Crypto Decrypted

19Signals versus Noise

We've often said that you can't turn on a financial news station without hearing crypto mentioned incessantly. That, and with constant failures in the world of crypto companies (just like in the early days of the Internet), there is a lot of information out there. We assert that most of it is noise, and our goal now is to give you the tools to sort through the barrage of information to find the true gold. Our goal is to separate the signals from the noise.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

We live in a world in which crypto has been seen to be the latest, greatest, and perhaps most accessible get‐rich‐quick scheme. It seems obvious, given the stories of teens who, in 2012, invested a few hundred dollars to buy bitcoin and are now driving Lamborghinis. It begs the question, which is sourced from a nonflattering combination of fear, greed, and envy, “Why can't I do that?”

We're happy for those who had the wisdom/hopefulness/foolishness to look ahead 10 years ago, take a risk, hold on for a decade, and suddenly reap the benefits of such a speculative investment. However, that period is over, so we need to look ahead. Is it possible to generate 1,000× gains on a crypto asset? Yes – but picking those is very, very hard to do. At the time of this writing, CoinMarketCap lists just slightly less than 9,500 crypto assets in the marketplace. That's a lot of assets, so let's see if we can narrow that down to a reasonable subset of viable investments.

First, let's ...