Now, before getting overexcited and trying to pull out your virtual wallet to through around your cash, you should lean back, take a deep breath and think things through.

This whole blockchain thing can go quickly the wrong way and you can easily lose your entire savings, if you don’t take the time to educate yourself, beforehand! Furthermore, always invest only money that you don’t care about! Don’t risk a heart attack, because you are watching your life’s savings go down the drain.

That said, let’s start.

It is no secret that blockchain is an amazing technology and it is here to stay! The question remaining is regarding the sheer amount of coins or projects out there. Which one to pick? Which one will last more than a hype period of one or two weeks? When will that period be? In the end, will there be only “one-coin-to-rule-them-all”? Does “XYZ”-coin skyrocket like “ABC”-coin? (Short side note: yes, there are ABC and XYZ coins, but those are not meant)

My simple answer is: “I don’t know and no-one else does”! If anyone else tells you otherwise, you are probably getting scammed or they don’t know what they are talking about!

It might be that Bitcoin will remain the only future coin (although I don’t believe that) or maybe Ethereum takes over or we will always have a pool of gazillion coins out there. I don’t know. A fact is that currently Bitcoin has an major impact on all existing coins. When the Bitcoin price rises, they “all” do and vice versa. This is because all coins are mostly traded against Bitcoin, meaning the volatility of Bitcoin has a major impact on their market prices.

Luckily, Bitcoin might have finally awakened from its dorm and started rising! And take a look at all the other coins, how they are following up “magically”.

At this point I presume you are motivated and can’t wait for some action.

The first and most important thing: If you don’t know what Bitcoin, blockchain, PoS, PoW, masternode, ICO, ( HODL and FOMO :D ), etc. is, you should check out some of the amazing posts from medium and all the other platforms and learn the basics first. Just to present a short list as an mere appetiser:

So far, so good. If you now have a basic understanding about the mentioned topics you are good to go.

At this point you should play a bit around and take some time to deepen your knowledge about how trading works and how chart analysis should be done. There are many sources out there, but for me the best two YouTube channels I came across and I can further recommend are:

I had the feeling that these two really know what they are talking about and the most important thing: They don’t sell you anything and just provide you with information what they think works best for them!

As a golden rule keep in mind: Don’t blindly trust someone’s advice and never let someone else decide upon your hard earned money!

Furthermore, in a nutshell some lessons I have learned regarding blockchain and trading so far:

Diversify your investments — don’t put everything into one coin / blockchain!

Stay up to date: read related news, posts from reddit, medium, hackernoon and so on or watch videos on YouTube, etc.

It is better to commit on an “long term” investment instead of stressing yourself with daily trades

Study some basic chart analysis and know your tools!

Don’t invest all you have on one coin (I cannot repeat myself more often)

(I cannot repeat myself more often) In the end, it’s your call — don’t let anyone else influence you upon your buying or selling decisions

Don’t buy when everybody else buys or quickly sell when the charts point downwards

Don’t FOMO — meaning, don’t let your emotions guid your trading behaviour — always have a plan and trading strategy in mind (set upper and lower bounds beforehand)

Keep your private keys for wallets safe! NEVER share them with anyone else — no serious blockchain developer or support team member will every request you to send them your private keys, so don’t be a naive fool!

Now, how did I start?

Three weeks ago I started very simple and very cheap. With just $ 120 and some time that I reserved myself I wanted at least to get the main idea about blockchain. Not more; not less! I played around with Bitcoin (at that time the only coin I actually “knew” about) to get familiar with Exchange Platforms, Wallets, Transactions and Fees. After I send back and forth some “money”, tested different platforms, read about different types of blockchains in several articles, I got more interested in masternodes and found out that even some of my friends were interested in the same stuff. They where focusing on an interesting new project, called Apollon. I asked them for their advice, how it works and how I could dive deeper into this topic. They pointed me to the corresponding sources and several hours later I had my own Apollon wallet up and running and was able to transfer XAP to it.

