Some thoughts and advices about investment and trading, in terms of altcoin features.
Here is what i learned during my years. This is not a trading tutorial
(there is so endless much more to know, especially when it comes to automatic trading)
but its a guide, that may give some orientation to fresh fellows,
how to think about coins and features and why trades may turn out, to evolve different, than expected
risks in a fancy economy
Fancy features, like apps-enabled chains, storage, voting and so on isn't senseless. These are the building Blocks of our future or at least of what we desire for our future. This desire is not only exploited frequently by several scams, it powers hypes and makes powerful marketing easy. This fact makes coins quickly go through the roof and to achieve ever greater budgets for the maintainers or hopefully for a powerful development team. But even the fact, people are already throwing their hard earned money at teams, that didn't even release a paper, to state HOW they tend to achieve any of their promises, its not all bad about these hypes. First of all we want and need great innovations and we have even seen many great ideas been created by projects, planned with questionable intentions. All in all you just have to be aware that ultra creative booming economies have to live with all sorts of intentions, the "good" and the "bad". Possibly this even may be the soup, creativity is generated from.risks of soft-features
Other coins are coming with some "heroic" ideas and policies. Their speech is often distracting from the fact, that their scam statistics are not even a dime better than the statistics of so called feature coins. The classical scammer of this kind of coins does not promise features, he just may be avoiding to make promises, by replacing them with "good intentions". Filtering really good intentions from the "dirty tricks" is often a task, especially newbes are not able to to. This makes them vulnerable for these kinds of scams. The only good intention that didn't need features to thrive, is called Bitcoin because it was an invention in itself and it had time to grow without distraction. Today intentions are not enough. A coin that doesn't reflect progress is a dead coin sooner or later, because competition drives our economy and that is a good thing.Investing: lets devide this "Investing" into speculating (what most of those, who say "investing", are in fact doing)
and "really investing"
a) speculating and features vs. soft features
//Short Term
If you are speculating in short timeframes, the hypes are your world. Its simply absolutely irrelevant, if these coins are scam or not, as long, as nobody notices, before you cashed out. Soft features are not your choise, because they are developing their value slower than others and second, because you wouldn't be able to filter the "good" and the "bad" ones. For your trading approach they are useless
//Mid/Long range Timeframe
You can go after some hipes, but if you are staying in longer, you will have to tripple check new projects, or your easily busted. A good and safer approach is to watch some more established projects and to keep up with the news. Knowing about a release date of their efforts, may be profitable, but be aware, that markets are not always reflecting to the action of these coins in real-time, but slightly later, because the bigger the amount of alernative coins, the slower a message is able to spread. Also soft feature coins are interesting, if you observed them long enough and they have proven to live up to their friendly speech over time and also used that time, to progress in terms of adoption or features that promote adoption.
b) investing and features vs. soft features
Here is where things are getting different. Who make the race in the long term? Answere is simple: nearly none. Lets estimate one of 1000 will evolve to a coin, that still matters, in five years, wich tend to be even quite optimistic. Feature-coins, that don't manage to live a spirit or to build an active community, that doesn't rely on new features, are getting caught in a spiral of having to provide ever new features, regarless of their sense, to entertain their users and are running themselfs to death. Similar to that, soft-features, that are thinking, being nice could capture a community without further efforts, are slowing down and passing quietly away without anybody even noticing. The only few, having a slight chance of staying in the game, are those longterm fighters. And these are seldom! In terms of features and soft-features, they need them all, to survive. You can identifiy them not in their first year of existence, but over time. Reading Bitcointalk threads closely and compairing their agenda and their speech with the real thruth and their achievements is a good way to find out more. These coins may have a wild history of scams, takeovers and finally a settlement with the right set of maintainers, that are dedicated and are having a realistic view about their market or nishe. In the future, features will not be the means of measurement, because the best features will finaly get standart for every coin in existence, to stay in the game. Intentions are not enough either. In the very long run there will be only two features that rule them all: ADOPTION and ACCEPTANCE
Do only invest longterm in projects that got that fact right and managed , to refect this fact in their actions, policies and features and of course in Bitcoin
Eyes open and have Fun
Matthias