It has sure has been a long time since I updated the interwebs with my crypto adventures! And the long hiatus has taught me at least one lesson: do not ever leave all your money with shitcoins you didn't really research and look away for an entire month. What might happen, you ask? Bitcoin could triple in value, your holdings may super-deflate in value and you might come back to a portfolio that has about half the value you had in it when you last laid eyes on it. Yeah. That sucked.

So what the shit happened?

Well, personal stuff. Oh and my phone broke so I lost all my 2FA accesses and learned how ill-prepared I was for that. But after said stuff came and went, and I opened up my blockfolio to see what my portfolio looked like, I found I had lost about 45% of my portfolio to the last unsafe day trades I had done. Patientory (PTOY) dropped over 50%, ReddCoin - once one of my favourites, went from 30 satoshi to 10 satoshi... Tirion (TNT) slipped into oblivion, pulverizing the profit I'd made off ARK. And add Iconomi (ICN) and TenX (PAY) to my worst performers... Ugh.

But BTC... went parabolic while I stopped looking. Last I'd checked, it was getting close to $3500. But now it was nearing the $7k mark, and with no end in sight, jumped to $8k. So the real lesson was: when in doubt, just convert to BTC or fiat, whichever you trust more. And then I was holding all these heavy ass bags.

Fuck. This.
Said I.

Confucius once said, sometimes it's better to take the loss up your butthole, and the tatters of your shame (read: money you have left) and re-invest it to re-coup whatever you can. So that was my new goal.

The ever-trading alt-frenzy comeback kids

I started moving lots of money around, and re-injected another good chunk to place into good performers instead of hedge all my bets on BTC. All the money I had left went to BTC, all the money I made in the last month or so has gone to several alts over the last few weeks, in and out. Some trades being all of one or two days long to maximize my gains as fast as possible, other positions I opened over a week or two.

Over the past few weeks, some of the best winners for me have been:

• Groestlcoin (GRS) with an increase of 92% over a week.
  A early segwit adopter, this coin is in continuous development, with new features coming out all the time and already features the Lightning Network for almost zero fee transactions. Apparently the wallet can send GRS over SMS which is neat. There are tons of wallets for it and it is boasts asic resistance (fairer mining distribution). I'm looking out for this one over the next year.
  I'm waiting for a 7k satoshi entry point back into this one for a medium-term hold.
• Einsteinium (EMC2) with an increase of 135% over a week.
  A POW coin, EMC2's mission is to raise funds for scientific research using a mining tax that pools funds to provide grants to deserving applicants. I don't know what to say, this is fucking great: Kickstarter for science. This one has a lot of stuff coming in the roadmap, some of it simple and underway: hire developers, API for web wallet, implement auth... No to mention some rather ambitious milestones that haven't started yet: credit card to buy EMC2 directly, EMC2 debit card, open-source SDK, asset insurance, to name a few. But it definitely is interesting. Remains to be seen if it is actually promising in the next few months.
  I'll wait for the inevitable market-wide correction and try and scoop this up sub-$5k satoshis.
• Voxelus with an increase of 161% over a week.
  Voxelus is a virtual reality game and experience creation platform for anyone, without any code. It also features multiplayer app to play the content created, currently working on Oculus Rift and the Samsung Gear VR. It's quite possible this is coming to the HTC line of products soon. Honestly, I hated the wallet, it looked like shit, but there is much talk of re-branding so I'm confident this will eventually be a winner. I've held this coin on an off for the better part of a year and it's got great peaks and valleys to play off of for maximized gains. Their twitter has always been very active with updates and it seems they deliver on their milestones, so keeping an eye on this one, too.
  I'll hold out to around 1300 satoshis to get back in this game. I'm hopeful news is coming sooner rather than later...

Long-term holding, newcomers

Aside from the ones I know I won't keep very long the time being, I'm always storing some coins away for cold storage or for staking. One day I might mine, but I haven't wrapped my head around that stuff yet. Give it time, though... Those that will be constantly accumulated count BTC, LTC, ETH, and ARK. And then there are the ones I think are here to stay for a while in my wallets:

• SALT (SALT)
  SALT is aiming to let you leverage your blockchain assets to secure cash loans. That's kind of cool. Instead of focusing on the borrower's creditworthiness: the most trustworthy system. Not gon' lie, I thought the branding was slick. Now I keep thinking how good... and possibly bad idea this is. But it's worth holding for a while, in my opinion. I'm going to hold it, and might even try to use it and report back on that.
• OmiseGo (OMG)
  OmiseGo promises to be the decentralized exchange we all wish for, on a public blockchain at high volume and with low transaction costs. Their network connected to the Ethereum mainnet, would enable anyone to do everything from payments and payroll to asset management and trading in an inexpensive way. For currency adoption, they claim the exchange won't pick favourite currencies, with their network being agnostic between fiat and decentralized money: a system built to favour the Winners of the Great Crypto Wars of the 21st Century. OMG is one of the only coins I sold when I mega failed. But I've been holding it again for a couple months now and it feels like it belongs.
• Stellar Lumens (XML)
  Stellar is amazing for micro payments. It cuts out the middleman to reduce transaction costs. It's already in use by Deloitte! This is also great for poorer communities like many on the African continent, where everyone has a cellphone, but not everyone has power, let alone wifi. Lumens enable people to make payments through mobile messaging for stuff like healthcare, education, and energy. This is one of the only things I bought when I started and never sold. And it seems I never will.

There have been more moves, but insignificant enough that I can't remember them...

Oh and there's this.

WHAT IN THE ACTUAL EFFING MEOW

I may need to reconsider my ETH holdings. Or lack of cat holdings.

-.-;;;