These altcoins have been selected based on uniqueness, technology, community & growth potential. The following altcoins I have chosen is purely base on my opinion and is not professional investment advice. My aim in this blog is to describe some of the features of each coin so the reader can make an informed choice and get a basic guide to investing in general.

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Disclaimer: I have a substantial weight of my Blockchain portfolio invested in these altcoins (more than 60%). The rest I have invested in ETH, XRP & XMR. I am holding off on BTC investing for the time being due to the BTC fork. I am typically a modest stock investor which has recently gain more interest in crypto’s in the last few years.

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Investment Style – Value Investing

Value investing is the art of buying cheap and holding for the long term, it is typically known as the warren buffet style of investing or “intelligent investing”. The majority of altcoins correlate with ETH & BTC price, so there is no point trying to buy altcoins when the price is down because ETH is likely be to be down also. The key is buy ETH cheap relative to USD price.

ETH/USD – (30/7/17)

Looking at this monthly chart it is easily to determine what are good prices using some simple support and resistance lines. Lets say I have $2,000 USD and 10 ETH to play with. Put in a few Limit Orders.

• Buy 4 ETH @ $172 USD
• Buy 4 ETH @ $148 USD
• Sell 2 ETH @ $243 USD
• Sell 2 ETH @ $398 (close to yearly high)

This is a very simple strategy that anybody can do, personally I don’t care for trading so much, I would just be happy accumulating ETH and holding for long periods. I associate day/margin trading with gambling and I don’t gamble!

Now that we have secured our base coins (BTC, ETH or XRP) at a good price we can look investing in some awesome altcoins.

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Investment Selection Criteria

“Investing is like chess, you have rules, principles and strategies. You can play aggressive and risky or passive and safe, if you want to break a rule that’s ok, just make sure you have a real good reason why you are doing it.”

Technology

Given that all things are equal and fair the coin with the best technology should succeed another coin with less technology in a perfect world. While this makes sense logically it is only a part of the totality of factors which makes a coin successful or not.

I don’t how many coins I have come across that state they are going to be the new “replacement Bitcoin” just because it has a slightly better tech than what Bitcoin currently has but we all know that Bitcoin is going to be around for a while and its goanna take a lot more than an upgraded “copy-cat” coin to replace it.

Uniqueness

Being the only one of its kind is a great attribute to an altcoin but sometimes being first is better than being unique. I like to look for things like fast/cheap transactions, built in chat feature, treasury fund for future projects and of course scalability. Having multiple altcoins that vary in use is a part of my investment strategy.

In stock market we have different sectors in gold, energy, retail, technology, health & finance ect. We take the same approach to altcoins and find unique markets eg. privacy, store of value, contracts or social media.

Growth Potential

The first thing I want you to notice is that none of these coins are NOT in the Top 10 in Market Cap. This is because we want to exceed the growth of the current leading Crypto’s. More often than not popular investments are also overvalued investments which is why I have not chosen any altcoins from the top 10, we want room to grow to maximise our profits!

Community & Development

Without a community or decent development team it is difficult to get anything off the ground. I was looking at ReddCoin which sounded great on the surface but once I checked into the twitter and reddit update forums I notice the activity was dead. Some updates were over 3 years and numerous questions and comments left unanswered, it was enough to turn me away.

Reddcoin (RDD) Promotional Video

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Making a Killing by 2020

EOS

This is probably my number one pick at moment as it ticks all the boxes for the selection criteria regarding technology, uniqueness, community and growth potential. It’s a little complicated to explain it small words what EOS actually is so you may have to watch a few video on EOS to wrap your head around it. EOS Overview Video (Dan Larimer Q&A Interview)

If it ticks all the boxes should I Invest everything now?... Well that’s hard to say when considering scary EOS Purchase Agreement, so invest at your own risk.

@cob posted a popular blog about a month discussing pro’s and con’s of the purchasing agreement and why it is written the way it is. Shedding some light on the EOS Token Purchase Agreement.

Anyhow the project is monster, and it should definitely on your list if its not already. EOS will be still distribution EOS token for another 300 days or so. If you are interested in EOS and not sure how to purchase @sandwich and done numerous guides on the purchasing EOS tokens but alternatively you can buy from the exchanges. Check EOS Crowdsale with MyEtherWallet - The Complete Guide

Steemit/Steem/Steem Power

I know what you are thinking “another fanatic steemit fan” well no. Actually I don’t like steem for a long term investment at all. What I mean to say by this is “I don’t actually think the price of Steem will rise that much at all” WTF!?

@dan has mentioned numerous times that Steem Dollar is pegged the US Dollar. “didn’t you get the memo?” So it would be fair to say that when price of Steem is over $1 USD it is overvalued.

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All the money that would be normally push the price of Steem up is actually paying active users of the platform. This creates an inflationary effect which results in Steem maintaining the same price without significant change (This is how I understand it). For a more complicated explanation feel free to read the Steem Whitepaper.pdf or read some responses to this blog: If Steem value tied to dollar- why hoping for massive value change?

To make a killing from Steemit we need to be an active user, whether it’s commenting, curating or blogging. Lately I have been tinkering with a free vote bot from SteemVoter. And from what I can work out from my calculations I can earn approximately 20%-30% a year (half a percent per week) just from curation alone. Throw in 20 or so decent blogs and we could easily earn 30%-40% on our money every year, And maybe even more if we commented frequently.

