As a crypto related blog, we often get questions from users asking us for our opinions on various alt coins. People want to know what our investment recommendations are. We are always hesitant to answer. We feel that investments are a personal decision and that everyone should do their due diligence and research the coins they are investing in. However, that’s much easier said than done.

Sometimes you get caught up in the hype of latest and greatest fad coin and watch everyone seemingly doubling and tripling their investments in a matter of hours. Then, you decide… what the heck… by the time I research this, I’ll miss the boat. So you get caught up in the mania and drop some cash on some unknown coin… and the pump is over…. the price starts to slide and you’re out half of your initial investment. Now you’re left to either hold the bag on your poor investment and hope the price goes back up eventually…. or, simply call it a poor decision and sell at a loss. Don’t worry, this happens to the best of us. Even some of the most successful traders will get caught up in some hype sometimes. You can’t win them all.

What you can do, however, is limit these poor decisions. Check out the coin’s website, check out their forums, search reddit and twitter. See if they’re popular, if they have any new projects in development. Check out the community, see how knowledgeable their forum/irc members are. That’s all fine and dandy, however, forums and irc can be very misleading. Much like the trollbox on the various exchanges. Most people generally fall into two categories, fanboys or haters. There aren’t very many rational people in the middle. Another thing to worry about from trusting the community, is that everyone is in it for themselves. Chances are, if people are trying to get you to buy, they are looking to dump their coins on you. And if they want you to sell, it’s probably so they can buy back lower.

What you really need is a global view of the economy. You need to learn to read the charts. Check out the volume of coins being traded. Look at the sizes of the buy and sell orders across various exchanges. Analyze the charts to see if you can find trends. It’s very tedious work. We’re not here to teach you how to read tickers and charts though, there are plenty of places on the web to learn that kind of stuff. We’re here to tell you about another statistic we find very interesting to look at when making any trading decision. Daily Coin Maintenance Costs.

What is Daily Coin Maintenance Cost?

Recently, we came across an interesting thread by FreeTrade on BitcoinTalk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=430639.0), which is where we got the idea for this article. To put it simply, it’s the amount of money needed per day to keep the coin at it’s current value. Meaning, that if a certain coin is worth X $, you would need at least Y amount of $ per day to be invested in the coin to keep it at that price. How is it calculated? You simply take the total amount of new coins that will be generated per day and multiply it by the current value of the coin. So if $10,000 worth of new coins are minted every day, theoretically if they were all sold people would need to purchase for $10,000 worth at the current price to keep the value the same.

CryptoSource has done an analysis on these numbers for over 85 different crypto currencies. You can see the full chart at the end of this post. We like looking at the top and bottom 10 coins. Coins at the bottom are ridiculously cheap to maintain. Just a few $100/day will keep them steady. These are really interesting. Especially if you find a coin in the bottom 10 with a great community and new upcoming services. You may have just found a diamond in the rough and probably the closest thing to a sure bet in the crypto world. It shouldn’t be very difficult to get these coins values to rise and the chances that they rise a significant amount are much greater.

On the other side of the spectrum, the top 10 will be the most expensive coins to maintain. You should be very weary of these coins. Especially if they are new or kitchy currencies. Chances are they will not be able to sustain this amount of investment for very long and their price will eventually plummet. Mind you, you will find all the big guns in this section (BTC, LTC). We consider Bitcoin and Litecoin to be “safe bets”. Their value and community have proven themselves, and their prices should remain fairly stable.

So, let’s get to the good stuff.

Great Buys

These coins all have various interesting projects in the works, have great communities and great developers. We consider these coins to be severely undervalued.

Zetacoin (ZET) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $228.13)

CryptogenicBullion (CGB) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $195.21)

Devcoin (DVC) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $452.23)

Frankos (FRK) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $1060.98)

Digitalcoin (DGC) (Daily Maintenace Cost: $8376.52)

Coins To Avoid

We consider these coins to be very gimmicky. While many of them have outstanding communities, their current maintenance cost is way too high to be sustainable in the long run. Most of these coins are brand new and are surviving off hype. Trading of these coins should only be attempted by experienced traders).

Dogecoin (DOGE) (Daily Maintance Cost: $1,060,957.44)

Mooncoin (MOON) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $133,602.05)

LotteryTickets (TIX) (Daily Mainteance Cost: $27,980.86)

Lottocoin (LOT) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $26,369.84)

Earthcoin (EAC) (Daily Maintenance Cost: $19,922.42)

This is not a knock on any of these coins. We actually applaud those of you who were smart enough to mine these babies from the start. It’s merely a reminder that their daily maintenance cost is extremely high for a new coin, so trade with extreme caution. Dogecoin costs more to maintain than Litecoin!)

Any suggestions we have made above are our personal opinions based on Daily Maintenance Costs. We advise any readers to thoroughly research each coins before investing any amount of money into alternate crypto currencies. Below is a chart of the current daily maintenance cost for over 80 crypto currencies based on their values and coin generation rates today.