Still not getting the whole picture, I wanted to dig deeper and started to experiment on my own terms, build my own wallet from the Github sources (yes, I am a developer) and even played around with the RPC API to understand the blockchain interface better. Then I invested some more time in understanding the white-paper of Apollon including their goals and road map. It seemed very ambitious, but still exciting and interesting for me, so I kept on going. I then entered their Discord channel tried to get a feeling for their community. Later on I tried to get in touch with some of the developers to see if I could contribute to the project. Because the developers are very open minded, operate very transparently and constantly remain in touch with their community I found myself confidence enough to continue and focus on their project. I got some work done and was also rewarded with some pre-mined coins. Putting in the initial investment of $ 120, staking some further coins and investing additionally $ 40, I was able to afford myself an own masternode in about a two weeks time period. Meanwhile, because I split my coins among multiple addresses including the masternode, I get rewards about every two hours and collected up to almost 1 BTC.

Now, I know that not everyone is a developer and is able to make the trade of coding time vs coins, but maybe you can still do your part with your skillset. There are many corner stones for a successful blockchain project and development is only one of them. Maybe you can do some PR, marketing or design work or help out connecting the right people and coordinate projects to merge them to one great software experience for the community. In the end the thing that caught my attention most with Apollon, was that they enable masternodes to everyone, not only techies, geeks or coders. No matter what your technical skill level is, you should be able to operate a masternode, which I believe is an amazing idea and they are on the right track.

This is now only one example. Of course, there are many other great ideas out there and you should definitely take your time and carefully read through them. Also consider what others think about them and then pick one, invest some additional time to fully understand their goals, ambitions and to build up the necessary trust boundries and maybe you can find yourself in the next great blockchain project, which might end up quite profitable!

Conclusion

I personally learned a lot during these last weeks and the time investment of about 30 hours plus $ 160, paid of big time! I am also proud to show you a screenshot from a hard staking Apollon wallet that I really enjoy watching:

Apollon Wallet

As you can see, I receive almost every two hours a decent reward of 100 XAP or 400 XAP and on average using a medium exchange price from graviex.net of approx. 0.000025 BTC per Apollon coin, we end up with earnings of around $ 10 per hour. By the way the shown balance of 36,813 XAP corresponds to roughly 0.92 BTC or about $ 7,467. My VPS (virtual privat server) costs about $ 5 a month, so not only do I pay off my initial investment, but I also cover my running “costs” and end up with some small profit after taxes! :)

Source: https://graviex.net/ — XAP trading prices

Looking back, this is not a bad summary for a three weeks time period, but keep in mind that money alone shouldn’t be your only motivator. When I started, I wanted to learn more about blockchain and I learned a lot in a very short time period and you should always value knowledge more than a quick win in short time.

In the mean time I’ve gotten more confident with blockchain and trading. I invested some additional money across EOS, Ethereum, BTC, Kraken etc., I am running my own VPS instances plus the masternode from Apollon and I am looking forward to launching multiple masternodes across different coins within the near future. And of course I am further supporting the Apollon team and I am proud to be part of their success!

Great thanks to Chad, Markus, Andy, Phil and Laurie from Apollon for allowing me to contribute and keep up the great work!

Appendix

To wrap it up, I wanted to share some websites I am currently using almost on a daily basis for trading, monitoring and staying up to date and I would like to see you hop on this crazy blockchain journey that has only just begun:

Apollon Outlook: By the way, if you are no developer and don’t care about actively contributing to a blockchain project, but are still interested in getting a masternode up and running in a few clicks, stay tuned for the new Apollon NodeBuilder app available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Visit http://apolloncoin.io/ for more information.

Apollon NodeBuilder start page

NodeBuilder “one-click wizard” to build a masternode

If you liked this article, I would highly appreciate your claps and if you would like me to do a separate article on Apollon or have your own awesome projects running, let me know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.