Thu Nov 26, 2015 8:10 pm



I entered bitcoin at the end of 2012 and been following your talks and writings. I very much enjoy the Austrian Economics you bring to your reasoning on BTC. You are also an investment adviser, so let me ask some questions on that topic Hey Tuur!I entered bitcoin at the end of 2012 and been following your talks and writings. I very much enjoy the Austrian Economics you bring to your reasoning on BTC. You are also an investment adviser, so let me ask some questions on that topic

What do you consider to be a good % of exposure one should have towards BTC in their portfolio?

I know this is probably dependent on the personal situation of the investor, but maybe you can give general advice.





I always steered clear of altcoins. I never really saw the innovation. I did had a small speculative position in LTC. Sold a lot during the LTC bubble (most of them > 0.04 BTC). I sold the remaining part of my stash once the rumors on the scrypt ASIC started to surface. Reason: LTC's USP was a more decentralized mining algorithm. Everybody with a GPU could mine, so that created a community. But since the scrypt ASICs, there is fundemantally no difference between BTC and LTC in my opinion.

What is your opinion on investing in LTC? Are there any altcoins you are following?

Personally I have a big % of my net worth in BTC, but that is due to the exponential growth of the BTC valueI always steered clear of altcoins. I never really saw the innovation. I did had a small speculative position in LTC. Sold a lot during the LTC bubble (most of them > 0.04 BTC). I sold the remaining part of my stash once the rumors on the scrypt ASIC started to surface. Reason: LTC's USP was a more decentralized mining algorithm. Everybody with a GPU could mine, so that created a community. But since the scrypt ASICs, there is fundemantally no difference between BTC and LTC in my opinion.

There is also a fungibility issue: because transactions are public, all sorts of regulation can be applied to them by centralized wallet services, payment processors and exchanges. Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant.

If you want fungibility, you need to mix your coins by default. You'll get default privacy as a bonus. In other words, a privacy oriented solution should be mandatory at the protocol level to achieve perfect fungibility. Personally, I think that this quote is very relevant on the topic:

If you ask me, Monero is a very good altcoin to hedge a bit. Why you may ask?



*Monero solves the fungibility issue. This coin has stealth addresses (hides the receiving address, balances are unlinkable), ring signatures (hides the history of the coins making them untraceable) and will likely implement Confidential Transactions (hides transaction amounts, money flows become completely opaque) as well while preserving a transparent emission (unlike zerocash).

*Monero also has a dynamical block size limit, making it a good hedge in case this becomes a real problem in BTC.

*And last but not least, it has a completely different codebase than BTC (unlike DASH for example) making it a good hedge in case some problem with the BTC code would arise (Monero uses for example a completely different elleptic curve than BTC)



So my final question is simple:

have you heard about Monero and do you think it's a good hedge for BTC? What percentage would you advice to hold?

Personally I diversified 10% of my BTC in XMR because I feel that this could become a complementary coin to BTC.

Hi crypto_investor!Glad to hear you've been enjoying my presentations & writingsSee page 15 and 16 of our free report about that: " How to position for the next rally in Bitcoin In summary, my thoughts:- Bitcoin as an insurance: 1-2% of financial assets- Bitcoin in a speculative portfolio: 2-5% allocation- Bitcoin as a bet on early retirement: 5-10% of financial assets(be sure to read all the caveats in the report I have liked Litecoin since I first learned about it, because it offers similar utility as the Bitcoin network, and therefore can be seen as a 'backup network' for Bitcoin. A 'silver' for Bitcoin's 'gold', as is often said.Other arguments for having at least a little LTC exposure, in my mind:- it's the number 2 in market cap: $150 million as of today- the most liquid altcoin (highest volumes on exchanges)- has a unique price relationship to Bitcoin, making it an interesting currency for tradingBelow is a reflection of my personal Litecoin-Bitcoin trades of the last two years. It's based on my trading history on several exchanges.Note that my actual profit may be a bit lower due to some unaccounted trading fees. Piecing everything together was pretty grueling, if anyone has tools to make this easier I want to hear about them!Chart explanation:Blue is the amount of litecoins I owned in these two years, purchased using bitcoin. In orange you see the amount of bitcoins invested (as it goes down) or rebought (as it goes up).As for timeline, there is none. It's just a succession of all my trades. To give an idea, you can follow the peaks and troughs above: my litecoin position peaked first on October 19, 2013 (first blue peak), and then I started selling into the rally. My selling ended on Nov 1st 2013. Then I started buying back over the next four months, and started selling on March 27, 2014. By April 24, my litecoin position was reduced to almost zero. Then I started on my last buying spree, which ended on July 6, 2015. On July 9 I cleared out half my position in one day, and then by the end of July 10 I had sold 75% of the litecoin position I had on July 6.I think that privacy friendly sidechains will go a long way to solve fungibility issues in Bitcoin.Yes I have certainly heard about Monero, it's one of the altcoins I am researching for our newsletter. Roeland Creve has been generous in providing me with info about it.I am very excited about the different technological innovations we've seen in the altcoin space. One of the questions I keep asking myself is which ones will be incorporated in sidechains, and which ones will function best in standalone alt-blockchains.