On why I don't invest in ADA and why I put my savings in ADA

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First of all, this is the description how I decided to handle my savings and some reasoning behind it. It’s not an advice on investment or money management. I’m well aware of the risks and responsibilities that comes with handling crypto, and so should be you.

Before I start to explain why and how I put my savings in ADA I would like to say a couple of words about myself. Your situation might be vastly different than mine which could lead to some totally different conclusions. I’m a middle aged man, with an above than avarage income in my country of residence. I don’t consider myself special in any way, but I’m comming from a programming backgroud I think I have a good eye for new technologies. I got a family, a job, some hobbies and I want to be good at all of them.

Since I’m earning decently I can save some money at the end of each month. Not much. It’s not that I wouldn’t be able to spend all my earnings, but I’m not a great fan of consuming too much. I don’t want to go deep into the topic, but I think the ongoing environmental crisis can not be solved without people consuming less.

After several years of fooling around with investment strategies in crypto I decided to stop investing and start saving in crypto. In ADA specifically. Whatever I could save that month I put in ADA at the current price. The trick is that I don’t try to evaluate the current price as low or high. I just buy, regularly and just that little that I could save that month.

I know it doesn’t sounds very clever or original, but I think the consequences made it worth to share my experiences. The most important consequence for me is that volatility doesn’t bothers me too much. When the price is high I’m happy because my savings worth more, if it’s low I’m happy because I can buy cheap. The second important consequence is that I don’t need to spend time on evaluation, which means I can spend that time on my family, my job or my hobbies. And because I’m diversifying on the time axis instead of the asset axis I don’t need to evaluate different assets as I did earlier and I can concentrate my support on the one asset that I like the most.

So why I can do it? First of all I’m saving and not investing. My goal is to keep the value (buying power) of my saving and not to maximize it. Secondly I have a low time preference. I don’t need this value saving to be immediate and constant: I need it to work in the long run. And last but not least I have no other option. Money is constantly loosing it’s buying power and stocks need constant evaluation. In my opinion bonds are a scam, since the only way you can guarantee interest is by inflation. No, I don’t want to support that even if it would be beneficial for me personally.

Some can argue that for this purpose BTC or ETH would be a better choice but their environmental impact stops me using them. For me ADA hits the sweet spot. It’s conservative where I’m conservative (security and safety) and inventive where I needed invention (energy consumption, speed, staking). I also know Haskell which in my opinion a perfect fit for smart contracts. I know it’s not yet easy to write SCs at the moment, but I think on the long run it will work out pretty well. As I used to say it’s a language that makes programming hard things easy in exchange of making programming easy things hard. And smart contracts are hard.

I have tons of other things to say, but I don’t want to make this already long post even longer. Remember it’s not financial advice, just my way of using ADA. I hope this could be useful for some.

Thanks for reading!
Mate

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First of all - this is the reason, why I really love this forum, because there IS the possibility to write such a long post and therefore I hate Twitter, although it also has its certain peculiarities and advantages. I like this post and the way personal reasons for involvement in ADA are presented openly and honestly without over-enthusiasm - as is all too common in forums and posts. In the end, everyone has to decide for themselves, but one thing remains certain: you have to spread your risks and not put all your eggs in one basket!

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I really love to way how you live your life. However id like to point something out which is in my eyes abit dangerous.

While im also extremly confident that Cardano will be a success, there is nothing guaranteed that you are going to save your buying power with your strategy in the future, as $ADA does not have a proof or records over a longer time period.

Yes you do with ETF’s. I dont really wanna go into details as this is definitly not a financial advice or similiar :stuck_out_tongue:

Cheers
Fabian

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@gadfly16 I’m also hoping your strategy will work for people who want to get & stay stacked in Ada but I share @Zyroxa 's concerns about the downside. This is why I’m looking forward to Cardano evolving something like Mango Markets has on Solana where you can buy futures for negative outcomes (i.e. shorts):

Those derivatives, which should be available for ADA if & when Cardano survives its adolescence (and maybe sooner via cross-chain assets like on Milkomeda which I hope will have Solana tokens soon), could help you hedge your position to hopefully get the same stability that people look for in the collateralised debt positions or algorithmic liquidity of stablecoins.

