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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Well that's why it's common knowledge in the stock market to diversify your portfolio, and they call it a portfolio, not a single stock, and why so many people invest in mutuals.

There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be.

I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.

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Stocks are an investment, currency is a medium of exchange and hopefully a stable one.

Something that you want me to use to buy things with should not be so volatile that it goes from pizza to luxury home in less than ten years years. If I had some bitcoin "lost in the cushions of my couch"from that era I would be a rich man today.

Crypto currency has become a massive misnomer. To that end I'm not sure WHAT it is any more because if it isn't stable as a currency and it doesn't have intrinsic value then what good is it?

Crypto is being treated as an asset, not a currency, by most major governments that have weighed in on the matter. Assets can be invested in, bought and sold, and traded for other assets.

And assets are worth whatever other people are willing to pay for it. My friend sold a digital-only World of Warcraft character to someone for over $2000 once, and for the longest time there was a sub-industry based around buildings of employees playing the game to get and sell World of Warcraft gold, so much so that it got its own term of 'goldfarming'.

Crypto has value because other people are willing to pay the asking price for it. If that ever becomes not the case, then it's no longer an asset. Could that ever happen? Possibly, and I'd say definitely for certain coins. But now that this idea exists in the world of programmable tokens that can be exchanged quickly and cheaply and decentralized public ledgers, I don't think it's ever going away, not totally.

There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be.

Working equivalents already exist.

At this point crypto mutual funds don't really make sense. They all fall and rise together for the most part.

That's a good point, and I think part of that is in order to get most alts you have to first get either bitcoin, ethereum or litecoin (or a couple others) first. Hopefully that either won't be true forever, or we'll get to the point where we stop using USD as the basis of comparison for all the currencies.

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