Rank Coin Coins/Day Current Rate Maintenance Cost/Day 1 DOGE 720000000 0.0000018 BTC $1060957.44 2 LTC 28800 0.02749 BTC $648127.11 3 MOON 960000000 0.00000017 BTC $133602.05 4 PPC 16482.24 0.00668 BTC $90133.38 5 PTS 4662.72 0.01417662 BTC $54113.42 6 WDC 152279.40096 0.00039112 BTC $48757.8 7 XPM 12960 0.00385 BTC $40846.86 8 NMC 7200 0.00687 BTC $40493.21 9 FTC 115200 0.00037 BTC $34893.71 10 TIX 405000000 0.00000307 LTC $27980.86 11 LOT 94740480 0.00000034 BTC $26369.84 12 42coin 0.0864 337.00000014 BTC $23836.18 13 EAC 14400000 0.00000169 BTC $19922.42 14 NVC 1340.46144 0.0167 BTC $18325.83 15 RPC 720 0.0285 BTC $16798.49 16 TAG 10800 0.0015419 BTC $13632.42 17 NET 737280 0.00001546 BTC $9331.14 18 MEC 14400 0.00073 BTC $8605.54 19 DGC 32400 0.00031581 BTC $8376.52 20 ANC 2105.26315789 0.00400008 BTC $6893.95 21 SRC 7200 0.00115001 BTC $6778.4 22 CLR 18000 0.00041103 BTC $6056.74 23 TRC 14400 0.00044 BTC $5186.9 24 DEM 36000 0.000157 BTC $4626.95 25 BUK 14400 0.00034676 BTC $4087.75 26 YAC 108000 0.00004104 BTC $3628.47 27 JKC 72000 0.00200111 LTC $3242.43 28 CAT 7200 0.00046615 BTC $2747.59 29 FST 230400 0.0000132 BTC $2489.71 30 RED 144000 0.0007 LTC $2268.44 31 CSC 144000 0.00001901 BTC $2240.98 32 SXC 162576 0.00058 LTC $2122.03 33 FLO 216000 0.0004132 LTC $2008.55 34 ASC 1474560 0.000057 LTC $1891.49 35 GDC 1920000 0.00000114 BTC $1791.84 36 PHS 11520 0.00018974 BTC $1789.39 37 CNC 126720 0.00001681 BTC $1743.84 38 IFC 11796480 0.0000064 LTC $1699.03 39 MNC 2880 0.00070243 BTC $1656.11 40 BQC 60480 0.00003195 BTC $1581.89 41 SBC 36000 0.00005162 BTC $1521.3 42 ARG 8100 0.00022043 BTC $1461.67 43 BTB 20.808 0.08499827 BTC $1447.88 44 IXC 13824 0.000124 BTC $1403.29 45 CMC 5040 0.00033515 BTC $1382.81 46 BET 46080 0.00003649 BTC $1376.51 47 GLC 216000 0.00000764 BTC $1350.95 48 FRC 29538.72 0.00005573 BTC $1347.64 49 DMD 1440 0.00098883 BTC $1165.67 50 OSC 28800 0.00004802 BTC $1132.16 51 FRK 720 0.00180004 BTC $1060.98 52 NEC 25868.2634731 0.00004948 BTC $1047.83 53 BTE 7200 0.000176 BTC $1037.38 54 ALF 144000 0.00000877 BTC $1033.84 55 TGC 122880 0.00000987 BTC $992.87 56 LKY 63360 0.00001895 BTC $982.92 57 SPT 60307.6923077 0.00001959 BTC $967.16 58 QRK 11712 0.00010004 BTC $930.29 59 CRC 2880 0.00036804 BTC $867.72 60 XJO 30720 0.00003405 BTC $856.31 61 EZC 72000 0.000528 LTC $855.53 62 UNO 240 0.00429984 BTC $844.81 63 GLD 32400 0.00115056 LTC $838.92 64 HBN 14400 0.00006882 BTC $811.28 65 GLX 184320 0.00000519 BTC $783.13 66 KGC 184320 0.00000492 BTC $742.39 67 BCX 36000 0.00002401 BTC $707.6 68 PXC 48000 0.00001614 BTC $634.22 69 NRB 14400 0.00005287 BTC $623.25 70 BTG 432 0.001427 BTC $504.66 71 ELP 216000 0.0000946 LTC $459.85 72 DVC 720000 0.00002791 LTC $452.23 73 CAP 14400 0.0000327 BTC $385.48 74 XNC 864000 0.00001937 LTC $376.63 75 GME 576000 0.00002893 LTC $375.01 76 EMD 21600 0.0000203 BTC $358.96 77 RYC 60000 0.00023764 LTC $320.88 78 MST 49371.4285714 0.00025583 LTC $284.25 79 LK7 110880 0.0000031 BTC $281.39 80 ZET 11250.144 0.00002477 BTC $228.13 81 FFC 172800 0.00000161 BTC $227.75 82 MEM 57600 0.00016565 LTC $214.72 83 CGB 225 0.00105983 BTC $195.21 84 TEK 1440 0.00013052 BTC $153.86 85 PYC 4320 0.0000293 BTC $103.62

Let us know what you think, or if you think we made a mistake in any of our calculations. Also, feel free to discuss further in the original BitcoinTalk thread that started to get us thinking: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=430639.0 Happy trading!

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