So for the past couple days, I've been playing with Poloniex.... In the past, pretty much the only crypto trading I've done has been to buy and hold bitcoin, little bits at a time, back when it was in the $300-500 range... Then last year, when it became obvious that bitcoin was headed for network capacity issues + a recalcitrant core dev team, when I learned about ethereum, I took my little bit of bitcoin and switched tracks to ETH. (Whether the core devs have been intentionally corrupted by the banking interests, or just have a terrible case of group tunnel vision, I leave for others to debate, but either way, it's been clear to me for a while that this was going to be a problem for bitcoin.)
Admittedly, I was one of the suckers who tried investing a portion of my ETH into what became the DAO debacle, and was relieved to get refunded during the hard fork. After the hard fork with ETC, I decided to convert the ETC that I had into extra STEEM power, which I was all excited about last summer. After the DAO, I was feeling a bit more cautious about eth, and decided to just let the ETH I had sit for a while. Didn't even bother trying to sync the blockchain on my laptop for many months.
Fast forward to last month. Still glancing at the price every now and then, one day I was mildly shocked to see that ETH was trading at over 0.05 BTC / ETC! At the same time, the bitcoin price had jumped up to over $1000/BTC. "Holy cow, this means at today's prices, those ETH crypto holdings that once felt so meager are now worth WHAT?!?! Woah...."
With less faith in the enduring value of USD than ever (which was never that great to begin with), I had no inclination to return there, despite the high BTC+ETH price. I contemplated how to proceed. The fact that Bitcoin Unlimited was up to hovering around 50% hash power gave me somewhat more optimism about the prospects for bitcoin to move beyond the small block issues, but overall, I still felt better about ETH, with so much development and innovation happening with promising dapps being developed anyway. That, plus the fluxuating price, gave me a reason to buy back a little bit of bitcoin, but only with a minority fraction of my ETH.
My initial hesitation due to uncertainty caused me to miss selling during the first bump above 0.050, so when that the price had jumped there a second time a couple weeks later, I didn't hesitate. I bought back into bitcoin, just a little.
When ETH kept going up, beyond 0.060BTC, I was glad I had kept most of my holdings in ETH, but didn't feel bad about changing a bit of it back into bitcoin again too. After all, I still needed bitcoin to make purchases from my favorite music store, so having some of it around would have personal practical value too.
The price of ETH dipped back below 0.040BTC. Now, with ETH feeling relatively cheap again, and bitcoin transaction fees going crazy as reports spread of the network became unreliable, I felt like I was holding a rotting hot potato again. How long would it take for enough miners and more nodes to hit the threshold needed to increase transaction capacity? Not fast enough. Despite these issues, the USD value of BTC continued to climb.
So I went on Poloniex, and tried to deposit half of my remaining bitcoin, with the intent of converting it back to ETH. The transaction wasn't getting confirmed. I should have known better. I hadn't bothered to go into preferences to change the fee settings in my Electrum wallet before hitting "Send". Of course, being informed on the latest news regarding network issues, I should have known to at least check this, but being in a hurry to get my deposit in so I could put an order through, I hadn't. Regardless, it drove the point home the degree to which the bitcoin user experience has deteriorated utterly, that trying to send funds from a common end-user wallet running with default settings would result in transactions being stuck in limbo indefinitely. People who might be just trying out bitcoin for the first time would be likely to hate it forever if this happened to them, and if this was their only interaction with cryptos in general, they might understandably lose trust not just in bitcoin, but avoid the whole scene altogether after such a bad experience.
My immediate solution, after a little reading, was to create a second transaction, spending the change output from the transaction stuck in limbo, with double a fee amount. "The hell with it," I thought. "After that shit, I just want to be rid of the rest of my bitcoin anyway."
I went to my favorite online music store, and logged in again. I noticed a new payment method. "Now Accepting LITECOIN." With that, the last practical reason for me to hold bitcoin had evaporated. Never having paid it much mind before, I looked again at Litecoin. A simple bitcoin clone, with a few tweaked parameters. Even before the latest development of getting segwit deployed, it had 4x the transaction capacity of bitcoin, due to faster block times. This would serve my near term practical needs just fine.
So now, I find myself again holding a good chunk of ETH for the long haul, a little bit of litecoin, and....
In the process of trying to buy back in at "a good price" over these past couple days, I got into playing on Poloniex. I've always thought of this as a fool's game, trying to predict the daily upswings and downswings, timing the market. But damn if it isn't exciting, as well as hypnotic, watching the order books, trying to make sense of the graphs, reading the market depth charts, placing limit orders based on intelligent guessing....
They say gambling is addictive, and maybe that's why, even after I've placing positions I feel good about, I find myself saying, "Ok, I'm going step away from the screen for a while, and let the markets and computers do their thing. If the price swings, and my orders go through (or not), so be it, everything is cool either way. If not, sitting and staring at the charts for another 10 minutes isn't going to make it change. Really now, really, time to focus on something else!" But then, just moments later, I find myself wanting to go back and look, just to see where it's going....
So now, typing this post has been a compromise, because even as I've been writing, I keep glancing up at the tickers. But really, I need to get up and go now, because I've been sitting in this coffee shop almost the entire afternoon, so....
Now I shall place my final market positions for the evening, and get on with living life! What a crazy fascinating game!
