I’m personally more interested in the underlying blockchain technology and what that has to offer us over the few decades (now making up my final dissertation for University). The cryptocurrency side to the technology is of little interest to me despite the fact I hold a small amount of ETH/ETN/XRP.
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So do you have any ideas on what else it can offer for us?
The technology itself?
The most popular use is for decentralising voting systems, however that’s one that brings with it a lot of controversy. For example, in the case of referendums where there are one of two options to vote for, the percentage share of computational power doesn’t necessarily reflect the spread of population. i.e. the vote of an 18 year old with a sexy i7 gaming PC will be ‘worth’ more than ten pensioners still pushing their Pentium 4 laptops. A good of example of where this would be bad is in the case of Brexit, where there was a clear divide in opinion between the elderly and the young. Had the Brexit referendum been done on Blockchain, remain would have won.
There are good use cases however, for example in the field of scientific research. One that I’m sure many of us can relate to is SETI@home. Moving this to the blockchain would pose no immediate benefit, however if the research was instead geared towards the cure for some futuristic disease it would be in everyone’s interest to ensure that the cure had not been tampered with, and this can be done through the almost guaranteed immutability of the blockchain.
I implemented a dreadful yet illustrative example of what you can do with the technology by implementing a game of “Four in a row”. The conditions under which the game is won is not determined by either participant, but instead several thousand miners all executing my game logic in parallel.
I’d be comfortable stating that wherever you can benefit from immutability, transparancy and decentralisation, you will end up using some form of blockchain. It’s currently in the peak of inflated expectations according to the 2017 Gartner Cycle, so what you will hear/see are a lot of bullshit uses and applications, and a lot of entrepreneur wannabes thinking it’s the next step in human evolution. That’s simply not true. Give it 5 to 10 years and I hope that by then we’ll be seeing uses of the technology where they can legitimately make a substantial difference. Until then only research and time will tell 
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Got involved a bit in the Fall as its popularity began picking up.
Was able to solo mine two Monero blocks (~12 XMR) before the difficulty rose. Sold half of it a couple months ago. Also have been trying to play the BTC game a bit – investing during lows, selling during highs – and have made some cash there.
Currently sitting on some BTC, XMR, ETN, LTC, SUMO, ITNS, and GRC. Been mining ETN, SUMO, and ITNS recently. Hoping ETN’s price goes back up so I can cash out some of what I have hoarded.
Got some good ETH buys off this morning between $450 and $480. Will probably play this out longer term though rather than a quick flip, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines with most money in USD/USDT since BTC was in the $9500-$11500 range.
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I bought around $50 worth of ETN (when it was like 9 cents [?]). It’s currently worth less than $22 
I can’t sell it anyway because Cryptopia has my ETN stuck. They’re having “problems with the size of the ETN wallet” which pisses me off because KuCoin works perfectly fine.
Edit: necro’ed
Yeah, I did it first, haha. I don’t see it being that big of a deal, makes more sense than spinning up a new thread.
Yeah, you basically bought towards the top. I mined a bunch and dumped them just short of the 1000 satoshi mark. Still holding onto a couple thousand to see if something changes long term. Also got some Sumo I mined more recently.
Buy high & sell low!
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Or buy high and HODL forever.
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That perfectly describes my situation and my bad luck. When I buy any crypto (be it LTC, BTC or ETH), it usually immediately crashes, so I HODL hoping it will rise again. No luck so far.
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Did anyone see the recent segment on John Oliver: Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube I think my favorite part was the bit about Dogecoin. --Katie
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