Where to begin your research on other cryptocurrencies?

You now know how to buy any of these various cryptocurrencies on offer but which one should you buy? If you browse the internet looking at popular opinion on a specific coin you’ll be able to find groups who sing the praises of it. You’ll also be able to find groups that are adamant it’s a scam and will crash imminently. The point being that nobody can say with certainty if the value will go up or not long term. In the short term most will appreciate in value due to the huge influx of people that are getting involved in cryptocurrencies.

As I encourage a long term holding strategy I suggest you treat it like an investment. By this I mean you should look up both what it’s used for and the team behind it. A good starting point is CoinMarketCap.com. They list some interesting statistics about each coin and have a link to the listed website.

Before you go off researching cryptocurrencies it’s worth learning about smart contracts. This is basically a program embedded in the blockchain. Following on from the above this means that some cryptocurrencies are basically ‘tokens’ used to run a program. It just so happens you can also buy/sell these.

Beginner overview of smart contracts

You can have a look at the currency’s website, read the whitepaper and see what purpose the coin serves, as well as looking up the team behind the coin. My own requirements are:

I need to believe in the value of project. Needs to have a good team. Some sort of proof of concept.

Your individual risk tolerance might change some of these requirements. I’ll do a worked example of these criteria in the next section.