This experiment has ended! Check out the results.

Despite becoming interested in cryptocurrency in 2010 (shortly after Bitcoin’s arrival onto the internet dork scene), I’ve missed every opportunity to become obscenely wealthy by way of ephemeral internet money. I came to terms with that by telling myself, very realistically, that had I found a way to buy Bitcoin at a dollar, I certainly would have sold at $10. Perhaps even more likely, I would have spent it all on something stupid online or simply deleted them like so many SimCity saves, dooming myself to the relative squalor of an okay-ish software engineer.

After the last cryptocurrency hype cycle faded away some time in early 2018, I turned my attention to other things, only to be surprised once again when prices shot through the roof earlier this year. Bitcoin was propelled to an all-time-high value over $60,000, several other coins exploding along with it. Some multiplied in value far more than Bitcoin, proving even more profitable for those that owned them. There I was, missing out on historic gains becuase I had sold most everything I’d bought years before to play around with.

I’m thinking about picking up something classy, like this.

Now, from the perspective of the guy trying to get rich quick with the minimum possible effort, Bitcoin is old news. The new hotness is the alt-coin that catches media attention for even just a day, rocketing in value as it secures its space in the greater crypto conversation. Anyone who scrolls far enough through historical price charts can find dozens of examples of this: coins trading in obscurity at sub-cent levels one week, and the next — sometimes due to justifiable technical innovations, sometimes because the right rich dude tweeted about them — they’re trading at a few dollars each and discussed in the same breath as Tezos, Ripple, and Dogecoin.

I won’t let this happen again! The question is: how can someone with a day job and/or friends keep up with this complex, fast-moving world well enough to predict the next coin to pop? Conveniently, my plan is to not even try. I’ll simply do no research at all, investing my modest cryptocurrency holdings left over from not-super-fruitful trading of years past in a tiny slice of every coin I can. Of course, some will go up and some will go down, but whenever one explodes, I can rest easy knowing I already own it (at least a few dollars' worth). It’ll be tough to not obsessively check the value of my portfolio and panic-sell everything the instant the line starts to turn the wrong way, but I plan to let it sit until 2022, at which point I’ll re-evaluate and probably be quitting my job.

If this works, I’ll post updates when my yacht comes to port. If not, I’ll leave this up as a warning to future traders: maybe do your due diligence. Up next in this series will be the code I use to make it all happen and a live view of the portfolio’s performance — stay tuned.