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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm focusing on Bitcoin and physical gold / silver, as I view stocks and houses overvalued, but I always get downvoted here on HN when I go into details, that's why I prefer if people read a lot for themselves.

I like Mike Maloney's youtube series as a start on macroeconomics.

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I got into crypto investing last year but with a strategy that nobody else seems to be doing (except maybe hedge funds). I don’t have the stomach or emotional stability for risky trades so everything I do is delta-neutral. Mostly leveraged futures basis trades, i.e. selling contango futures and buying spot, or vice versa on backwardated futures.

It will never generate the same returns that skilled long/short trading can pull, but I also never have a drawdown. Still managed >50% return last year so I’ll tale it.

I hope you know what you're doing and making money, as I was afraid to go into futures / leveraged trading so far.

I'm also working on making more money with some trading, but I don't want to talk about it, and even in the best case it has only a small of upside compared to just holding Bitcoin itself.

I understand your viewpoint totally, as I saw many friends getting into deep depression because of the volatility of the Bitcoin price. It is very serious thing. One friend of mine got very strong into cocaine, another friend's marriage burned down, another friend started day trading alts and lost half of his Bitcoins, and another friend (the smartest one) realized that he can't take the volatility and sold after a 10% loss. I view holding Bitcoin as a revolution, so I'm emotionally attached to holding it even if its value goes to 0. Still, I'm a software engineer, so even in the worst case I just work and get a high salary and probably start investing again.

One thing you could do is to just buy Bitcoin with 1-2% of your net worth, which is a great hedge for the current financial system, and also maybe that loss / volatility you are able to stomach. You're upside will be tiny, but you will get used to volatility a bit more.

1. Cryptocurrency isn't an investment, it's more like unregulated gambling.

2. This [1] is the guy that you think is a good economist? Really?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/whygoldandsilver/featured

Look at my top comment. Probably Bitcoin and physical gold is not for you, the important part is that for me long term investing is a great side project to make money. There are lots of ways to do it, and if you don't like my tools, there are lot of other options to be profitable.

ily zeach

I tried making a single player clone of your game agar.io: https://www.agar22.cf : can we be friends or can you share your discord? Did you make Diepix arena 2?

Are there any other books/yt channels you recommend on long term investment? And would you allow me to ask some follow up questions?

Thanks.

Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them.

This is the video series I was writing about: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE88E9ICdipidHkTehs1Vb...

Mike Maloney most important part of the film about investing in silver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAAIwef3dOg

Why you should invest in Bitcoin (Tuur Demester, 2013): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LQu-eIOO0

Bitcoin Whitepaper: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Origins of money (by Nick Szabo): http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html

Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are:

- Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns)

- Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust).

- Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at the energy that's securing it...there are a lot of reasons why I never ever thought of buying any alt coins.

Thank you, really appreciate it.

What about Ethereum? I'm not in the space much and follow it rather loosely, but Ether seems like one of the better options out there.

Ethereum is very interesting, but it has some red flags for me:

- It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary.

- Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients.

- With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier).

- The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts.

- It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world.

- State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol

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