I’ll admit…

that the cryptocurrency opportunities are appealing. I mean, when you look at the huge fluctuations in value and that $500 could become $5,000 in a matter of months how can you not think about it? Well, I did more than think about it. A few months ago, I read an article in the WSJ about a company changing how banking transactions happen. The company’s name was Ripple and you can read more about them here. Ripple had something else to offer though; an investment opportunity in a cryptocurrency.

XPR

is the name of their cryptocurrency, and it was relatively cheap. At the time, a XRP was going for about $2.00. When I looked at a Bitcoin, they were going for about $16,000 each. So I started thinking. What if XRP shoots up to even one tenth of what a Bitcoin is at? After doing some reading on Ripple’s website, I could see the potential. These guys are already working with some pretty big names in banking. So I did what you’d expected a novice investor would do. I bought some XRP.

The Buy

wasn’t as easy as I thought. It involved setting up accounts with Kraken and Coinbase. While this isn’t a review or endorsement of either of these sites, I haven’t had any issues to speak of to date. Two weeks later, I owned 2 Litecoins, 222 XRP, and a fraction of a Bitcoin. A month after that, it happened.

The bottom fell out

and every cryptocurrency out there took a nosedive. In retrospect, I should have known this. With all of the hype about cryptocurrencies and the highs these were reaching, a correction was inevitable. I was just greedy. So today, my roughly $800 investment is worth just over $400. Losing half of my investment obviously isn’t ideal, but I went into this with a strategy.

Going long

is really the only way I saw this playing out anyway. These currencies and shifts in banking technology are just getting started. We’ll see a lot of changes in the years ahead and if these technologies and cryptocurrencies stabilize, I still see the potential for huge upsides. So for now, I’m holding. I do not check balances daily and I realize I could lose the entire $800 I put in. Time will tell if that’s the case. Or, perhaps we see the turnaround and this $800 investment turns out to be the most profitable one I’ve made. I’ll keep you posted.