Gonzo Crypto Blog - Week 11: So Many Options

You know, I’m trying to be more productive and proactive for this blog and I think I’m slowly getting there. I have a couple of very interesting things lined up for you guys, you’ll soon find out what they are. This time round though, I’m bringing you three stories alongside some genuinely useful info. I was planning on reviewing a couple of services, but not everything went according to that plan. As it turned out, I couldn’t actually do it.

Some of you might remember a couple of stupid orders I’ve placed a while a back that were never filled. I bought some Verge and TRON and then tried selling it at higher prices, but the market went down. To my surprise, that was almost 6 weeks ago and I couldn’t wait any longer. I cancelled them and placed more realistic orders that got filled within a day.

I did that for one particular reason. I’m going to buy some Binance Coins. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Binance buying back and burning their own tokens from time to time. If they’ll be as consistent as they have been, they should make an announcement on October, 15 and do the actual burning on the 18th.

So buying them a month before to make some easy profit feels like a good idea.

There was one story this week that made me realise just how different the scopes of cryptocurrency operations can be. There is this Bitcoin wallet that has been inactive for four years and started moving the big bucks lately. It holds 0.52% of total bitcoin supply, which amounts to 111,114.62 BTC and BCH. Not including other Bitcoin forks, this is in the region of $850 million. Include other forks, that could be a billion.

It’s a whole mystery drama, people are thinking it’s either an old Silk Road wallet (as there are apparently six transactions that can trace that wallet to Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road creator’s wallet) or an equally old MtGox wallet. But that’s not important.

What is though is the fact that there are such huge wallets out there that can easily manipulate the entire market. I did a little research and found a couple of tools that can help people trace the movement of the big boys. This definitely won’t help me as I’m still practically clueless, but it might help some of you.

Etherscan is an app that can tell you what the wallets are doing without you having access to them. It does BTC, ETH and all the ERC-20 tokens. Here’s a list of the Bitcoin top-100 accounts (the top two contain over a billions worth of bitcoins, bloody hell), you can find the other lists there as well. And here’s a Telegram Bot that does all the monitoring work for you.

Last week, I made a sizeable investment and bought 5465 dogecoins (that’s like $32.79 if my calculations are correct), so, naturally I have been monitoring news related to the token and reading up on some of its history. I found out some things that I didn’t know about its community which made me love it even more. Here’s a quick recap.

I vividly remember the Jamaican Bobsleigh team crowdfunding their way to the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. They managed to qualify, but lacked funds to actually make the trip. And here’s the part that I somehow never knew about: the dogecoin community raised and donated something in the region of $30,000 in just two days.

Besides everything else, it resulted in The Guardian running the story with this wholesome picture:

Also, the community has raised $30,000 for World Water Day and then raised another $55,000 to sponsor a NASCAR driver, allowing him to compete in one of the races. So very charity!

Another thing I found out - the dogethereum bridge is not the first time dogecoin ‘merged’ with another token. Apparently, back in 2014 they’ve introduced Merged Mining with Litecoin, meaning two currencies could be mined at the same time. Kind of cool.

So, if you went out and bought some dogecoins a week or two ago like I did, you might be wondering what to do with them. Initially, I had two ideas. For the past month, I kept hearing about Yahoo Finance in relation to cryptocurrencies. I’ve heard that it enabled crypto trading some time ago, and just recently they apparently added dogecoin. Naturally, I was hoping to test the platform for the blog and write a brilliantly hilarious review, but then I found this:

This is a great example of how adding the word ‘reddit’ to your Google search can keep you from wasting your time on a rather crappy service.

So, I figured I’ll test another service that has recently listed dogecoin and to be honest it sounds kind of great. It’s called Robinhood. It’s an app and it enables feel-less trading and somehow makes it more accessible. They also have (or rather will soon have) this:

I thought that this sounded a bit too good to be true and I was right. Robinhood is only available for the U.S. citizens. Well, moving on.

What else could I do with my dogecoins? I figured I’ll try trading them. I’ve looked up exchanges where dogecoin is listed and the top-3 were Gate, ZB and HitBTC. Gate was my first choice purely because of the fact it had a lot more dogecoin volume. I tried depositing, but was met with this:

I don’t know what it is, but every time I even imagine myself holding my passport up to a camera along with a piece of paper with my ID number on it I want to puke. It’s kind of degrading, isn’t it? So yeah, that was an easy decision.

ZB was just down for two days. So I went on HitBTC. I signed up within minutes, created the dogecoin wallet and opened my MultiDoge wallet. And I couldn’t send any money. Because I had to wait for the wallet to sync with the entire network. Which took 20 minutes. Not cool.

Once it synced though, I found out that the dogecoin network fees are indeed tiny. As far as I remember, 1 DOGE is the smallest fee I’ve ever paid. Much wow.

On top of that, it seems to be one of the fastest networks. It took just 6 minutes for my dogecoins to appear on the exchange. That’s the quickest transfer I’ve experienced with cryptocurrencies! Pretty neat for a meme crypto, may be it’s ain't that humorous anymore.

I did some trading, but I’m not going to bore you with the details. Next week, I’m going out into the real world, so stay tuned.