The Best Performing Cryptocurrencies of 2017 Thus Far | Hacker News Reader

The Best Performing Cryptocurrencies of 2017 Thus Far

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How does one judge the "performance" of a cryptocurrency? In the abstract, I'd say what marks a currency's "performance" is its ability to be exchanged for goods and services; in that sense there really aren't any performing cryptocurrencies.

They seem to mean "which has the biggest increase in spot price this year?", which is a kind of weird thing to judge a currency on.

"Performance" in the sense of the "performance" of a stock is pretty well established terminology, but yeah, that just highlights how these currencies are highly speculative assets.

It's definitely possible to exchange cryptocurrencies for goods and services. I paid for a plane ticket with BTC just the other day (AirBaltic) and it was more convenient than using my debit card (because my bank requires a particular proprietary 2FA scheme that I don't always carry).

There are many people who charge for their programming services in cryptocurrency... there are huge dark markets... several cafés accept cryptocurrency (Paralelni Polis in Prague just switched to Litecoin from Bitcoin)... etc etc.

The top cryptocurrencies are valuable, liquid, and offer many benefits over other payment methods, so it's obvious that you can use them for exchange.

I've been judging cryptocurrencies based on what you can DO with them, which is why I think Ethereum is going places: Bitcoin with smart contracts. Monero is Bitcoin with better privacy. That sort of thing.

USD is often judged by its performance against the currencies of other nations, in terms of the exchange rate differences over time.

Liquidity by itself has an objective and quantifiable value. Bitcoin, and possibly a few other cryptocurrencies, have some unique properties that have intrinsic value, like algorithmic fairness, low transaction costs, logistical simplicity, and lack of centralized control over money supply. BTC has a distinct possibility of becoming the future default Exchange Currency in international currency markets, which basically means that the transaction costs of trading A -> BTC -> B are cheaper than trading A -> B directly.

I'd argue that if it were possible to isolate effects from hoarding and speculation, that the spot price would represent the intrinsic value of its liquidity and other intrinsic benefits. And thus, to the degree that prices are not influenced by speculation, the price reflects performance.

But since we know that prices are heavily influenced by speculation, I'd argue that the better metric for performance should be daily trading volume. Because that is a more direct measure of liquidity. It might be meaningless by itself (the trading volume doesn't "represent" anything more than the total value that exchanges hands everyday), but contextually it is important. The 24 hour bitcoin trading volume is currently $1.6B. The currency trading volume across all worldwide currencies is $5T [1]. So BTC can roughly be considered to have 3-ish orders of magnitude of difference in liquidity over the worldwide currency market. As someone who has no involvement in BTC whatsoever, I find that pretty impressive.

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/global-markets-currency-volum...

> lack of centralized control over money supply

This might be clear to someone with more experience in the field, but it's not apparent how the benefits of such a constraint is quantified. For example, the fed raising interest rates is not translated to a deterministic response from the stock market and so using bitcoin might have sound fundamental advantages but equivalent pragmatic limitations?

Should the potential of a cryptocurrency be based on wide aspect like developer, social, search popularity? https://www.coingecko.com/en

In way tells you what lies behind a price

Is there something like a crypto etf for all these high grow coin that's more passive?

There's an index some where in the stock market for the top 5 or top 10

There was an attempt to create a Bitcoin ETF that was rejected by the SEC:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/business/dealbook/winkelv...

I don't know whether the SEC's reasons for rejecting it would apply to other proposed cryptocurrency ETFs or not.

Yes, and it is itself a crypto coin:

https://www.iconomi.net/

They're still "comming".

Not really. It's still too hard to do from both a regulatory and technical standpoint. There is enough liquidity and infrastructure around BTC to be feasible, but the regulators squashed that idea.

Also ETFs are great, but they are not a panacea for every asset class. Sometimes there are fundamental reasons why they don't work, but the idea is so buzzy that you can make a buck off selling garbage and calling it an ETF. Reminds me of something...

> now that we’ve reached the halfway point of 2017

Aren't we 5/12-s into 2017? Given the volatility of these currencies, a month could make a lot of difference.

Err, yes. Apparently I need to go back and learn how to count months in a year again. I've updated the wording. Thanks!

While many of these cryptocurrencies have some underlying function besides speculation, seems to me they are mostly a way around pyramid scheme laws at the moment. Such a huge number of competing pyramid schemes going all at once should produce some good data for a few economics PhD's.

I strongly suspect that buying these currencies will be much, much easier than selling them. There will be lots of tiny currencies where people are grateful to give currency for US $, but very few people want to give US $ for your currency.

The prices will adjust to the demand.

WorldPay is probably in that group, it has a market cap of $1-$3. Dollars. But many of them, in a given day, trade value in the millions to billions. It drops off pretty quick after the top 5 by market cap (Ether is #2 and is in the billion/day range, Ripple is #3 and half that, Lumens is #12 and is $44M).

Did not know that there were so many other bitcoins out there. Has anyone actually bought anything with these other coins or is it pure speculation.

Many of these are pure speculation or beginning projects.

Others are platforms (ETH) or ledgers (XRP) that are seeing significant growth in usage.

But in the grand scheme of things, ALL of these are speculation plays at this point. With maybe, just maybe, the exception of bitcoin.

Is there a similar chart for poorly performing cryptocurrencies, or is basically everything going up?

48 experienced negative growth in the period, actually. You can take a look at the complete dataset in CSV format (https://gitlab.com/subverter/cryptocurrency-growth/raw/maste...) to see which they are.

So, uh...what's the fastest way to take $1000 of play money and start speculating?

rule 1. don't leave coins on exchanges.

coinbase

gemini

poloniex

rule 2. don't leave coins on exchanges.

Why not?

Because multiple exchanges have folded and taken/lost people's money.

after buying transfer to separate wallet? and where? what wallet would ya recommend?

Buy a hardware wallet. I would recommend the Ledger Nano S. I have no affiliation with them.

Agreed, though I haven't used gemini. I would put Kraken on that list. CEX.IO is easy, but super expensive to get money in via.

Expect it to take around a week to get $1K in to play with, and plan to get real cozy with the security folks at your credit card company. Plan to spend a few hours just futzing around with everything involved. Easiest path is likely a credit card on coinbase, they have a $500/week limit on credit card. You can do a bank transfer, with a higher limit, but you will buy Ether/Bitcoin and then not be able to trade it for anything else for a week until it clears. Great if you want to get Ether, bad if you want to turn your $1K into Ripple. Unless Ether doubles the week you are sitting on it.

What am I doing wasting time with Bitcoin, when WOP had a 14,087% (!!) gain???

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