The State of Bitcoin Blockchains Crypto: December 2017

Follow my commentary at BitcoinBlockchainCrypto.com

Possible reasons for the sell off in crypto (aka upcoming buying opportunity):

• Deleveraging by those who leveled up expecting further rally’s and getting out before they lose too much in margin interest

• People expecting a New Years sell off (people take their gains after the ball drops to defer taxes on their 2017 gains) and are taking their gains now because they are worried about coinbase’s slowness when there is a massive amount of activity. (This time of year is usually rough for all financial assets)

• massive amount of low conviction investors leaving cause they can’t stand the volatility

• Some institutions taking their gains

Now some of the less famous Altcoins have still retained their value and have even grown in this correction. (Thank you WAVES)

Usually when BTC goes down everything else goes up because people decide to diversify. Instead we are seeing the USD value of all coins except a few drop which means the money isn’t going into Altcoins but people are cashing out. (Many Altcoins May not be dropping relative to bitcoin but as bitcoin drops in dollars so alts which often are traded in BTC)

I imagine some institutions are taking advantage of this buying opportunity seeing that the price is still 13k/14k (remember for every seller there must be a buyer)

Long term reasons for optimism on bitcoin:

• In 2020 there halving of the reward if I remember correctly meaning the growth of the Bitcoin supply will drop in half which will create a shortage.

• In 2018 as more Bitcoin vendors adapt Segwit (which will lower BTC fees) and implement the soon coming lightening network (which will make things a lot faster) some of the current issues will be resolved.

• RSK and Omni both are creating/have created a platform for smart contracts and token creation that work on top of Bitcoin instead of independent of it like Ethereum. (So your bitcoin address would be the same address you use when using these platforms). This gives bitcoin and its Blockchain even more use cases.

Reasons to be optimistic on Altcoins:

• People are developing interoperability among blockchains in a lot of ways with multi currency wallets and other more sophisticated apps that makes it easier for more than one Blockchain to find its niche and be a long term player.

• Privacy is still in demand so Dash/Monero/Zcash/Aeon/Stealthcoin and other Privacy coins still have a fight ahead of them and along the way also become used for retail uses.

• While Bitcoin waits for RSK/Segwit/Lightening to do their thing slow transactions and high fees will still plague the bitcoin network so there will be demand for currently faster lower fee networks like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash at least for time being.

• Seeing the congestion in the Ethereum network shows there will be a need not just for one smart contracts/token/dapp platform but that there is room for many to handle the demand to process these applications so plenty of reason to think EOS/NXT/ARDR/BTS/WAVES/EXP/OMNI/NEO/BURST etc. have plenty of room to coexist and thrive.

• Despite congestion people are still developing many cool upcoming Dapps (decentralized apps) on top of Ethereum so there will be plenty of demand for Ethereum to facilitate the use of all these dapps.