Hullo there people
Just wondering if anybody else here is dabbling in the dark arts of Crypto Currencies ? I’ve gotten tangled into this murky world of bizarre jargon and hundred fold percentage swings, and woudl be helpful to chat with like-minded “investors” 
I have been playing with investments for a few months now, but have gotten deep into the technical aspect the last month or two , I have some stuff invested and cpu mine for fun not for profit not going to risk my GPU, I don’t have the financial means to actualy make buckets of money out of this but Its fun.
Edit: in fact I was listening to crypto related stuff when I saw the thread 
I have no skin in the game.
It is an interesting thing though. I’m sure there is a future in it somewhere.
I bought ~R1750 worth of BTC in 2014. Been HODLing ever since.
Nice epic win on that one, some good timing
Wow, very nice!
Just a shame I didn’t buy more, but at the time I honestly didn’t think it would catch on. Anyway, I am now the proud owner of 0.93 BTC. Already have my sell order setup on Luno @ R390K. That would pay my bond and give me a little holiday money. After that, I plan to use my bond payments for a few months to get into alt coins and day trade BTC.
ALT coins and ICO’s is a serious rabbit hole, I’m going to play games today I said and I’m still watching crypto videos and crap lol want to get myself a usb scrypt miner and mine some alts
I decided to get into it early December - I’ve gone the casual, or user-friendly route to start off and went with Luno. It’s really helpful that they have an app. From just playing around and getting used to the market of BTC and ETH I’ve managed to make a small bit of profit - but unfortunately I didn’t sell at the R300k mark and now I’m working my way back up again trying and often failing to play the market.
My brother-in-law had better luck and chucked in R30k and doubled his money when BTC shot up to R300k, so now he’s withdrawn the initial amount and left the other half to play around with.
Ok, timing of this thread is interesting so I have a lot to say. Oh yes, and I guess this is my first post on the new site… so welcome to me 
.
My father was here over December and he talked me into it. So I played with R25k… and lost R5000 
. Bad timing getting in while price is high. My father was/is planning to go into Bitcoin Club which looks to me like a cloud mining scam (the founder even has a criminal record) so I’ve tried talking him out of it (unsure if I was successful).
I’ve started investing with 2 cloud mining sites actually this weekend. Had to do a bunch of Googling and Youtubing before because the terms “cloud mining” and “scam” almost always come up in the same sentence. I do think we’re in the last phase where mining might still be profitable so while I might be too late for the Bitcoin gravy-train, there still seems to be some money to be made.
I’ve done some rough calculations and playing around, but I estimate that I can turn my R3600 investment into R75k after 2 years so I’m planning to add another R9k once I’ve seen how much I make in a day to confirm my calculations (they only update the dashboard stats every night at midnight… not sure whose midnight though). I’ll also only be able to get my initial investment out in November.
With the other site, I’m a bit more conservative because it might be a scam. They’re too new (May 2017) for anyone to confirm but people have confirmed they’ve received payouts (but scams do pay out sometimes to lure reinvestment so that tells me nothing). I’ve only invested R2500 with them, but that will see my investment multiply by 100 after 2 years. I’m working it in such a way though that I’ll withdraw my initial investment in the first week of May so if it turns out to be a scam, then I’ll either have all my money out (no loss) or I’m out R2500 if they vanish before then. It is an acceptable loss I’m willing to risk.
In my “rough” calculations though, I didn’t account for some things. On the downside, I didn’t account for price increases for hashpower or mining difficulty increase. On the upside, I didn’t take price increases in Bitcoin into account and I’ve only calculated on 2 years, but they should generate money for at least 3, although somewhat less. I didn’t really calculate past 2 years because I don’t really think mining will still be viable 2 years from now.
I still think the mining gig is dead for us small fry. there are industrial mining setups in China that crank out 20-30 BTC per day!
honestly, the easiest way for us small fry to move up, is via ALT coins. I bought PRL on the 24th Dec for R0.28c and today its going for around $4.23. Many such massive gains on a lot of other ALT coins. To get going with mining, you need huge initial cash outlay.
Yeah, I’m also interested in ALT coins. Mining is an initial expense unfortunately but at least it is passive income and for a small investment (if my calculations are remotely correct), I don’t see other investment options with that high return. I do see it as a relatively “safe” investment due to the fact that I should be able to get my money out quite early and that Bitcoin is tipped to increase a lot this year (heard predictions of $100k by December, but even if the price stays the same I’ll be fine).
I’ll go with cloud mining though. Wouldn’t waste time to do it myself as that is a whole different animal.
With ALT coins though, firstly where do you buy them? Must you first buy BTC through Luno and then send the funds to a wallet on another exchange and buy/sell them there and then send the money back to Luno to get it out?
Secondly, the cheap ones seem to be somewhat of a gamble. How did you decide on PRL (which I’ve never even heard of) or did you just randomly invest some money in a bunch of them hoping for more hits than misses?
I have heard that Stellar has potential, but no idea on how to buy.
With my cloud mining underway, ALT coins is my next interest and I’m quite clueless.
Yup, you start off buying on Luno or Altcointrader with your ZAR, then transfer to an exchange like Binance or HitBTC or KuCoin. I would recommend ETH rather than BTC, as it’s cheaper to transfer.
