lattice tech? DAG is the only way found so far to have feeless transactions so no fees go to miners or stakers/delegators. Feeless may well win out in the long term (for value transfer if not store of value), which means the only way to profit (with no transaction fees) is to buy the coins and profit as they appreciate in price. Do we own any NANO, IOTA, BAN etc via our investment in Pluto?
I can't find any details of any DAG investments on Pluto's site - does anyone here know?
DAG tech would be interesting to Peter Wall I'm sure, as it uses a fraction of the energy to complete transactions when compared to BTC, so might fit in with his green ambitions.
@94.57 on the basis that this huge multinational chain has a market cap of £1.29B. IMHO that is ludicrously cheap, even taking debt into account. Still a gamble / recovery play obviously, but the downside risk is much smaller than the upside potential.
"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."
It's the latter for me today, but you should do your own research - it's your money and no one else's.
Sorry, this is a better link.
https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/bitcoin-stock-to-flow-cross-asset-model-50d260feed12
https://100trillionusd.github.io/
I found this quite an interesting analysis of where BTC is going and its market cap's relationship to the bitcoin halving cycle. There seems to be a consensus among his twitter followers that BTC will be north of US$250k before the end of this cycle.
ADA and ETH are both projects for the long term. ADA in particular goes about development in the right way, but is way behind ETH currently in terms of adoption.
ADA uses Proof of Stake (ETH is in the process of switching to PoS also), which is much more ecologically sound than BTC's electricity guzzling Proof of Work. However, you can't get round the fact that the historical investment in all that electricity is part of what gives BTC its value (hence it is king in terms of store of value, but still pretty sickening from a climate change perspective).
NANO is most like the future dream of crypto - no inflation, no mining, no fees, and (until recently) sub-second transactions. In the last few weeks, spammers (probably from a rival crypto) have exploited the feeless nature of NANO to spam the network so it is currently taking almost 2 minutes to confirm transactions. The dev team have some good ideas about spam mitigation (really interesting reads on reddit nanocurrency if you are a massive geek like me) so this should get sorted out in time. What's interesting is that someone feels threatened enough by the 94th ranking crypto (NANO) to feel the need to try and create reputational damage to it via spam, and put in the required effort.
But if you want a punt then don't forget that the thing that drives price ultimately scales with network effects (number of users squared). BANANO (a near identical fork of NANO but with ambitions to add privacy features) is ranked 797 on Coinmarketcap, but has a surprisingly active reddit community (a bit like DOGE). Definitely beer money not rent money.
But do your own research, there are lots of interesting projects out there. GL all.
Just realised that the net effect of this will favour Argo - it reduces the number of ways to gain exposure to blockchain technology without actually holding crypto. Argo is therefore one of only a few valid options remaining.
It strikes me that the super deduction tax relief in the budget will be of massive benefit to Argo, as it will allow 25p off their tax bill for every £1 invested in machinery.
As Argo is both profitable and needs to constantly update its mining hardware (BTC mining being the unceasing Arms race that it is), it is exactly the sort of company that will benefit.
But I'm not au fait with the details. Would the Texas investment qualify or does the plant need to be installed onshore to qualify?
Any tax experts here?
@unix83, if you get a hardware wallet, you don't need to worry about losing it or breaking it. It does not store your coins (which are actually on the public blockchain), rather it generates (from 24 random words that you MUST keep safe) , a set of private keys for all of your different crypto assets. On a day to day basis you access it with a PIN number, but if you lose the device you can just get a new one and prime it with your 24 word seed.
This is one of the unique things about crypto: if you can remember 24 words you can effectively store billions of dollars in your head (although I wouldn't recommend it!)
Fascinatingly unconfiscatable!
Altinvestor makes an excellent point, get yourself a Ledger hardware wallet (wallet is actually a poor description, as it actually holds the private keys that assert your ownership of crypto funds - but it trips off the tongue better than "private cryptographic key storage and transaction signing device".
As coincollector says, XLM is another project I have a lot of time for, quietly getting on with building stuff and growing.
I've been in crypto since 2013. I paid off my first mortgage with gains in 2018 and held on to a significant amount.
My first piece of advice about crypto is don't listen to anyone on reddit about how to invest (but do use reddit to learn about the tech) . Second piece of advice, don't invest unless and until you understand (in at least a rudimentary way) the underlying tech behind a particular coin, how a blockchain works, difference between proof of work and proof of stake, consensus mechanisms, etc. You don't need to be a programmer (I'm not) but you need to do a bit of reading or it's just plucking names out of a hat and probably getting someone's heavy bags dumped on you.
FWIW, my main holdings are (with rationale in brackets):-
BTC (proven 'deflationary' store of value)
ETH and ADA (smart contract substrata)
NANO (only crypto that is totally fee-less to transact and hence actually usable as a global payment currency unless you can be bothered with IOTA which doesn't have anything like as slick tech yet)
Of these, NANO is the only one that still has a (very, very small) chance of appreciating 1000x or more. I don't know anyone who has seen the tech in action, transferring value for free in less than a second, that hasn't instantly become a convert. There is a helpful reddit nanocurrency sub, and you can get sent nano for free from one of the Nano faucets so you can try out the wallets etc.
But (really, I mean it) do your own research and good luck