My 2018 Cryptocurrency Expectations

It's already 15 days into the new year, and crypto has continued to grow. I thought it would be fun to put together my assessment of the space right now and what I expect from 2018. The first half of this article may be obvious to those who follow cryptocurrency carefully, but I wanted to condense some of what I tell my friends when I talk about crypto into a blog post that I can reference them to read on their own.

What is Cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is a generic title for currencies-money-that use public/private key cryptography to transfer value peer to peer, without the need for a third party (such as Paypal or Visa). Bitcoin was the first. Bitcoin is exciting because it proved the capability (and the need) of transferring money securely over the internet. Bitcoin has proven that a network of nodes that don't know or trust one another can keep running.

As bitcoin grew, it attracted copies. Some early copies of bitcoin, such as Litecoin, still exist and are very strong. Others were abandoned by their developers when they didn't catch on. Much of this development happened in 2013-2014.

The later copies of bitcoin have reacted to market need and added features such as anonymity and scalability. Bitcoin has had difficulty lately in adapting to change, taking a much more conservative approach to development and execution. The result has been a number of spinoff coins (known as "forks") from the bitcoin blockchain, such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold. "Bitcoin" is still the leader, but competition is fierce.

Cryptocurrencies to watch in 2018 are anonymous coins such as Monero, Zcash, Dash, and Zen Cash. There are many more, but these are the ones I currently believe have strongest development teams behind them. While I own some of these, it remains to be seen if they would survive a coordinated government attack, which I believe is possible due to their asymmetric advantage against the current institutions of power.

Scalability is a huge issue looking forward, and many of the DAG (distinct from, but sort of similar in concept to a blockchain) projects are experimenting with increasing transactions/second by orders of magnitude. Instead of 7 tx/s (like bitcoin), these would hope for 100 or 1000 times that many...or more. It remains to be seen if this is secure.

Smart Contract Blockchains

Ethereum is the clear leader going into 2018, with more than half of all blockchain transactions happening on the ethereum blockchain. There are a number of initiatives that Vitalik and the team are working on, many of which are focused on the issue of scalability. Ether also happens to work better than bitcoin as a currency, although that isn't its intended purpose.

Projects to watch using ethereum are Maker, Digix, and Augur, all of which are coming into their own after a couple of quiet years of serious development. These companies paved the way for many who have followed, and each has a top notch team worth following.

The race to build blockchains that host smart contracts has been heated, with many other challengers entering the fray. Each focuses on different ways to improve upon ethereum's progress. When evaluating these, avoid focusing too much on market cap, as some have been hyped beyond any reasonable valuation, while others are slowly and steadily working well behind the scenes to build connections and write good code. There are too many good projects to mention but I would put Steem in this category, and I think it will continue to grow at a surprising rate...especially when SMTs come online.

Jobs

This is exciting. There is a ton of money piling into this space, and it has to go somewhere. These projects all need good people working for them, and it's not just developers. There are lots of opportunities for side gigs, bounty hunting, marketers, sales, operations, analysts, and more. We're entering a serious leg upward in the Information Economy, where people who can find information and interpret it will be the greatest beneficiaries of this bubble. Learning about cryptocurrency requires online searching, forum discussions, and intellectual curiousity, but it's not too late for newcomers to dive into the rabbit hole and reap the rewards. There are literally opportunities for anyone hungry right now, with no end in sight.

This, really, is the most exciting part of crypto. It's a very free market, filled with enthusiastic people worldwide trying to make products that can make the global job market more accessible for everyone. Already, we see our steemit community growing and apps being built around steemit that function similar to existing social media models, but with value spread out among the community of users. It's as if Facebook, upon going public, issued stock to their users.

It is too early to tell how this will all end up, but at the moment, things are very bullish for people interested in cryptocurrency. Here's to 2018 and all it brings!

-Jeff