Yet the recent stablecoin debacle also calls into question what would happen if your chosen derivatives market also suffered a catastrophic withdrawal of liquidity. In any case I believe the best long-term approach for those of us 100% exposed to crypto is to incorporate the same combination of “investment” and “savings” that are (supposed to be) used by conventional financial institutions… i.e. hedging. :face_with_monocle:

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Thanks for your replies!

I know that my explained strategy seems risky, and I’m well aware of how I could lower the risks of my savings. I just thought it’s worth telling how I widened my perspective on this crypto thing. How I started to consider my other needs, like my time, my peace of mind and my environmental awareness into the equation, and how it lead to choosing one crypto to my liking and values and standing behind it by buying little but regularly.

Every tool that lowers the risk of investment is based on lowering expectation. I just found that instead of complicated diversification and/or complicated cross betting simply lowering my expectation in general and diversification by time does the trick without fragmenting my support to projects I’m not aligned to completely otherwise. I also realized that I can use the time and effort saved for creating more value and earn more with my job.

I think that the crypto market is overly fragmented. I personally don’t need 1000 different cryptos. ADA can do what BTC and ETH can, but in an environmentally sustainable way while staking gives me 4% a year. The question is will it stay or will it go to the ground with my precious 4%? :slight_smile:

I think sustainability will be more and more important for everybody on the planet, the crypto crowd included. I also think the community behind Cardano is dedicated, decent and cautious enough to not screw things up too much.

Which leads to the conclusion that while you are all right, it’s somewhat risky, yet I’m pretty confident that it will make what I expect it to make.

Cheers,
Mate

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Hey!

IMO being 100% certain on your investment/saving is impossible. What one can do is to evaluate the thing she’s buying, and then reevaluate it time to time. The more things you evaluate at a given time the less the quality of the evaluation gets. Since I need my time to earn money I have only a limited time to evaluate. So I decided to choose one thing, evaluate it and its competition thoroughly and follow it’s development and how it delivers.

Correct me if I’m wrong but ETF’s are just diversified stocks where it’s not you who are making the evaluation but you pay for some specialists to do it for you. So you have to evaluate both the stocks the specialist put in the ETF and the specialist himself. And you loose the commission and the 4% income from staking. But there is more.

I think what humanity needs now the most is the ability of saving. It needs it more than new cars, new electric devices, more food, more new clothing brands, etc. I’m well aware that humanity thinks it otherwise :), but I think that will change gradually as changed my thinking in this regard. And the need of saving is pretty general, so to invest in a product that in my opinion can do that well is even more diversified than to invest in ETF.

It’s a recursive train of thought: I save my money in an asset that makes it possible to save for everyone which is a huge market gap.

I hope it makes sense. Cheers!
Mate

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While i do agree with the way you are living your life and your point of view i dont really agree on different things here.

There are ETFs which represent a standard index like the NASDAQ or SP500 where you dont really have to pay someone to analyize any stocks and you are also getting interests on such ETF’s.

100% agree! But often we dont get what we need the most.

Let me be clear, im not saying you are doing it wrong. Im just trying to say that if you are using a long time span, you probably shouldnt put all your money into a single bucket.

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As @Zyroxa already said: ETFs replicate an index, so there are not really specialists to pay and trust. You can even choose SRI ETFs, where some of the worst companies are excluded based on sustainability criteria, but they still have lower fees than actively managed funds.

Also, “investing” in a cryptocurrency is not really comparable to investing in stocks or funds. It is still not clear, what they really are or are supposed to be.

If they should be currencies, the volatility combined with the general trend to become much more valuable, makes them spectacularly bad at that. Currencies are used for buying your sandwich. Who would buy a sandwich for an amount that could in five years buy them a computer and in ten years maybe a house? And also: Who would say “I am investing in the USD!” when they just buy currency and let it lie around? Currencies’ main function is to circulate, not be hoarded.

If they should be stores of value (gold-like), it’s a little detrimental that they are just numbers in computers. There is no intrinsic value in them. And it’s not even “investing” in the sense of “Someone can do something sensible with the money and I’m getting a share of the profits.” for gold and silver, let alone cryptocurrencies.

…, but you do save to buy goods and services for the saved “money” later on, don’t you? And other people should also be able to save, get a part of the cake? So, there should be some movement that let’s them get their share?

And how can we be sure that in the future someone will be prepared to give us the food, accommodation, services we need (or fiat to buy those) for the ADA we “saved”?

