CryptoGram_0004: January 5, 2018

For new readers:
Cryptogram is my personal journal of thoughts about cryptocurrencies and related topics. I am posting them on Steemit as a means of keeping a record of them. At the bottom of each post is brief summary of the general layout of this, and future posts. Thanks for reading. (Also to find other posts, search "cryptogram")

State of the market:

This morning I am happy to see bitcoin on the rise again. It has broken its previous barrier of 16000 and hopefully will continue a meteoric rise up to between 40k and 80k per coin.

During the last few weeks, the altcoin runs have been unreal, probably making people millionaires just in the last week. Personally, i have been trying to figure out how often to re-balance into bitcoin. Around early December, I was about 50 percent btc. Since the alts have taken off, I now sit at around 35% btc. This would have been a great time to up my stake in BTC, but I never chose to move on the advantage, instead relying on negligent optimism for alt coins. In other words, i couldn't bring my self to miss out on any potential gains in the alts.

However, I think i may regret not having moved money back into BTC. It is still my favorite in the crypto world, and I think it has the most potential due to its overwhelming networks effects, and especially to the core development structure. I think people continually under value the Bitcoin Core project. The fact that it is an open source and heavily distributed process is amazing. It also give the currency the best chance at security in the long run.

Also on my mind the past few days has been payment channels. I think i mentioned this a day or 2 ago, but the implementation of payment channels on both bitcoin and ethereum needs to happen soon. I believe it would bring back the majority of the functionality that we have lost due to scale. Yesterday, the Ethereum mem pool was consistently over 20,000. I grabbed the following image from https://etherscan.io/chart/pendingtx

Sum up for today,

1. I wish I had more bitcoin because i think its about to make a run.
2. I don't know which alts to trade for more bitcoin - so I need to decide on a methodical system for this, like every double, turn 1/4 or 1/5 into bitcoin...
3. Raiden and Lightning need to ramp up se we can use this wonderful technology in spite of the crowds - its like waiting in a 2 hour line for an awesome 2 min rollercoaster. Its awesome when you get to use it, but you wont wait in a 2 hour line more than once a day.

Thanks for reading
-libertyhound

Edit: today i came across this medium post by Vinny Langham, creator of CIVIC (CVC). I really enjoyed his take on the two major bitcoins: Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. For the everyday user this does a good job of summing up the differences between the two.

https://vinnylingham.com/a-tale-of-two-bitcoins-20375d49d3d3

Purpose of CryptoGram:
Currently in the crypto space it can be difficult to remember what you have discussed or been thinking from one week to the next. The rapid development of, and many changes in the space keep everyone on their toes. Now that I have been financially involved in the space for roughly a year, I realize that I would love to have my thoughts from 2017 written down somewhere. I believe having this information will help me stay focused, avoid repeating past mistakes, and hopefully help some other people, (anyone who decides to read this,) from making those same mistakes.

Briefly, I need a place to record my train of thought and that place will now be dubbed "CryptoGram"

My initial thoughts on the structure of this post will be:

about 500 words
frequency of once a day to once a week
each post will have a number and date
snippet of top 5 cmc coins for price reference.
i will always use tags bitcoin cryptocurrency ethereum cryptogram libertyhound (unless of course there are drastic changes, but for now these will be the tags