Bitcoin and Blockchain – A Disruptive Movement - Check the Depth before Diving In
The intention of this post is to educate and protect those who are gravitating toward or currently involved in the bitcoin and blockchain movement, but have very limited investing experience. It is meant to condense major concepts into a brief post and encourage your own due diligence on any one of the branching ideas contained herein.
If you need the money or if someone is depending on you for the money, but you don’t know much about bitcoin/blockchain, then put your ego aside and do not trade in bitcoin/blockchain. If you are entering at this stage, then understand many of the easy fortunes to be made perhaps already have been made. If simply curious and wondering where to find more information, a couple good primers to get up to speed would be to watch the Netflix “Banking on Bitcoin” documentary after visiting www.coindesk.com/information to learn about the basics.
If you decide to “invest” or trade in the movement, know ahead of time there are far more losers than winners when booms and busts occur. Tulip, .com and nano-technology crazes made fortunes for a select few, but most lost out.
Arm yourself with some basic technical analysis skills and learn how to read key financial disclosures. Resist the temptation to jump in immediately when a random news release leads to a pop. If you do chase the stock, then have an exit strategy in advance and stick to it.
Take RIOT Blockchain as an example. The stock demonstrated support and resistance from $7 to $9. Once it cleared the $9 resistance, triggering a buy, it quickly moved to $24. When it fell back it didn’t find support at $9, but at its 4-day moving average in the $13 range, which is typical of very fast-moving stocks. 4-day, 9-day, 20-day and 50-day averages are known critical support points for momentum stocks. RSI and MACD indicators also provide guidance on whether a stock is overbought or oversold in mathematical terms. The lesson here is to know what the professionals are looking at to time their buys and sells and what you don’t know can hurt you.
At the time of this post, Bitcoin is trading just above $15k and has experienced 20% +/- fluctuations measured in a very short span of hours/days.
To simplify, I’ll label the current environment as “bitcoin mania”, which reduces the underlying hype-factors to a single term covering cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, smart contracts, the anti-centralized banking movement toward a decentralized system and emerging revenue streams, such as crypto-currency mining.
The future of cryptocurrency and blockchain is uncertain. Listening to snippets from Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates or John McAfee can leave one either puzzled or more convinced that a preconceived probability will occur. If you side with the notions of doubt, then a couple of reinforcing predictions are the potential crushing blows through the introduction of government intervention or another major hacking scheme which will lead to permanent loss in confidence. Energy consumption of mining activity, computers crunching the algorithms accounting for transactions, may also prove to limit potential. On the other side, if you hold strong to a view of unlimited potential, then you may believe we are in the very early stages of a revolution and the market will ultimately value a given crypto-currency at an equilibrium price far greater than the current value, whatever that may be.
This movement is churning a perfect mixture of ingredients for a great bubble:
There is some utility and value, but the full potential and scale of possibilities is undefined
Most of the population does not understand the fundamentals of crypto-currencies, coin-mining or the blockchain technology driving the movement.
The creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, adds a mythical accent.
Its touted as a new form of money and no one knows how to value or what the value should be. Bitcoin, by design, has a predetermined finite supply of 21m coins that can be mined. This acts to essentially limit supply. If demand increases, then prices move upward given basic laws of economics.
Extraordinary returns for a select few attracts a “me too” mentality and everyone wants in at the same time. This is a global craze and not limited individual stock exchanges, but heavily concentrated in a single-global currency. The most perfect bubbles in history occur when a subset of an investable “asset class” skyrockets and a few success stories gives rise to the appearance of abundant opportunity in a space.
Did you know there was a blockchain game called “crypto-kitties”, where a digital kitty recently sold in-excess of $100,000?
Many of these companies spent years running unsuccessful publicly traded companies. To keep up with demand for “pure play” equities, companies have been changing their names to provide more “investable” supply. Be honest with yourself, do you believe really believe the leadership of these companies will find instant success by simply changing a company name or adopting a new business strategy? Some of these companies have failed meet the issuer listing requirements, have been subject to a trading halt or only survive by selling additional shares to raise capital.
Here is a listing of some publicly traded Bitcoin/Blockchain related companies:
SRAX, BTCS, BTSC, GBTC, OTIV, RIOT, DPW, MARA, NETE, UBIA, BKLLF, PRELF and BITCF. The list will continue to grow so long as demand stays strong. There is also a long list of companies with more mature business models that will share in the success or failure such as OSTK, NVDA and SQ - these may be a “safer” alternative to consider, but they are also trading at or near all-time highs.
Remember history’s lessons.