Good Day.
There are two things I would like to talk about today. Maybe three. But first, let's define some terms.
Core: as in "Core Wallet"
What is it? Well, it is at the core or center of what you want when you're looking to store crypto. A core wallet is one that downloads the entire blockchain. It is usually created by the crypto community itself. Bitcoin core, if you run it, will try to mine Bitcoin. They are usually open source and the most reliable wallet you can get for storage of said coin.
Hold on for dear life -or- HODL: it's called that because you have to be pretty brave in order to buy, store, and not think about the coin you just stored throughout all its fluctuations.
Now that we got all of that out of the way, we can talk a little bit about other things and you will know what I mean when I say those words. I like to HODL and I always store my coins and call wallet, if I have a wallet at all.
You do not need a wallet, as in wallet application, in order to HODL. You can just generate keys and put them on paper stored in a safe, like what we do on Hive. Here on Hive, if you only ever use your posting key and the rest of the keys are on a piece of paper in your safe (hopefully two different saves into different geographic locations), you can be sure that no one will ever take your money because no one has ever seen you are active key.
That said, I usually have both. I keep a paper record of keys and, if I have a significant amount of a coin, I keep a core wallet on my computer. More on that later.
Foundational "Must Have"s
When somebody tells me about a coin and that I should "check it out", I look at all the happy details that one might want to know about, but before I buy I always check if they have a core wallet. What are my storage options? I might develop a prominent position in the coin and if so, I would need quick access to the coins in case something comes up and I need to sell them. You can't very well sell while the coin is crashing if you have to wait several days for the blockchain to download before you can touch your coins.
Something else that a coin or token has to have is functionality. If a coin or token is sent and it does not arrive or is very expensive, think fees, that would cause me to stop holding a coin no matter what the upside might look like.
Example
Shiba was the most expensive coin that I ever owned, as far as fees go. If you wanted to send $100 worth of Shiba, it would cost you $100 worth of fees. It was a time where everyone wanted that coin. A friend of mine NEEDED to have it. I don't remember what the amount was, but he paid double the listed price in order for me to send it to him. The amazing part was that after I explained it to him, and showed him the fee that I paid, he still wanted it. That coin is not functional.
Not sure if I mentioned this one or not. I used to mine Ethereum when it came out and I owned it for a while. Over the few years that I did have it, there was more than one occasion where I sent EtherIum, and incidentally the fees are always huge, and the coins took an incredibly long time to arrive. Two strikes, you're out. I have never owned it since. Even when using USDT, I refuse to transact in the ERC20 variety. I do not care how high it goes, I need to know that it arrives when I send it.
I'm both occasions where it had not arrived, it did arrive eventually. On one occasion, it took six months. luckily I was sending the coins from one of my wallets to another one of my wallets.
Slow sending and high fees almost had me completely out of Bitcoin back in 2017. As a matter of fact I sold half of my Bitcoins back then because I thought the coin would be killed for utility reasons.
Etherium lost functionality for me and I gave the coins away because I could not be bothered to dig the private key out of the miner and I repurposed the machine. The fellow promptly cashed them out for a couple hundred dollars.
The next example is in the news today. Dash, I guess, is about to do a hard fork. I didn't know that because I don't own it anymore. It nearly doubled in price today and I was just curious as to why.
Here is one piece of news - Good for LeoDEX but it was too long ago for it to impact the price today.
So that was not it.
Here are some other possible reasons. CoinMarketCap put this article out. I think it is the hard fork that caused the price to jump.
Hard forks are awesome if you already own coins, especially if you mined the coins. Every few years, I go through my holdings and look for forks that happened after I bought. They are nice as long as the resulting forked coin does not dive to nothingness.
Dash had a lot of promise. They developed a lot of ways to use it. One was a texting feature used in Venezuela when their money went all "Weimar" on them. One of the above articles mentioned a payment method for people to buy things anonymously. Dash is no more anonymous than Bitcoin.
I dumped 75% of my Dash after the core wallet failed catastrophically over and over, over the years. I had not access to my money - all I had was a private key. In every case, I had to start from scratch and download the entire blockchain in order to use the money.
I never lost anything, but I got tired of the errors. I was holding long term and when I wanted to sell some or buy anything using Dash, it was always a weeks long event. I do not have time for that. If Dash fails, it will be for that reason. I am not sure if it is functional now or not. I do not care. Dash popped today, and the above experience, always comes to mind when I see it. The coin was stuck in the low-twenty-dollar range for years and for some reason it is still on my tracker.
The third thing is Hive. Don't worry, I am not leaving.
It is functional, secure, no fees, and reasonably anonymous to use. I have always been between 2X and 10X my buy-in for as long as I have been here. Recently I broke even on Hive, event though it is worth double what I paid for my investment here. Leo seems to be profiting still.
I am thinking about powering some or all of my Hive and moving it to HBD for an interest payment. The acquaintance who brought me here tells me that interest pays more than voting right now. I also know that Hive cycles down to the single digits every now and again. It usually stays there for an extended time when it does that. When it does, I would rebuy and maybe double my investment here. I welcome your thoughts on this topic in the comments. I have not decided as of yet.
Feel free to comment on anything I have brought up in this post. I love to see them.