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Thanks!

Maybe I’m totally wrong but what I see is that the ETFs linked to Nasdaq for example pays around 3-4%. That’s on par with the officially reported inflation rate. My problem is that the inflation rate is calculated by the same government agencies that benefits from a low reported inflation rate. Independent inflation estimates are around 7%. Real estate prices raised by 6% in the US at the lowest in the last 10 years. So 3-4% is not an option. Again, please correct me if I’m looking at the wrong ETFs!

In my opinion cryptos are currencies in their infancy, which means that they are not yet adopted enough to be used as currencies as we are used to. What the main promise and point of cryptos is that there is a limited supply. So when (and if) their adoption level reaches a point they will reflect the efficiencies of the economy (of their underlying community): there will be no inflation caused by more money supply. If there will be inflation it will be because the economy lost efficiency.

So they will be able to do what gold based currencies did: both work as a method of payment and as a store of value. We are conditioned to think that the two contradicts each other, but it’s not: if I need to drink I will buy a glass of water even if I can buy a house from that from 10 years from that. Yeah maybe I won’t buy a 7th pair of sneakers, but that’s a good thing from my perspective.

The level of adoption puts cryptos on the investment-saving axis. Low adoption means it works more like an investment, high adoption means it works more like store of value and method of payment.

Two more thing that I don’t agree with: I already payed for several things in crypto. It was harder and less comfortable than a credit card, but I did, because cryptos are exchangeable. You wouldn’t say that USD is not a currency because you can’t pay directly with it in my country.

The other thing is that crypto’s don’t have intrinsic value. First of all 90% of fiat are numbers in computers, yet central banks hoard them to back their assets. The difference is that some people can make those numbers go up in those computers. Crypto’s intrinsic value is that nobody can do that. (Gold’s industrial application makes it less good at as a storage of value, because that’s increases supply). Intrinsic value is different from market value. In the case of cryptos market value is directly proportional to the adoption level.

So my point is that crypto’s are currencies with the ability to store value (that’s their competitive advantage) by design, and investments by nature at the moment because of their low adoption level. Volatility will come down with higher adoption level since people’s real needs will be needed to be fulfilled in larger numbers. As will be the growth of value since there will be no more growth in the underlying community, so it will be less and less good as an investment.

I know I didn’t gave an acceptable answer to the question why I choose to use ADA only. It’s a bit reckless, I know. But I don’t want to use BTC and ETH and SOL. Unfortunately I have some reservation against all of them. (As I had against Luna, not that if that proves anything…) So that’s my personal and somewhat emotional or instinctive choice or sentiment. I don’t expect anybody to agree with that.

Thanks for your answers again. I would like to be able to explain my decision the best way I can. I know I’m not there yet, but I learn a lot from these conversations.

Cheers,
Mate

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Seems a bit low to me. Could be at this very moment, because all the markets are quite down. From 2007-12-31 to 2021-09-30, Nasdaq themselves give an annualised return of 16.4%: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/when-performance-matters%3A-nasdaq-100-vs.-sp-500-third-quarter-21

A typical ETF on the MSCI World index gave around 10% annually on average when looking at longer periods (5 to 10 years): https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239696/ishares-msci-world-etf

Still, not investment advice, though.

How do they benefit? For what it’s worth, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics does report the currently exorbitantly high inflation rate: https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm On average, over decades, it will not be that bad.

I’m not convinced that limited supply and deflation are a good thing.

The goal of monetary policy to keep a moderate inflation seems sound to me. Yes, it means that just holding your money will result in losing value, but is that bad? What good does it do if large parts of the population just sit on heaps of money waiting for retirement?

And there are alternatives, which can also be combined: The capitalistic one is to invest in something that gives returns higher than inflation – the ETFs above or more risky ones. The social democratic one is to build societal pay-as-you-go pension schemes: The currently earning people pay taxes or duties and the retired people get a pension adjusted for inflation. This can gladly be accompanied with universal basic income for all the people who are not able to save anything – in fiat or crypto, in capital or national PAYG pensions.

Is it really good to take away the possibility of any monetary policy? How bad is the current monetary policy really – apart from general preconceptions against the powers that be?

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I see! 10%: that brakes the validity of my statement about my options. Good.

