Ask HN: Which is the best cryptocurrency to invest in right now, and why? - cyber_dude
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thiagooffm
Don't consider as investment advice, just my own thoughts:

1st of all, investing in crypto is 100% speculation, 0% investing. I still do
it though just for fun, for now, it has been working but all could be 0
tomorrow.

Coins to watch for:

NEO coin: it's the chinese ethereum, there's some talks in ICOs getting
regulated there and its looked upon on being the "regulated ICO coin" sometime
soon, speculation, but definitely performing well.

Bitcoin: just invest in the most stable one, why not?

Ethereum: smart contracts, the most stable also. Much better than bitcoin,
just not as popular.

Monero: bitcoin, but fully anonymised. It's not so hard to trace bitcoin tx,
but monero makes it sort of impossible.

Ripple: wants to kill SWIFT and partner up with a lot of banks, basically the
"playing in the side of the banks" coin

Also, do your own research. Don't trust anyone. Avoid small coins if you
aren't the person doing the pump and dump.

The only thing I would invest in is the IDEA. Blockchain is there to replace
tons of industries, we just don't know yet how much time it's going to take,
or who'll be the winner. It's very likely that the winner doesn't even exist.

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h1d
Bitcoin will always be there as the proof that blockchain model works. It will
stay simple for the sake of stability.

Calling Ethereum better is like saying JavaScript is better than HTML.

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solomatov
AFAIU, Ethereum can do everything that Bitcoin can. In this sense, Ethereum is
strictly better than Bitcoin. Am I wrong?

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infinii
It does more than Bitcoin because it allows the founders to rollback
transactions from the ledger if they feel like it.

Sorry, a bit trollish but am I wrong? In theory Ethereum does promise a lot
but in practice, we're yet to see much in terms of useful smart contracts. And
as we can see from the DAO debacle, they've broken their claims of "Ethereum
is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed
without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference."

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itamarst
None, it's speculation at best, incompetence most of the time, fraud quite
often.

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kexari
Ethereum or Bitcoin for investing. They have real intrinsic value. Most the
other currencies are just spin offs of the original deal or overly ambitious
white papers with nothing implemented. Stay away from NEO.

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solomatov
How to calculate their intrinsic value?

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quickthrower2
Same way as you calculate USD intrinsic value.

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richardknop
Starting your own blockchain and raising Bitcoin to distribute your new tokens
seems to be the quickest way to big bucks.

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arisAlexis
Some of ny picks: elastic is a supercomputer that will release product
probably during the month, QRL is a quantum resistant ledger that will do the
same, NEO is te new ethereum, Monero is the only super private one and Ardor
will release mainnet in Q4 with very solid child chain tech.

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mbrock
I think this type of thread should probably be removed by moderators. There's
like one every week or so.

You're basically just asking people to pump their favorite altcoin.

This is not a good way to do investing.

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hector_ka
It is time to buy tulips.

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arisAlexis
Same argument again without realising tulips offered no innovation while
blockchain clearly does

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Frogolocalypse
Investing in crypto is fantastically risky. The premise under which almost all
investors view the asset is that it will be worth some multiple of where it is
today, or zero.

To invest in any crypto you have to understand what separates each of them in
terms of security from their counterparts. There is a significant amount of
buzz that has no relationship to the value proposition of a given alt. I can
think of only three (perhaps four explain later) cryptos that have any real
ecosystem that isn't 100% controlled by the founders. That is bitcoin,
litecoin, and ethereum. Every other crypto is really just a crypto in name
only.

In order to be a crypto in anything except name only you have to be able to
validate transactions as they are attached to the blockchain of the crypto.
Without doing this, all you have is an expensive distributed database, and
when I say distributed, that's exactly the problem. Bitcoin is distributed.
Every node holds a copy of the blockchain, and it is fantastically difficult
to get each of these nodes to adopt consensus rules changes, especially
changes that reduce the network security. That feature makes bitcoin more
valuable than all other crypto currencies combined, because even if the most
competent crypto open source development team, i.e. bitcoin core, chose to put
forward a proposal that the node owners thought would reduce security, it
would be rejected. No other crypto has this level of separation from the
maintainers of the system, and the developers of the system.

In my opinion, unless you are a sophisticated trader, there is only one crypto
worth investing in. If you are sophisticated trader, there will always be pump
and dump schemes for new cryptos, and I expect there is a lot of money to be
made. But that seems little more than gambling.

It is possible that the offshoots of some of these cryptos might gain
traction. Bitcoin cash provides no real security because its node
decentralization is almost non-existent, and it is controlled by a small group
of miners, perhaps only even one. They can change the rules at any time. Same
goes for Ethereum really. Vitalik Buderim might just to modify the consensus
rules, and there's very little anyone could do about it. People will blindly
follow him. But with bitcoin cash, it is possible that the chinese government
will capture bitcoin cash, given it would only need to capture one company
that exists in its country, and dictate that that is the crypto that must be
used. Maybe that will make it more valuable? Maybe it won't? Can't say. It
seems a big risk to me though.

So unless you really understand or believe in the value proposition of a
crypto, and understand how it can be protected from capture, it's best to
steer clear of all of them. There is only one crypto, bitcoin, that you can
reasonably download and run a node, and ensure that your crypto is secure, at
least in the short to medium term.

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SirLJ
not a single one is investment grade yet

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DesiLurker
z-cash. IMO zkSNARKS have legs.

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grover_hartmann
Bitcoin.

