At the time of writing this article Bitcoin is near it's all time high, $7275 verse the United States Dollar. This of course raises the obvious question of whether or not now is a good time to begin buying crypto-currencies, let alone bitcoin. I have been fascinated with bitcoin since the time I first heard about it back in 2012. But, as a very conservative investor I wanted to do my proper due diligence before investing my hard earned money. Having had high and low periods in terms of making money I know how hard it is to make a dollar, so I did not want to blindly throw my money down the drain so to speak. After just over a year of research and watching bitcoin become more stable I finally came to the determination that I should purchase at least some bitcoin. This was in early February 2014 when Bitcoin was trading just around $220 per coin. My plan was to purchase 10 coins, which at the time was not a lot, but all the articles I read said bitcoin has a chance to reach $30,000 in the near future. So the risk reward ratio was heavily in my favor, risk $2,200 to make $300,000.
So, now I have my investment figured out and after doing all the research I came to the conclusion that Mt. Gox was the best and most trustworthy place to purchase your bitcoin. Back in 2013/14 Mt. Gox was doing about 70% of all transactions according to Wikipedia. So, I began the process of opening an account at Mt. Gox. Back then there was not as much AML/KYC as there is now so it was a pretty quick process. Now my account is opened, I have my bank account synced, and just as I am about to deposit the money and purchase my bitcoins rumors started circulating about Mt. Gox going under. This made me pause for a couple of day and low and behold during that time Mt. Gox went bankrupt during that period of time. Not only that, but they made off with something like $80 million worth of bitcoin in the process. I come from the Forex industry and brokers stealing money from clients like this happened all the time before regulation became stronger. So, this immediately made me re-evaluate and come to the conclusion that at the moment investing in bitcoin or other crypto-currencies was not for me because what is to stop the next person from stealing my bitcoin.
Fast Forward to early 2017...............................................
Bitcoin hardly slowed down in popularity at all from the Mt. Gox scandal. It continued to grow in popularity and government regulators were starting to take notice. They started to form some regulation around Bitcoin and other crytpo-currencies, mainly in the form of regulating the exchanges that they are traded on. This had an immediate impact and the price of bitcoin began to rise again, quickly surpassing $1000 again in early 2017. I also took notice, but like the cautious investor I am I still was not sold on investing. So, I starting doing my research again and came to the conclusion that it was safe to invest in bitcoin. But, by the time I came to this conclusion BTCUSD was already trading around $3000 on Bitstamp. My initial investment of $2200 wasn't even going to buy me a single coin.
I just couldn't justify buying a fraction of a coin, it just didn't make sense to me. This led me to exploring alternative crypto-currencies such as Etherum, Ripple, Lite Coin, and others. But, I just was not convinced that any of them will have the same long term investment opportunity as bitcoin. Every time I thought about investing in one of the coins I quickly began to doubt it and didn't pull the trigger. At this stage I have yet to invest in a single crypto-currency. Time just keeps passing by, the popularity of crypto-currencies continues to grow, the price continues to go up, and I am just sitting on the side lines.
I have done the research on the major crypto-currencies listed above and I keep coming back to wanting to invest in Ripple, or more specifically XRPUSD. Bitcoin just seems like it is ripe for a massive correction, similar to the tulip mania. The price of bitcoin just keeps skyrocketing, which cannot last forever. I honestly believe we might see a 30-50% correction in the bitcoin market. So, I don't want to invest in that product yet, and most others seem unstable, except for Ripple.
I have heard that there are so many Ripple coins available, 100 billion to be exact, that it is not worth investing in it because the price will never increase.
I have heard that the only crypto-currency that will survive is Bitcoin.
I have heard that Ripple is a scam because the company owns over 50% of all the available XRP and it is just about propping up their currency.
I have heard that same company keeps the price or XRP artificially high.
But I also have heard positive things about Ripple, such as they deal with a lot of large companies making it more efficient and cheaper for them to do business.
So, I am proposing the question to our viewers. With roughly $2,000 to invest, is it worth it to invest in Crypto-Currencies at all? Is it worth it to invest in Ripple (XRP), or should I be looking to invest in one of the other crypto-currencies out there? I would love to hear everyone's opinion, so let me know in the comments section below.
