[placeybordeaux]

Just don't buy any of the newer cryptocurrencies. There's much less risk involved in the older cryptocurrencies. That being said bitcoin seems intent on tearing it's self apart at the moment.

If you want to choose a cryptocurrency as a hedge I'd go for litecoin, it's fairly old and under active development. It's far past the point where it's riding on a couple pump and dumps and unlike bitcoin isn't talking about 2-3 chain splits in one year.

It's very hard to tell which of the new cryptocurrencies are legit, and even if you identify ones that look good, that's no guarantee the price will actually go up.

[nosuchthing]

Why should anyone buy the older cryptocurrencies for a pricer higher than the early adopters?

Surely cryptocoin software is more than a pump and dump system right? Hodl until you can pass off to the later bag holders?

What happens when the old networks are obsolete?

  In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure 
  of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to 
  determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in 
  the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and 
  many addresses have been used only once or a few times. 
  (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small 
  exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from 
  early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 
  25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution 
  "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea 
  and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution 
  look like that of a workers' paradise

  Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 
  22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, 
  there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with 
  any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a 
  quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner 
  was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in 
  thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the 
  most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in 
  "RSA encryption")"

[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard

[hndamien]

This is probably true, but wealth is only distributed when traded for wealth (or service for wealth creation).

[nosuchthing]

What?

Cryptocoin minting algorithms distribute the supply based on what the developer typed in. Almost always, this is exploited by the developer to create the most amount of coins for the least amount of effort to the smallest group of users at the start of the project. Then they just wait in hopes other users speculate on the "limited" supply and they dump their holdings which cost less to produce then current coins are being produced for.

Trading cards, beanie babies, and database-coin entries have production costs, which users don't always realize are significantly lower than the price they're charged for in retail.

[Kiro]

That's funny because one of the biggest name in the Litecoin community is also one of the biggest names on Steem.