Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them.
Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are:
- Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns)
- Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust).
- Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at the energy that's securing it...there are a lot of reasons why I never ever thought of buying any alt coins.
Ethereum is very interesting, but it has some red flags for me:
- It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary.
- Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients.
- With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier).
- The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts.
- It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world.
- State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol
Thanks.