I don’t think that’s the real inflation rate. From 2020 to 2021 real estate prices went up by more than 15% and the trend is still that. That 6% I mentioned was the lowest yearly increase in the last 10 years. Average is around 7%. They benefit from the simple fact that reporting the real value would weaken their chance of reelection. To get a real sense of inflation you must also take into consideration how much more efficient we are getting at producing things. It’s nonsensical that we are getting better and better at building houses yet the prices are going up, not constantly, but with an increasing rate.

I’m not convinced that it’s a good thing, but I’m pretty sure that it’s better. The goal might seem sound but what actually happens doesn’t look right to me at all. I start from the implementation and will arrive to the results.

There is two source of new money supply: governments and banks. New money is always arrives into the economy in the form of credit. That basically means that the government can finance things from credit instead of taxation and the banks can shuffle off the risks of their loans to the general public. This is ugly cause governments can finance unpopular expenses this way - like wars for example -, while the banks and the debtor share all the profit while the general public suffers most of the risks.

Maybe that’s not fair, but it still might be beneficial for the society as a whole. Yep, unfortunately that’s not the case. We live in the constant illusion of scarcity, and that’s really not good. It makes us consume more than we need, but even worse it makes us anxious and ungentlemanly. We spend less on culture, and we don’t give a single fuck about our environment and general future since we are forced into the belief that we need to survive the immediate future. Again, while we are getting better and better at producing things.

And the inequality in our societies are on the rise. Surprise, surprise. There are people, who can make credit from thin air, lend it to their buddies, who pay back some of it for their campaigns as donations. Now we start to understand how we got here. And that 7% inflation means something else for those who earn ten times more than their needs and for those who earn just enough to cover them. Let’s not mention now those who earn less…

And there’s more. Inflation doesn’t only devalues our savings. It devalues our earnings too. You make less and less every month for the same work. How on earth can that be right?

Unfortunately there is one more thing I must mention. That this whole scam is built on the promise of growth. Something the beneficiaries of this system says we must have, while we all know we must stop. We don’t have nor space, nor resources to grow. We must shrink. We need to rationalize the way we are living and how and how much we are consuming. Anyway mostly we grow mountains of trash, our debts and the inequality gap.

No IMO there is no need for monetary policy. What we need is constant supply, and we will find some solutions if people would want to consume less. :slight_smile: What a joke! Will they not eat? Will they sleep on the streets because of deflation!?

Last question: would you like the Cardano project, to have an elected (khm…) board who could single-handedly increase the supply of ADA? Where would that lead?

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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=PCg1 confirms +17.76% 2020 to 2021, but in the last 10 year there were even decreases in house sell prices. And house sells are not that big of a factor in consumer price indexes, anyway. You don’t buy them regularly.

The people in these administrations are not elected. Are you saying that the elected officials at the very top give them orders to not do their job properly and falsify the statistics? Is there any evidence for that?

Supply and demand? You could also call it scarcity.

It is not good that productivity gains go to the shareholders so often. I’d rather see them go to the employees, but if I want them there, they can’t go to the customers. So maybe split them between the two?

But: Would that be so much different in a crypto economy? Limited supply of currency would probably let prices fall. But it would also let salaries fall. And if prices fall slower than salaries, you have exactly the same problems again.

Governments cannot just print money. They have to borrow it. And they cannot borrow it from central banks directly (at least not in the US and EU). They have to borrow it from the public.

So, like in one of your previous answers, the deflationary nature of a crypto currency system should lead us to only consume what we really need? But at the same time, we shall spend more on culture and on saving the earth? Wouldn’t that also be at risk due to deflation? “Oh, no, we can’t do that! Everything is becoming so much more expensive!” just replaced by “Oh, no we need to save! Tomorrow, we might have much less salary, but out savings will be worth so much more!”?

Those are banks, not politicians, …

… and banks do not really collect donations for campaigns.

I believe growth doesn’t have to be growth in resource consumption. It could also be growth in culture and entertainment, growth in technologies against the climate crisis, growth in quality, not quantity. But, granted, that is one of my very, very weak points.

I think we very well might see quite similar problems. I’m just not convinced that those are repaired by cryptos, that they are due to fiat. Most need much more nuanced regulation by actual politics, in my opinion. They might be possible with both kinds of monetary systems, but are, I believe, also needed with both.

