I am a Bitcoin owner and have been since 2013. I have been through some stuff and I think I’ve been successful. I’m not rich from it yet, but getting close. It’s hard to talk about, especially in lefty circles, but hey, I’ve gotta get mine.

Anyway, I’m happy to help anyone https://twitter.com/PequenosDre/status/1386866136638185477

Happy to educate anyone on anything pertaining to crypto. The first two thoughts that come to mind are Bitcoin/Ethereum co-maximalism and pump-and-dumps.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two big dogs in crypto. Bitcoin is of course the original. It created the whole ecosystem.

Many coins are direct copies of Bitcoin. Litecoin and Dogecoin are examples. Since Bitcoin is open-source software, anyone can create a new version. Convince enough people to mine it, and you’ve got a viable coin. This is what Litecoin did.

Bitcoin has a few parameters that are easily changed. One being the target block time (10 minutes) and the other being the hash algorithm (SHA256).

I go over these a bit in my Bitcoin Mining thread: https://twitter.com/GunBlobber/status/1384522147314372612?s=20

Litecoin is literally the same code as Bitcoin but it changed out the block time for 2.5 minutes and the hash algorithm to scrypt. That’s literally the only difference.

Litecoin was one of the first copies of Bitcoin, and it has stuck around pretty well.

Dogecoin was in turn a copy of Litecoin that had an even shorter block time (1 minute) and used the same scrypt hash algorithm. In the beginning, it had a gimmick where the block reward was random, but people gamed it, so this was changed.

Dogecoin was part of an explosion of copycat coins circa 2013. All of them Bitcoin code with a few other things tacked on or tweaked. A few of them remain viable today; most are in the trash bin. Blackcoin, Vertcoin, Kanyecoin, Mazacoin, Maxcoin. You-name-it-coin.

Most of the real competitors in the modern crypto space come from an entirely fresh codebase. They don’t use or build off of Bitcoin code; they use the ideas but implement them differently, for different purposes.

Ethereum is one of these. Bitcoin is designed to be fairly simple, really; it’s really just digital money. You can send Bitcoin from one account to another. That’s what it’s designed to do. But people started trying to use it for other stuff.

Like paper checks, Bitcoin has a “memo” field. It’s something like 20 or 30 characters. People starting putting stuff in those memo fields that had actual meaning. They came up with code systems that would utilize the Bitcoin memo line to do cool stuff.

Like imagine if you had infinite paper checks and that was all you had to communicate. So you sent checks for $0.01 each to your friend, hundreds of them, and wrote a whole book in the small spaces of the memo lines.

And the bank had to cash these checks and basically publish your book for free.

Some people just published information, but others used these spaces to create complex transactions like bets on sporting events. Two of these implementations were called Mastercoin and CounterParty.

They were not their own coins, rather they “rode on top of” Bitcoin and added new functionality to Bitcoin. CP eventually became Turing-complete, so you could theoretically program games or any other computer program on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Of course there were 2 problems with this. 1, Bitcoin wasn’t meant for this. Some Bitcoiners got angry and tried to block CounterParty transactions. 2, Bitcoin transactions became expensive. Even sending a check for $0.01 gets expensive if the postage stamp has to be $20.

So Ethereum came out in 2015 after a couple years of public development. It was built from the ground-up to be a computing platform, not just a coin. Games, complex financial transactions, *anything* can run on Ethereum.

If you want to start a virtual corporation in Ethereum, and issue stock, and people can trade their stock, and you can pay dividends to your stockholders... it’s pretty easy to do in Ethereum. Of course each of these things costs Ethereum to create, but it’s not horrible.

That is the whole point of Ethereum. If you can imagine it, you can do it. Of course it can do ordinary “A sends $60 to B” transactions like Bitcoin, but that’s only a small portion of what it can do.

So people are justifiably hyped about Ethereum! Some people think that it will take over basically everything. In 20 years maybe the whole Internet will run on Ethereum. This could happen. Like, it’s fairly trivial to write Twitter as an Ethereum program.

But it has trouble scaling, and doing so right now would be very expensive. Everything you do on Ethereum costs Ethereum to do it. But they are working on making this better.

Trying to get to my main point here. Some people think that Ethereum essentially take over the world. These people are Ethereum maximalists and they think the only smart investment is Ethereum.

Ok the other hand, Bitcoin maximalists point to the long-standing success of Bitcoin as a dedicated monetary scheme, and say that Ethereum is too complicated and Bitcoin is a better form of money. Bitcoin Maximalists.

There are some other cryptos out there too. Ripple (XRP) is an example. There are a few people who are XRP maximalists but they mostly work for the Ripple company. But moving on.

I am simultaneously too smart and too dumb to figure out which of BTC and ETH will be the winner in the end. Therefore I am a co-maximalist.

The current market cap of Ethereum to Bitcoin is about a 3:10 ratio. I own ETH and BTC in about this ratio. For every $10 of BTC, I own about $3 of ETH.

This means that if the Ethereum network becomes more valuable than the Bitcoin network (something referred to as The Flippening, which many see as inevitable) then my Ethereum holdings will be worth more than my Bitcoin holdings.

If you are new to crypto, I highly recommend this strategy. It is too hard to decide whether Bitcoin or Ethereum will win in the end. Just go for both, for now at least.