Millionaire club here we come… easy…! Mental note; put the order in for the Tesla, buy those round the world tickets - First Class! Run into the office, two fingers up at the boss, job shackles cast off!
And then the dump starts…. $1000 to $50 in a day… reality sinks in. Oh crap, I’ve bought a scam… Ponzi for breakfast, Pyramid scheme for dinner…. This is the internal dialogue for a Masternode Investor!
To be fair not every day is as bad as this, and most are just a nice and steady accumulation of rewards. Sell them for BTC and bang it into cheap as chips NEO. But for every winner there’s a catastrophic loser!
It’s good fun though. Exciting, engaging. As Poirot would say it keeps the “little grey cells” nice and busy.
What to buy next? Is it a scam? Can I really trust the use-case….? Will the Devs actually stick around? These are a few of the many questions that run round the Masternoder’s mind before the order is placed, the bots are battled and the most random of random potentially Sh*t Coin is bagged…!
Anyway, random diatribe over… I thought I’d start this blog as much as to get my mind clear with my progress, successes, and more importantly failures. As well as to see if my experiences can help any other - would be - wannabe - or need to be - Masternode investors out there.
I started flirting with nodes just over six months ago… and much like my ill-fated inexperienced early teenage romantic blunders, it was a mixture of embarrassing failures and the odd premature false start.
But as my experience with nodes, my knowledge of Linux, Putty, tracking tools, cold vs hot wallets etc grew, the disappointing early forays began to bear fruit, and the flirtation gradually blossomed into a burgeoning relationship…
Fifty plus nodes and six months later and I can say with certainty (well… some sort of certainty… - in fact not much certainty, as the only thing certain in the world of nodes is that there is no certainty!!!) that I’m starting to understand the game a little better. And what a game it is…
Over the weeks and months to come I’m going to try and sum up how I’ve fared week by week, with a little recap of what went right, what went wrong, and give some insights into; nodes I like, those I don’t, and hopefully something interesting to kick off the coming week with a little enthusiasm and excitement….!
Super Successes, Best Performers, and coins I like:
Acreage - I like these guys… they had an exploit (same PIVX crap that has affected so many coins recently)… and when some Devs might have packed up and ran - they managed a pretty quick, slick and decent wallet update. Their use case is eventually to try to digitise property site surveys, to avoid expensive duplication and costly surveyor fees. Owners of site surveys will be able to sell their site survey for ACR, and it will be digitised and made available on the ACR platform for others to buy and use. It’s an interesting use-case and one that has potential. Even though the price is pretty low right now… I’m steadily accumulating a few MNs - and am hoping the trading spread tightens up and a viable market for it grows.
CardBuyers - like ACR they had a lot of FUD chucked at them a week or so back, with rumours of a hack… and coupled to this with the ROI being high, a touch of the usual inflationary issues, and the price took a beating. But things are starting to look up now… They’ve just announced a partnership with Savenode, and the price is stabilising. Their eventual use-case is that they want to link BCARD to gift/store cards for places (they say) like Amazon, Steam, Google Store etc…. The idea is that holding BCARD Masternodes will give you rewards passively that you can then convert to gift cards to buy goods, services etc online and in store… It’s a nice idea and the Savenode partnership shows there is development ongoing. I think the eventual use-case is probably realistically a while off but I bagged another node at the cheaper prices, might try and get another and I’m hoping things will keep improving and the price and volume will rise. They may need a collateral increase or rewards decrease in the future to avoid inflationary issues… but I like the project.
http://cardbuyers.skypool.fr/
https://medium.com/savenode/savenode-bcard-building-partnerships-for-the-future-5410186bd415
SecureCloudCoin - this has been a favourite of mine for a few weeks now… low cost, mid ROI coin. The rewards have just dropped by a 1/3 but I like this as the coin’s ROI drops to around 450% - which is more stable longer term than upwards of 700%. The price has dipped quite a little over the few days because of this, but there’s good volume, and the opportunity to spin out a few nice cheap little nodes…. And they are KYD verified which is always a bonus! They are also listed on Gentarium, GIN Platform, Armageddon hosting platforms for easy set up. Their use-case is a little confusing but I think reading the whitepaper that the gist of it is they will partner with various cloud based services - like VPS providers etc - and you’ll be able to use your SC2 coin to pay for the cloud services that they partner with. Therefore being an MN holder will effectively spin out rewards to pay for cloud services. You could then run a load of VPS’s for other coins with whichever provider they partner with and use your SC2 MNs to pay for them all so negating the need to use your hard earned fiat….
Resounding failures, worst performers, coins that have pissed me off:
Qyno - I’ll start by saying that this looks like a long term solid project and actually it’s performed ok in the last week BUT the devs announced a wallet update and 4 x collateral raise the day before it was due to take place… I tried to scrabble some funds together to get enough rewards to meet the collateral requirements but by the time it hit CB the market had tanked and then been driven right back up again… then the wallets were frozen and I had about half the required collateral stuck in my wallet… I’ll make a judgement call on whether to sell out now the market is back open or to dive in and bag some more coins to make up a new MN, time will tell… Check out their website for more details:
Cotton Coin - I really liked Cotton Coin (and still do like the potential) - I loved their old white paper and plan for the coin, but the last few weeks has really pissed me off! Firstly they changed their wallet without letting any exchange know… I was planning to sell a chunk of my rewards anyway, but they got “lost” in-between my wallet and CB, for nearly two fricking weeks! By the time I got them back the COTN market had slammed… and the previous project leaders had left the coin… Now the whole plan and roadmap for the coin has changed. I still have faith in the project, but the market needs to stabilise. I’m just going to hodl my nodes for now and accumulate more with the rewards, until the market rises to a level that I’m happy to start gently cashing out some of my coins to recoup my loses… For more details check out:
Lesson re-enforced - you must monitor every project you are in!!! Keep checking the discord regularly - at least once a day… things move quickly in the MN market - so you need to keep one step ahead or at least keep a tight grip to the coat-tails of those that are!
And now for something interesting…:
Sign off time guys, but before I go, let’s talk about ROI. I’ve played all the games out there - go for high ROI coins, sell rewards as they come in and hope to get my original stake back before the dumpers trash the market… I’ve bought the lower ROI coins of the “Proper” projects aiming to hold and compile a nice little nest of nodes to remain stable and pay an income month by month… and I’ve tried the mid ROI market - as a hedge to balance between the two.
So far I’ve had some success with all tactics (and some failures too) but I’ve come to the conclusion that when a high ROI, highly promoted project launches onto an exchange, I try to avoid the temptation to buy in and ride the ROI. I now wait for a few weeks, monitor it closely and when the coin takes the inevitable dump as the early investors sell their pre-sale nodes, and if the coin still looks like a viable longer term project with good devs and a decent roadmap, Whitepaper and plan, and decent volume, then I jump in.
I’ve found that at this point the coin might still dip down but usually not as sharply or as much as the first big dump. Now the high ROI easily replaces any dip I experience when I cash out my rewards as they come in day by day. Once I’ve made up my initial investment then I take a view on whether to sell the node or keep taking the profits. If it is a lower cost node then I might buy some more and/or keep the rewards to buy another node and then compound….
I’ve found that there is no hard and fast rule book to this. I try and plan ahead and have an idea of which way I want to go with a node, but one of the main lessons I’ve learned is to be adaptive, remain fluid, and trust my instincts…
Anyway till next time - good luck, keep your chins up, and most importantly; Happy Masternoding!!
BNB
(I need to add a little disclaimer to the above - do not treat this as financial or investment advice - and do your own research!!! Really important…..)