Maybe. At the moment, governance decisions are still just decided by two companies and a foundation. There could also be some general scheme – supply growth based on transaction volume or something like that – that could be amended by votes via the governance system to be developed in the future, anyway.

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First of all, thanks for your answer! Reading your replies on other topics made me realize that you must heard these sentiments a zillion times. I’m new here and I had to let it out from my system. Thanks for your patience!

Real estate buying is rare, but usually it consumes many years of earnings. If it’s renting than it’s pretty regular and a big chunk of the monthly spending. As low a family’s income is the bigger the chunk. That leads to another thought. Inflation is subjective. As close your earning is to the limit of covering your basic needs are as close your inflation gets to the price increase of the basic goods and services. So my wording of real inflation is erroneous. Since basic goods are all end products usually their price increases are a much more than the reported inflation rate.

No, the they are not elected directly. They are appointed by people who got elected. Of course I have no evidence of tempering with the data, neither I witnessed elected officials giving orders in this direction. Maybe you find it more factual if I say that corruption and inflation rate are linearly correlated. For me that tells that current monetary systems have the possibility of corruption encoded into them and more often than not it’s get exploited. My main argument toward fixed supply is that it’s simpler and easier to reason with IMO. It won’t solve corruption, but it provides a better foundation for a good design.

If population growth doesn’t exceed the price increase scarcity contradicts increase of efficiency. Since 2000 US population rate is under 1%, so either we are becoming less and less efficient at house building or the system is somehow flawed.

It seems to me more like an organizational problem. Cooperative form comes to mind first.

I don’t know. But I guess that it would have a chance to reach an equilibrium. Again: cryptos are not the first constant supply monetary systems. Humanity lived thousands of years using gold and a short but pretty blossoming period under gold backed currencies. Also, if I had to program a simulation to try to answer these questions, it would be infinitely easier with constant supply. With the current system I would have to simulate every possible supply and then when new money is printed again every possible amount for every possible amount from the previous round. That’s why we don’t have economic simulations: it’s computationally not feasible with the current system.

My bad. I meant central banks. Anyway from my perspective they are indistinguishable.

As you enlightened me kindly, we already have a decent way of saving. Does that stop us doing anything? Similarly, are we doing things because of inflation? I’m not a huge fan of the current monetary system but even I wouldn’t say that we are consuming because of inflation. We consume because we like to consume very-very much. Deflation would counteract that urge while inflation pushes us toward that. I’m not saying that cryptos couldn’t drag us into a deflation spiral, but that could be solved by agreement. One of the most interesting problem you brought up in that other topic, is the problem of inequality caused by the difference of time of adoption. I think it’s a similar problem. I think it’s a definitely a problem we should dedicate a topic to.

Again formally true, but in my world there is only a fuzzy and permeable boundary between them.

What I’m saying is that the financial sector donate to political campaigns, not that it collects donations.

That scares the s#it out of me. But in theory the community still has a veto by not switching to a new branch in the improbable event of some major fuckup, right? Must be noted that until now I’m really pleased by their way of handling things and design decisions. (Omitting Turing-completeness from Marlowe for one.) I’m asking this mainly because this is the main criticism coming from PoW advocates.

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The community is also far behind. We are still sheep. It is not only that governance is led by them, the development is enforced by them. The technical community is still too ignorant to take a stand and continue development on their own, the user community has no chance. We right now upgrade our nodes as they ask too, users don’t even understand Daedalus to be a full node and why it consumes so much resources.

To exemplify how little the community right now can do. We didn’t have a block size war, they have been increasing it without asking. I would much rather prefer a marketplace for fees. Block space must be scarce, every person running a node pays that price forever, I would really want to have in there things that are worth paying a high fee for. Yet for some reason fees are decided by IOG not the market.

The market is the correct entity for that not even the community. The market settles what it is worth. Me as a member of the community, I want low even zero fees of course, because we all to get the most out of our money. I have witnessed many times how people ask for low fees as a competitive feature. It can’t be done, if you want a system to accrue value it must get continuously more expensive proportional to the value it secures.

Does the community really have a vote? A marketplace for fees should be the very first thing SPO should have implemented, but they haven’t. Only IOG, at the moment, has enough knowledge of the system to implement that, and it is not on their plans to allow that market participation.

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