As for PRL, I saw it mentioned on Reddit sub and thought it may have some potential and took a stab. Your real starting point should be coinmarketcap.com
Ya Cloud mining has a bad rep, I don’t think I Would , depending on how much its going to cost you for a contract I would rather put together a Mining Rig and use it to mine Eth or alt coins, you can always sell the GPU’s later as well to recoup some initial costs.
As for which coins to buy its all speculation and keeping up with current affairs, someone in my office bought Ripple months ago which then took a nose dive and now that American Express is using it the Price is climbing , if you buy and it goes below what you paid I would suggest HODL (holding on for dear life) 
but thats entirely up to you, just keep doing your own research and don’t get swept up, its easy to get sucked into things and there a lot of people out there that will be more than willing to take your money.
I would again stay away from mining it myself as you have to contend with noise and high electricity usage. The nice thing about the contracts is that you can choose how much you want to invest. I bought my initial one for R2800 which was inflated because I bought with Bitcoin. Bought another one just now for R8400 using credit card. Had I paid with Bitcoin, it would have cost R1000 more. So for around R11k, I get 4.2 TH/s. I’m not sure how strong an actual mining rig is or what they cost, but now you have some figures to compare.
So far I’m doing ok (for the past 2 days). The possible scam site is performing as predicted in my calculations (0.0003305736 BTC / $4.9 generated over approx. 52 hours). The legit site is actually generating better than that which is surprising since they still deduct a maintenance fee every day.
As for ALT coins, I’m busy looking into DENT. Maybe invest R1000 for long term. It is currently sitting at around 81c (ZAR). Read about them and their purpose last night but already forgot everything. Will have to read again.
Bought DENT at 2c I like their concept and they already have an APP developed, so ahead of thegame of lots of other coins
So I have been giving more and more thought around how best to ride this new revolution. Some days I think its total BS (like with “DOGE” and other shitcoins). But there are other days when I come across properly fantastic ideas that could really work. On the other hand, if these products are already on the exchanges, chances are the value has already been realized. My current leaning is towards ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). So think of it like “Kickstarter for Crypto”. This is high risk/high reward stuff. For example, ETHOS ICO was around $0.06 and its currently trading around $10! It did that in around 6 months. I have been searching for solid ICO’s and found a couple that I reckon could do big things.
DISCLAIMER : I have included two links, one with a referral code (that costs you nothing) and a vanilla, if you don’t feel lik sharing the love. Would be cool if you used the referral, but please be clear that I truly believe in the two projects below and think they are well worth looking into regardless of which link you use. Give them a closer look and you may be smiling and thanking me in a year
The first, is EZTOKEN. You can have a look here for the ratings of people far smarter and more experienced than me : Review : https://icobench.com/ico/ezpos
Here is there pitch :
They have been selling them in stages. The first round of 1mill tokens sold out in under 3 minutes. The 2nd round consisted of 3 millionn tokens priced at $1 each. It sold out in 47 seconds!!! There is a third round due on the 12th Jan, if you are interested. Price will be set at $1.20. What really got me interest here is that they already have an established market and a team on the ground. The core infrastructure is already there! the second major point of appeal is the supply. Only 50mill tokens. That is a very small number, compared to something like RIPPLE which has 100bn supply or ETH, which has total supply around 99m. The prospects for a serious price spike are there. If you register, you get 5 EZT for free, whether you buy or not
Referral link : https://ico.ezpos.io/register?r=Ts7jx71i3duQ9b8x3rla
Vanilla link : https://ico.ezpos.io/
The second ICO that i think has the potential to be a real gamechanger, is CoinMetro. This (IMHO) will shake things up in a massive way.
think about this scenario :
You want to trade Crypto currencies, to try and make some gains. But you have the annoying and cumbersome process of first having to send ZAR to Luno (and wait for it to clear). Then buy BTC or ETH at their very wonky prices. Then you have to transfer to Binance or HitBTC to buy some coins and the Cryptopia to buy others. And once you have made some gains and need FIAT cash back, you have to sell on the exchange and transfer back to Luno (again, getting knocked fees).
BEHOLD! The solution …
Review : https://icobench.com/ico/coinmetro
High-level Ad :
ICO Pitch :
Nice detailed breakdown (this here really sold me!)
*FYI : Using the referral nets you a 2.5% bonus on your first purchase.
Referral link : https://go.coinmetro.com/?refId=5a53a0449493d304ccbd6374
Vanilla link : https://go.coinmetro.com
Read the “abstract” section here : https://coinmetro.com/whitepaper/
BONUS! Fascinating Youtube video from 2014 (this was posted on SAGamer, credit to whoever posted it, its late and i’m too lazy to check)
Thanks for the tips. Of course we’ll use your links (already did). It’s the least we can do for you after doing all the research.
Edit:
Just for the record, which coins so far would you consider “shitcoins”?
DOGE for sure (IMHO). B3 maybe. plus lots of the rubbish lower down the coinmarketcap.com page. There are 1,389 listed coins. Safe to say, the vast majority are utter rubbish
my personal outlook is that, if the coin has no proper value proposition, then you should look upon it with suspicion.
How Dare you sir, long live the DOGE …to the MOooon
In all seriousness it might actually start going up since AUXpow , so folks mining LTC get DOGE as well for example.