In many of my previous posts, we have talked about how to spend wisely, or rather, spend a small percentage of what you have in cash so that you can keep from going to zero. That also allows you to invest in things like Hive Power so you can vote and earn money on those votes.
Forks
Today we're going to talk about pulling money out of thin air and becoming rich, even if only for a few hours, from that money!
So what is a fork? First I want to tell you what it is not. If you put your crypto on an exchange and it's held there when a fork happens, you cannot use the benefits of that fork. The reason is that you don't have your private keys for the coins you hold on that exchange. There's an old saying, "not your keys, not your crypto." Hey what I just told you is why that is so true.
Several years ago, I bought a few hundred thousand of a certain coin, and I held it with my private keys saved securely. that means that I had a wallet and I extracted the private key. The crypto lived there for years and no one could ever take it away from me unless they knew the key.
The coin gained some notoriety and everybody was going crazy to have some of it, and for that reason, the coin went up in price quite a bit.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened. But that coin forked, which means there was a new copy of the entire blockchain, and a new coin was born. The only thing I had to do was download the wallet that coincides with the new coin. Then I simply import my private to that new wallet, the one from my original wallet.
The result was that I had two different wallets on the same screen, with the same balance,but there were two were now two different coins. I essentially doubled my nominal balance. One coin was valuable and the new forked coin was nearly worthless because it had no network effect and no one was purchasing it. But I owned X thousands of it. I stored my key and put it on an external drive. Then I simply tracked the price in case it developed a use case as did Bitcoin.
If I had not sold any of the first coin, then I would have hundreds of thousands of the second coin. But that's not the case. I had sold over 100,000 coins (of the first coin) before the fork occurred. Still, I was very happy to see that the second coin rose to a nominal value of 11,000 each at about 8:00 this morning. It is currently trading at (the average price for the coin when considering all exchanges that track it) $8,554.00 each.
I had feverishly tried to find an exchange that lists it so I could sign up and sell some. The only exchange that had it listed for a high price was barely functional and had no way to deposit money for trading. I had hoped to repeat the success story listed at the bottom of this post, and do it quick.
If you have read my blog in the past no that I have reported owning Doge. I heard a lot of squawking about how it's not a good coin. To me it has some potential because it is accepted almost anywhere Bitcoin is accepted, which gives it an edge over some of the others that are not accepted everywhere. But that is a debate for another day.
I was holding it and when it became popular, and I was selling it hand over fist Then I was able to recoup my original $100 investment 600 times over for a huge profit. To me, that makes it a very good coin no matter what anyone's opinion dictates. When the price dropped to a level that I was at accustomed to, I stopped selling Doge together. And what's left, I still hold in case it ever decides to go to some astronomical value.
This is a photo of the current balance I have in the core wallet for DogeC (DogeCash). That would give it a current (nominal and completely impractical) value of $575,372,790.00
Believe me. If I could sell even a small portion of these tokens today I would. Moreover, if I could sell all of them today, I would do it in a heartbeat. And, of course, I would consider it a very good coin.
How to Claim a New Coin from a Fork
If you are running a program on your physical computer and the name of the executable is something like; bitcoind or bitcoin-qt, litecoind or litecoin-qt, bitcoincashd or bitcoincash-qt, etc. then you are running a core-wallet which is able to spit out your private key for use at some later date. With it you are able to claim a fork and double up. (at least nominally)
To get your private key, you need to go to the console in that wallet program and type out:
dumpprivkey c8Yu67XKuirH7445UioP86gfe65z
The address above is made up but it represents the public key that you use to receive money into the wallet. The output will be a similar, but longer, code. That IS your private key.
There are probably hundreds of forks that I have not yet claimed. It is not wise to claim a fork when you currently have large amount of coins that can be retrieved by that same private key, the key that could retrieve the original coin being forked.
What I do is I empty the entire balance of my coins into another wallet and store that (new) private key, then I can expose the original private key (now with a zero balance behind it) in order to claim the forked coins. I never expose a key that currently contains a large dollar value of the coinage. By pasting that (original) key into any program or site, in order to claim the fork, someone may intercept it and claim your real (original) coins. So, start your claim with the original key with no risk of people getting any of the original coins.
So to do it right, you need to be careful and make sure to keep your private key private. Using the method explained here, you are only exposing the key that can claim forked coins.
I have used the above process to claim Bitcoincash, Bitcoingold, BitcoinSV, EthereumClassic, DodeCash and others. When I have time, I will probably claim others that I know of and especially ones that have gained any kind of value or notoriety.
A Success Story
The same thing happened to me as that which happened today. There was an obscure coin that ran at first then dropped to near zero. I had bought $100 of each 'alt-coin' in existence at the time to see which ones would run up in price. That is the same way I got my first Doge coins.
The success story involved FeatherCoin. It was not a fork that I claimed. It was like Doge. I had bought it. As with all coins that I have in storage, I track the prices of each daily. The key to having a lottery-ticket success in crypto is checking the numbers when you are playing.
One day I looked and instead of $4, the same $100 worth of coins was valued over $40,000! I scurried to find an exchange that allowed trading of FTC and sold it all flat out. I did it in $5,000 cycles through the exchange at first. Then each time money went in and came back out as BTC, I increased the next transfer until it was all in my BTC wallet.
I did not start out thinking this would happen. I was just planning to watch them and trade them when they are up and buy them back when they went down. But because I watched the prices every day, as I do today, I am able to notice when a little obscure coin jumps. The killer prices do not always stay up for very long. It is important to know when they start to pop.
That is the story of how I was worth a billion dollars as of eight o'clock this morning with no way to turn that nominal currency into another more reputable coin. (never paper money). I promised this post on InLeo this morning and I am writing it as I trade a very volatile Bitcion market now.
I hope this will help others to stay away
from emotional attachments to a name or idea
when trading in small amounts.
It can bring great rewards.