Confessions of an Anonymous Altcoin Trader

This week I had the chance to sit down and speak with an anonymous trader in alternative currencies (altcoins).  Alternative currencies, for those who don’t know, are all digital currencies other than bitcoin.  I found my discussion to be informative and at times eye opening.   I hope you find the discussion to be as valuable as I did.

KH:  For the purposes of this discussion, what should I call you?

GC:  I like going by “Genghis Coin” (GC).

KH: Fair enough.  How did you get involved in trading bitcoin and other altcoins?

GC:  2011 was the first time I heard of bitcoin.  At the time I was finishing college and it was hard to get your hands on bitcoin.  I wanted to try to mine it, but that was also very difficult to do.  So I put it off for a few years until I was given a severance package by my employer and started reading about it more again.

Ultimately, I put part of the severance into an IRA and the other portion into Dogecoin.  After making some money with it, I cashed out my IRA for bitcoin in 2013 after the price jump and from that point forward, I have been trading alt-coins.  Right now, I am currently divested from bitcoin and diversified across altcoins and new ICOs.

KH:  How did you become an organizer for the Atlanta bitcoin meetup?

GC: One day I went online and saw an event that was being hosted at BitPay.com.  It was the BitPay meetup that was run by their CEO Tony Galippi. As BitPay grew, it became more difficult for the company executives and staff to continue to host, so myself and a few of my friends started our own meetup that was later endorsed by BitPay that allowed us to take over the event.  Once their members joined our meetup it grew from 100 members to 600 members and it is still growing!

KH: What are the indicators you look for when investing in an altcoin?

GC: First of all, I don’t employ fundamental or technical analysis.  Instead, I trade almost completely on market sentiment.

KH:  How do you decide whether to trade a digital asset for the short-term or long-term?

GC:  When trading long-term, I look to see if the currency employs a platform that serves a useful purpose with known developers and a large community behind them.

For the short-term, I look for active market makers with affiliations and wait for a pump to occur.  I do absolutely everything I can to avoid shit coins.

KH: What are “shit coins?”

CG:  “Shitcoins” are alt-coins that are traded simply based on a fad for a short-term play.  They typically have a developer make a fancy looking landing page to attract people and pump the coin.  In fact, my strategy for trading them is to come in and make a quick scalp, but I never hold onto them for any long period of time.

KH: So would you put Trumpcoin in that category?

GC: Just another shit coin.  I didn’t think much about it at first, but next thing I knew it was pumping.  No telling when it will dump, though.

KH: So how do you know an alt-coin is a scam?

GC:  The vast majority of alt-coins are a scam.  They are an easy money grab. There are so many young and impressionable investors in the space.  In the past, people have caused an alt-coin to appreciate through a major pump cycle only to grab the money and disappear.

KH: When do you know when to avoid an alt-coin?

GC: Generally, it comes down to doing your research.  I try to avoid newcomers to the cryptocurrency space. Platforms that have bad technical writing, no informational website or Github/active development.  Most of all, I avoid any project that has a big pre-mine.

For example OneCoin, more like “One Big Scam” with no blockchain, no mining, and no place to trade it.  They are just scamming people that are interested in bitcoin and sells at an extremely inflated market cap.

KH: Yes, OneCoin is an absolute disaster… Well, thanks so much for your time Genghis!