
The Best Performing Cryptocurrencies of 2017 Thus Far - subverter
https://www.subverter.co/2017/06/01/the-best-performing-cryptocurrencies-of-2017-thus-far/
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bandrami
How does one judge the "performance" of a cryptocurrency? In the abstract, I'd
say what marks a currency's "performance" is its ability to be exchanged for
goods and services; in that sense there really aren't any performing
cryptocurrencies.

They seem to mean "which has the biggest increase in spot price this year?",
which is a kind of weird thing to judge a currency on.

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saosebastiao
Liquidity by itself has an objective and quantifiable value. Bitcoin, and
possibly a few other cryptocurrencies, have some unique properties that have
intrinsic value, like algorithmic fairness, low transaction costs, logistical
simplicity, and lack of centralized control over money supply. BTC has a
distinct possibility of becoming the future default Exchange Currency in
international currency markets, which basically means that the transaction
costs of trading A -> BTC -> B are cheaper than trading A -> B directly.

I'd argue that if it were possible to isolate effects from hoarding and
speculation, that the spot price would represent the intrinsic value of its
liquidity and other intrinsic benefits. And thus, to the degree that prices
are not influenced by speculation, the price reflects performance.

But since we know that prices are heavily influenced by speculation, I'd argue
that the better metric for performance should be daily trading volume. Because
that is a more direct measure of liquidity. It might be meaningless by itself
(the trading volume doesn't "represent" anything more than the total value
that exchanges hands everyday), but contextually it is important. The 24 hour
bitcoin trading volume is currently $1.6B. The currency trading volume across
all worldwide currencies is $5T [1]. So BTC can roughly be considered to have
3-ish orders of magnitude of difference in liquidity over the worldwide
currency market. As someone who has no involvement in BTC whatsoever, I find
that pretty impressive.

[0]
[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/)

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/global-markets-currency-
volum...](http://www.reuters.com/article/global-markets-currency-volumes-
idUSL5N18E3K3)

~~~
vikiomega9
> lack of centralized control over money supply

This might be clear to someone with more experience in the field, but it's not
apparent how the benefits of such a constraint is quantified. For example, the
fed raising interest rates is not translated to a deterministic response from
the stock market and so using bitcoin might have sound fundamental advantages
but equivalent pragmatic limitations?

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icpmacdo
Is there something like a crypto etf for all these high grow coin that's more
passive?

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eigenvalue
Yes, and it is itself a crypto coin:

[https://www.iconomi.net/](https://www.iconomi.net/)

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insulanian
They're still "comming".

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alexchamberlain
> now that we’ve reached the halfway point of 2017

Aren't we 5/12-s into 2017? Given the volatility of these currencies, a month
could make a lot of difference.

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subverter
Err, yes. Apparently I need to go back and learn how to count months in a year
again. I've updated the wording. Thanks!

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njarboe
While many of these cryptocurrencies have some underlying function besides
speculation, seems to me they are mostly a way around pyramid scheme laws at
the moment. Such a huge number of competing pyramid schemes going all at once
should produce some good data for a few economics PhD's.

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chipuni
I strongly suspect that buying these currencies will be much, much easier than
selling them. There will be lots of tiny currencies where people are grateful
to give currency for US $, but very few people want to give US $ for your
currency.

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linsomniac
WorldPay is probably in that group, it has a market cap of $1-$3. Dollars. But
many of them, in a given day, trade value in the millions to billions. It
drops off pretty quick after the top 5 by market cap (Ether is #2 and is in
the billion/day range, Ripple is #3 and half that, Lumens is #12 and is $44M).

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wehadfun
Did not know that there were so many other bitcoins out there. Has anyone
actually bought anything with these other coins or is it pure speculation.

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deweller
Many of these are pure speculation or beginning projects.

Others are platforms (ETH) or ledgers (XRP) that are seeing significant growth
in usage.

But in the grand scheme of things, ALL of these are speculation plays at this
point. With maybe, just maybe, the exception of bitcoin.

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RangerScience
Is there a similar chart for poorly performing cryptocurrencies, or is
basically everything going up?

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subverter
48 experienced negative growth in the period, actually. You can take a look at
the complete dataset in CSV format
([https://gitlab.com/subverter/cryptocurrency-
growth/raw/maste...](https://gitlab.com/subverter/cryptocurrency-
growth/raw/master/archive/2016-12-31_2017-05-31_USD.csv)) to see which they
are.

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Dirlewanger
So, uh...what's the fastest way to take $1000 of play money and start
speculating?

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atm0sphere
rule 1. don't leave coins on exchanges.

coinbase

gemini

poloniex

rule 2. don't leave coins on exchanges.

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CedarMill
after buying transfer to separate wallet? and where? what wallet would ya
recommend?

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sushid
Buy a hardware wallet. I would recommend the Ledger Nano S. I have no
affiliation with them.

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vocatus_gate
What am I doing wasting time with Bitcoin, when WOP had a 14,087% (!!) gain???

