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Health, Wealth, and Happiness

October 21, 2024

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."



- Alexander Graham Bell

The End of an Era

A message from the publisher of Bitcoin Market Journal.

After seven years (that’s 49 years in crypto time), we are closing down Bitcoin Market Journal.

As publisher, I am focusing my efforts on my next book, The Intelligent Crypto Investor. I aspire to make it the best reference guide ever written for crypto investors around the world.

When we began Bitcoin Market Journal, “crypto” and “investing” were not two words you’d put in the same sentence. Today we have more crypto investors than ever, in part through patient repetition of our key investing principles, which have been both practical and profitable.

From 30 million crypto investors when we started, to nearly one billion crypto investors today. (Courtesy Social Capital Markets)



I’ve written a weekly crypto investing column for seven years: that’s about 350,000 words. Our analysts and journalists have probably written twice that much. So in case you haven’t read the last one million words, here’s the TLDR.

Our Key Investing Principles

• Invest in high-quality crypto assets as a small piece of your portfolio. Most beginning investors go all-in on crypto, then lose it all the next time the market crashes (which it does, frequently). You level out this volatility by investing primarily in stocks and bonds (roughly 60%/30%) and allocating a small slice of the pie to crypto (no more than 10%).

• Stick with large, proven crypto projects. It’s tempting to get caught up in the hype of 13,000%+ returns, but no one can predict these long-shot winners, any more than you can predict a winning lottery number. The two biggest, battle-tested crypto investments are bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), so we start there. If you want to diversify beyond those two...

• Do your homework. We’ve provided a wealth of information and tools on how to do intelligent crypto analysis. On the qualitative side, we’ve analyzed nearly 150 top crypto assets (available to Premium members) using our Blockchain Investor Scorecard (which is available for free). On the quntative side, we’ve also published dozens of popular guides on the most important metrics, including Daily Active Users, Revenue, and Fees.

• Make monthly contributions. You start your investing journey with whatever you can afford – whether that’s $100 or $100,000. You then invest a little bit each month, in the percentages listed above – again, whatever you can afford. Preferably you set this up through an automatic withdrawal from your banking account, so you avoid investing on emotion: set it up once, then just let it grow.

• Avoid fees. Crypto was supposed to free us from fees, but the fees in crypto are worse than ever, hidden in devious ways. Unless you are diligent, these fees will eat into your long-term gains, so you must be careful about selling, swapping, or even moving your investments between platforms. The less you use your crypto, the more you’ll save in fees.

• Avoid taxes. Of course you should pay taxes, but you should avoid creating taxable events. And in crypto, just about everything is a taxable event. Every time you sell, stake, or swap, you potentially are creating a taxable event. But just letting it sit and grow? That’s totally tax-free. Keep it simple.

• Put your crypto to work. That said, staking is like earning interest. So rather than just letting your crypto investments sit idle, you can stake them to earn a little bit of additional income. (True, you’ll pay tax on the staking income, but you’ll still come out ahead.)

• Bet on future winners. Much of our work at Bitcoin Market Journal has been making sense of the millions of crypto projects, identifying key categories that will produce long-term winners. For example, Ethereum is the clear leader in smart contract platforms, Binance is the clear leader in global crypto exchanges, and Uniswap is the clear leader in decentralized exchanges. Category leaders are pretty good long-term bets.

• Watch for crypto opportunities in non-crypto markets. For example, Coinbase is a crypto company with a publicly-traded stock ($COIN). All the big payment providers and financial institutions are now experimenting with crypto. But don’t invest in experiments, invest in proven projects that have found product/market fit. The more crypto bleeds into the traditional economy, the more of these opportunities you’ll find. Keep your eyes open.

• Avoid “free money.” ICOs, token drops, play-to-earn: your time is too valuable for that nonsense. Invest real money in, and you’re more likely to get real money out.

• Think long-term. The billionaire investor Kenneth Fisher said, “Time in the market beats timing the market.” That goes double (or 10x) for crypto, where the returns for patient, long-term investors have blown away the returns of traditional investors.

There’s a lot more (like, a million words more), but that’s the core of our approach. And boy, has it paid off.

Our Jaw-Dropping Performance

While I’m incredibly proud of this investing framework that we’ve created – so radical when we started, but increasingly just becoming common sense – I’m even more proud of the returns from our Blockchain Believers Portfolio.

We introduced this portfolio back in 2018, in my book Blockchain for Everyone, and we’ve been tracking it every quarter since. Investors who have followed this strategy have enjoyed eye-popping returns of more than 44% over traditional investors:

Our strategy has worked. Here’s the proof.

Our Investing Principles

A final point of pride is that we have done a lot to promote crypto investing with integrity.

While there are plenty of shady characters in crypto – as in any new and emerging asset class – we have always tried to show, in both word and deed, that crypto is a legitimate asset class that investors can embrace with integrity.

It hasn’t been easy: the news media is still negative on crypto, jumping on every scandal while ignoring the tremendous investing profits of those who have followed our approach. (You don’t often see the headline, “PATIENT CRYPTO INVESTORS HAVE MADE A LOT OF MONEY.”)

At its heart, crypto is good, because it is transforming the global financial system.

It’s old-school money running on new-school technology. The net result is that money will be able to move better, faster, and cheaper. We will eventually, in my view, move away from the U.S. dollar as the controlling global currency, and our “dollar dependence” will be replaced by a one-world money, run on crypto rails.

For all kinds of reasons, these are hugely positive things for the world.

Investing with integrity means putting your money behind the people, projects, and products that are improving the world. When we pool our money together, we can do bigger and better things than any of us can do alone. That’s the beauty of investing in common enterprises, in common stocks, in common crypto.

We have always tried to legitimize crypto, as something that’s good for investors and good for the world. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there.

What Happens Next

We’ll be shutting down the website at the end of the month. But our crypto investing mailing list will remain: subscribe here.

For our Premium members, who have generously supported our research and development of this work, we will be turning off your monthly billing on October 31. You may still redeem your BMJ Reward Tokens for Premium rewards until then. (And BMJ tokens are yours to keep, forever.)

For everyone else, I truly appreciate your readership, your collaboration, and your ideas over the last seven years. Together we’ve done something amazing: we’ve created a new discipline called “intelligent crypto investing.”

Now, on to write the next chapter. Literally.

John Hargrave

Publisher

Bitcoin Market Journal

Bitcoin Market Journal is the premiere newsletter to make you a better crypto investor. It has been created by John Hargrave, Steve Walters, Anatol Antonovici, Matthew Du, Daniel Joel, and Preetam Kaushik. We thank you for your readership and support.