By Samuel Taube
Important Note: During this podcast, we discuss a hypothetical IPO for an imaginary cryptocurrency that we spontaneously named “Sharpcoin” (after this week’s guest, Adam Sharp).
As it turns out, there actually is a small cryptocurrency called Sharpcoin. To be clear, this podcast is not recommending an investment in Sharpcoin.
Transcript:
Samuel Taube: Joining us again today is Adam Sharp, co-founder of Early Investing. Today we are talking about alternative cryptocurrencies, or “altcoins,” and initial coin offerings. Adam, thanks for joining us again.
Adam Sharp: Thanks for having me, Sam.
ST: As our listeners probably know at this point, you’ve had tremendous success investing in, shall we say, “conventional” cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and so on. What has motivated you to start looking into smaller coins and ICOs?
AS: Well, I think it’s just a natural attraction. The type of people who are drawn to bitcoin – they’re obviously looking for something different, something that has a very high potential for returns.
After you get into bitcoin for a while, and you get comfortable with it, and you’ve made a bunch of transactions, and you probably made some money on it, you start to think about what’s next, because there’s all these other cryptocurrencies out there.
There’s now thousands of different cryptocurrencies. A lot of that, by the way, is due to the fact that bitcoin is open-source, which means that anyone can take the code and use it as they wish.
So you can create your own version of bitcoin. Virtually anyone can, but the thing that gives bitcoin itself real value is the fact that it’s so liquid, it has such a good community around it, it can be traded for cash all over the world and some of the best developers in the world are working on it.
There’s certainly a network effect, a benefit that you get once you have a big network like that and it builds over time, but the really neat thing about it being open source is that it allows anyone to create their own cryptocurrency if they want to use the bitcoin technology.
So in 2013, when I started investing in bitcoin, I also – almost immediately, really – just started looking into alternative cryptocurrencies because there were a few around then.
There were probably only about 10 that were worth knowing. A few of those are still alive today. Among them are Litecoin, Ripple, Feathercoin – there are a couple other ones that are still around, but I owned all those at the time.
ST: Did Ethereum exist back then or was that a later development?
AS: No, I think Ethereum was developed in 2015.
ST: Oh, OK.
AS: They had their ICO, which is an initial coin offering – we’ll get into that in a little bit – but nothing really happened with alternative cryptocurrencies for a long time.
We had a very quiet period in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from about 2014 to early 2016. It was relatively quiet. Not much happened.
Of course, bitcoin came first and then you see after-effects as people start …read more
Source:: Investment You
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