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PIVX

PIVX (Private Instant Verified Transaction/X) is a technically better version of dash which it has forked from. The main benefits of PIVX are as followed;

• Instant send using SwitfTX
• Block Time of 60 seconds
• Transparent coin supply
• Optional private transactions using Obfuscation
• Great scalability due to built-in incentives to expand
• Endless coin supply meaning endless amount of master-nodes
• Generous size treasury fund (10%) & fast voting to address issues
• Future roadmap includes encrypted chat & elastic block sizes
• Reported payments of receiving 5-6 PIVX per day for holding a master-node of 10,000 PIVX which supports the decentralised network.
• Seesaw reward system balances the payments between stakers and master-nodes to balance out the network
• Incentives for small users by “staking” - see video

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That being said PIVX development team is comprised of community members which could be debated as “lacking” or “not first” compared to other teams like to NEM and DASH.

PIVX is currently in the fight for market dominance to establish its name as a top contender for an anonymous crypto currency, if they can lure enough people through its lucrative incentives and marketing there may be chance for exponential growth.

How to make with money with PIVX by staking

Wallet Issues Fix: https://forum.pivx.org/t/faq-for-wallet-issues/878

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NEO

Previously known as AntShares (ANS), Neo is the China’s first original public chain, you may be thinking “so what?” Well we have to understand that Bitcoin used to be a US phenomenon, now almost all Bitcoin trading occurs in China and Neo is one of the first.

Neo defines itself as quoted

“NEO As China's first ever original and open source public chain project, NEO serves as a smart assets platform. Smart assets are the combination of smart contract of blockchain and digital assets. NEO allows for a smarter way for assets registration, issuance, and circulation.”

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We can think of NEO similar to Ethereum (ETH) as it also does smart contracts. NEO is trying to be “The Ethereum of China” and is directly competing. What makes it different/better is the following;

• Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) instead of “proof of work/stake”
• Multi-Language Contract Complier
• Government Support for real world assets
• Cross-Chain Patent which allows Neo to work work across different block chains
• Partnerships: Microsoft, Bancor & Agrello

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Where it goes from here is hard to say but with Government support and heavy China dominance I will be keeping my eye on this one.

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MAID, GNT, & MCO

For these next four coins I will put a series of very short overview videos of what these altcoins are all about. I have mainly chosen these coins based of the uniqueness & technology. I believe all these are “first of their kind” which gives them a better chance to succeed over other coins.

MAID

To summerize MaidSafe plans to create a secure decentralised blockchain cloud storage network like “Google drive” or “OneDrive” but with privacy and absolute security in mind. Once you create an anonymous account with MaidSafe people will then be able to “rent” their computer free resources like their hard drive space for exchange for MaidSafe Coins.

GNT

Golem (GNT) is 2 sided market which allows users buy or sell unused computational resources (GPU or GPU time). To better explain how MAID & GNT works I have include a video from Amazon Web Services (AWS) which currently offers a simillar service. I should also mention cloud computer is a huge market reaching almost 200 billion world wide.

MCO

Monaco doesn’t require too much explanation as it’s trying to establish itself as the worlds first crypto Visa Debit Card. It has all the bells and whistle you would expect from a project.

• Best interbank exchange rates for ETH/BTC/ERC20 tokens
• Online phone Apps for money management; send, receive, spend & borrow
• Full security features including face recognition software

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Monaco Overview -YouTube Link

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If I could only pick one, which one would it be?

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ICN

Iconomi (ICN) is a Digital Asset Platform which allows a person to use their service to invest and manage in digital assets. It will be unique system that lets beginners or “first time investors” get into the crypto economy without all the hassle of dealing with research, exchanges or wallets.

What does this mean?

Since the 1st of August 2017 Iconomi (ICN) has launched their platform which allows the users to pick a fund INCX DAA (Digital Assets Array) to invest in. This fund represents from 70-90% of the total market capitalisation of all digital assets. (https://coinmarketcap.com/).

Currently INCX is trading for just over a dollar USD and contains a solid listing of 21 well known digital assets (shown above), ETH or BTC can be used to buy in. The web platform is relative new but I can confirm its works very smoothly with no hiccups so far.

It has all the security features including 2FA and ID Verification process although for my country Australia the 2nd step verification process is not yet available and limits my account to $1,000 USD for the meantime. I should also mention that the INCX fund comes with a management of 3% and a exit fee of 0.5%. They are also looking to create more funds in the future which are more relative to ICO and other lucrative investments (heavy performance fees will apply).

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THE SILENT SLEEPER

HEAT

I always like to have at least super risky penny coin investment to make myself the next “Wolf of Wall Street” and for this one I have picked HEAT, currently ranked way, way down on the coin market cap at 461. Yes, its far from a top 10 crypto but I do believe it has the potential to be in the top 50 which gives it a huge growth potential.

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After watching the video interview with Dennis de Klerk (Heat Developer) I became extremely intrigued with the future developments of HEAT. What’s most impressive is the overall feel of the professionalism website, wallet & UI design, everything was so smooth and visually stunning... no shortcuts were taken here.

The Heat Wallet Direct Asset Exchange has a built in trollbox and private messaging features.

HEAT appears to have all the right technology & growth potential to create a successful coin, the only downside to heat is the size of the development team & community. At the moment there is only 2 people running the show.

The road map suggest it will be another 2 years before HEAT is self-sustaining blockchain economy.

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Heat Interview with the Dennis de Klerk (Developer)

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The written content in this blog is 100% original and created by me. Remember to vote, comment & follow @jaycobbell